Illusion is Reality
Chapter 83
-I'm gonna drink it like a person-
When Lee came out of changing room, mostly dry, but hair still wet (but clean!), and grimacing at the way his clothes were getting soaked down the back, he found Sixer, Miz, and Bill waiting for him. Miz was chatting with a few of the other girls. (Even Ben was there, still clutching the violin like a shield between himself and Bill.) But when Miz noticed him, she grinned and bounced her way over (in multiple ways) to poke Lee in the nose. "Dry off~" she sang.
Lee shivered as he felt a warmth overtake him as the water evaporated off. "About time! Come on! We've got math next," Miz said, still grinning, before taking his hand and pulling him forwards. Miz waved at the other kids as they went. "Bye Ben, bye Allison, Jane, Trisha!" she called out. (She only remembered their names via cheating and scanning them. -What? These were a lot of names to remember!) As she passed Sixer along the way, Lee already in tow, she took his hand as well.
"Come on! We're gonna be late for Algebra!" Miz whined as she pulled the twins along behind her. Sixer was staring at Miz, bright red as she did this. (She was holding his hand. She was-)
Bill walked along with them, a bit more sedately. "Why the rush, sis?"
Miz pouted. "I don't like being late for stuff." Punctuality was important. "Besides, I wanna get a good seat!" Miz added. They got to the classroom right as the bell rang.
Miz raised her hands (along with Sixer and Lee's) into the air and cheered. "Woo! We're not late!"
The teacher, a thin old man with a deep set scowl, glared at her as she came in. "Yer not in your seats with your notes open. You're still late." He knew these were the new girls; troublemakers, from what he'd heard. And Gregory Carrow did NOT like troublemakers. His scowl got deeper at the sight of the new girl's body. How obscene and shameless. How vulgar. (Even though Miz was dressed relatively modestly, only exposing her neck, Mr. Carrow took one look at her body shape and declared her a harlot in his mind.)
"Sorry sir. We just came from gym and the showers and-" Miz tried to explain but Mr. Carrow cut her off.
"Sit down. You're disrupting class." His tone was stern and angry.
Miz flinched back, dropping the twin's hands and quickly slipping into a free desk in the front row. "Sorry, sir," she repeated sadly. Lee and Sixer sat down as well.
Mr. Carrow glared at Bill when he didn't sit down. Bill narrowed his eyes at the teacher right back, because Miz was upset, and it had happened after that teacher had talked to her. Was what the teacher had said been what had upset Miz? (Miz was wrong; they had been late; they hadn't sat down yet, yes; this was a fact.) Had upsetting Miz been intentional? (...She'd wanted to not be late, and she'd been very happy when she'd thought she was on time. Was being told they were disrupting class upsetting? Or was Miz upset about being wrong about being late? Or... was it SOMETHING ELSE?)
Miz scanned around the room and brightened a little when she found Mary from homeroom. (Miz had trouble recognizing people so she always cheated with her powers to remember who was who.) Miz gave the other girl a shy wave from under her desk.
Mary raised an eyebrow at Miz's wave 'hello', but she still smiled and waved back. She'd been hearing all sorts of interesting rumors about the new girls. Kinda wanted to talk to them more.
Mary had another class with the twins for the last period today, and it seemed like the girls had the same schedule as them. Mary was curious about how much truth was in any of the whispered stories being passed around the school. She didn't believe in aliens or anything like that but even if the new girls were just lying to get attention, it was interesting. Anything was better than the monotonous bore of daily school drudgery. She would try to talk to them next, next period. Sadly, Mr. Carrow wasn't the type who allowed chatting in class.
Miz looked around the classroom and hid a grin when she spotted her own target, Carla McCorkle. Catching her eyes briefly during her scan of the room, Miz gave Carla a sweet smile before turning back to the front of the class, leaning slightly to her right to press up against Sixer's side. As she was doing this, Mr. Carrow was still glaring at Bill (and Bill was still narrowing his eyes at the teacher).
"Sit down, girl!" the old man snapped. Bill straightened and put his hands on his hips, opening his mouth to say that he wasn't a girl-
... and was interrupted by Crampelter stumbling into the classroom. The blond was looking a little weary (and still more than a little worse for wear) until he spotted Bill. Then his eyes widened in fear and he turned on his heel to leave the classroom. Unfortunately for him, before he could do so, Bill's hand snapped out like a striking snake to grab up the taller boy's sleeve (and wrist) in a movement frighteningly similar to a steel trap slamming shut.
"YOU. You're not trying to SKIP CLASS now, ARE YOU?" Bill intoned with a glint in his eyes, as Crampelter tried (and failed) to twist away and out of the demon's grip. Bill grinned and pulled the struggling teenager back into the classroom, shoving Crampelter down onto the chair behind an empty desk in the front row two desks down from Miz, then slapping Crampelter downwards on top of his shoulders twice hard, before sitting down himself right next to him. (...And now the front row of the class consisted of Crampelter, Bill, Miz, Sixer, and Lee, with Lee sitting closest to the door.)
Mr. Carrow looked livid at this arrangement of hooligans in his front row, but didn't want to delay his lesson anymore and got up to begin writing on the chalkboard. At least that new girl was sitting down now.
-And so the teacher began his lesson, droning on about the topic they were currently covering. Most of the class were already nodding off. His voice was just too boring to listen to.
Bill himself wasn't bored, exactly. This was math. He'd used to BE math. And many many things in his home dimension had been FAR more boring than this. (So was Watching things and waiting for things to happen, sometimes. ...At least the rules the teacher was using here made sense and were consistent.) So Bill sat there with his chin propped up on a hand, quietly watching and listening the teacher as the lesson progressed… with half an eye on the readings he was getting from his suit's sensors on Crampelter.
Miz, on the other hand, was trying very hard to sit still and listen but she was BORED, just like most of the rest of the class. This was all stuff she already knew. She wiggled around in her seat, wanting something to do. She sneakily glanced back at Carla who looked curious about Miz and Bill. And also about how close they seemed to be with the Stan twins. Miz didn't have a textbook for this class so she shifted ever closer to Sixer and leaned over his, pressing herself against him in such a way that her breasts were practically resting on his arm. Sixer was actually too distracted watching Bill and Crampelter (and Bill seeming to casually ignore Crampelter, and Crampelter sweating buckets and looking like he wanted to be anywhere else but there) to notice what Miz was doing. But Lee did.
Miz hid a smirk at the jealous looks all the boys in class were shooting at them. But they weren't the ones she wanted to get a reaction from. Miz had her Eye opened and staring out at Carla behind her. The girl was not looking happy. But it wasn't good enough. It wasn't the reaction Miz was hoping for. Perhaps if she tried with Lee instead?
"You! Straighten up!" Mr. Carrow snapped at Miz. She jumped. (Bill let out a huff of breath.) "Ah, I don't have a textbook yet so…" She tried to explain but the man just scowled. Stanford Pines was on self-study, with a separate, more advanced math textbook than the rest of the class, so that excuse didn't fly with him. "-Don't talk back to me." Harlot. He glared. Miz flinched and scooted her desk a little farther from Sixer. 'Ok, looks like I shouldn't be messing with this during class,' Miz thought. ...Well, she had the rest of the week to mess with Carla. Miz tried to sit quietly through the class but it was just so boring~
What class did they have after this? Social Studies. Ah. That. Well, Miz started doodling in her notebook out of boredom. She jumped when the teacher called on her to answer a question, likely thinking that she wasn't paying attention since she was drawing. He seemed angry that she got it right. (Admittedly, her All-Seeing Eye had helped her out a little bit there, since she hadn't been paying attention and wouldn't have known what the question was, otherwise.) Miz answered easily enough when the old man shot her another question, which only made Mr. Carrow more determined to find some way to trip her up. He didn't like her already.
Miz tried very hard to sit still and be quiet when not being spoken to by the teacher. She used to be able to do this as a human, though even then, she had to doodle or fiddle with her hands or she'd go crazy. But here? With her energy buzzing beneath the skin of her vessel? It was awful. She wished her bowtie was here for her to flick. Not wanting to be scolded by the teacher anymore, Miz left her Eye open and put the rest of her focus on doodling in her notebook, her mind drifting off to some far off daydream instead.
Mr. Carrow was obviously annoyed but continued his lesson. He saw how the new girl was distracting the other students; the other students were staring at her when she leaned back to stretch or when she chewed on the side of her pencil. He scowled more deeply. Girls like that needed to cover themselves. He clacked his chalk against the board loudly, making the kids jump and look back at the board.
"Miss McCorkle! Can you solve this equation?" Mr. Carrow glared at her. She had been staring at the new girl instead of paying attention. It disappointed him, how these children could be so easily distracted. Carla stumbled a little, but managed to give the correct answer still, as she usually did when there weren't any hooligans hell-bent on distracting her. Good. Mr. Carrow began calling on more kids randomly throughout class. They all began to try and focus more, not wanting to be the target of their teacher's intimidating scowl.
Finally, Mr. Carrow called on Bill.
"You, solve this equation." Mr. Carrow scowled, clacking his chalk against the blackboard.
Lee wasn't exactly sure what Bill said next, but with all the "lines in length by" some number and "angles in degrees by" some other number, and "relative turnwise of" something else… Lee wasn't actually expecting him to end with some random-sounding thing of "-which is equivalent to the number twelve-point-seven-five in base-ten."
With the way Mr. Carrow was scowling at Bill, though, it was probably, technically the correct answer. Except...
"This is algebra," Mr. Carrow said with a scowl.
"And I'm geometry," said Bill, which had Lee wincing and slapping a hand across his face. Not again…
"Get up here and do it properly, if you think you know the answer!" Mr. Carrow barked out, challenging the hooligan. She'd likely copied it from- (Then Mr. Carrow frowned as he realized that Stan likely didn't know the answer, the Crampelter boy was terrible at math, and the harlot- ...Fine. It was probably her sister she'd cheated off of, then. That Pines boy had used to cheat off of his brother the same way, up until Mr. Carrow had put a stop to that by giving them different assignments entirely. He'd almost never caught them at it, either, unfortunately...)
Bill got up from his chair and strode up to the board, facing the teacher.
He took the piece of chalk from the teacher's hand, held it between his hands by both fingers and thumbs… and split it in half right in front of him with a quick and sharp 'snap!'
There was a pause in which Mr. Carrow looked like he was going to have an apoplectic fit over this - he did not split his chalk! - and the class nearly gasped as one, thinking that the new girl was going to-
...except Bill then turned on his heel to face the board, and started writing across it, top-to-bottom, two-handed, a piece of chalk in each hand.
Lee blinked as Bill wrote from the outsides in, from the left and right at the same time, then moved down the board a bit, and started writing center-outwards, to the left and right this time, then...
It took Bill maybe five seconds to get the solution down on the board this way, and then he put both pieces of the broken chalk down on the chalk ledge, turned in place, and walked right back to his seat. Except, what he'd written up there looked kind of weird… -oh shit.
(To finish it all off, Miz flicked her fingers and the chalk recombined into one piece with a soft 'click' sound, that nobody really noticed in the aftermath of the teacher losing his temper with the lot of them.)
(Because for some reason, the demon had written it all out on the board - correctly as an algebraic rather than geometric proof this time, mind you - but in Sixer's handwriting.)
Lee let out a sigh of not-quite relief as they stumbled out the door into the hallway. The math teach had drilled Bill for the rest of the period, but this time he'd actually said all the answers in algebra instead of whatever-it-was that he'd said before. (And Mr. Carrow had done nearly everything short of blindfolding Bill to try and prove that he must have been cheating somehow. He'd even demanded to see Sixer's notes, thinking he must've written the answer down for Bill to see before the hooligan girl's 'performance' at the board. Spoiler alert: Sixer hadn't.)
Miz rubbed her temples. "Well, that happened." No anger was felt, thanks to the headband, but she didn't like angry scolding tones from an older man. (Part of the reason she'd thrown herself out the window a few days back when an argument was starting back at the Shack. That tone made her unhappy.)
"At least we didn't get any detention over it," Lee said, wiping a hand across his forehead and letting out a breath. He hadn't exactly been spared from a couple questions during that grilling himself, and with the teacher as pissed as he'd been? Lee had had to actually take it seriously that time, instead of trying to joke off a bunch of wrong answers like he usually did.
"We've got Social Studies next right? Are we done?" Miz Flickered to see if that teacher was more pleasant… and thank Ax, they were! A kind older woman who was very enthusiastic about discussing current topics.
"Social studies, then 'art'," Lee told them. He looked at her askance; hadn't she said she knew their schedule?
Miz grinned. "Oh! I love art!" She tilted her head. "I don't have any supplies… should I make some supplies?" Then a voice interrupted them.
"If you have Art last period, I'll be there. You can borrow some of my stuff." Miz turned to see Mary. The teenaged girl grinned at them. "You guys are hilarious."
Lee groaned. "It's not as funny from this side." Sixer just shrugged; he was still wondering why Bill's handwriting was practically identical to his. Bill's contribution to this was an odd tilted-head look at Lee and an, "Of course not. Funny and hilarious are not the same thing!"
Mary laughed at that before waving at them and walking off. "I'll see you guys in Art."
Miz waved before grabbing Sixer and Lee's hands again to drag them off to Social Studies. This time they were able to get to class with time to spare and Miz slid into a seat, unsure what this class would be about, she didn't really remember her own social study classes from a whole lifetime ago.
The teacher for this class, a cheerful woman named Helena Evergreen, smiled at the two new girls. "Hello, dears," she said, then greeted Miz with an, "Are you William or Miz?" She had already heard from rumors that the new students were two sisters, she had been a little confused about the name but figured that perhaps her parents had really wanted a son.
"I'm Miz and this is Bill." Miz introduced herself before gesturing to her brother. Bill nodded to the teacher once in confirmation. Sixer and Lee were already getting into their seats. Lee was hoping, praying, that Bill would just be normal for this class...
His prayers were in vain. The AXOLOTL didn't care.
"I can't believe you kept trying to convince her that there was a 8th and a half president!" Lee groaned as they left class.
Bill looked offended. "There WAS!" he protested.
Miz patted Bill's shoulder. "The nature of truth is fluid and skewed by preconceptions, ignorance, misinformation and years of careful propaganda by the reptilian shadow government," she tried to soothe him (to the tune of an irritated, "I KNOW THAT! But it SHOULDN'T be!" from Bill). "Besides, if the authorities found out that some people knew the truth, they'd get arrested and shipped off to Washington," Miz tried next. (Nevermind the fact that no one had believed Bill, Miz noticed plenty of kids muffling giggles.)
Sixer blinked. "You mean there really WAS a 8th and a half President?"
"YES!" Bill insisted. "I used to talk to him-" he stopped short, blinking, then looked incredibly annoyed for some reason Lee didn't get. "WELL," said Bill, in slightly more sedate tones again. "I used to talk to the one in the dimension we portaled here from," Bill muttered out.
Miz winced. "Oh geez, how did your Ax even manage to do all this without you?" That… would require a lot of work, wouldn't it?
"I KNOW." Bill looked thoroughly annoyed. It wasn't as though he hadn't looked into this all before they'd jumped; it was why he'd gotten so mad about what the stupid lizard had done in the first place! "Fever dreams and mushrooms are MUCH MORE of a 'thing' here! Mostly. Also: global warming; more sunspots; less giant birds." He glared at nothing in particular. "-And stealing enough weirdness from MY dimension to practically DEFLATE IT like a BALLOON!" he gritted out, voice rising, fists clenched at his sides.
Miz continued patting Bill on the back. "Huh, well the global warming thing sounds like what my past dimension was going through, maybe it's what happens when there's no Bill?"
Bill turned his head towards his little sister and gave her a confused look. "Global warming happens when there's a star acting as a sun!" he told her. "That's why the planet isn't one big iceball!"
Miz shrugged, "And enough carbon in the atmosphere to trap too much heat in the planet to cause global climate shifts."
"Well, yes?" said Bill, because enough carbon in the atmosphere did do that. "What's your point?"
Miz shrugged, not really wanting to go into this right now. "Well, does carbon fueled overheating of the planet happen in the dimension we portaled in from? I forgot to check."
Bill blinked. "It could happen that way." He tilted his head at her. "Why do you want to know?" (He was, yet again, not connecting the concepts Miz was bringing up as all belonging to the same train of thought.)
Miz shrugged. "It would be nice if it didn't. Intense climate changes like that tend to kill off the plants and animals that can't adapt quickly enough. Which, was kinda normal, mass extinctions happen all the time, but I like the animals that currently exist.."
They were all walking to the art room as they talked, Sixer was swinging his head around to look at the two. "Wait, climate change? Global warming?"
"Your planet's coming out of a mini ice age," Bill told him, waving it off. "Don't worry about it. YET." As far as he was concerned, fixing that sort of thing was easy. It just required a little… ATTENTION! Haha! (Though he wasn't doing THAT sort of thing, to prevent it, for Stanley's dimension. Global warming unfroze Time Baby where and when he was going to finish reconstituting his molecules! -Bill wanted that time loop set up and remaining FIRMLY in place, as it was and already had been and would continue to would-be in the future, present, and past… So global warming for that dimension, there would be! One way or the other. HAHAHAHAHA!)
Lee still looked worried, but Bill waved him off as they got to the art room. Miz blinked slowly before sighing. She would Look this up later and see about fixing it. The Earth was supposed to have periods of hot and cold, but they weren't supposed to be as intense as her memories from her human years told her.
Mary waved at them when they got into the art room. "Hey, how've you all been?" Miz shrugged as she sat down beside her. "Brother tried to enlighten our class on the truth of American history. They didn't believe him." Mary raised an eyebrow. "Ah, huh?" Miz shrugged. "It's not all that important."
This class was smaller than their other classes, being an elective. The teacher came in to grin at them all. "Oh. New students! Right! Yes! Nice to meet you! Well, today we're doing still life sketching. If you don't have charcoal, you can grab some from the cart. You will have to get your own paper though." The teacher, an energetic young woman who seemed like a grad student herself, spoke incredibly quickly.
Miz sighed. She knew still lives were meant for practicing their technical skills, but she didn't like them. Well, unless it was an interesting still life. The teacher flicked on a few spot lights to give her display a stark light and dark with shadows. Miz blinked. Oh. This wasn't bad. There was a deer skull and a bird cage. She could do that. Mary ripped off two pieces of paper from her sketchpad and handed them to Miz and Bill.
"Thanks." Miz grinned at her. (Bill didn't bother with the thanks; Mary had said she would share her supplies, and sharing her supplies, she was doing. Bill hadn't asked for it, so as far as Bill was concerned, he didn't owe her anything for what was being given, that she'd promised without any strings attached to give.)
Mary grinned back, scooting her chair a little closer. "So, you don't mind if I try to get to know you, right?" Mary asked bluntly.
Miz tilted her head. "Not really? Are you suggesting we become friends?" Miz responded just as bluntly.
Mary blinked before she snorted. "Sure. Why not? You two are new to the neighborhood right?" Mary waggled her eyebrows at the other girl. "Space aliens or something?" Lee groaned in the background.
Miz giggled. "Yup. We're really far from home. A whole dimension away!"
Mary hummed as she began lightly roughing out the shapes of the still life onto her paper, measuring with her thumb and everything. "That's cool. So, are you here for the invasion or just sightseeing?" Mary asked wryly, not really serious. But those were the two main theories going around and she was curious what 'story' the new girls had made up for their little play.
"It was originally a rescue mission, but then stuff happened with those hatchlings over there and we ended up staying here for longer than we planned." Miz gestured to the Stans when she mentioned 'hatchlings'. Mary raised an eyebrow. ("Hatchlings?!" Lee was sputtering, he wasn't some baby animal!) "Well, you see, we're actually from an alternate future, so the older versions of the twins came here and saw their younger selves, and then some things happened and Stan wanted to make sure these two didn't suffer like they did in their timeline and he asked me to make sure that Lee doesn't try to drop out of school, like he had to do in his timeline-"
"-Wait, what?!" Lee interrupted. He hadn't really gotten that from what the old guy him had said earlier.
Miz turned to him with a serious look, her hands still sketching out the still life (cheating with an All Seeing Eye? Fuck yeah she would!) and deadpanned, "In their dimension, Stan got blamed for breaking the project."
At this, the twins both flinched violently, and they both went more than a little pale. They could clearly imagine what would have happened if something like that happened. Filbrick would have been even MORE pissed off. And with Lee taking the blame...
('Oh shit,' Lee thought, because hadn't the old-SIxer said that things had happened differently in their dimension? That they hadn't had a bunch of older-thems around? -Then what had that older-him had to do, all out on… his own? Lee wasn't too sure that he could hold down enough jobs to make enough money for hotel rooms every night, let alone food…)
Mary looked back and forth between them. Was this 'play' even more intricate than she thought? The twins looked legitimately upset. She frowned. The whole 'alien' thing couldn't be real, could it?
Lee was frowning, and Sixer glanced at his brother with a worried expression. He remembered Miz had said in the boat with those two older versions of them that Filbrick had originally planned to throw him out… which means that in the other timeline, it must have been Lee who had been thrown out, instead of him. And from the sounds of it, if he was understanding Miz correctly now, Lee must have dropped out of school altogether in order to try and make ends meet...
Miz hummed as she turned back to her own drawing. "-But anyway, we're staying for a while in this dimension so we can help these two reach some sort of financial stability, considering Sixer got disowned by their father and Lee left home to be with his brother, because you shouldn't abandon your sibling, and the older versions of them are going to work on making enough money for them so that they can survive until graduation, at which point they're on their own." Miz worked as she talked, and by the time she finished her summary, she had the rough shape of everything sketched out and was now adding in the details.
Mary stared at the twins. "...you got disowned by your dad?!" she asked them quietly.
Sixer winced and looked away, working on his own sketch for a bit. Lee clenched his jaw, but made no comment.
Miz commented, "Fildick is a jerk."
-which made Lee bristle. "Hey! He's still our Pa!"
Miz turned to stare at him. "A man who willingly throws his own child into the streets is not a father."
Lee shivered at the expression on her face. Miz turned back to her sketch and Lee heaved out a breath. (Geez. Ok, the younger sister was scary too. Got it. But why was she getting mad at him for something his pa had done, huh?! That wasn't fair!) He hunched his shoulders.
"He isn't your twin's father anymore," Bill pointed out to Lee next, as the demon was staring (... scowling?) at the still life out of display. "Your Filbrick disowned him before kicking him out of the family. Or were you not paying attention to hear him?" (Bill had checked that right before opening the portal, while everyone had been tense and distracted. -HA, his Zodiac had probably thought he'd spent that entire time setting up the portal at the beach's edge, instead! But he'd been concentrating on far more than just and only THAT...)
Lee bristled even more. "Just 'cause he-" but Sixer cut him off.
"It's fine Lee, let it go." Sixer turned back to his sketch. "It's better this way," he said quietly, with an odd intensity that left Lee frowning.
Mary blinked and then blinked again. "Ooookaaay…" she said slowly. Weird. Really weird. "So… you two are here… because of them?" She wasn't quite sure what that meant.
Miz nodded as she sketched. "I don't mind. It's kind of exciting to be around so many humans. And it's a learning experience for brother." Bill scoffed at this, while staring at the still life they were supposed to draw. He hadn't started, not even touching his paper as he just stared at the display. "Bill, are you going to try to draw it?" Miz prompted him gently.
Bill hunched his shoulders slightly and crossed his arms. "I don't like it!" Bill complained. "Leaving out too much information," he grumbled, glaring at the still life, then again at the blank page.
Miz shrugged. "It's better than drawing toilet paper."
"Mmmn," Bill said. He glared at the still life still.
"Just draw it however you want to?" the teacher prompted from behind them - and startling Bill a bit, if the way his shoulders and arms dropped and his facial expression went all shocked-long was any indication.
Bill twisted his head around on his neck and stated up at her, wide-eyed. Then his eyes narrowed slightly.
"...However I want?" Bill asked her, clearly testing. But the teacher just smiled at him and said, "Yes." This assignment was on observation but it was also the new girl's first time here so Ms. Talia thought it would be okay for them to do what they wanted; the way a child approached art would tell her a lot about how these kids were - their temperament, personality, etc.
Bill stared up at her for another long few moments.
"HM," said Bill. He looked at her for another drawn-out moment.
And then he turned away from her and picked up the pencil.
...and started writing equation after equation onto the page, starting at the very top, and working his way down.
Ms. Talia looked fascinated. "An interesting approach." Very different, she itched to know if the girl was testing her or was just expressing herself in a unique way; hard to tell sometimes, with her students.
"Mm," said Bill. "Easier to start with defining the general shape and material and environmental conditions for nonbiologicals, and then describing the deformations." He tapped the equation for a cylinder, the chemical formula for the aluminum-stainless-steel mix, and the formulas describing the intensity and relative location of the light (and light-color type) and the temperature-pressure-atmospheric conditions. He paused for a moment, partway through the equations describing the free space absent of metal (starting with a smaller cylinder-of-removal inside the larger cylinder for the central cage region). "Other way around would need a lot more paper!" he told her. "-Biologicals are easier," Bill added, gesturing to the specific genetic profile he'd written for the deer skull (and the short addendums below it describing age, time of birth, time of death, time of now, rate of decomposition and decay - pretty much complete at this stage - along with a the descriptor detailing the specific portion of the body being further described, the level of damage to it such as which were the missing teeth from said skull, and final resting place of said remains). Then he got back to his equation-writing.
Ms. Talia nodded. "That's a new way to think about it," she responded easily before she glanced over at the other new girl's work… who seemed to be doing the assignment properly by drawing what she saw and shading it in… but was also doodling tiny little humans climbing all over the display… was one of them trapped inside the birdcage? "I see someone's having fun." Ms. Talia grinned.
Miz nodded. "It looked too empty." Ms. Talia was about to move on when she paused, noticing that within the eye socket of the deer skull there was a… kitchen?
It was very small and Ms. Talia had to lean a little closer to look at it. A tiny little kitchen seen within the eye socket, as if it were a window. The detail was exquisite considering the size. But something seemed off. Ms. Talia tilted her head and was amazed to see that the 'view' of the kitchen moved along with her. As if she was now moving to look through a window from a different angle. The art teacher frowned and moved her head back and forth, watching the view of the kitchen change, she could only see the fridge and countertop before, but now she could see there was a stove as well. She rubbed her eyes, confused about what was happening, some sort of optical illusion perhaps?
She blinked her eyes down at the sketch and was shocked to see there was now a person inside the kitchen. Had the new girl drawn it in the few seconds her eyes had been closed? Wait. Ms. Talia looked around to the rest of the sketch and frowned. The person inside the birdcage was gone and… the rest of the people in the drawing had moved positions?
"Miz," she heard the other girl say in tones of complaint. "It's supposed to be a STILL life."
The asian girl pouted. "But that's boring~" She added a tiny little cat. It didn't move but when Ms. Talia looked away to Bill and then back, the cat was halfway up the side of the cage, frozen in the act of climbing.
"Do the assignment right," Bill told her. "Or do a different assignment! ...Ask for another one?" Bill amended. "But don't do it wrong ON PURPOSE; that's just annoying," he chided her absently, not looking away from his own work (as he kept on writing). "School is for learning how to do things right!"
Miz pouted some more but drew a car, which everyone in the drawing piled into and left as she moved her hand over the drawing to block it from view, only allowing brief glimpses of the car and the people in it, leaving the still life empty once more. Ms. Talia was still staring.
Mary was staring too. "That's really cool. How'd you do that?"
Miz shrugged while Lee was groaning into his hands. "I just animated them." She paused. "I need more practice though." Since these could only move when they weren't watched directly, that wasn't good enough. But drawing all the inbetweens was too much work.
"You couldn't just erase them?" Lee complained. Because had she really needed to show off all that weird demon-ness of hers some more while people had actually been watching?! Gym class had been bad enough, but… she was… just as bad as Bill at this!
Miz gasped. "And take the life from that which was just granted? How cruel! This way, they're just gonna go off and start their own lives somewhere else where they wouldn't have to stay still."
Lee stared at her. "Those drawings… were alive?" Oh man, he was gonna have nightmares over this...
"Not fully, they don't have very long life spans; they'll live out their lives and pass away peacefully when their charcoal runs out." Miz blinked before assuring him, "But they wouldn't be in pain, they're meant to be temporary and they're okay with that. They're happy just to be able to experience life for a short while…" Miz frowned.
Bill glanced over at her. "Thought you said you couldn't do the life thing?" This sounded like it was at least partway to what 'her (stupid) lizard' did already. Did she just not think of it that way?
"It's not like they have Souls, though… I guess you might find that upsetting? I can animate stuff and make it 'alive'-ish but they aren't… really… real?" Miz frowned. "It's like making a water tower grow a mouth and walk around, but it's not really 'alive'."
Oh. "-'Automate', not 'animate'. As in, turn into automatons. Animating is for cartoons! -And reanimating is for things that were once-alive before but are-not-now," Bill told her, grinning at her winningly. "And terminating is for making currently-alive things dead!" Bill ended simply, then paused. "Or firing from a job. Except not firing. For less than gross incompetence. ...Usually because the position is no longer necessary, existing, or paid?" Bill said, pausing in his equation writing for a moment as he attempted to articulate what he thought was the current human English definition for that. They were in an English human-language 20th century Western human-society school, after all.
"Well these are drawings, so it's kinda like a cartoon, thus, animation. And even if they're not really alive, I would feel bad just… erasing them." Miz pointed out. Sixer was scribbling stuff down in his journal. ...And Mary was taking this all in stride better than Lee had thought she would.
"So where are they now?" Mary asked as Lee stared. He wanted to know too, mainly because this was really messed up and he wanted to know, just in case. (He didn't like the idea of little drawn people climbing over all his skin when he was asleep. Because tattoos were a thing, and…)
"I think they're just gonna wander about through other pieces of paper until they find a place they want to settle down and build a new house to live in. Unless someone supplies them with more charcoal to sustain them and they end up growing or reproducing…" Miz put her paper down, having pretty much finished and not having anything else to do.
"What would they build a house out of?" Mary asked next, intrigued.
"Other drawing-lines," said Bill. "The cannibals." And just when Lee thought that the demon might have a problem with that, Bill let out a gleeful "HA!" instead. (Lee groaned and covered his face with a hand.)
Miz reached over to pat Lee's back, realizing he was upset but not quite sure why. "There, there?"
Ms. Talia was staring at the sketch on the table in front of Miz with a gobsmacked expression.
"Don't 'there, there' me!" Lee complained, straightening up in place and away from her hand. "Why would you just up and make a bunch of cannibal lines? Or whatever the heck they are? -That's messed up!" he complained.
Miz shrugged. "I was bored?" ("You made a bunch of cannibals because you were bored?!" Lee complained next.) She frowned. "And they would have been happy to just live in my drawing, but it's supposed to be a Still Life so they had to move and find a new home."
"Could've just left them there and started the still life assignment over with a new piece of paper if they were already happy where they were, little sis," said Bill, as he finished up his own work, lifting his pencil from the page and giving a half-grimace, half-smile at what he'd just completed. He turned to look at her, setting down his pencil. "You didn't need to drive them out of their home." Wasn't that Stanley's definition of… mean?
Miz hummed, "I… didn't think of that…", before turning to the teacher, who was incredibly pale right now, "Would it be alright to have a not-still life for my assignment?" Ms. Talia nodded slowly, eyes staring far into the distance as she seemed not fully aware of where she was right now. Miz cheered before tapping a finger on her paper. "She says you guys can come home!" The dragon-demon whispered into the page. She waved her hand over the paper a few times and a happy family returned and moved back into the deer skull in all their stop-motion frame glory. Miz turned to Bill. "I forgot I could have asked the teacher if I could change the assignment."
"I did say that earlier," Bill agreed good-naturedly.
"I wasn't sure if she would allow me, but she seems to like them…" Miz glanced up at the teacher who was blinking rapidly to watch the little drawings move around.
"Allow you?" Bill said, sounding surprised. "It's YOUR artwork," Bill told her. "'Allowed' isn't a thing! -She can critique, but she can't MAKE you change it or do it a certain way. Neither will I," Bill told his little sister, making it clear that: "I was just offering you advice and suggestions earlier. -I wasn't trying to tell what I thought you HAD to do or I'd MAKE you. You know that, right?" Bill told her with a light frown.
Miz nodded to show she understood and leaned over to nuzzle Bill's side affectionately. "Okay, thanks." Bill smiled slightly; he didn't quite grimace at the start of the bodily contact this time. (Either Miz was getting 'better' at the way she was touching him, or Bill was slowly getting used to it...)
Ms. Talia finally seemed to snap out of whatever stupor she was in. She reached out to hesitantly trace the edges of the paper. "Um… ca-can I have this?" She asked. Miz blinked. "Um… yeah? I'm passing in my assignment, right?" The teacher nodded, a jerky motion. "D-do I need to feed them?" Ms. Talia asked. Miz blinked. "Well, you can draw stuff for them. Like food or stuff if you want? But you don't have to, they'll fade once they run out of charcoal anyway."
"How would… someone give them more charcoal and… keep them alive?" Ms. Talia asked, a bit eagerly. Miz tilted her head. "I guess, you just trace over their outlines when they look like they're fading-" The teacher snatched up the drawing with a grin. "Ok. Thanks. I will- go and grade this now! In my office! Yes!" She had a manic look in her eyes as she power-walked out of the classroom with the drawing held carefully out in front of her. "I will take good care of them- I mean, grading! Yes." Before Ms. Talia left the room, she called back, "Free study for the rest of the period! I will grade your sketches during our next lesson-"
The door closed and Miz blinked. Uh...
Bill let out a soft laugh. He was rather used to inducing that sort of reaction in humans (...and others...) as a muse. Though usually, he went in more for the types who were…...
...WELL. Let's just say that he was LOOKING FORWARD to his upcoming 'detention' that afternoon! HAHAHAHAHA!
(It was nice to be APPRECIATED, after all!)
Lee was groaning into his hands. Sixer, the oblivious idiot, was still cheerfully writing all this down in his journal (without really thinking through - or being concerned in the least about - the deeper implications of any of it), while Mary 'woop'ed at the free period.
Lee had never wished for the end of the school day more. What little reputation he'd had before this was already completely shot by this point, he knew it. No going back there. -He just wanted it to stop before it got even worse, and turned into the negative bullying ostracization junk that he and his brother had used to put up with before. He didn't want to go back to that! Not again! He'd finally-
...Oh shit, the demons were going to be in school with them tomorrow, too, weren't they?! Lee wanted to beg the older version of himself to reconsider this, ple- that word that you were supposed to use when asking for things nicely. Arrrrrrgh, Lee might even have to use it!
Lee was thrilled to leave the demons behind for Detention; unfortunately, Miz didn't want to stay for it.
"It's good enough that I got it. I don't really have to go, right?" she had asked Mr. Harman, who was already almost completely distracted by what Bill had started writing on the board - which had made far more sense than what Miz had written up earlier (which had been smudged into further illegibility by the opening of the viewing portal itself).
And being so distracted, the science teacher shrugged and said, without looking away from Bill, "Yes, yes. I've got class with you two tomorrow, as well. I'll see you then."
Bill wanted to stay in detention, though he was a little disappointed that Miz didn't. (But Bill didn't argue Miz's reasoning, which was that Stan had told her to keep watch on the twins so they didn't skip school, but Stan had asked that of her because the want-behind-the-want was that he also wanted the two to graduate. So she wanted to stick with them and make sure they got back to the boat safely and did their homework so that they COULD graduate.)
So Bill took a moment to send a dead-eyed stare the teenagers' way, before finally agreeing with Miz's reasoning, with an expression of 'If anything bad happens to my little sister, you're BOTH going to pay for it!' quite clear on his face.
Lee sighed, feeling a little uncomfortable at the responsibility there. (Like the younger demon would listen to him if he told her not to do something that might get her hurt!) He watched as Miz gave her big brother one last nuzzle before waving goodbye and bouncing out of the school.
Mary wanted to hang out some more, but was forced to go home when she saw her parents arrive at the school to pick her up, some kind of family emergency or something. Thus, parting was such sweet sorrow for the two girls, as Miz's new friend(?) waved at her as she got into her parent's car, and they drove off.
So Miz and the twins walked back to the beach by themselves, with Miz looking around properly at the neighborhood as they went. She wanted to check out what kinda food they had here; a port town near the ocean definitely had plenty of seafood. She wanted to check that out. Miz stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of one particular restaurant, though.
"Is that place called the Spaghetto?" she laughed and ran towards it, holding Sixer's hand and dragging him behind her. "That's hilarious!"
Sixer stumbled as Miz pulled him along. "Ah?! Wait!" She slowed and looked back at him curiously. "Shouldn't we tell the older us where we're going?" he asked.
Miz tilted her head and considered it. "Ooh! We should invite them to go out to dinner with us!" She still had left over money from her sales. Besides~ she loved going out to restaurants with friends!
Lee sighed. "Uh…" He sort of didn't want to hang out with the demons in public. They were embarrassing enough at school! Though Bill wasn't here right now, and Miz was better at blending in as long as she wasn't showing off her powers or whatever, Lee was still worried about another 'lunch' incident if the food here wasn't up to her standards. Sixer didn't seem to care about any secondhand embarrassment, so it would be up to Lee to save the both of them by: "We… need to do our homework." Lee felt like gagging, just saying this. (Oh shit. Was HE turning into the RESPONSIBLE one?! Noooooo!)
Miz raised an eyebrow before shrugging. "Right! Schoolwork!" She ruffled Sixer's hair. "You need to get yourself a scholarship, young man! Then you're gonna go and do awesome things! And-" she leaned in close. "Don't abandon your brother." She told him quietly with a serious expression. Sixer blinked. "Wha-?" Miz booped his nose with a grin. "Don't worry about it. But don't forget either." (Sixer looked at her oddly for this, as he readjusted his glasses.)
Miz looked around for the older Stan, eyes flickering absently. After getting them into school, Stan and Ford had returned to the beach and worked on repairs for the boat later that morning, before heading off. Stan had spent the morning along the boardwalk earning more money, after that. (And Ford had left at the same time as Stan.) ...Well, she would get the kids back to the boat, help them finish their homework, and then she'd take them out to dinner!
She pulled Sixer along. "Onwards! To victory!" She bounced cheerfully to the boardwalk. Her new bra offered enough support to do so without toppling over this time.
The twins were essentially herded back to the boat where Miz sat down with them, pulling out her own homework to work on it with them. Lee was planning to just half-ass his work as per usual, but he jumped when Miz suddenly appeared over his shoulder. "You can do better," she informed him, to which Lee groaned and said, "It's fine."
"I can tutor you." Miz insisted, scooting closer to him and leaning forward, pressing her breasts against Lee's back as she reached out to point at his homework. "You're not even trying. I know you can do better than this." She didn't seem to notice Lee's blush as she leaned against him to pull his Algebra homework back out. "You didn't even double-check your work."
"I don't really care?" Lee mumbled. Miz scoffed. "Come on. I know you don't care but it's not bad to try and do better?" Lee groaned. He didn't want to. This was so annoying. But he couldn't help but enjoy the soft bumps against his back. It felt really... nice. So if Miz wanted to lean against him while tutoring him… well-!
Sixer was diligently doing his own homework without prompting. -The sooner he was done, the sooner he could start asking Miz a few hundred questions about demons!
"Show your work along the side, it lets the teacher know you did this yourself. Otherwise they'd accuse you of copying your brother again and fail you without even checking," Miz could be heard saying from where she was helping his brother with his work. Sixer quietly approved of his brother trying harder on his schoolwork. He watched Miz lean over Lee with her… ah… Sixer blushed bright red at seeing the position she was in.
Miz didn't seem to notice as she continued walking Lee through the math. "-then you multiply this with the one in front, the one there and you add them up afterward-" Lee nodded stiffly, face red.
Part of Sixer wanted to tease Lee about having a hot demon babe hanging off of him (and what said demon babe's older brother might have to say about the whole situation once he was back from the detention that he'd so desired), but other other part of him was more interested in listening to how Miz explained the work to his twin.
Through some miracle, Lee actually managed to finish his homework. That earned him a beaming smile and a cheerful "Great job! I knew you could do it!" which gave Lee an odd expression on his face.
Sixer finished his homework as well, which earned him his own praise. He tried to hide his blush, an odd tight feeling in his chest. (He was… proud? Happy? He wasn't sure what this feeling was. But Miz's praise, as simple as it sounded, really seemed to be real and heartfelt. She really was happy for them. Legitimately proud of them. ...It was an odd feeling.)
Once Miz finished checking over all their work and approved of it all (stating that it wasn't about them getting the answers correct, but that they had each answered to the best of their knowledge), she pulled them out of the boat behind her in search of their older counterparts. They were both in the booth that they'd claimed. Ford was in the back, seemingly not doing anything at all; Stan was up front, counting up the cash that he'd earned for the day.
Miz grinned. "Hi Stan~" (It was then that the teenagers realized Miz was back in her child form (having finally accepted defeat on the difficulties of basically lugging around two basketballs on her chest). When had she changed?)
Stan looked up and raised an eyebrow. He took a good look at the three of them, and the next words out of his mouth were, "Where's Bill?"
"He said that detention sounded like it would be fun so he asked the physics teacher to give him one." Miz responded simply. "I got a detention slip too! But I didn't feel like sitting through it, and I wanted to keep an eye on the twins. So I skipped." Miz said cheerfully as she help up the slip of paper. "This is the first time I've ever gotten a detention slip, is that good?" she asked.
Stan stared. "Hold on a sec. Bill asked the teacher to give him detention?" He needed proper clarification on that one first, before anything else. (The kid didn't do nothin' without a reason for it; had he really just done it 'for fun'? ...And which kind of fun had the kid been going for there, was also a pretty damn big concern.)
Stan looked over to Lee and Sixer for their input, and Lee sighed. "Bill walked right into class and demanded for the teachers to give him detention. He tried with our homeroom and English teacher but they both refused. Then Mr. Harman agreed to give him detention 'cause he wanted to talk to him…" Lee trailed off. Should he tell Stan about how the two demons had failed to pretend to be human that day?
"So… the kid… wanted detention?" Stan frowned at them in confusion, eyebrows raised and barely stifling a laugh, because… what the heck?! (He couldn't wait to hear the kid explain this one to him. How was detention supposed to be fun?) Miz shrugged, folding up her detention slip and making it vanish with a flick of her wrist. "He said it was fun? I dunno? Never got detention before, maybe it's actually supposed to be fun?" She shrugged. "But I wanted to explore the city and I saw a restaurant and it had a funny name so I want to go there for dinner," she told Stan simply.
"-Wait," Ford cut in. "Mr. Harman. Our science teacher?" he asked, his voice rising in tone abruptly. It had been so long ago, but…
The younger twins exchanged a glance. "Uh, yeah? He teaches physics." said Lee, wondering what the problem was. Especially when the older Sixer turned white as a sheet.
"Oh no," Ford breathed out, looking like he'd just seen the face of death… or worse. "No no no-"
"-Ford!" Stan exclaimed, startled, as Ford vaulted the table and shot off at a dead run. "...The heck?" Stan muttered, standing up and craning his head around. Was Ford headed for… the school?
The teenagers looked at the retreating back of the man and exchanged worried frowns with each other.
"It's fine; I'll handle it," Stan told the teens, as he rubbed his eyes under his glasses with his fingers. Then he let out a sigh and dropped his hand, looking up at Miz. "You said you wanna go out to eat?" he asked her directly.
"Yup! And I made sure we all finished our homework first!" Miz tugged on Lee and Sixer's hands. "They both did really well." The teens flushed at the praise.
Stan glanced at them both, then back to Miz. "Yeah, okay. Good." He paused for a moment. "You got enough money to do that? Eat out?" Stan asked her.
Miz nodded eagerly. "I can pay for myself! I still have some money! And… and I wanna taste the way they cook stuff here!" She didn't quite whine but she was wiggling in place with pent up impatience.
Stan nodded almost absently, already pulling a couple bills off the stack. He handed them over to his younger counterpart and said, "Take her wherever. Stay out of trouble." Stan leaned back and shoved the rest of the money in a pocket. "I'm gonna go catch up with my brother, figure out what's what," he told them all. "Don't wait up for us." Stan looked over at Miz. "Have fun. Just don't go eating out the whole restaurant, yeah?" he said, with a slight smile and a huff of breath that generously could be called a laugh. (He was tired thinking about it already, how he was going to have to handle the kid and Ford next.)
Miz hugged the two younger twin's arms to herself. "Okaaay! I haven't had Italian food in EONS!" there was something similar to it out in space but it just wasn't the same!
"Uh huh." Right. She'd been living out in space all this time, and 'her' humans hadn't really gotten out of the pyramid age yet, right? She really had missed Earth food, hadn't she? She'd said it a couple times, kinda, what with not having the right ingredients for junk, but the demon-kid really meant it. ...Well, Stan could sort of understand that. He didn't know much about what kinds of food existed out in the multiverse, but with what he'd picked up from Ford whenever he'd accidentally let something slip about what he'd eaten during his time on the other side of the portal...
...Yeah, 'very different' didn't even begin to cut it. Not with 'classifications of species nutritional intake requirements' with 'modifiers for fatal sensitivities' and all that junk. (Stan still didn't know how exactly Ford had been so sure that the kid had made those pancakes that one time a couple days before, though, instead of Dipper. 'That particular kind of bland' didn't really cut it. They hadn't actually tasted bland. He had a few guesses, but... Stan had been even more careful not to accidentally call Dipper 'kid' ever since, though. He'd meant to ask Dipper to try his hand at making those pancakes, not the triangle demon.)
Miz was actually whining now. "I kept introducing the idea of Earth food to the creatures in my own dimensional set, but it's just not the same! The closest things I've found are Potatoes and Tomatoes! And even then they're not the same KINDS!" she said vehemently, as if this was of vital importance. "I've been trying to recreate the plants from scratch by altering the DNA of the other plants I've found, and getting my worshippers to breed their crops until they resemble the stuff that I remember, but-"
Stan held up a hand and Miz quieted. "Yeah, I remember. You said that before." Because she had. The potato and tomato thing, anyway, if not the specifics. Not like he needed to know those - and if she was anything like the kid on this, too, she'd just rant on and on forever and just keep getting hungrier and hungrier, if he didn't stop her before she really got started. "It's fine. You're here now; you can copy whatever ingredients you want for later. -But for now, you three go out and get yourselves something already-made for you to eat. -That's enough money, right?" Stan asked Lee. "You're not goin' ta some high end fancy place? Or are ya?" With the way Miz had ranted about expensive foods being fancy for the sake of price and how they ruin food, Stan was pretty sure Miz wouldn't want to go to a high end place, but he figured he'd better check, just in case.
Lee spoke up, "She wants to go to the Spaghetto." Miz giggled softly at the name. Stan paused. Was she really wanting to go there just from the name? Miz grinned. "It sounds funny." Sixer finally spoke up: "Can't you just create whatever food you want?"
Miz tilted her head up at him. "Fresh cooked food always tastes better than synthesized food. If I'm copying the atomic structure, they all end up tasting the same because they're all the same, down to every last particle that makes it up - but actual cooked food has all sorts of minute differences in flavor!" She could scan and copy any meal from Earth she wanted but they were all going to be the same. Even if she scanned and recopied something from a 5-star restaurant, it just wasn't as unique as actual cooked food.
"Which is why maybe you all should swing by a grocery store with her after you eat, before they close. Let her get a good look at a bunch of ingredients for stuff. Cooking stuff together differently would make stuff taste different, yeah?" Stan raised an eyebrow at her. Miz nodded. He was starting to get the sense that she felt even more strongly about food than he had originally thought.
Lee sighed but looked down at where Miz was holding his hand. "Well, off to the Spaghetto we go." He waved at Stan with his free hand after counting and pocketing the bills (that was gonna be way more than enough for where they were going), and the three of them walked off.
Stan let out a sigh as he watched them walk away, Miz skipping cheerfully while holding their hands He didn't exactly take his time cleaning up the booth, but he wasn't exactly not rushing it either.
Once he had everything handled for the day, though, Stan hurried off for the high school.
Lee had figured Miz was a big eater. He just hadn't fully understood what that meant.
They'd gone to the Spaghetto and Miz had spotted one of those Food Challenge things on a poster. A bowl of 4 pound pasta and 1 pound of meatballs challenge. 5 pounds of food within 50 minutes. If you finished the bowl then it was free of charge. Lee saw the way her eyes lit up.
Well, Lee had figured it was HER money so if she wanted to go for it, it wasn't his problem. The three got a table and when the waiter came around to take their orders, Lee watched Miz order the challenge bowl and the restaurant staff brought out a waiver for her to sign. Sixer, the damn nerd, was also taking notes on this, after ordering an eggplant lasagna for himself.
Lee got a normal-sized spaghetti and meatballs for himself and stared when Miz ordered a few appetizers for the table. "Don't worry, I'll pay for the appetizers," she told them, "Since I'm gonna be getting the Ghetto-Meato for free," Miz said confidently. The restaurant staff gave their group some worried looks.
"If she gets sick, it's not our fault," the waiter told them. "Are you sure you want to let her do this?" They asked the older (looking) kids. Lee shrugged. She was a demon, so whatever.
The appetizers came out and the staff were even more worried when Miz ate some of those too. Sixer was content to just sit back and watch the action, eating some food when Miz prompted him to. Lee felt a little weird about it, because Miz was fussing over them a little like… a mom or something. Maybe the way Lee supposed an older sister might have done it? Actually, didn't Miz do that with Bill too? Make him eat his vegetables?
After they finished off the stuffed mushrooms and calamari, the entrees came out. Lee sipped on his soda while Miz drank some hot tea. ("To clear my pallet," Miz had claimed.)
A waiter with a stopwatch stood beside their table. Miz grinned at the giant plate filled with a pile of noodles larger than her head. Lee really hoped this wasn't going to end badly. (Sixer just noted down his observations: one demon seemed to love eating while her older brother was the opposite, was there a reason for this?) Then Lee's thoughts were derailed as Miz began digging into her plate.
...holy freaking shit.
Lee could see how wide the waiter's eyes were, and he was sure his own were the same. Right, demon, yeah, but watching someone a whole head smaller than him eat a bowl of noodles bigger than her head was… a bit much. Miz sat back in her chair, rubbing her round belly and sighing happily once she finished. "That was goooood~" She wiped the tomato sauce off her cheeks with a napkin. The waiter put down the stop watch. "Uh…." He glanced at the empty bowl and then down at the stop watch. "Well, I guess you won the challenge…" And probably beat the old record time as well, if Lee had to guess.
Miz grinned at them. "Woo! Free food!"
Sixer snorted before turning back to his own meal. "Well, that's one way to save money." Miz glanced around. "So I'm paying for the appetizers, I can pay for the deserts as well, if you two want any?"
Sixer wiped his mouth before responding, "I'd actually prefer to have another one of your hand-crafted ice creams. They were delicious."
And that got a faint blush out of the demon girl, which made Lee groan. Dammit Sixer. Lee seriously hoped his idiot brother didn't end up accidentally seducing the demon who found him attractive and may or may not want to eat him. (Sixer seemed to have a problem with girls that way - as in, he was totally oblivious unless it smacked him in the face, and then... well, nothing really. There was no smacking him in the face, other than the actually-smacking-him-in-the-face kind; not as far as Stan knew, anyway.)
Luckily, Miz was distracted by the manager coming up to ask if she wanted her picture taken to go on the Wall of Winners. As Miz walked off with them to get her picture taken, Lee turned to Sixer and sighed.
"Be careful around her." Lee told his brother. Sixer blinked. "What do you mean? Well, if you're worried she'll eat me, I'm not old enough yet." which made Lee sigh again. "Look, just try not to be alone with her if you can help it, yeah?" mainly so Lee could catch whenever his idiot brother somehow managed to accidentally flirt with the younger demon, and maybe keep him from getting clobbered at some point later.
Miz came back, holding a certificate of success for completing the challenge. She slid back into her seat and grinned. "You know I got a coupon for completing the challenge?" She held it out to Lee. "Here. I don't need this so you can have it."
The teen took it with a grunt. -A discount was a discount.
They finished their meal as Miz hummed to herself and seemed to stare off into the distance, her eyes Flickering in a way that made Sixer really, really want to study her more closely. Lee gave him a firm look and Sixer rolled his eyes at his brother's over-protectiveness.
They finished their food and Miz happily ordered desert. Sixer scribbled in his journal while Miz dug through her slice of key lime pie and Lee flagged down a waiter for the bill.
Like Miz said, she paid for the appetizers and deserts, while Lee paid for his and Sixer's entrees. Once all was done and paid for, the group left the restaurant and made their way back to the boat. (Lee almost started heading home but remembered that the pawn shop wasn't their home anymore and had to stifle a tremble as he followed Miz and Sixer. The two were holding hands again as Miz chattered on about some nerdy science thing that Lee couldn't understand but his twin seemed utterly enraptured by.)
Since their homework was done, and none of his part-time jobs were on for the day, Lee wasn't sure what to do with his time aside from keeping an eye on the small demon in case she tried to eat his brother or something. Sixer was asking Miz all sorts of questions about 'quantum'-somethings and 'relativity' or whatever. Lee leaned back against the wall, sitting on his sleeping bag as he stifled a yawn. Listening to them drone on and on was boring as heck.
Lee was wondering what his older counterpart was doing, and almost wanted to go back to the school to check on them, when Miz thoroughly distracted him by exclaiming, "Ugh, I can't stand it anymore! I need to change!" before her form shifted and suddenly there was a young man standing there, stretching and sighing in relief. "Ugh… much better. I've been stuck as a female for far too long…" he grinned. "So where's the nearest grocery store? Farmer's market? Ooh! Fish market!"
...Oh right, Miz DID say she could be male if she wanted…
"Ford! Ford! -What's going on?" Stan called out, as he miraculously found his brother in the middle of one of the hallways in the high school - weirdly, one not too far past the gymnasium where the science fair was. Stan had honestly half-expected to enter the school to hear the yelling from the kid being strangled (or Ford getting drop-kicked for trying it with the kid when the triangle demon had that bodysuit thing on and protecting him) somewhere; Ford had had a pretty serious head start on him, there. (And it wasn't like Stan had been racing after him, either.) The heck was Ford doing here, anyway?
"What's wrong with the kid being with our old science teacher for detention?" Stan asked him, as Ford was glancing around looking frustrated, and… seriously, did Ford not remember where the detention classroom was? (Wasn't like Ford hadn't been sent there a time or two, himself, hell…) Stan sighed and started walking. "C'mon, Ford. The room is this way, ya nerd. And you think I'm the one with 'memory problems', geez."
Ford frowned after Stan not quite furiously (he was certain that he'd already checked the right room for that!) and strode forward and down the hallway past Stan within seconds. Stan let out a grumbling huff at this, but just followed along behind him. Ford was muttering something under his breath to himself as he looked around, and Stan couldn't quite hear him - his hearing aid wasn't that great. ...And Ford wasn't facing him, so he couldn't lip-read him, either. "Hey! Poindexter! Talk to me."
"Bill is going to break him!" Ford hissed out as he strode down the empty hallway. School was out and the kids had all but cleared out, leaving the scientist's footsteps echoing down the hallways.
Stan almost faltered between steps. "Break- what?" Dammit. The kid knew he wasn't supposed to do mental attacks! "Why would he do that? -The kid knows better," he told his brother, frowning at his back.
"That's not-!" Ford made a frustrated sound as he turned a corner and power-walked down the next hallway. "You don't understand-"
"Then explain it to me, Ford," Stan said, reaching out and grasping Ford's elbow in exasperation, pulling him to a stop. (Huh. That... wasn't as hard as he'd thought it was gonna be. Why hadn't Ford fought him on-)
...Oh. Shit. Ford didn't look so hot.
And Stan could feel his brother shaking slightly, through the firm grip he had on his arm.
"He-" Hell, Ford looked cagey as a trapped animal right now, almost. (Or a bought-and-paid-for cop trying to get out of 'fessing up to a mob boss on something.) "You don't understand, you don't-"
"-know what he's like, yeah, Ford, you've told me this one a thousand times, already," Stan said, about ready to smack Ford for pulling this shit on him, yet again-
"-No," said Ford, looking even more nervous almost, like… "You don't care what he's like!" And Stan was just left standing there, blinking, as Ford just… wouldn't meet his eyes, looked for the world like he just wanted the floor to swallow him up whole and- "It doesn't matter to you, that he-" Ford cut himself off, and he'd fully turned his head away from Stan now, looking around frantically - literally looking at anything and everything else but Stan, at this point.
Stan let go of Ford's arm and reached out to gently grab both of his shoulders instead.
"Ford, look at me," Stan said evenly. "It's gonna be okay."
"You can't- I- I mean, you can, but I-" Ford winced and dropped his head. He shuddered slightly, and looked absolutely miserable, like he was confessing some horrible secret to him as he said, "I- I'm fine now!" Ford said, finally lifting up his head, and he looked almost desperate as he said, "I- I'm over- I'm immune to him now, mostly-"
Stan stared at his brother, because… "Ford, you are not making even one bit of sense right now. Are you gonna tell me what I'm walkin' into, or not?"
And his brother looked scared, still, even as he visibly steeled himself and said, "Bill is… addictive."
Stan blinked at him.
...Yeah, he didn't get it.
"The kid's… addictive?" Stan said slowly, because… "What, were you smokin' him inside your head, somehow?" Stan asked his brother incredulously, because he was pretty sure that fire and the kid didn't really mix all that well, no matter what the kid might try to pull over on everybody and their dog. But to what he'd just said, Ford grimaced and shook his head sharply in a 'no', looking irritated… with himself. (Not Stan.) Okay, but…
"Bill is addictive," Ford repeated, looking out-and-out sick. "He's… he's contagious. He's like a virus, a contagion, and he just-" Ford shook his head, shivering slightly in place again. "His thoughts are terrible - memetic, almost - and they spread like- like-" Ford swallowed, hard. "-You don't know, Stan," Ford told him almost desperately. "You don't know what he does. What he is! What he can do to-"
"Ford, is this some kinda weirdness thing, or something else?" Stan asked him, seriously not getting it.
"No, Stanley, it's what Bill is!" Ford said, grabbing his arms back, and he was searching Stan's gaze frantically - for what, Stan didn't know. "What Bill does, what he can do to any thinking species-" His brother was starting to shake again.
"He doin' whatever this is on purpose?" Stan said, eyes narrowing. (He'd seriously lost the thread here - not that he'd had it to begin with - but he figured that, maybe if he tried to stick with the general stuff, he could still…)
Ford looked almost miserable again, pulling away from Stan slightly to clutch his arms around himself. "He doesn't-" Ford said quietly, then looked away and shook his head. "...No. No, I don't believe so." And then Ford looked at least a little angry, on top of everything else, as he squeezed his arms around himself even tighter. "He's just… He's simply him. And he… he's..." Ford looked drawn as he looked down at the floor, very quiet now.
"He's what," Stan said evenly, not judging any because, hell, he didn't even know what to judge, here.
"...Terrible," Ford said finally, but Stan got the feeling that that really wasn't the word that Ford was usin' for the kid, inside his own head.
Stan eyed his brother for a long moment. But instead of asking what he could've asked, he asked instead, "If you're so worried about this stuff, the kid talking to people, then why didn't you jump down my throat about any of the kids talkin' to him, before?" Stan asked him.
But to this, Ford just shook his head. "The niblings aren't at any risk of-" Then Ford stopped and grimaced. "...Dipper might be, in a few years," Ford said more quietly next, looking away from him, and that had Stan narrowing his eyes at him, slightly. (Okay. So this was probably some kinda geek thing, then. Stan could fill in the blanks.)
"Ford, what are you afraid of me seein' here," Stan asked his brother straight-out. "You… do you need me to wait outside while you…handle things?" Stan asked him, because if this was one of those other-side-of-the-portal things that Ford was so messed up about, then-
"-No!" Ford said, looked shocked (and almost… afraid?) for a moment, before somewhat composing himself again. "I- I need you to stop Bill. To tell him to stop." To make him stop (- because I can't and won't be able to), was the subtext Stan got there. Okay. "I'll take our teacher… away. From him." Ford glanced away from him. "Hopefully before it's too late," Ford said next, but Stan couldn't help but stare at the tone of absolute despair in Ford's tone at...
"...Ford," Stan said slowly. "Do I gotta ask…"
"You won't have to," Ford not-quite whispered out. "You'll likely see… they said he wanted to talk to Bill, and..." Ford pulled in a slow and shaky breath, trying to get himself better under control. "...You'll likely see. What I was like. After I first met Bill."
And Stan couldn't help but stare. His brother was standing there, shaking, out in the hallway, in the middle of their old school, looking...
...utterly miserable, and desperate, and scared, and almost as bad as he had when he'd opened the door of the Shack his house to Stan a little more than thirty years ago, to let Stan in after asking him to 'please come!' (Past the junk with the damn crossbow and the flashlight beamed into his eyes, anyway.) Except this time there was no paranoia and no sleepless nights to blame the shakiness on, or the out-and-out fear in Ford's eyes...
So Stan stared at his brother for a good couple of long seconds...
...and then Stan shrugged (absolutely on purpose) and said, "Eh, I've seen you and McGucket geek out over shit before. I can handle it."
And then he watched as his too-pale brother stilled in place and stared at him in sheer and utter disbelief.
"...What?" Stan complained. "That's what you did with the kid inside your head that you never talk about, right? 'Wanting to talk to him'? About all that math stuff, with the portal?" Not like he hadn't had the kid complain to him about it, a time or two before. "I know you thought you and the kid used to get along before, Ford," Stan told his brother in descending tones, with a frustrated sigh. "Dipper told me that one. Not like I didn't know about that already. So what?" (Yeah, that got a grimace out of Ford... but also almost a smile? Yeah, Stan was totally lost at this point.)
"You know detention is for sitting at desks and being bored, not doing geek things with the teacher, right?" Stan told him next.
That got Stan a startled sort of huff of breath, and a grim, "One can only hope…" out of his brother.
Ford glanced around again. He honestly couldn't remember where all the rooms were anymore, his high school years having been forty years past at this point. He'd thought he'd remembered where the detention room was, but… Ford shook his head in frustration. With how quiet the building was after school now (and with all the students remaining for their athletics practice having finally gotten their acts and materials together, having gone through the locker rooms, changed, and gotten themselves all out to the fields for said practice…) perhaps he could try to simply listen for Bill. Hopefully, if he heard the dream demon… (as much as he was dreading what that would mean for their old teacher, and what Stan was likely going to see and then be able to relate to him next…)
Ford knew Bill better than he thought, because after he and Stan both waited quietly for a minute or so, Ford finally heard the faint echoes of the demon's laughter coming from somewhere down the hall, not too far away from them.
-And Ford was off like a shot, racing down the hall in that direction.
"Ford, that ain't-" Stan sighed and cut himself off, running after him, worried about what this was really all about. (That wasn't the way to the detention room, either.)
Except after half-a-minute of racing after his brother… Stan could hear muted voices coming from down the hallway in front of them now - the kid's voice definitely - the cadence was pretty damn distinctive, even through walls - and... somebody else, exclaiming something in... surprise. Hell, he recognized that tone from Ford, back in high school, when he'd been working through something and just chattering on and on about it: enlightenment.
Ford skidded to a halt and turned to slam up against - no, burst through the door, it wasn't locked - and… oh no. Oh, no no no no-
Ford made a frustrated, horrified sound as froze in place and turned his head slowly, looking around the room.
This wasn't the normal detention room. This wasn't a normal classroom.
This was one of the advanced study rooms, with all the chairs shoved to one side of the room, and- there were those old moveable standing chalkboards everywhere- and every last one of them was literally COVERED in-
"BILL!" Ford shrieked out, nearly breathless. He had the horrible urge to read every last one of those equations- slap his hands over both of his eyes and scream-
The wonderful horrifying former muse demon of his, turned away from watching the teacher (who was standing at one of the boards) and blinked at him. And Bill looked… relaxed, not even excited, just- While the teacher was-
"Sixer?" Bill said. The dream demon looked legitimately surprised to see him there.
Mr. Harman, who was standing at the board, started to turn away from it, too, towards the entrant who he would almost certainly see as an irritant or an intruder upon his work and- the teacher stopped partway, because while his body started to turn away slightly, his head and neck didn't quite make it, and… he slowly and completely turned his entire body back towards the board.
Ford felt Stan enter the room at his back, and he had the urge to- no, no, he could do this, he just needed to-
Mr. Harman, or rather, the man standing in front of him who was an alternate-dimensional duplicate of his favorite science teacher in high school, was shaking in place where he stood at the board, gripping a three-quarters used up piece of chalk in his hand like it was a lifeline, almost. He was staring, shaking as his eyes roamed over the board, trying to- Ford didn't have to guess at what he was trying to do, he recognized Bill's handwriting, and he recognized the teacher's (funny, how the little things came back, how they stuck with you even after), and he knew exactly how bad it was just from the ratio of the occurrence of each of those two things, scrawled across the twelve boards lining and littered throughout the classroom, alone. And…
"S-six?" he heard the teacher say, as if in almost a daze. "Six- ah-er-it- it- Six is- is- is?-" Mr. Harman's hands were shaking, and he was starting to look over the board almost frantically at this point- trying to figure out what had he missed, because Bill never gave hints out unless-
-and Bill just turned back to the teacher and took the two steps forward to stand by his side.
And lifted a hand.
And leisurely stroked the back of Mr. Harman's head oh-so gently.
And then Bill said, "Oh, not six. Sixer. It's a name. He's right over there. No sixes here, don't worry!" Bill ended on a quite cheerful note.
And Ford couldn't help but flinch hard at the tone of voice Bill was using. The instructive one. The one which he'd ALWAYS used when he'd been-
Mr. Harman continued shaking as he stared at the equations Bill had scrawled across the board, "No sixes, no sixes," he murmured, almost like a mantra. His eyes were somewhat dazed, still. (He was gone already. He was so far gone… Ford felt like throwing up.)
"That's right," Bill said almost soothingly, stroking the back of the teacher's head again, before lowering his hand.
And Ford froze stiffly in place at Bill's next words:
"You're almost there..."
"...I'm- I'm almost?" Mr. Harman said, the not-quite frustrated and desperate and yearning frown on his face slowly easing and… morphing into… "I'm almost there. -I'm almost there, I'm almost THERE!"
And Ford violently shuddered at the wide, rictus grin that Mr. Harman now had plastered across his face. His eyes were sharper; he was leaning in towards the board, now. But his hands were still shaking; he looked no less unhinged.
No. No. Not again. Not-
-He couldn't be too late. Not again. If- if he stopped the man now, quickly, before-
Ford shoved himself forward, moving past Bill and getting in-between the teacher and the board, interjecting himself between them (...more than a little worried that things were about to get physically violent, because…)
-but the teacher only startled as he lost sight of what he was working on. Ford pulled in a breath and grabbed him by the shoulders, all-but-dragging him towards the doorway -
- where Stan was standing, looking nothing but confused -
-Ford forced himself to keep moving, and keep moving Mr. Harman along with him.
"-What, what are you doing!" the man finally complained, and he looked exhausted, oh Axolotl, he'd really been about ready to drop on his feet. "Wait, no, wait- wait-wait-wait! I-"
"You need to stop," Ford told him firmly, as he bodily dragged the man out of the classroom - past Stanley, who quickly moved into the room and out of the way - as the teacher finally began to struggle against his hold, trying to push his way back in-
"No!" Mr. Harman exclaimed, as if he was seeing the promised land barred and gated away from him all his hopes and dreams being ripped away, out of his hands and out of his sight, and Ford's heart ached as he stood and planted himself like a tree in the doorway, as the (dear lord, far younger than him) man tried to push past him and get back inside (still, still clutching onto that piece of chalk). "I need to-!"
"You don't," Ford said, starting to feel the strain and stress of it, beyond his capacity and capability to bear, on his own. (Not on his own.)
"I need to finish!" Mr. Harman said, managing to claw past him with his arms, if not his body, trying to get a grip on the doorway to pull himself past, and-
"What's the problem, Sixer?" Ford heard Bill say behind him, and for one long moment, Ford nearly folded and dropped where he stood.
Instead, he shoved both arms out to his sides and got a double-grip on each side of the doorway instead, bracing himself, because he knew-
"He's almost done."
...and the teacher paused for a moment as that wonderful horrible phrase from Bill sunk in.
And then Mr. Harman got a hard gleam in his eye (which, really, Ford had been expecting to see from him right from the start).
"Get out of my way, the teacher demanded, "I need to finish this NOW!"
Ford's mouth dropped open as the teacher raised his hands (...fists?...) to- But Ford couldn't- he didn't know what to say to- he NEVER knew what to say, to- oh, this was going to get violent, he was going to have to hit him, knock him out, and then- and then Bill would- once he was unconscious, he'd-
"Why?" Ford heard behind him, and he not quite froze in place as he felt his brother's hand at his shoulder, pushing slightly…
...he froze at the look of confusion he saw fall across Mr. Harman's face…
"Why?" Mr. Harman echoed, and he looked a little lost, tossed for a loop a bit.
"Why do you have to finish that junk-" Stan began.
"-IT'S NOT JUNK!" the teacher roared out, and Ford had to let go of both sides of the doorframe to grab onto the teacher and drag him back, away from his brother. "IT'S-"
"Important science stuff, right, I gotcha," said Stan. "-You eat dinner yet?"
Ford blinked at his brother, as did Mr. Harman, at the entirely foreign question that was, at the very essence of it, very difficult to parse in that moment.
"Dinner?" Mr. Harman said, looking absolutely lost and confused (and… no longer combative anymore. What… How had Stan…?).
"Yeah," said Stan. "It's way past time for that." (No it wasn't, it was barely past 4pm; school had been out for less than an hour and a half. Dinner was usually at 5pm, or 6 o'clock; Stan knew that.) "It's why we came looking for the kid - to see what was takin' so long with the detention and all, yeah?" Stan said next, almost immediately redirecting the teacher's initial restless worry (that they were going to take Bill away from him) before the thought could even fully form. "You should go get some food, yeah?" Stan continued on. "Can't go workin' on stuff on an empty stomach. Ya won't get anywhere." And Ford stared at his brother, because-
"-I can't!" Mr. Harman said. "I can't just STOP and- I'm almost there! I can FEEL it-" the man said not quite desperately, almost as if… he was asking Stan for permission?. Ford blinked down at his ex-high school teacher in pure disbelief. (What-)
"Sure you can," Stan said easily. "My brother's right, y'know," Stan said next, "You gotta stop. Get some food, get some sleep." Stan was peering at him, where Ford was almost clutching the man to his chest now. "You look like hell. You can't get nothin' done like this. -You feel tired, dont'cha?" Stan said, as Mr. Harman struggled in Ford's arms, about to protest. "-How do you feel right now? Huh?" Stan challenged him quickly.
"I'm fine, I'm fine," the man stressed, trying to shove himself away from Ford's grasp. "I'm- I'm..." He stopped for a moment, then pulled in a breath, shook his head, and tried to wrench himself away from Ford grip again. "I'll feel better when I'm finished-" the man said next, sounding a little differently than he had before. (Was he… did he sound a little more awake now? Except that wasn't quite… -What was Stan doing?)
"Hell, no. You feel like crap right now, and you won't finish until you get some sleep first," Stan said, sounding terribly authoritative all of a sudden - so suddenly it nearly left Ford's head spinning. "You already lost the thread, didn't you?" Stan said next, almost consolingly, and Ford felt the man still completely in his arms, then let out something of a wail. Ford winced as the teacher began to clutch at his head, starting to pull at his hair in despair; he didn't have enough hands to be able to both hold him back from re-entering the room and-
"Hey, hey now, none of that," Stan said, reaching out to grab up the man's hands at the wrists, pulling them down away from his head. He sounded almost soothing, like… he was talking to an animal, or perhaps a small unhappy child. "You got it once, right? You thought it before, you can think it again." (Ford felt a chill go down his spine at this, because no, no, the whole point of this was that he was not going to-) "Just gotta get a little sleep in you first, maybe some food. -Kid," (Ford felt another chill go down his spine because, no, no, what was Stan doing-?!) "This guy's smart enough to get it, right? The thing you two were working on here. Got it before, didn't he?"
"...Almost," Ford heard Bill say, as he slowly made his way over, across the room, over to the door. And Bill sounded almost a bit wary, himself.
"But you think he can get it if he works at it a little more, yeah?" Stan said so leadingly, Ford wondered at how far the teacher really was gone, because when Bill said...
"...Yes?"
...at Stan's very heavy prompting (also, oddly and scarily, not a lie), the teacher didn't seem to pick up on it. He merely relaxed completely in Ford's arms, so much so, and so abruptly, that Ford nearly dropped him to the linoleum floor.
"See? There ya go, even the kid thinks you'll get it later," Stan chuckled wryly, and Ford didn't miss the stress Stan put on that last word.
"...Yes," Bill said again, except... "He's been doing very well for a human," Ford heard Bill add next, unprompted, and Ford flinched hard.
"Uh huh," Stan said to that, a little more neutrally. Then he got a bit of a smile. "Hey, y'know, I've seen this big ol' brainiac nerd-" Stan nudged his brother, as he moved out the doorway and past him "-get stuck on his work, no joke, and get just about nowhere, all kinds of frustrated, until he's gotten a good meal in him, and a few hours of shut eye." (No, actually, Stan hadn't. But the man was buying everything Stan was saying, and staying largely sedate, nonviolent, and suggestible as apparently part-and-parcel of that, so Ford kept his mouth shut on all of it.) "You ain't the only one. It's like that for everybody. Even the kid gets it; he stops when he needs to eat and sleep, too." (Ford carefully did not look Bill's way as Stan made this pronouncement.)
And then Stan reached out and practically plucked Mr. Harman out of Ford's hold like he was some kind of… baby bird, looking and sounding perfectly genial all the while. "Trust me, it's much easier to get those things all figured out and finished once you take a break." Stan told him, giving a shrug as he recentered the man back onto his feet, got a shoulder under him, and... started helping him walk down the hallway? "It'll all be there for you, later. Just gonna get you to the teacher's lounge for a bit, just have you lie down for awhile, yeah?" Stan said, looking back over his shoulder.
Ford stiffened in place slightly at the look Stan gave him, that was damn near murderous in its glare. (And Ford heard Bill let out a 'tch' sound, and then a quiet "Fine," as the demon leaned up against the doorway, crossing his arms.)
"And hey," Ford heard Stan add, as they kept making their slowly way down the corridor, the teacher both tired and confused (but not fighting Stan as they went), "Worst-case, the kid's here tomorrow, and you can ask him anything you want again, then," Stan said at the last, almost sing-song. (No, no Bill wouldn't - not if he had anything to say about it. And Ford was going to have a talk with his brother about-)
Stan turned the corner with the teacher, and Ford realized that he had just been left alone in the hallway with Bill.
Just outside the room full of research and math equations filling the entire room.
Oh, no.
Ford slowly turned his head to look at Bill.
Bill was giving him a long glare.
And then Bill said, "Just because Stanley wants me to 'behave' with you, doesn't mean I'm not going to attack back if you try something stupid with me right now," and it left Ford blinking.
...And it was about that point that Ford realized that he hadn't been the only one that Stan had been glaring at, there.
Ford stomped into the room, past Bill, nearly shoving him out of the doorway in the process.
"Hey!" Bill protested, not moving much to keep from either getting mowed down (or having Ford run into him and go nowhere because of his suit)-
-but Bill had moved enough for what Ford had needed, and Ford felt no small (angry, and self-righteous, and fully-justified) satisfaction as he grabbed the door and slammed it in Bill's face behind him. Ford then locked the door for good measure.
Which left Ford fully and completely alone in the room with-
Ford tried desperately hard not to look at any of it, as he grabbed up the nearest eraser, and started doing what he absolutely needed to do next.
Stan didn't really know what the heck had just happened there, with the teach and Ford and the kid, exactly. But he managed to get Mr. Harman out and away from all that geeky math stuff, and settled into the teacher's lounge, where the man almost immediately passed out on the couch. -Seriously, what the heck was going on? Stan remembered the man being as straight-laced as they come, with a wife and young kid at home, and…
Stan shook his head. He really didn't get it. The guy he'd known didn't even drink, as far as he or any of the students knew - or had known - but this guy, standing there, had just looked as strung out as if he'd been on some kinda…
Stan paused in place as he was lowering the man's own coat over him as a blanket.
...He'd looked strung out. Like he'd been on some kinda drugs. The worst kind. And he hadn't wanted to stop what he'd been doing when Ford had tried to…
Stan got the man's coat covering him, and he quietly walked his way out of the teacher's lounge, flicking off the lightswitch as he went, and closing the door behind him with a soft 'click'.
...Had this been what Ford had tried to say, when he'd said he thought Bill was addictive? Had… working with the kid been like a drug, or something? ...How the hell did that even work? Stan had never had that problem with the kid, and neither had the niblings...
And the guy had been really not all there to begin with, there, too. Stan really couldn't see the kid having a hell of a lot of patience with somebody who wasn't bringing their A-game to whatever math-stuff he was interested in, and… the man had looked shot. And school hadn't even been out that long; wrestling and boxing practice were on hold for the next week or so, if Stan remembered correctly, which was why Lee had been back at the boat with Sixer and Miz pretty much right away after school. And the kid had only been doing stuff with the teach for… what, maybe an hour?
Bill couldn't have done this to Mr. Harman in less than an hour, right?
...If he had, then what did that mean for Ford? The dream demon had literally been inside Ford's head when he'd been...
Hell, did that make things better? Or worse?
The kid had been acting normal, though. ...Well, for the kid. He'd even seemed kinda low-energy, there. The kid hadn't been all excited, all bouncing around, all grating and shit. He hadn't been...
Stan frowned.
The kid had been talking a little bit like the sponge-edged way he had been before, with the magic act and stuff. Not quite, but almost. And Stan hadn't exactly missed the 'did very well for a human' that the kid had tossed out there at the end, thinking that he was being helpful. Stan ran a hand over his face. ...Hell, if that was usually what passed for a compliment for the kid, to anybody who wasn't his little sister, then…
Stan stomped his way back down the hallway, towards the not the detention room, the room where they'd found the teacher and the kid.
...He was gonna have to ask Ford what he'd meant about the whole 'contagious virus' thing next, wasn't he. And maybe even the kid himself, too. Hell. Stan really wasn't looking forward to that.
And the sight he was greeted to in the hallway when he got back didn't exactly put him in any better of a mood, because the kid was leaning up against the wall sulking, and his brother was nowhere in sight.
"Where's Ford," Stan asked the kid angrily, to which the kid looked up at him (arms crossed, also looking twelve kinds of pissed-off) and tossed a thumb back at the closed doorway.
"Right," Stan muttered. He stepped forward and… rattled the doorknob. Because his brother had locked the door, the idiot - so Stan pounded on the stupid door that was barring his way next.
"Ford, damnit, open the goddamn door!" Stan called out, and he heard a rustle inside.
He was about to pound on the door again when he heard the 'click' of a lock, and the door opened up.
Ford came out, his sleeves smudged to hell and back with chalk dust. Stan blinked. "...Ford, are you-" 'okay?' he started to ask him, because his brother looked seriously… off.
Except he got a glimpse of the room before Ford flicked off the light and slammed the door closed behind him, and... Stan got a bit of a bad feeling all of a sudden, even worse than the not-so-great feeling that he'd had going since seeing the look of their old science teacher first-thing, standing there in the room with the kid.
"...You erased it," Stan said slowly, as Ford leaned back against the door he'd just closed behind him. And Ford… looked a little shell-shocked.
"Yes," Ford said a bit shakily, and then he let out a slight laugh. "I erased it all." And his brother looked about half-gone himself. ...Not in the same way as the teach, but...
"You shouldn't have done that," was what Bill piped up with in the hallway, looking and sounding irritated at him for it. "Why did you do that?!"
"-I'm saving him from YOU!" was what Ford shouted out at the triangle-kid, rounding on him.
"'Saving him'." The kid just let out a scoffing sound. "He's going to be ANGRY with you for doing that…" (Weirdly, the kid sounded almost tired, and also that kind of irritated the kid always got when he was rehashing things for the twentieth time… so... Ford had done something like this before?)
"You shouldn't have done it!" Ford cried out at the kid, all-enraged. "Stop doing this!" (Oh, hell. Stan could just about see the next one coming a mile away...)
The kid straightened right up abruptly and almost got in Ford's face - except for Stan stepping between them and putting out an arm, stopping the kid from moving forward any further.
"Words," Stan said tersely, as the kid fumed at the 'stop' that Stan knew the kid wasn't gonna want to go with, and Stan needed to know exactly what the kid thought Ford had just told him to stop-
"He's interesting," the kid said, glaring up at Ford. "And fun. He wanted to KNOW something, and I told him! Enough to get him started!" The kid gritted his teeth (and Stan blinked, straightening in place himself, because had the kid just said that he'd-?). "I'm not stopping-"
"-You don't get to toy with people, to play with them until they break!" Ford all but shrieked out at the demon, hands fisted at his sides, shaking, and sounding as stressed as Stan had ever heard out of him.
And then Ford turned to him. "Stanley-!"
"-Kid, were you tryin' to make that teacher drop from exhaustion?" Stan said, not looking away from his brother. (And his brother seemed to freeze in place at this. -C'mon, Ford, just give me a second here...)
There was a pause.
"...No," was the response he finally got from the kid.
Stan pulled in a breath, nice and slow. (Ford was staring at him, motionless now. Damn straight.) "Then whatever you're doin'," Stan told the demon, "You're screwin' it up someplace." (See, Ford? I know what I'm doin'.)
Stan turned to the demon, to see the kid not quite glaring at him.
He half-expected an argument of 'I'm doing it just fine!' outta the kid.
Instead, he got… nothin'. Just the glare. Not even a demand of '...explain'.
"Stanley, tell him to-" Ford didn't look so great. "Make him stop. You have to-!"
Stan sent a glance back his brother's way. (He didn't really like how desperate his brother looked just then. ...He really didn't like the idea that Ford was suddenly clinging to the idea that maybe Stan might have some control over the demon, when Ford clearly had thought otherwise before. ...And Stan wasn't so sure that Ford actually, suddenly and 'magically', thought any differently now.)
"Ford," Stan said slowly, "I want Bill telling- me things," Stan finished quickly, when he saw his brother go deathly pale. "I'm workin' on havin' the kid not go runnin' around mentally screwin' up anybody he's talkin' to, too," Stan added next, then looked back at the kid. "This whole thing? This is some kinda mental breakdown shit. Don't even know what to call it." He frowned at the kid. "What the hell were you even tryin' to do here, kid?" Stan asked him outright.
"I was helping him learn," was what Bill said, and that damn near had tha hairs on the back of Stan's neck standing on end. But before Stan could say anything, Bill added, while sending a glare Ford's way, "The better ones like to figure things out for themselves," which had Ford twitching and going even paler.
"Kid, five minutes," Stan ground out, then turned away from him. "Ford, sit down right now," he told him brother next, because he looked like he was halfway to hyperventilating. "C'mon, down. SIt down. -Yeah, right on the floor," Stan said, guiding his (still shaking) brother down to the ground, his back to the door, and… Ford put his head on his knees and curled his arms up around them. Stan sat down next to him, and put an arm around his brother's shoulders.
"Breathe, Ford," he told his brother. "Just breathe."
And for five minutes of silence? They did just that. They sat there together, and they breathed.
(And after about the first three, the kid sat down where he was and closed his eyes and just… waited himself, too.)
"...He's going to ask tomorrow," the kid said after the five minutes were up. "You can't stop him."
"Tell Bill not to answer him," Ford said, without lifting his head off of his knees.
Before Stan could reply, the kid turned his head towards them. "He'll just give me detention again. And Miz might answer him instead."
"Tell Miz not to-" Ford began next.
"-You don't want me telling him things? That's not going to stop him," the kid interjected rudely, cutting Ford off. "He's already gotten this far-"
"He'll be fine as long as you don't enter his head again while he's asleep, to reinforce-" Ford said almost breathlessly next, slowly lifting his head.
The kid looked angry at that one, and Stan answered for him, "Kid's not doing that, Ford. He ain't going inside anybody else's head."
"Tell him no," Ford said, looking at him. Hell, Ford. "If you really, truly think you can control him-" (Damn it, Ford...)
"It ain't about control," Stan told him. "It's about trust." (Hell, the stare he was getting from Ford on that one. ...Pretty sure he was getting one from the kid behind him, too.) "Kid," Stan said next, "Tell me you ain't pullin' this shit on Mabel at that spaceship of yours." (...And yeah, now Ford was silently freaking out next to him. He'd still had to ask.)
The kid tilted his head at him, looking at him curiously. "No," said the kid.
"No problems with Mabel, right?" Stan said, knowing that that had to be true. He'd been asking her… and payin' attention. So had Dipper. Nothing had come up.
"No problems, yes," Bill said next.
"Why're you doin' it differently for this guy, then?" Stan asked the kid next, because the kid had to be doin' something different for the teach for him to be ending up this way, right? (Stan couldn't imagine that this was 'just some Zodiac thing' keepin' 'em safe, or whatever, if Ford had had problems with it, too.)
At this, the kid just blinked at him and said, "Shooting Star didn't like how I tried to teach her, at first. She stopped me and told me so. So we talked, and she told me how she wanted me to teach her, instead," the kid said next. "So I've been doing that, instead." (Ford slowly raised his head up and looked over at him, staring.)
Huh. "Mabel told you how to teach her?" Hell, Stan didn't know how to answer that kinda question. (Hell, could Ford do that, even?) How did you tell somebody how you wanted to be taught?
"I had to ask questions; it took awhile," Bill said, sounding a little irritated.
"I hear ya," Stan said, though… "I am definitely gonna have a couple questions for the two of you on that later, once we're all back home again," Stan told the kid. But in the meantime… "Why didn't you do that for Mr. Harman, here?" Stan asked him.
And the last thing he'd expected to hear outta the kid for that one was, "I did."
Stan gave him a long look.
"He told you he wanted to work until he dropped of exhaustion," Stan said next, very skeptically.
"...No," the kid said slowly.
"Yeah," said Stan, "I'll just bet he didn't." He frowned and slowly stood up, back aching. "We are talkin' about this," he told the kid. "Later. -I don't want you pullin' this whole thing on anybody yourself again, not until we've got this all worked out. -You got some pressin' need, or whatever? You bring me in on it," the same as the whole 'writing to the trio' thing. "You're doin' it wrong, and you don't know why. Yeah?" he pressed the kid, who looked away from him, frowning and not saying anything. "Yeah. ...We'll work it out," he told the kid, then turned away from him to look down at Ford. His brother didn't look particularly pleased with him, but...
"C'mon," Stan told the two of them. "Let's get back to the boat."
"Tomorrow, he's going to ask me," the kid said again, as he stood up. (Ford seemed to be taking a little longer, for some reason.) "I don't want to lose the bet with you because this single teacher doesn't like me, because of this-"
"I'll come into school with you tomorrow morning," Stan said. "And I'll have a talk with him before classes, first thing. All right?" Silence from the kid. "Alright. We'll finish getting this whole mess of a thing straightened out then," Stan told them both. "It'll be fine."
...Neither Ford or the kid looked particularly happy with him, or trusting in the idea of him being able to pull this thing off at all, not even a little, but then what else was new.
"Kid, eat your crackers," Stan told the kid next. "You're gettin' testy. And you're probably tired, too," Stan told him next. "I bet you wore yourself out there, too; same as he did."
"I know how to pace myself better," was what Stan got out of the kid for his trouble.
"Uh huh," was what Stan said neutrally to this. But the kid did pull a cracker box out of his hat and start munching on the contents. ...Well, good. At least somethin' was goin' right that afternoon-towards-evening.
"Say, kid," Stan asked Bill next, as Ford stayed quiet (well, whatever; Stan wasn't complaining). "Why the hell did you want detention in the first place, anyway?" because Stan really didn't get that one. He'd specifically kept it off the 'fail' list - except for the whole 'getting caught fightin' thing - because he knew how goddamn easy it was to get a detention slip in this place (especially when a teach woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning), but... that didn't really explain Bill wanting one right from the start. Because if he'd understood his younger self right earlier, the kid had wanted one, even before he'd been talking to Mr. Harman.
"-Well!" the kid said, with the start of a smile.
And with that as a start, the kid was off and running his mouth off, telling Stan every last detail of his first day in school, as they all walked their way out of the school, heading back for the boat.
Ford winced more than a few times during Bill's telling, but Stan couldn't help but chuckle once or twice himself - and hey, props to the kid for the whole 'getting away with looking like he murdered the top-of-the heap bully' bit. Stan wouldn't have known about the retractable 'mild neurotoxin spikes' that the suit had in the knuckles - that apparently paralyzed a body's muscles all floppy and junk so you could kick 'em all over the place, and broke down into some kinda alcohol-like something-or-another that caused hangovers in people afterwards, all untraceable-like - if he wasn't hearing about it from the kid having used it on the jerk, now. (And Stan knew that Ford wasn't just ignoring the kid on this stuff, either. Which was good.) The thing about the kid's 'sketching' sounded kinda interesting, too; he was gonna sic Mabel on him after they got back, on that one.
By the time they all got back to the boat, the kid had finished about twice the number of crackers that he usually did, and Ford was not so pale anymore, and breathing almost normally. (And not looking like he wanted to dig himself only halfway to China, pulling the dirt back over him as he went.) So, yeah. That was a thing.
Stan figured that they really could all figure out all the rest tomorrow, one way or another. Wasn't like the kid was fighting him on this stuff. (That was… a first. Kinda. He could get used to this… but Stan knew that'd just be askin' for trouble. He'd have to just pay that much more attention, to make sure he wasn't backing himself into a corner, steamrolling over the kid when the kid wasn't talking to him on something. No takin' shortcuts on this shit; he'd work at it all, and figure it out. It just might take some time… Hopefully, Ford could just keep on holdin' out until then. Really wasn't helpin' that Ford couldn't really just up and run off for however-long as he wanted, gettin' away from all of 'em, though - not like he could've at home with Fiddlenerd in the mansion, or just literally leavin' town for awhile because he'd have the money for it.)
(Because as long as Stan didn't have things settled out completely here, Ford might feel kinda stuck. ...And he'd need to stay near enough nearby still, to not worry about maybe bein' left behind. So there was that, too. Not that Stan would ever do that to him, but Ford sometimes, still...)
When Stan got the kid and his brother back to the boat, it was to find the younger twins sitting up on the deck with a stranger who could only be Miz as a male… something-or-another with a tail. Whatever. (It was pretty clear to Stan who it was, considering that Bill had just walked right on over and sat down next to him like nothing was wrong, instead of complaining LOUDLY to everyone within earshot about stupid and unwanted unexpected interlopers - like the kid had used to do, really early on, about all the tourists that kept visiting the Mystery Shack, on the other side of the wall from the rest of the living space.)
Stan barely paused before shrugging it off and going to grab some cooking supplies to make himself and Ford some dinner.
Ford, on the other hand, took a moment to stop and stare at Miz. "What-"
The young man turned and waved. "Hey~ I got tired of being a girl, so I'm a guy for now. I'll change back when we go to school tomorrow."
'Don't,' Ford thought to himself. 'Don't change back.' He at least realized what would likely happen if he said such out loud, though - given why Bill had supposedly turned into a 'female' in the first place - and thus wisely remained silent on the issue (he thought). Rather than commenting on the situation out loud, Ford grimaced, shook his head, and opted to follow his brother down into the hold in the more pressing pursuit of dinner supplies, instead. (As it was, he didn't particularly want to be around Bill right then; as far as Ford was concerned, this was just another reason to leave the deck.)
"Could just put on a perception filter instead, if you want to stay comfortable and not tired, little sis," Bill put out there (as Ford disappeared into the hold after his brother, and) as he himself settled in place at her(/his?) side.
The young man blinked at Bill, then grinned. "Right! I forgot I could do that!" He looked down at himself and laughed. "I think we're the same height now." That seemed to please him greatly.
Bill blinked at him. "You like being taller?" What was it about height (and hierarchy) that got humans (and shapes) so worked up? -His little sister could float. Height shouldn't matter! (...Should it?)
Miz(?) nodded. "I can reach things now!" ("You could just float," Bill put out there matter-of-factly, which had his now-male sibling letting out a laugh.) His tail wagged slowly; the younger Ford was staring at it in fascination.
Sixer was starting a sketch of Bill's demonic sister(?) in their current form, for his own records. He knew these two were demons, but aside from their magic and Bill's eyes, this was far more substantial proof of their non-humanity. He'd asked Miz earlier and they had explained that they were a dragon-demon, who was originally a triangle-demon, who used to be a triangle. Lee had been quite confused, while Sixer had wanted to know more about what that really meant.
Meanwhile, Xin figured he could still go by Miz, just to make things easier for the people around him. He figured that Stanford was gonna be confused enough with him switching sex on them. He pressed his shoulder lightly into Bill's side before standing up and moving off to continue building…something on the deck of the boat. "So how did detention go? Was it really that fun?"
"Mmmm…" Bill hummed. "-It was! Fun that is." Bill grinned. But then he slowly lost the grin. "But that Stanford tried to RUIN it." Bill sighed and slid down to lie flat on the deck. "He used to appreciate my brilliance, you know," Bill said, not quite pouting outright, and Xin laughed.
"Well, I'm sure we can find you something else to do for fun at school." Xin wiggled his fingers, assembling the machinery in front of him and tilted his head as he looked at it from different angles. "Okay~ and done! One washing machine! It's solar powered and the battery is waaay better than anything humans would be able to come up with for… like… 80 years from now. This should help with your clothing situation." Xin patted the washing machine.
"Water input works on seawater?" Bill asked, slowly sitting upright.
Xin nodded. "Works with both fresh and seawater. There's a hose they can pull out and connect to the ocean."
"Mm." Bill pulled a knee up to his chest and lazily dropped an arm to dangle across it. "Might want to make a separate water filter that works on seawater, too. For drinkable water. And repair parts for the machines you are making?" Stanley would want something like that, wouldn't he? Or at least find it useful? Spare parts in case something broke down was something that had had Stanley cursing the most, when it had come to repairing the portal. And not having to have so many barrels of water on-deck for water-stores would likely be considered helpful, too, Bill thought.
"Already got those too." Xin tapped on a panel and it slid open to reveal several spares. "It also empties out the waste water from each cycle back into the filter, and the resulting fresh water can be used for another wash for clothes, or a shower if they need to bathe themselves." Xin opened another panel. "And this filter is for making drinking water. For whenever they want to take this ship out to sea."
Bill smiled. -His little sister was so considerate! "Stanley will like that," he confirmed to her. "Good job!"
But Lee frowned a little bit, seeing what was missing. "Uh, that's great and all," Lee began, not super-enthused at the moment because he wasn't really sure he'd even be able to use it correctly. "But… the dryer?" Lee asked.
Xin blinked slowly. "You don't want to hang your clothes up to dry?"
Lee groaned. "I don't like the idea of parading my underwear for the whole beach to see. And saltwater spray gets in the air! It'll be so humid, it'll take forever to dry anything out on deck!" That was one of the reasons he was planning on building a little cabin up on deck, too - not just to have a living space up on deck itself with a workroom and kitchen - it'd leave a space on top of it (accessible by ladder) that was up high enough that water couldn't really get up there unless it was raining, so laundry and other things could be hung up to dry once they were out sailing. But if Miz was gonna be makin' all this stuff anyway...
Xin wanted to tell him that there was a Perception Filter over the whole boat, but thought better of it (and saw his point about the spray) and just built a clothes dryer as well out of more sand (and glass; he'd been grabbing glass out of the beach all afternoon). Might as well add a heating function so it could act as a mini furnace to keep the above deck warm when the weather turned cold. "You'll need to buy the soap and other stuff yourself. And take the lint out to throw in the trash." He looked around. "Would you need an ironing board? Is that safe to have on a boat?"
"Well, the oil lamps are fine below decks, as long as we're careful," Lee put out there, as Sixer stayed out of the conversation (engrossed in his sketching). "Don't see why an iron would be any worse. Unless water got into the electric-whatever," Lee said, then grimaced. "Not that I'm planning on having any real electric-whatever onboard. Maybe a two-way radio with a crank-up battery or somethin'," Lee said with a frown. He'd planned on this being a sailboat.
Adding an electric generator for a motor, or anything else, was not something he'd planned on doing to the Stan O' War. Those things ran on gas, and gas was expensive enough that it would break his budget as-is; the generator itself would cost even more to buy, let alone put in. Really, he'd planned on a lot of fishing, a lot of 'water stealing' (unless he'd gotten Sixer interested enough to pitch in on that part - though he guessed the dragon-demon had done that for him instead), and some decent-enough luck at treasure hunting to make 'em both rich. He hadn't really thought of washing their clothing out at sea; just on-shore. They had coin laundromats practically everywhere, didn't they?
"Not sure what stuff we'd need to be ironin' out here, though," Lee told her next, shrugging. Wasn't like he was gonna be some big muckety-muck businessman, running around in a suit and tie.
Xin nodded and proceeded to explain to Lee how the machines worked. "Put dirty clothes in here and dump in one scoop of detergent-" He even had the instructions printed on the sides to explain what the buttons did. "-this button to run the wash, there's heavy, light and so on. Might add more stuff to the dryer, well I can leave that for later, once you've got more of the deck built." He was more interested in showing off his work.
The washer was built to send the dirty water into a filter in the back, which would deposit the contaminants over the side of the boat, leaving clean water behind. And by filter, Xin made it break things apart much like his stomach did, because recycling in that way so much more efficient~
As well as helping it self-generate energy in emergencies.
And if that caused the battery to store some extra energy from the recycling process? Bonus! Xin didn't even need to give the dryer a solar panel. It hooked into the battery from the washer. Xin hugged the dryer as he explained this (to Lee's bemusement). Hm… what else could Xin build to fix up the boat and make it super awesome? Well, he DID need to ask the kids first. Nodding to himself, Xin looked over at Lee and asked, "Do you guys want anything else?" just as Stan climbed back up the ladder and out onto the deck.
"'Anything else?'" Stan echoed, then frowned at the kid's kid sister. Was Miz just… giving them stuff? For free? ...Though 'what had they been asking her for?' was maybe the bigger question (and problem) there, Stan knew. He glowered a bit at them all.
Noticing his look, Xin explained. "I'm helping in exchange for them allowing me to tutor them. And I wanted the washing machine anyway." Xin could justify it for himself in various ways so that his powers didn't act up. He'd been getting better at finding his OWN loopholes. Would be useful for later. Especially if he wanted to try and do good with his powers for people more often.
(Maybe if Xin could figure this out, he could REALLY try to do some good in his own dimensional set…)
"You wanted- Wait." Stan blinked. "Allowing you to tutor them?" If she was making 'tutoring' - really, any kind of learning - into something that the person giving it had to pay for… Hell. That was gonna cause him no end of problems with the kid. (Hell, did the kid believe this himself?) And to top it all off, 'using it as an excuse to get something they wanted' was… something that sounded almost exactly like every last problem Ford had had with the triangle demon since forever.
-Yeah, no. Stan was cutting this one off right at the pass. Right now. Before things got any worse. (The very last thing Stan needed was Bill learning all the wrong stuff, let alone having it reinforced by his sister.)
"Miz, that ain't right-" Stan started to say.
Xin shook his head. "They could just ignore me when I try to help or teach them something, like everyone else does, but this way, they'll actually pay attention." He grinned. Sixer shrugged, he didn't mind, in fact he rather liked having the demon teach him stuff. They were more interesting than the things he was learning in school. Lee, on the other hand, just groaned out, "She made me do MATH!"
"Miz-" Stan started again, starting to walk across the deck and over to her, as Ford finally ascended the ladder. (Ford, for some reason, had decided to carry up most of the junk himself. He'd been moving things between decks...)
Xin huffed. "I KNOW you can do much better in school if you bothered to apply yourself. You're not stupid. You're just unmotivated…" He glanced around the boat. "So I'll have to give you motivation! And this here-" He slapped the washing machine with a hollow 'thunk', "-is one such motivation!"
Stan slapped a hand down on the washing machine himself, leaning forward in front of Xin, to look him in the eyes. "Miz. Hold up. We gotta talk about this. This ain't right."
Xin blinked. "What's wrong?"
Stan let out a sigh and straightened up a bit, now that he finally had her attention. "Everything, kid." He rubbed a hand across his face. "'Tutoring' doesn't mean you 'pay' them; usually, it means it the other way around, if anybody is gettin' paid for it - and those two don't need tutoring, anyway. They don't need that kinda help at learning, to start with," Stan said, starting with the most basic of basic things first.
Xin nodded to show he understood what Stan was saying. His brow was a little creased.
"And if you are tutoring them, especially if you want to do it for… free," Stan said, "- which is different than just teaching them stuff outright, yeah?" Stan added, for good measure. "Then they should be listening to you in the first place, and not wastin' your time for bein' nice enough to do it, to help 'em out."
Xin pressed his lips together. "I'm used to people shunning my attempts to teach them stuff. Some people listen but most do the opposite of what I try to teach them." Like some scientists who went through with adding certain chemicals together in labs even though he TOLD them it would create a toxic gas that would melt their flesh from their bones… and they had the GALL to get mad at him afterward when their flesh melted off their bones!
(Stan very carefully did not bring up what had just happened with the kid at the school, upon hearing that from Miz. The dragon-lady didn't seem to have the same 'drug-addictive' 'virus-contagious' problem as the kid apparently did, so… Stan didn't want her learning all the wrong things from the kid.)
"Yeah, well, like I told the kid," Stan said (instead, keeping it as general as he could), "Maybe a bunch of other stupid junk happens in those other stupid dimensions." Stan leaned down in front of her again, "But it don't happen here. -Get used to it," he told her almost threateningly, straightening back up. (He could practically hear the eyeroll he was almost definitely getting from the kid behind his back. -And yeah, he'd told the kid just about the same thing, on a hell of a lot of other stuff before. He'd gotten a hell of a lot of arguments and back-talk from the kid on that one before, too. So Stan figured it was probably gonna be a toss-up on whether the dragon-lady was gonna argue with him on it - like the kid did - or not.)
Xin nodded. "Okay…" Well, humans DID seem more receptive to his attempts at enlightening them with various things. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians had certainly appreciated his help. Though he HAD made sure to hide his form from most of them.
Stan let out another sigh. These demon-kids, he swore. "And you two," Stan said to the younger twin set. "Don't go tryin' to take advantage of the demons. Y'hear me?" He frowned. "Can't believe either of you two would think of ignoring Miz when you're askin' her to tutor you on your schoolwork and stuff to begin with." It didn't really make sense to him; heck, why would Sixer even think he'd need a tutor in the first place?
Ford set the items down and frowned at the conversation. What was happening now?
Lee'd eyes went wide. He shook his head and held up his hands, in surrender almost, as Sixer winced. "I wasn't asking specifically for that," Sixer noted, stopping his observational study and lowering his pen for the moment. "I just wanted to know how to go about actually building the machines she was talking about, like that communications device she keeps playing with, something about an internet? But Lee wasn't all that interested and Miz didn't like how he ignored her…"
"Hey, I wasn't ignoring her! -Uh, him. Them. Whatever!" Lee protested. "The dragon-demon lady was showin' me how to use a washer just now!" He hadn't even been sure about how to use the one at home; he'd been listening! "-And I didn't ask her for help with my schoolwork," he complained next. "Neither did Sixer. She was just, kinda..." And at that point, Lee lowered his hands, feeling a little confused, because he wasn't really sure how to explain what had happened with their schoolwork and junk, other than… "She's pushy. He. -Seriously, what do I call you?" Lee asked Miz next, feeling a little aggrieved, because she kept making faces when he said 'she' now, but sh- he(?) hadn't actually explained what he was doin' wrong!
Xin thought about it. "I'm fine with 'he' when I'm male, but I wouldn't be upset if you called me 'she' either."
"You keep makin' faces at me when I say 'she', though- see!" Lee pointed at her quickly, when he saw him make the (slight) face at him again.
Xin pouted. "Okay it's a little weird. I'm just…" he frowned. "Well, in the language I'm more used to, the distinction between the two words sounds nicer."
Stan let out another heavy sigh. "Kid, just say what you want us to call you when you look like this, yeah? Even if it's in another language. Ain't no big deal for any of us."
Xin wiggled. "I… gave each of my forms a different name. So… this," he gestured to himself "-is named Xin. Like how the female humanoid-looking one is Miz." He suddenly shifted quickly through his other forms, Jan and William appeared for a few seconds before he was Xin once more. "I'm used to switching between my personas. But single-formed people get confused when I switch names on them so I thought it would be easier for you all to just keep referring to me however you wanted." (Yeah, that didn't sound so hard to Stan, not as long as the dragon lady looked different enough to go with it.)
"Which one do you call 'Bill'," was Ford's terse contribution to the discussion, before Stan could even open his mouth.
Xin glanced at him briefly. "My triangle form," he said simply. He had made sure to NOT turn into that form, not anywhere near that Stanford.
Ford frowned. "Which one was that." None of those forms had looked particularly triangular to him.
"Ford…" Stan said, not sure where his brother was going with this.
Xin looked down at his lap. "Turning into my triangle form would upset you. So I'm not gonna use that one."
Ford narrowed his eyes at 'Xin'. "Oh, don't go not looking like the triangle demon that you say you are and want to be, on my account," Ford said next (already and still in a rather bad mood from not too long before).
"Ford," Stan said quellingly. "-He's lying," Ford said next, glaring at his brother.
Xin looked a little confused. So… was he supposed to turn into his triangle form? He glanced at Stan. "Um… should I?"
Stan glanced over at her. "...Do you want to?" Stan said, in a way that was about as neutral as a human could get.
Xin thought about it. "My triangle form is most comfortable. Miz is second most comfortable." Was what he responded with.
"If you want to be comfortable, be comfortable," Bill said, propping his chin up on a fist. He had both his knees pulled up to his chest now. (He'd been listening and paying attention, just not joining in on the discussion.) "You were uncomfortable before; why not relax and be comfortable now?"
Xin looked back and forth between everyone. Sixer, for his part, seemed very interested in this so-called triangle form. What did that actually mean? (Lee had no idea what the hell they were all talking about really.) Finally, a little warily, Xin's form glowed and reshaped into a very familiar shape, to at least some of those present.
Bill blinked his eye open, feeling himself relax fully for the first time in this dimensional set. His bricks glowed softly, thrumming with energy in a way that felt less itchy than his fleshier forms. And then he looked over at that Stanford, preparing himself for the worst.
Ford straightened up immediately in place, frowning, and going unconsciously tense.
...But Ford's hands hung at his sides, rather than going for his weaponry. And he kept on frowning as he looked over this Miz-who-was-Bill from where he stood firm.
Ford didn't quite glare at Miz-Bill as s(t)/he(/y) hovered in the air, over near his brother's shoulder almost.
And after awhile, he turned away and crouched down to continue what he'd been doing with the two crates he'd moved up onto deck only a little while before.
"You're not fooling anyone, you know," Ford said, not quite casually and not quite under his breath at Miz-Bill, without looking the 'triangle demon's way. He rummaged through the crate and pulled out one can of beans, and then another. (The color was off, just a bit. Hell, the demon wasn't even getting Bill's signature hum right - who did they think they were fooling with this horrible charade…)
Bill (of that Stanford) did not look surprised at this reaction at all. He just smiled a bit (thinly) instead.
Bill (MizBill) sighed. Well, denial was probably better than hostility? He floated down to sit on the washing machine, a soft metallic thump sounding out as he did.
Sixer was staring with wide eyes as he immediately opened his notebook again to start sketching Miz (also Bill? She'd named this triangle form after her brother?) "Amazing!" he gasped. (At that reaction, Ford gave a hard flinch, though he did not turn around.) MizBill's large eye widened and his bricks faded into a faint orange tint before going back to yellow.
"If he starts calling you a muse, run for it," (Blue)Bill told his little sister not quite sarcastically, leaning back and then relaxing his legs and arms until he was lying flat on the deck again.
MizBill blinked. "Um, ok." He moved his eye back to the younger Ford. "So… you're not… disgusted? By me?" He asked almost timidly.
Sixer blinked at MizBill. "Why would I be disgusted by you? You're fascinating!"
MizBill slumped. "Most people are. Um…"
Sixer blinked at her and adjusted his glasses, feeling a little off-put. "Ah… did you want me to be…?" he asked of the demon next, pausing in his writing (because he was a bit worried that perhaps it might be just that important, to require his full attention).
MizBill twiddled his little fingers. "No. I actually created my other forms originally because I was tired of people being disgusted by me…"
"Oh," said Sixer, unconsciously curling his littlest fingers under and cringing a bit. "That's…" And Sixer went quiet.
"Insane," was Ford's next contribution to the conversation. "And almost certainly not true. -Don't listen to them."
MizBill sighed. "Well, I'm glad you don't think I'm horrifying to look at, or whatever. It's nice."
That had Ford twisting his head around to look over his shoulder at her with a frown. "What?" Horrifying to look at? -How utterly shallow did the demon think he was?!
Lee kept quiet about the fact that he thought the way that giant eye swirled around to look at things was a little off-putting. Stan just leaned up against the washer a bit and crossed his arms, watching them all. (Especially his brother.)
When Ford saw Stan giving him a long look, Ford grimaced - looking a bit angry almost - and turned away.
"'Horrifying to look at' is not in that Stanford's vocabulary, little sis," (Blue)Bill said lazily from his prone position on the deck, eyes closed. (-To which Ford spat out the appropriate single-word descriptor for that concept in Intergalactic Trade at Bill, almost spitefully.)
MizBill watched Sixer as the teenager got up to walk around them, examining their form from all sides. "Is that a good thing?" Sixer asked. "Not being horrifying? Or horrified?" Sixer was too busy sketching this wonderful alien creature to really think about how what he was saying might sound. (-They were nearly flat! How did that even work? Where were its organs? Its brain?)
MizBill shrugged. "Being feared is sometimes a good thing, when I'm trying to scare people, or intimidate them so they wouldn't try to mess with me…"
"Fear and respect are the currency of the interdimensional market-space, for any being who wants to get something DONE!" BlueBill said easily, crossing his arms behind his head. (Ford flicked his eyes over to Bill for a moment at the use of the descriptor 'being', rather than 'demon'.)
"-Speaking of getting things 'done'," Stan cut in. "What do you want us to call you in which 'forms', and what things are you wantin' here besides the washer?" Stan frowned at the floating triangle demon. "You don't have to go makin' up excuses to get what you want with me, y'know. Just ask the kid."
MizBill raised one noodle hand and wiggled it. "This form is Bill, but brother is also Bill, so MizBill is fine. Miz you already know. The male form you saw earlier is Xin. My four-armed form is Jan and the Cyclops one is William." He thought about it. "As for stuff I want, a proper kitchen and pantry would be nice."
Stan nodded almost absently. "We're workin' on the cabin on-deck next. Figure we'll put that all together in there." He glanced over at his younger self. "That was the plan, anyway. -Shouldn't take more than a day or two," Stan told MizBill next. Then Stan reached up a hand of his own and not quite poked at the noodle-hand. "MizBill, huh. ...Pronouns?" he asked of MizBill next. Wasn't like he didn't know that was a thing with the demon-kid, especially with all the 'faces' Miz had kept making as Xin at all the 'she' pronouns.
MizBill brightened (literally, their bricks glowing as they spoke) "Well I'm actually both as a triangle. So either she or he is fine. I'm going with 'he' right now."
Stan nodded. "Yeah, okay." Good to know.
MizBill tilted to look up at Stan from where he was sitting. "Oh right, I got a bunch of coupons from restaurants around the neighborhood since I won some food challenges." He flicked his wrist and a small stack of papers appeared. "I figured these could help the kids save money if they eat out." MizBill handed the papers to Stan to look over. The old man hummed.
"...Food challenges?" Stan echoed. He turned his gaze on the younger twins.
Lee shuddered. "Where did he fit it all?" ("It all goes to my thighs when I'm in a flesh form!" MizBill said cheerfully.) "He won the Pizza challenge, the hot dog challenge, the burger challenge…" Lee frowned. "He refused to do the hot wings challenge though."
"I don't like spicy food." MizBill shrugged. Lee looked at him incredulously, because THAT was the limit on what he would eat?!
Stan flipped through the coupons. "Heh. You win those and your meal's free? Nice." He'd realized pretty much right away that MizBill had probably gotten all of these coupons so that the twins would be able to save money on food and meals. Stan didn't quite frown as he tapped the coupons against his palm. MizBill was trying to help, in his own way. ...Roundabout, indirect. (Just like the kid, most days ...when the kid wasn't too busy playing 'who can be the biggest jerk?' with Ford, anyway.) Was there a reason for that? Stan made a note to ask them both later.
Stan walked over, squatted down in front of his younger twin self, and slapped the coupons into Lee's chest with a grunted, "Hold onto these for me, willya." He sighed as he mentally tallied up the list of junk he needed to talk to the demons about, still. It was a pretty long list at this point.
"Speaking of food. I need to make dinner for myself and my brother." Stan straightened up again with another grunt, and walked over to his brother, to get started on that. (He didn't really trust Ford with the cooking for a second; he'd learned that one the hard way on their boat trip.)
MizBill floated over. "Can I help or would that make Ford uncomfortable?" Sixer squealed in the background ("How does the levitation work?")
Ford just eyed MizBill from where he was crouching, having finished setting up the campstove. "'Demons' don't help. Ever."
"Help with what?" was Stan's own question.
MizBill placed his hands on the sides of his 'face' and wiggled (which looked a bit weird in mid-air). "Cooking! I love cooking!"
"Uh," Stan began. "-No!" Ford said immediately, shooting to his feet and looking alarmed. (And Stan sighed, remembering how Ford had reacted to accidentally eating some of those pancakes the kid had made… hell, had it been that many days ago?)
Lee raised an eyebrow. "Why? Miz-Bill's cooking is great! He, uh, well, she at the time? She made lunch today at school! And-"
"-Food is important," was what (Blue)Bill said rather colorlessly, cutting Lee off. Bill was still lying on deck, staring up at the sky. "He can't check it right now; he left all of his dimension-hopping gear at home."
Ford pulled in a breath, looking incredibly angry and about to read Bill the riot act… but then Ford closed his mouth and let out a hard breath through his nose, instead. He was glaring at Bill, though, as he did it.
Stan rolled his eyes at what he knew his brother would say next.
"...Tell me you didn't eat it," was what Ford said to Lee, finally, next. (...Yeah, he'd called it. Stan turned back to the campstove, and the cans of beans Ford had pulled out, and started getting down to it. No point in waiting; he knew his brother wasn't gonna budge on this one.)
Lee tilted his head. The hell? "Uh, yeah? Of course I did." He glanced between them all, wondering what was up. "I don't see the problem." Sixer spoke up, "It was safe for human consumption. And it tasted normal."
"And who told you this?" Ford said next, rather acerbically. "That it was safe to eat?"
Sixer adjusted his glasses, a little worried now, "Bill? But Miz ate the food too." was the older him worried about MizBill creating alien food? For his part, MizBill kept quiet. Anything they said would be used against them anyway.
Ford looked pale. Stan gave him a pat on the shoulder. "Oi, it's fine Poindexter. MizBill likes human food."
"But Bill doesn't," Ford said slowly, looking over at him. That demon could've done anything to that food. At least… at least he knew what to expect from Bill. But this demon...
"You knew that that demon made it, and you ate it anyway..." Ford said to the twins, with a terrible sinking feeling.
"I checked it," Bill said, sitting up slowly, to look over at Ford. "It was fine."
Ford pulled in a sharp breath. Bill wasn't lying, but… (wait. They'd said before, that…)
"You actually ate something. That… your 'sister'," Ford struggled to choke out, "made."
Bill nodded. "Yes."
"You ate-"
"-I checked it first, Sixer." Bill rolled his eyes and lay back down again. "I'm not an idiot." (And this… did not make Ford feel any better. ...If anything, it made him even more wary - and leery - of this 'MizBill' than before.)
MizBill floated away, sighing. It wasn't worth arguing over. "Nevermind then. I can do something else if he doesn't trust my cooking."
"Yeah, well, he don't trust your big brother's cooking, either," Stan told her, as he turned up the heat on the campstove, to set the pot of beans to start slowly bubbling away. "So don't take it personal. -Why I didn't want ya' makin' breakfast for everybody before, yeah? He's about as twitchy about demon-made food as… heh, Bill is about human-food, I guess," Stan not quite shrugged off. He sent both Ford and Bill a look. "If you want to cook for yourself, you can," he told MizBill. "Bet you're hungry after all that stuff-making again?" It wasn't quite a question.
MizBill tilted. "I'm actually pretty good." He thumped a hand against his bricks. "This form holds energy better. And I can self-generate energy more quickly as a triangle." His bricks hummed faintly.
"What?" said… Bill, who sat up quickly. then he seemed to shake himself mentally. "Generate energy from what?" Bill asked next, palms flat against the deck.
MizBill blinked. "My emotions, my own knowledge, my own thoughts, and a small bit of solar radiation absorption if I have to."
Bill looked about to protest and question, until the 'solar radiation absorption' bit. Then he seemed to settle a little. "Amplitude and resonance are different than self-generation, little sis," Bill said a little churlishly.
MizBill shrugged. "Emotion to energy is the easiest. The other stuff are supplementary." He tilted. "I've been pretty calm."
Bill opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked a little like a deer caught in a pair of headlights (at least to Stan, heh). Then he looked more than a little annoyed. He pulled his knees up to his chest again, wrapped his arms around them, and said, "Emotional energy doesn't come from nowhere." He sounded annoyed, and maybe a little… suspicious? (What was up with the kid now?)
MizBill shrugged. "I can feel emotions. If I convert some of it into energy, I can just self generate by feeling something.
Bill was looking at her without much expression on his face. "You said you get tired if you're angry for too long," he said, slowly and neutrally. "Yes?"
MizBill nodded. "It… happens…"
"'Getting tired' means an energy drop," Bill said next. "You felt an emotion, and you had a noticeable energy drop."
MizBill lowered and sat down. "It's kinda paradoxical. I feel tired as in mentally tired, but my actual storage is fine."
"That's not-" Bill looked frustrated as he cut himself off. He glanced over at the younger twins, then the older ones, then looked away. Then he looked almost belligerent as he curled his arms around his knees a little more tightly and said, "'Mentally tired' is still an energy drop, when you're a being of pure energy. 'Storage' is what you pull from to replenish, after."
MizBill shrugged. "I think I feel things differently from you? Or store them differently?"
"...Or you've never had to think about how much energy you have to work with, to consider the total energy you are having to work with - including yourself - separate from everything and everyone else around you," Bill not quite muttered out, looking like he was getting a headache. (And at that, Ford glanced over at Bill.)
MizBill considered that. "Maybe… I didn't really think about it." Heck, most of his powers ran on autopilot nowadays.
"Maybe," said Bill. He wasn't entirely sure at this point, though, if his sister was or wasn't actually running on different principles than he did? Maybe she was. Maybe. -He had NEVER tried messing with emotion that way before, but… he'd thought it would be a dead-end. (Emotion didn't come from NOTHING; it was fueled and spiked internally! Maintaining it through resonance and the right set of screaming-singing hums was ONE thing, but the initial-generation step?) Bill shook his head quickly from side to side.
(Closed-systems weren't closed systems, yes - but they could be if you MADE them that way, Bill knew. And he'd had to be very careful in what he did and didn't try to take in - with what his boundaries were and how he'd defined them - back in his old decaying dimension, destabilized as it was. Anything outside of him wasn't and hadn't been 'stable' unless he'd been actively making it stable, and expending the energy to do so; he hadn't been able to just… go up and 'press' against things and use the 'natural' pressure differentials to his advantage, like he could now, now that he was out, or eat whatever free-floating energy he wanted that was not-quite-magically 'just THERE' for him to eat.)
...But now he was in a stable dimension. And Bill frowned a little, because nothing was really the same now, as before, as his baselines, and while he'd done SOME planning as to his new circumstances before… he really needed to expand his thinking further, but WITHOUT losing his sense of measurement of inner-outer and sourcing. (He didn't HAVE to be as careful with absolutely everything anymore; he hadn't really been able to 'lean' up against anything before, like he could NOW - not without risking it tearing on him, or worse - and he hadn't been able to just up and eat energy in a destabilized dimension without worry either, because such energy was 'naturally destabilized' itself. But now...)
Now that he was in a stable dimension, though… for Bill, the sky wasn't anywhere CLOSE to the limit. (But that didn't mean that everything he got was FOR FREE; the processes that were already in place were just something he was using to his advantage to…) And yet, Bill didn't quite feel comfortable enough in his own stupid human-ish body's skin to actually stop treating everything like it was just as dangerous as it was and had always been in the past. Before he'd gotten out. It made said-body want to shiver on him when he DID think it, in fact, the stupid thing. (And Bill didn't know why it wanted to do that, why exactly he felt that way.)
Stan grunted out, "So you're not hungry?" to MizBill. Their eye squinted in a smile.
"I can still eat a little, but I need much less than before." MizBill then frowned. "But my triangle form can't taste things like my other forms." And the triangle sounded so sad about this fact. "Which seems to be part of how my form is built. Changing my tastebuds into something more human makes it so I can't actually digest, it's too much trouble."
Bill frowned. "How close is your form right now to your form in your old dimension?" he asked him.
"Pretty close. The only difference is that this form is DURABLE." MizBill grinned.
Bill didn't have to think about this for very long. "Try layering it in? -Don't change the 'tastebuds', just add a layer inside or above them," Bill said. "Sensing layer first, to read the information; second layer, convert the information to something else, to groupings closer to the human mapping; third layer, complete the connection's transition to human tastebud sensations; then try hooking it in to the rest of your mentality. Yes? -No food conversion at that stage, by any of those layers," Bill added, "Just something the food has to pass through, across, around? Passive sensing. Does that make sense?" (Ford flicked his eyes over to Bill as Bill talked; Ford was sitting at Stan's side as he cooked their meal of mostly beans.)
Sixer watched attentively as the triangle nodded at Bill, then shimmered, colors flickering along their bricks, and that large eye seemed to blur as something seemed to materialize faintly over it. Sixer wasn't sure what exactly was happening, but when the colors faded back to yellow, MizBill blinked and suddenly that eye was now a mouth. Sixer's jaw dropped. That was… amazing!
"Test?" MizBill asked.
"Fish?" Bill asked. MizBill nodded. Bill pulled out his eyepatch, flicked it up into a hat, then reached a hand in, and whipped out a fish, tossing it over to his sister in one smooth motion. MizBill nodded (bobbing up and down) as he caught it with one hand.
"Ahhhh~" He shoved the fish into the mouth that was an eye. (Lee shuddered. Ok, yeah, he could see why other people might have thought he was gross-looking, because if anybody had seen him eat? -THAT was really disturbing!)
MizBill chewed a bit and hummed.
"Good? Bad? Aquamarine, with a pink elephant chaser?" Bill asked him, curious himself as to how his experiment with taste was going. MizBill giggled. "It tastes like fish, but also like keratin and carbon. So, a mix of my different methods of tasting."
Bill straightened in place and grinned. He dropped his knees into a cross-legged position, looking pleased. "Good job, sis!" He hummed for a moment. "You could probably increase or decrease the intensity of each of the methods, for a different mix of tasting, if you want?" Sometimes he liked mixing things up a bit, himself! "Or add a layer to block the triangle-taste-method at the input, if you really want to keep it separate," though Bill grimaced a little at the idea of even partially-blocking a sense, once again.
MizBill happily floated around, thrilled at this new sensation. (Sixer was scribbling in his notebook: He just ate a fish, but he's flat! Where does it all go?)
Ford was frowning slightly, leaning back on his hands and watching all this. He was startled out of it slightly by a shoulder-bump from his brother, and when he turned towards him, Stan handed him a plate of beans and a couple slices of bread, with a "Here."
Ford took the plate from his brother, and the spoon, but he turned back to the rest of them, watching MizBill as he ate some more fish that Bill pulled out of his hat for him, explaining in delight the various sensations he was (seemingly) reveling in, as he apparently tried modifying his new 'tastebuds' further. ("Now it tastes like marrow!")
"How long has Bill been… teaching that other demon things," Ford murmured to his brother, in-between bites of beans. He wasn't entirely sure whether it was an act or not. But Bill at least...
Ford looked over at Bill. Bill, at least, seemed sincere in what he was doing. And it left Ford with very mixed feelings on what he was seeing, here.
His brother not quite side-eyed him. "Kid's been tryin' to teach her all kinds a' stuff ever since she's gotten back, Ford," Stan told him. "Taught her how to sleep, the first time she showed up with that other demon-guy, before that, too." Ford glanced over at Stan at the tone in his voice at that one, to see his brother giving him a long look that he didn't quite like, as Stan said (slowly, and almost a bit too carefully) next, "You were in the woods with 'em, for the headband thing. Weren't they doin' it then, too?"
In the background, MizBill was nuzzling his brother. "Thanks for always being brilliant!"
Bill let out a chittering-chuckle, grinning up a storm. The kid was... patting MizBill on the head(? well, he was stroking his back and his side-face with the flat of his palm and fingers) intermittently, and Bill was just looking out-and-out pleased with his demonic kid sister. "You learned how to do it yourself! I just gave you the general concept, to get you started. And you did very well!" He paused for a moment, then said, after a long moment, in a not quite drawn out way... "I am proud of you."
Stan sat up a little internally, taking notice of that. (He didn't realize that he'd pulled in an unconscious breath at those particular words, but Ford - who was watching him - did.) That… sounded like something the kid had been translating; kid had paused like that before after a chittery-thing or two with him, saying things in a way that didn't really have a beat to it, every syllable and sound taking the exact same amount of time for the kid to say to him, and... it had felt like the kid was restating things - not word-for-word, but still... (Which meant…) Damn. The kid was… and Miz was… -They both were actually trying to be supportive and affectionate with each other, and they were doing it in the way that they'd- Shit. This was…
It made Stan want to punch somebody all over again. Maybe the kid's lizard. (Damnit. Why hadn't somebody just…)
It shouldn't have had to be him. Or them with each other, after a couple hundred of billions of years. Damnit.
Stan pulled in a breath, and looked away.
(He missed Ford's look of concern, and no small worry, on his behalf.)
But when he heard, "Stan…" the grumpy old man just looked down at his plate and said, "Eat your beans, Ford."
There was a pause.
And Stan heard his brother let out a long sigh.
"You're going to get hurt," he heard Ford say quietly, as if in warning - hell, as if anything that came outta his brother's mouth these days wasn't one of those, when it was directed at him - and Stan clenched his jaw and glared down at his plate.
"Like hell," Stan bit back in reply, under his breath himself.
And Stan took another bite of his beans, using his bread as a spoon.
They ate the rest of their dinnertime meal quietly, watching and listening to the kids (human and demon) as they chatted about the various and sundry stuff that they could (maybe) do with the boat. Sixer was finishing a sketch of MizBill's form. He wanted a closer look at that Eye/Mouth thing but MizBill told him that was a bad idea.
"I might get an urge to bite down, and that would end badly for you." MizBill told him gently. Sixer pouted but wrote that down. "Bite reflex, like an alligator?" he mumbled.
Ford frowned as he chewed on his last mouthful of beans, and started cleaning up after both Stan and himself. What was it with teenagers wanting to get near a demon's mouth?
"My friend Pyronica once stuck her arm in my mouth. It felt super weird and it took everything I had to not bite." MizBill reminisced. "My friends wanted to know how deep my throat was…" it was VERY deep apparently. He was a little curious himself, but too uncomfortable with the process to really try it out himself.
"How deep is it?" Sixer asked. MizBill shrugged. "Not sure. Everything I swallow gets torn apart molecule by molecule, so I don't know. Maybe it's infinite, or maybe there's a bottom. But any camera I've swallowed was destroyed within a few minutes." They STILL had the recordings from that planet he swallowed. Geez, you eat a planet once and people refuse to let you forget it.
Stan noticed that MizBill was looking a little uncomfortable when Sixer insisted once again to at least see their mouth again. "I-it's not that interesting! It's just a mouth! Which is also my eye!" MizBill glowed orange, flustered and wiggling in midair.
At that, Stan spoke up, knowing his 'twin' wouldn't stop unless being told firmly and straight-out: "Hey, no means no." ...And Lee was already smacking his twin's shoulder with an annoyed look on his face, as well.
Bill frowned as he watched his sister, and that 'Ford. He got up and crouched down in front of the teenager, glaring at him. "KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY SISTER," Bill told 'Ford, getting right up in his face. (He did not look pleased. ...Neither did 'that Stanford', who was watching them both.)
Sixer looked disappointed, and (only a little bit) rueful as he raised both hands up a bit, palms outward in (temporary) surrender, even as Lee groaned at his (apparently) suicidal brother. Seriously, over-protective older demon here!
Bill glared at the younger Ford for a long moment, then two, then three. Then he finally stood back up and took the few steps he needed to, to sit down next to where his little sister was floating, again. "You need to be more assertive," Bill said simply, to said little sister, reaching up to gather him down into his lap, gently (and not quite caging him in with his arms). And he said it because he knew MizBill was going to get into trouble if he didn't. 'Ford would think that he could get away with things if he just pushed enough, otherwise.
MizBill seemed to pout, his large eye being quite expressive, "Like, how? I don't want to offend him."
"HA," Bill scoffed. "Who cares about offending him? -He should be caring more about not offending YOU! -You don't like what he's asking, so just say so. HE is the one in the wrong, for not stopping at no. No means no. You said no."
MizBill wiggled again. "But I want him to be my friend. So, how do I turn him down if I also don't want him to dislike me?"
Bill frowned. "If you want to be Stanley's human-definition of 'friends' with someone, and they don't listen to 'no', then that should DISQUALIFY them from the being-friends. No means no. Even if you think you maybe want to be friends with someone," Bill stressed, as Stan looked on with a bit of surprise. (He hadn't thought he'd quite gotten through to the kid all the way on that one, as of yet.)
"Well kid, you've got that one right," Stan said for his part, pretty firmly, sending a hard look over at the younger Ford, as he made sure that all the kids were hearing it. This was something pretty damn important, in Stan's book - since it was one of the few (if only) reasons why and how Stan had managed to convince the kid not to contact his demon-friends yet in the first place. (Mainly, that the kid's idea of 'friends' had sucked and that the kid needed - and could get - much better friends than that.) And this had Stan a little worried, as he was beginning to get the idea that MizBill might be in even more danger of being taken advantage of by other people than he'd originally even thought that the kid might be able to be taken advantage of as-is, in the wrong hands.
As if picking up on Stan's unhappy thoughts, MizBill turned to him and pouted some more. "I know how to refuse people I don't like! But Sixer's a friend."
"Not if he's trying to get you to do things you don't want to do, when he knows you don't want to do it, he's not," Stan told her firmly, sending another glare the younger Ford's way. (His brother had been kind of bad about that junk sometimes, but he was absolutely horrible at it, pushing at people's boundaries like that; nobody had ever really put up with or fallen for his junk. ...And, y'know, clearly his brother had grown out of that stupidity in college, or later, or something. Ford never tried to pull that shit with anybody anymore, not even as a joke. Whatever had happened with the kid when he'd been a triangle demon, and that whole 'deal' thing, had clearly been a whole 'nother thing entirely; Ford clearly hadn't known what he was doing at the time.)
Lee sighed. So the demon-dragon-lady thought they were all friends? Well, he wasn't sure if he should correct her on that. He still gave Sixer an unhappy frown, because that just wasn't cool.
MizBill nodded. "Okay." He (sliding seamlessly into she, mentally) nuzzled back into her brother's chest. "I'm fine with petting along my head. I don't like foreign objects that aren't food inserted inside me," she told Sixer firmly. "That one time with Pyronica was because I was curious, but I didn't like it and I don't want to do that again."
Bill blinked as MizBill performed her shift. "...Bow not bowtie?" Bill murmured, a bit confused. (He'd caught the ever-so-slight shift in apparel - but nothing else, since they weren't in the Mindscape or Dreamscape and he couldn't read minds as he was - not without further magical or scientific intervention.) MizBill snuggled against him, glowing softly. "I'm in female-mode right now. I'll probably switch it around later, again."
"Mm," said Bill, registering 'girl' as her gender now. "Let me know?" Clearly he was bad at guessing - he'd just thought she'd wanted to change clothing-accessories again! He pulled in his arms a little closer (crossed across his chest and also MizBill) and ran his fingers lightly along her lower outer sides, up and down, soothingly.
MizBill closed her eye and rumbled softly. This was nice. Brother wasn't as soft as Xanthar, but his hugs were nice too.
Bill's eyelids lowered a bit and he let out a soft breath. This… wasn't exactly like getting 'hugged' back by his brother when he'd been a triangle? But it was sort of close… (He let out another soft sigh and relaxed a little bit further. He wasn't really touching MizBill any harder than he'd have touched another shape or line just then - a bit of pressure, but easily pushed against and released, and nothing anywhere close to being able to crumple a very fragile Flatlander.)
Lee stared before leaning over to ask Stan. "Eh, is she purring?" he whispered. Stan shrugged. Hell if he knew. (All he knew was that the kid was humming a bit, like he did sometimes when he was half-asleep in the chair and Stan rubbed his fingers against this temples instead of on top of his head.) The two demon-kids both looked pretty relaxed, though.
Stan checked the time and huffed. "Hey, you kids better get to bed now. You've all got school again tomorrow." He glanced over at the younger twins. "You've both finished all your homework an' stuff, yeah?" Stan stressed, leveling a look at the two of them, both.
Lee rolled his eyes. "Yeah. Miz made sure I finished my homework," he grumbled. "She's more pushy than Ma…"
"Yeah? Well, be glad she was the one pushin' and not me," Stan told his younger self, to a short groan from Lee. He didn't get any more backtalk from either Lee or Sixer, as they both stood up and headed down below-decks, though. He and Ford got to their own feet, and Stan sent the kid a glance. (...Yeah, okay. Kid got the message too. Good.) He headed to the hatch and down the ladder after Ford himself.
"Mm," said Bill, taking his time at the 'getting to bed'. He didn't exactly poke MizBill to get her attention, but he did stop what he was doing that was making her purr-hum along with his own humming. "Should maybe go back to one human-ish form or another for the sleeping. Easier," he told her, opening his arms up a bit (in preparation to accommodate a larger form if she did it on the spot).
MizBill blinked her eye open. "Okay." She shifted back into Miz, appearing in Bill's lap already in her pajamas (just an oversized t-shirt, with shorts).
"You want to stay female for now? Or male?" Bill asked her directly, rubbing at one eye a bit tiredly, as he looked down at her.
"Female for now, I'll be male tomorrow at school." Miz yawned.
Bill nodded. Then he glanced down and added, "Breast-resizing?" (He wasn't teasing, just asking out of what he himself would classify as an emotion of 'concern'.)
Miz pouted. "I don't mind them for short amounts of time, they're fun to touch. But having them that big all day is heavy."
"Yes," Bill agreed, "Heavy-heavy. ...You can change them back-and-forth now yourself, yes? You Saw how I did it?" he asked her quite seriously, slowly pulling away from her and getting to his feet, walking casually over to the side of the deck where the sandcastle was. (Stan had not quite banished the two demon-kids to the sandcastle the next morning, after Bill had woken up; he'd coached it as the much better option for the two of them instead of the blankets below-decks, while the rest of them had sleeping bags, though. Mostly, Stan had just not wanted to have to worry about the twins sneaking up onto deck and maybe getting into trouble with the thing, if he didn't have the two demon-kids using it and having a reason to want to lock it all down.)
Miz nodded. "Yup. I should be able to do age shifts myself based on what you've shown me, will need to practice them to get them to look right. But I can go back and forth between this-" she gestured at her current child-self, "-and the larger form easily now." Now, all the in between were another story, if she ever wanted to make herself look like she was aging normally like a human, it would be a pain to have to make each in between stage, but she knew HOW to do it now.
Bill nodded and smiled, proud that his little sister was such a fast learner! He patted her head gently as they stopped at the (enlargened) sandcastle entrance on the deck. "Good job," he told her. Miz beamed up at him, making Bill feel a little warm (...happy?) inside.
Miz crawled into the sand castle and set about building another 'nest' out of pillows and blankets. Bill crawled in shortly after her, set the 'lock' that Stanley had seemed to want, and then waited patiently for Miz to finish what she was doing.) Once Miz shuffled around and fluffed the pillows just right, she settled down and sighed. "Good night brother, I love you." She yawned as she snuggled into her nest.
"I love you, too," Bill told her with a tired smile, as he spider-crawled his way over the pillows and blankets, to settle down at her back, back-to-back again as they usually did these days.
Miz hummed quietly as she wiggled to press against Bill. She was quickly growing used to this, sleeping with her brother. Knowing he was there. Knowing she wasn't alone.
Bill relaxed completely as he felt his little sister at his back. She was there, he knew where she was; she was safe (with him), and everything was...
And Bill fell asleep just that quickly, lying there, mid-thought.
