Illusion is Reality
Chapter 88 (Part 1)
-Get distracted by jingling keys-
"Wait," Sixer said, pulling back a bit, as Miz not quite dragged him and his brother by the hands out the entrance to the front of the school. "There's something I want to do first, before we go to the beach."
Miz blinked back at him and stopped in place, as the tugging of his hand got a bit more insistent, and he actually pulled his hand away from her own.
"Sure, what's up?" Miz asked, stopping to let Sixer talk. She wasn't in a rush, more time meant a larger crowd anyway. And what's a performance without an audience?
"I want to retrieve my science fair project from the gymnasium," Sixer said. He'd been putting it off because, quite frankly, between everything else going on - and the open house for the 'fair lasting through the week to (supposedly) let the rest of the community see what they'd all worked on (not that anyone ever seemed interested in this sort of thing in their town)...
Sixer hadn't really had a chance to grab it yet, since the exhibits were supposed to stay as they were for evaluation for grading by the teachers, and then general viewing. (He also somewhat hadn't wanted to - and still almost didn't want to - retrieve it to determine exactly what had gone wrong, given how the thing not working had just about ruined his life, turning everything completely upside down. Because what if the demon was lying? If it hadn't really been sabotage at all, then that would mean that pa-)
Really, the last week had just been so full of craziness, that he'd hardly had a chance to think, between the older versions of them and the demons and the boat, but… he'd been observing the two demons carefully, and the demon-dragon one who called him-and-her-self Miz sometimes didn't seem like much of a liar at all. In fact, he'd not heard her utter anything that seemed to be a lie, not a single solitary time, not even once.
And at the beginning of everything, she had said that someone had sabotaged his project.
He hadn't quite been able to think straight about it at first; not the first night, when things had been so rough that he'd nearly cried himself to sleep, and not the next morning when things hadn't quite seemed anything like real to him yet at all.
But that had been Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning. Thursday had been strange, what with the second demon (consistently 'Bill') going from acting larger-than-life the previous day at school, to nearly dead-with-fatigue and all-but-sleeping through every single class instead.
But today wasn't the first day, or the second. Today was Friday. He'd had nearly three whole days to get used to things now. The new state of things, and the new status quo. He'd even gotten a decent amount of rest the previous night, for the first time since he'd been kicked out of the house and out of 'the family' for good, though apparently that didn't mean Lee treating him like some sort of leper as well.
Sixer was feeling pretty secure in his current situation now, and now? Now he wanted to know who had done it. -He wanted to know who had dared to sabotage him and his efforts at scientific achievement.
"Sixer, we've got until Monday," Lee told him, as Bill and the older-Ford (who had been following at a few paces behind) came to a stop, up next to him and the dragon-demon lady who was still holding his hand. "We shouldn't be too late gettin' to the beach, just in case. Miz might get bored with waiting- uh, no offense," Lee said, turning to her. "I mean, keepin' a girl waitin' is just bad manners, Sixer," Stan told his brother, frowning at him.
"No," said Sixer. "I don't want to wait to retrieve it. It won't take but a few minutes," Sixer said, turning around on his heel and marching back down the hallway towards the gymnasium. "-And it will give me something to focus on over the weekend," he informed his brother, over his shoulder, as he walked off, and the distance between them grew.
"But we're gonna be doing the stand thing the old me talked about, this weekend," Lee called after him, feeling a little wrong-footed. He'd thought Sixer was going to help with that. (He wasn't so sure about running it all himself… that kind of felt wrong.)
Bill glanced after Sixer, then turned and started following after him as well.
"Bill," Ford called out, pushing himself into half-a-jog to catch up to him. "Don't try and stop him from-"
"HA. -Who's STOPPING anybody?" said Bill, who merely caught up to Sixer, following at his side. "NOT ME!" Bill enthused out. "-Miz, Lee, you two coming or not?" the demon simply tilted his head back and called out, not even turning any part of himself back the slightest bit towards the two others.
Ford frowned as he caught up to Bill, and strode down the hallway alongside them both, now three-abreast: Ford, Bill at his right, and his younger counterpart at Bill's right.
...He noticed as they went how Bill was watching his younger self sidelong, almost carefully. And Ford wasn't entirely certain if Bill was watching something, or watching for something. ...But the dream demon was most certainly paying attention, and that was enough to make the hairs on the back of Ford's neck stand up a bit in worry and warning. (Because in Ford's experience, whatever Bill paid attention to for too long, whenever he decided to pay attention to something, whether it be a person, event, or thing…)
Sixer was staring at the table in disbelief.
Everything was gone. His project. His display. -Everything!
"What the heck?" he heard Lee say as if at a distance, despite the fact that he was standing at his left shoulder. "-Hey, what's goin' on?"
Sixer managed to tear his eyes away from the empty table to see Lee marching right up to the nearest student and-
Carla McCorkle, holding a clipboard, turned around to face them. Ford noticed Miz frowning and deliberately looking away; Bill, meanwhile, was looking around the gymnasium with no small interest. (The dream demon didn't look surprised, though.) It left Ford frowning.
"Carla, what the heck is going on?" Lee demanded. He'd noticed that a bunch of the displays were gone, not just Sixer's - his was missing too, for a start. "This stuff's supposed to be up until Monday, right?" he asked her. She was obviously in charge here, what with the clipboard and all, so she should know! (And it wasn't like they weren't on speaking terms at all after their breakup. He'd just been… well, not avoiding her mostly, not exactly, just-)
(It'd been easier not to talk with her so much anymore after dumping him like that the way she had, after what she'd said about him being a total loser, is all. He hadn't needed that noise. But now he had a reason to talk to her, so he was. Wasn't nothing complicated about it.)
"The dance committee wanted to get a head start on the dance, before after school on Monday; it's coming up in only two weeks, you know," Carla told him primly.
Lee frowned. "Carla, you are the dance committee." She was the one who always took point and worked on that stuff for their class. "What the heck? -Did you tell anybody about this first, before throwing people's stuff out?" he asked her. "Give people a chance to grab their stuff?" Because he knew a couple people besides Sixer who'd have a real problem with this.
"It was approved by the science teachers and the principal," she told him simply. "It's not like the open house was being extended into this weekend, too," she said with a shrug. "And it's not like we're throwing out any project that doesn't have a bad grade on it. The rest, we're going to be sticking in one of the supply closets for the weekend."
"Okay, then where's the supply closet?" Lee said, letting out a breath in relief. Because hey, for a second he'd been worried there.
Carla blinked at him. "Stan, we started by trashing the bad ones first. All the others left here are going to go on one of the A/V carts," she told him.
Lee saw Sixer go still next to him, and Lee glared at her. "If you're only throwin' out stuff with a bad grade," Lee said slowly, as his hands slowly clenched into fists at his side, "Then where's Sixer's and mine?"
Carla looked down at her clipboard and flipped a page. "Well, it was probably tossed out with the rest of the trash. You both got bad grades on yours."
"I got an A+ on my project!" Sixer exclaimed angrily at Lee's side, as Carla looked on coolly. Lee glanced between them.
"Well, I have the grades listing right here, and it says that you received a D-," Carla said. "Probably because the teachers evaluating the projects realized that you shouldn't have gotten so high a grade in the first place for lying." Carla flipped the pages back, and then let her hands fall, to hold the clipboard two-handed, down against her legs casually. "I suppose it's a good thing that those college-board people showed up and let them know exactly what was wrong with it when they did."
Sixer was breathing heavily. "My work… was sabotaged-"
"Really, Stanford," Carla said in chiding tones, lifting the clipboard again, "Is that what you're going with? Really?" She tilted her head and gave him a half-lidded look. "Do you really think that they didn't just go ahead and revise your grade based solely on the poster board display after that? I can't see Mr. Harman being anything other than fair. The physical part of the project was only a quarter of the grade, you know." She had a slight smile on her face, and-
-Sixer stepped forward and snatched the clipboard from her hands. (She let him.) "I don't believe you!" he snapped out at her as he did so, but he was already looking pale. And when he paged through it and saw for himself what his newly-revised grade was, he went absolutely dead white.
Carla stepped forward and slowly pulled the clipboard from Sixer's hand, taking it back.
"Like I said," Carla said. "It was thrown in the trash. Just like all the others."
Sixer lifted his head abruptly at her words and stared at her, eyes blazing.
"Shame." Miz spoke up. "There were quite a few good ones there. Not trash at all." She was staring at Carla evenly. The other girl clicked her tongue.
"Well, to each their own. You're free to go through the trash looking for them, though, if you want to. We've been emptying the rolling trash cans out into the dumpster, out by the side there," Carla gestured carelessly with a hand at the double-doors. "We did move it closer to the building to make it easier on the other students helping out, and it looked pretty empty to start with, so it shouldn't be too hard to find it," Carla told them all.
Miz smiled sweetly as she gave a carefree shrug. "I wouldn't mind. I'm used to picking up things that other people abandon and discard." She was still holding Lee's hand.
"...Well, you might not have to do it yourself, because it looks like your older friend's already on it," Carla said, glancing past Miz's shoulder, as Ford was already striding off, with Bill following along behind him at an easy, almost careless pace.
"Well," Miz shrugged, taking up and squeezing Lee's hand, "One woman's trash is another woman's treasure as they say." She gently tugged the younger Stan's hand. "Come on Lee, we should probably make sure Sixer doesn't fall into the incinerator. He's not supposed to die until he's 92 or something..."
"Incinerator?" Carla said. "It's just a dumpster outside." They had no incinerator on the premises. "We aren't burning anything." What did they think this was, some kind of mortuary? "It would be nice if you all got out of the way. Just go off and do whatever you're planning on doing, okay?" Carla told them, "Unless you want to stick around and help out?" she said, gesturing at the handful of students milling about, working on doing just that, as another few students rolled in another two empty A/V carts and started carefully loading them up with the first of the remaining projects.
Lee gave Carla a long look, then put his free hand on Sixer's shoulder, turned, tugged, and started walking away. "C'mon, Sixer. Let's go get your project back," he told his twin, who was walking a lot more slowly than he was expecting.
Miz turned to stare at Carla as they walked away before finally turning back to face forward. Bitch.
Carla didn't even bother to look back at the rest of them as they left, already moving on to the newly-arrived group of students. She handed off her clipboard to one of them and began giving them directions, starting with a hands-on example of how careful to be in retrieving and moving the remaining 'good' projects onto the carts.
Ford didn't bother wasting time. He just strode right over to the large metal dumpster and flipped the first and then second lids over in rapid succession.
He glanced inside, let out a breath at seeing that the students had apparently tossed the majority of the projects and (torn-up) poster boards into just the one half-side of it. He calculated the best location to place his feet inside the dumpster.
And then he slapped both hands onto the rim of it and vaulted himself bodily inside. (He'd lost any compunction about this sort of thing long ago. One took what one could get, in other dimensions. He'd found some of his best materials in other alien species' equivalents of garbage heaps and junkyards on multiple occasions. And frankly, this dumpster was far cleaner by comparison, not containing any biohazardous or potentially radioactive material within it.)
He'd gotten the majority of the poster boards moved off to the side and out of the way (apparently, they'd taken care of removing all of those last), and had slowly picked his way through about a third of the pile when the man-eater and their younger selves made their way outside.
"Woah," Lee said, walking up next to Bill (who was casually leaning back up against the front of the dumpster, looking inside it and half-watching as the older Sixer went at it), and Lee gingerly put his hands against the side of the dumpster (not wanting to risk a cut against something that rusty) as he looked in himself. He hadn't expected the older Sixer to just… dive right in and start going through stuff like that. Like it was nothing. And he really seemed to know what he was doing, too. ...Huh.
The older Sixer looked up at him from where he was crouched. "Oh, here," he was told, and Lee blinked as the old man made an odd sort of sweeping-scooping motion at his side and stood up.
And then Lee blinked as his foot-bot was suddenly only being held in front of him about a foot away from his face.
...Lee raised his hands up and took it back from him.
And as he slowly lowered it a little closer to his chest, he heard the older Sixer say, "I don't know what Carla was thinking. That really shouldn't have been in here."
Lee looked down at his beat-up looking project, then stepped forward and looked down into the big metal dumpster at the old guy who'd just handed it to him, as the older Sixer just… turned away and crouched right back down again and got back to what he'd been doing before, carefully going through all the trashed stuff.
And Lee thought, '...What?'
"But it's junk," Lee said slowly. He knew that. They both knew that.
"Is it? I thought you worked rather hard on the idea for it."
Lee stared down at this older Sixer. "I mean, I guess…?"
"And you got a C+ on it, didn't you?" he heard the older Sixer say almost absently next, as he picked up and moved another piece of something out of the way, and Lee blinked.
"Well, yeah," Lee said. "But…"
"Then it shouldn't have been in here," the older Sixer said, as Sixer peered into the dumpster and pulled a bit of a face at some of the nastiness caked along the inner sides of it. "That's not a bad grade."
"Carla is a vindictive bitch." Miz muttered. If she wanted to trash Sixer's project, that's fine, but Stan's too? That was where Miz drew the line.
"Yeah, well, Carla thinks that anything below a B+ is junk," Lee said to his twin's older counterpart, just to say it - not like he didn't know that, it was mostly just for the demon to hear, really. Lee shifted in place as he watched the older Sixer work at it, still feeling a little odd about what he'd just had said to him by him.
Then he saw a few sparks go off from the projects with both mechanical and electrical parts at the far edge of the pile, as something shifted. One of them hissed and popped, igniting some dust, which spread to the posterbocards.
"Aw shit!" Lee cursed, shoving the footbot he was holding at Bill. The demon took it from him, and Lee wasted no time in getting an arm and leg over the side and pulling himself inside the stupid thing.
Miz looked in. "Do you want me to put the fire out?" She asked. Because Ford had said she should ask first.
Ford, who was already using the edge of his (fireproof) trench coat to slap the fire out, said, "No. Do not disturb anything that is in here! -I don't want you messing with it!" He was worried about not just magical contamination, but that any spell cast could do far more than the most apparent effects.
"Okay." Miz said simply.
Lee grabbed up one of the poster boards that had caught fire and flipped it over, shoving the burning side up against the side of the metal dumpster with his foot, effectively snuffing the fire out by removing that particular side of it from the oxygen in the open air.
Ford saw this and quickly said, "-Move away." He grabbed up the entire pile with both hands, and stepped away quickly, pulling and rotating the entire pile of them away, to do the same thing in the same way as Lee had. "There. That's better."
(It also got the fire away from the rest of the other projects, as Ford then kicked a line of the junk he'd already gone through up against them, making a partial-air barrier between the burning poster board material and the rest of the pile.)
"...You're just gonna leave it like that?" Lee asked him incredulously, as Ford turned around, crouched back down, and largely ignored the small (but growing) fire at his back to continue picking through the pile.
"It's isolated now; it'll burn itself out," Ford told him. "Do you mind pitching in? It will go more quickly if you help out."
Lee stared down at him.
"...Sure," Lee said slowly. (That was weird. He would have thought that-)
"-Lee, do you even know what it looks like?!" he heard from his twin, and Lee sighed, slowly bringing his hands back up and away.
"Of course he does." Miz told Sixer simply. "Because Lee is a good brother."
"It's a delicate piece of equipment!" Sixer said to them all. "It's probably broken under all of that!"
"It's fine," Ford said, as he removed another piece from the pile, and tossed it over his shoulder. "He can just remove anything that's obviously not part of it, then. ...Correct?"
Lee glanced over at the older Sixer and… realized he was serious. And looking at him like he thought he could actually do it, instead of just being a bother and a complete screw-up.
"...Sure," Lee repeated, to a nod from the older Sixer and...
...the old guy didn't even explain what he thought 'obviously not it' meant. He just got right back to what he was doing like he thought Lee could figure that one out on his own.
It left Lee blinking, feeling even more weird in his chest again, and almost kinda… uncertain?
But then Lee blew out a breath (then grimaced at the smell a bit as he breathed back in), and he stood up a bit more, looking at some of the stuff a little bit higher up in the pile, instead of just along the side-slope of it.
He was a lot more careful with how close he was to the bottom of the dumpster, but after awhile he started pulling junk loose out of the pile, and then chucking it up against the far right side of the dumpster... just like the older Sixer was doing; he followed the older Sixer's example. (Well, maybe not tossing it nearly as hard; he did it kinda more underhanded, while trying not to pay attention to how Sixer was carefully looking over what all he tossed up against there, like a hawk.)
And this felt… really weird. He hadn't worked side-by-side together with his twin brother since...
"Are you sure you're my brother?" Lee muttered to himself, as he tossed another weird-looking thing over his shoulder that definitely wasn't any part of Sixer's perpetual motion machine.
Ford faltered a little. "What do you mean?" His heart was racing, as his own wordless doubts rose up in a wave and that persistent and slowly-growing feeling of wrongness reared its head yet again, stronger than ever. "I... am a Stanford Pines, older twin to a Stanley Pines, from another dimension." He didn't know how to explain...
"He spent thirty years struggling to survive while lost in the multiverse," Miz pointed out helpfully.
"Shit; what?" Lee said, startled, looking over at the older Sixer. "Seriously?" He saw the older Sixer hesitate for a moment without looking over at him, then nod once. "-Struggling? Really?" He got another hesitation another terse nod. ...Damn.
Lee frowned and turned away from him, looking back to the pile, frowning further as he thought about this. Because that was weird. The older him had seemed… oh. Huh. "How long did it take that old-man me to get good enough at everything to take care of ya, then?" Lee asked, as he gave the next thing he was thinking of removing a careful look-over, slowly pulling it out, because it looked like it might be caught on something...
"Stan spent the thirty years building a machine to find him and bring him home." Miz shifted from foot to foot. (Bill shot her a warning look.)
"So, what," Lee said, not really believing what he was hearing there, because, "He thought getting home was more important than making sure you were eating," Lee said almost sarcastically because, yeah right. "Or-" Then Lee hesitated. Because, "...wait. Find you?" He stopped to look over and down at the older Sixer in worry.
Ford closed his eyes briefly, and let out a quiet sigh, realizing what Stan's younger counterpart must have been thinking at first. "Stan wasn't with me. He was there, living in my house, back in our home dimension, while I..." Ford grimaced. "I... fell through a portal to another dimension, because of Bill," he ended tersely, not particularly feeling like hashing out the details of the entire issue there, as to what had occurred.
"They were separated." Miz clarified, as Bill straightened away from the dumpster and began walking towards her. "And brother made you build the portal, but he hadn't wanted you to-" Bill came to a stop next to her and placed a hand over her mouth.
"One," Bill said, "I did NOT 'make' that Stanford do anything. He WANTED that portal; I gave him the concept, explained all of the hardest parts of it to him, and helped him with the design and the make of it." He sent Miz a long look. "Two, he wanted the Deal we made, too." (Ford barely kept his mouth shut at that one; he only managed it because he knew starting a verbal fight with Bill on that subject without Stan there was asking for far more than just trouble, especially with the second demon right there to back Bill up.) "Three, what I wanted is NOT up for discussion here," Bill ended on. Bill then slowly removed his hand from her mouth. "You're risking confusing them all over again, little sis. -What you said just now was incorrect, and in the strictest sense untrue, if technically not a lie." Because she hadn't been lying, just telling the truth as she understood it. At least, Bill thought that was what she'd been trying to do.
Miz pouted. "Sorry." She looked down at her feet. "I'm not very good at this, huh?"
"Explaining me to other people? HA!" He gave her a bit of an almost-amused look. "No, you are not. -So maybe you should leave the explaining-of-me to the expert on me, here! Yes?" he said leadingly, placing a dramatic hand against his own chest.
"I'd rather not make the attempt, thank you; you tend to defy any sort of rational explanation," they all heard Ford say dryly from inside the dumpster, and Bill's smiling expression dropped into something a bit more annoyed.
"I was TALKING about ME," Bill said, turning towards the dumpster.
"Oh, were you?" Ford said lightly, with a running undercurrent of dry sarcasm beneath. "What a surprise. You hardly ever do that."
Bill sent him a steady glare over his shoulder.
He didn't reply to that bait, though, and silence largely reigned for the next few minutes, as both Ford and Lee worked away at the pile.
...And it was only a good ten minutes later that they'd shifted nearly the entire pile from one side of the dumpster to the other, and finally found the pieces of Sixer's perpetual motion machine at the very, very bottom of it.
Ford frowned at this, as Lee unshouldered one strap of his bookbag and unzipped it open. He'd found Lee's foot-bot farther away; that had to have been in one of the last few garbage cans emptied into the dumpster, by the placement. But, by the looks of where his counterpart's project had been found, that had to have been one of the first, if not the very first, to go in.
...Though Ford supposed that meant that it would have potentially had to have been on the very top (or very near the top) of the first garbage can full of 'bad' projects.
Had they simply gone through and removed the projects by lowest-grade to highest? That wouldn't have been very efficient, though. It would have been easier to simply go row-by-row and remove those that were on the 'bad' list one by one… wouldn't it?
Carla had seemed to have been carrying the only list though. She could have just been reading off names, with people running off and then coming back with the given 'bad grade'ed project...
...but proceeding in an alphabetical order with a particular grade cutoff would still make more sense under those circumstances, though. That still would have had his and his brother's projects next to each other in the dumpster.
...unless perhaps they'd started with a different cutoff, realized they wouldn't have enough space in the supply closet, and then raised the bar (from perhaps a C to a B) for a second-pass of 'throw away' removals. Ford's frown deepened as he tried to make sense of this, as he carefully loaded the pieces of the broken project into Lee's backpack.
Miz made a face. "Of course she dumped yours first. Seriously, what did you do to make her so mad at you?" she asked Sixer (as Lee checked how Ford had packed the pieces in and zipped up his backpack again). Because she still didn't fully understand why.
Sixer frowned at her, crossing his arms. "I don't know." He shorted. "I don't presume to know what might go through any unobservant little moron's head at any given moment."
Miz paused (and Lee froze in place for a moment, himself). "Did you call her that to her face?" Miz asked quietly, as Lee carefully shouldered his backpack again, and slowly stood up.
Sixer rolled his eyes. (Ford looked over at him, openly staring.)
"Sixer," Lee said slowly, "Did you call my girlfriend that to her face?"
"No," Sixer said.
"Sixer," Lee said. Because- "Did you ever call her that." Ex- or otherwise.
"No, I did not ever call her that," Sixer repeated. Then he added, "It's true, though. She's rather stupid." (Lee frowned at him.)
Miz scowled. "Huh, well, I think I finally understand why this happened." Because she had not been privy to people's thoughts when she Saw them while looking up events, but this? Well, even if Sixer hadn't said it aloud, Carla was a smart girl; she'd almost certainly picked up on it.
Lee gave his twin a long look.
"...Yeah, okay," Lee said, as he pushed himself up on the edge of the dumpster, and then kicked one, then the other, leg over the edge and fell the short distance feet-first back to the concrete below. He wasn't gonna argue with his own twin over an ex; that would be even more stupid than that.
Ford vaulted the edge, and took the time to close both halves of the lid on the still-smoldering fire behind them. He gave his younger counterpart a very long look as he did so. Because that hadn't been… well. It hadn't been the impression that he'd ever gotten from Stan's high-school flame at all.
"...I suppose she can't have been very smart to have dumped you," Ford finally said to Lee, after a long moment of thought. (Lee looked over at him and blinked, a little shocked.) Ford supposed it might be possible that, with how bitter this other self might be at having been kicked out of the house at age seventeen, that he might be projecting his anger onto those undeserved a little bit. He likely hadn't meant what he'd said, in as thorough a manner as he'd said it… He himself would not have; at least, Ford thought he wouldn't have. (It was a very tentative thought, though.)
Then Ford realized that, with this Carla having been in charge of throwing out his science fair project like it was junk, and being anything but conciliatory or the least bit sorry about it… some of the anger this younger him might be feeling at her at present could be directly related to that. (After all, he himself had latched on to blaming Stan immediately for his own project breaking, and… yes, he'd been right about at least some of it certainly - Stan had admitted to some part in whatever had happened, whatever 'an accident' truly meant - but he'd had no real proof that Stan had broken it, just a single empty candy-bag lying on the floor nearby. So this younger version of himself might likely blame Carla for having taken at least some small part in what was adding insult to injury, really.
...Not to mention being the bearer of bad news on the revision of his grade significantly downwards, Ford suspected. They'd both ended up with a D- at the end of things, but Mr. Harman had been the one to both softly tell and then gently explain it to him, which had significantly softened what had been a rather terrible blow.
But that had been back in his own timeline. -Here? Mr. Harman hadn't gotten the chance. (Not least of which because Bill- ...Wait. Had Bill done what he'd done to him deliberately? Ford glanced over at the dream demon suspiciously.)
Lee let out a breathy laugh, surprised. "Hell, Ford," he told the older man. "Carla broke up with me because I'm stupid. Remember?"
Ford looked over at him, and he opened his mouth to say something-
-but Sixer cut in, taking the footbot from Bill's easy hold and shoving it into Lee's chest, with a, "Lee, you get lower grades than she does. Of course you're more stupid than she is." (Ford pulled in a breath at this.)
Miz was glaring out right now. "I can't believe you're more of a jerk than that Stanford," she said, as if being worse than Ford was a shocking achievement. Then she seemed to slump in place. "Well, whatever. I don't really feel like caring about this right now," she mumbled. "But Stan's not stupid."
"You three should probably head over to the beach, now," Bill said, as Lee handled his own project far less carefully than his twin's, simply contenting himself to tying up the cord around one of the backpack straps, to dangle down at his side. "Stanley will be wondering where you all are! -Better LATE than NEVER. HA!"
"We can hand off your backpack to him once we get there, for safekeeping," Sixer said, nodding once as he moved off.
Miz frowned, but followed behind.
And as Lee turned to follow them, Ford reached out a hand and grabbed his elbow, stopping him. He turned back to look at him, a tense, frowning sort of look on his face (his shoulders hunching up slightly), and...
"Look... Lee, you-" Ford struggled with how to put this, but…
Lee watched as the older Sixer pulled in a breath, then seemed to steel himself and say, under his breath almost, with a terrible urgent intensity, "Lee, you are not stupid. And grades are not everything. -Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
Lee stared up at the old guy in front of him in literal shock at his words.
"You're just smart in a different way!" Miz called back over her shoulder to Lee from a bit farther away, as she turned to walk backward to keep Lee in sight. "I mean it! You're a great guy and don't let anyone make you feel bad about yourself." She waved her arms at him but it didn't look like Lee saw her, his eyes locked onto the older version of his brother standing in front of him.
"Lee?" the older Sixer(?) said to him, looking a little concerned almost, "Did you hear me?" and… "I said-"
"...Okay, sure," Lee said, getting the feeling that he'd better agree with him, that the guy wouldn't let go of him until he did. "Yeah," Lee said, a little more weakly than he meant to. The older Sixer looked into his eyes for a long moment, then nodded at him once and slowly let go of him, and…
It left Lee feeling almost a little faint, as he backed up a step, and and another, and then turned away and started walking after his twin, a little more and more hurriedly as he went, hands fisted tensely around his bookbag straps as he caught up to Miz and his twin, because... a Sixer who didn't think their grades at school were the most important thing in the history of everything? -Had the world ended at some point, and he just hadn't noticed?
Ford stared after Stan's younger counterpart as he watched the three of them go.
...And then he sighed tiredly as he heard a soft 'hmmmm'ing sound behind him, and turned around to see Bill stretching a bit in place leisurely.
Ford really wasn't looking forward to spending the afternoon with the triangle demon. Watching him and that other demon interacting with the whole of humanity at the school that day, while being within the same room as the two demons, while also waiting for the next (three-megaton nuclear bomb of a) 'shoe' to fall, had been nerve-wracking enough. He couldn't imagine that Bill would be on anything but his worst behavior, after barely managing to maintain a halfway-working repore with the various people he had encountered throughout the course of the school day.
And now, he had a choice between trying to somehow coax Bill into spending the time in a highly-public place (where Bill could play games with and hurt others), or try and take him off to someplace secluded with no-one else around (and no witnesses to whatever Bill would then decide to do to him). Neither of those situations (or outcomes) were particularly palatable, but if Ford had to choose, then he would pick…
Ford startled as he realized that Bill was halfway across the schoolyard from him already, and quickly dashed after him-
...to slow down to a walk as Bill kept up his half-sedate pace without speeding it up.
Ford frowned as he kept pace with him, walking two steps behind the demon for a good hundred feet or so, then frowning and coming up to walk apace with him, as they hit the sidewalk.
"Bill, where are you going," Ford asked him, as Bill didn't stop walking.
"The Harman's house," Bill told him, without much expression to his face. "He shouldn't have taken today off from teaching at the school. Stanley wanted him to balance his teaching and work and his home life properly, yes?"
"...Yes," Ford noted.
Bill tossed a look up at him as he walked, before turning back to face-forward again.
"...You want to go check up on him for Stanley," Ford said slowly.
"Yes," said Bill.
"That isn't a good idea," Ford told him roughly, as they both continued walking along.
"If there's something out of whack, then Stanley's going to want to know about it sooner than Monday, Sixer," he was told, as they both came to a stop at the first streetlight along the way, waiting for the crosswalk light to change. "I can assess him without 'inspiring him' any more than I already have," Bill told him.
Ford frowned.
But when the 'walk' sign lit up again, and Bill started making his way across the street, Ford didn't try to stop him.
Ford followed him, instead.
Lee finally caught up to Sixer and the demon-dragon, and jogged up to slow down to a walk at Miz's left side. He huffed a bit for breath, recovering quickly, and then turned to Miz, because…
"Did you know there would be a fire?" Lee asked, remembering Miz's comment about an incinerator.
Miz shook her head. "I didn't know. But there was a huge possibility of a fire starting since there were a lot of electrical things in there that weren't properly taken apart when they got dumped."
Lee grumbled. "Could have told us." He could've grabbed a fire extinguisher from inside or something, if he'd known. He looked over at his brother and frowned. Sixer was scribbling in his notebook as per usual.
Lee wanted to say something, wanted to ask his brother what happened between him and Carla. Something must've. Because his ex had just treated his twin like… he'd never seen a girl act like that when there wasn't something else going on that they were angry about before, and that stuff Sixer had said just then? Calling her a 'moron' like that, and just leaving it at that? -If that had been something new from just then, Sixer would've vented about it, right then. But he hadn't. Which meant…
Lee sighed and looked away. He wasn't gonna tackle this right now. Not right now. (Later, definitely. But...) They had other stuff to do right now.
Like...
Lee looked up when he heard the screams as they got closer to the beach. "...So… you're in two places at once?" Lee asked her. "Kinda?" He hadn't really understood the whole conversation she and Bill and the old-man him had gotten into the night before; mostly, he'd just gotten out of it that, whatever she was doing, was supposed to be a lot safer for her?
Miz nodded, swinging their hands back and forth as she went. "Yes and no. I made a projection that I can control from a distance, and it'll act according to the list of actions I've given it beforehand. It's currently raiding beach picnics and scaring tourists."
More screams rang out as they began to approach the boardwalk. Lee was a little worried now. "You're, uh, this thing you did ain't hurting anyone-"
"Of COURSE not. What do you take me for? It's just growling and chasing people." Miz looked away, her eyes glazing over. "Oh. The beach cops are here." she stated nonchalantly, making Lee jolt in worry. Sixer also looked a little uneasy, now that they were actually doing this. (And it didn't exactly help that he was still more than a little bit upset from before, even after the long brisk walk back.)
Miz turned back to look at them. "Well, we should hurry along then."
DragonMiz was having fun stomping around, kicking sand in the air and roaring. Well, it wasn't a roar. More like the sound of a rumbling air conditioner mixed with a squeal. There were many people who ran away, some who stayed to point and stare from a distance, and the beach cops were also there, unsure of what to do. For her part, DragonMiz was playing up her act of being some sort of ocean creature that had wandered onto land, shuffling around, inspecting the beach towels and discarded snack foods that people had dropped.
She had made sure to NOT show any signs of aggression until and unless a human got within a certain distance from her. Which those beach cops were doing now. DragonMiz hissed at them and backed up a little as they approached. One cop had his gun up, pointing it at her. His partner was trying to get him to put it down. "Don't shoot, the noise will probably startle the damn thing into attacking!"
"What the fuck is that?" the cop with the gun out hissed. They'd gotten an alert of a large animal on the beach; they'd thought it was a shark or something, but this… neither of them had ever seen a creature like this. It sort of looked like a snake with legs? It had scales. -This was much worse than a shark; it could walk on land and was much larger than a shark. Twice the length of a great white and with just as many teeth. -And they both saw those teeth a lot closer than either of them would've liked when it opened its huge maw and snapped up a plate of hot dogs that some scared beach patrons had abandoned, in running away from the thing.
"I reckon it's a new species? Or maybe some freaky escaped government experiment?" the other cop muttered, watching the beast carefully. Once it had backed away from them a little it had calmed, looking more interested in nudging around the colorful beach towels than in attacking them. He took a step towards it and the beast began hissing again, rearing up slightly. The cop quickly took a step back again. "Shit, how're we gonna catch this thing?"
"I say we just shoot the thing and be done with it," the younger cop said, raising his gun. But his older partner huffed and put a hand out on top of it and pushed the barrel down towards the ground again, stopping him.
"Look," the older cop told his younger partner. "A large animal like that can take multiple shots, of a hell of a lot higher caliber ammunition than that pistol you've got there, before going down - and in that time, those claws and teeth are probably gonna go straight into you." He was older, wiser, and had more than a little experience with hunting stuff out in the forests in the out-of-state parks a little farther south than Jersey; he'd had a few run-ins with black bears before. And deer. Plenty of deer. And if there was one thing he'd learned about wild animals, it was that they didn't want to pick a fight with humans, not unless you attacked 'em first.
"Should we call in animal control?" the younger cop asked next, doubtfully but also almost hopefully.
His older partner sighed. "We might need to..." As far as he was concerned, they needed more people with wild animal experience, not more people with guns that might just panic the damn thing and send it into a rage.
DragonMiz paused. When was the cue coming? She glanced around, flicking her tail to knock over a few umbrellas. Ugh. There was trash and litter everywhere. (Miz could see though and control this projection remotely and there was a LOT of trash here) Even with her having deliberately grabbed up every glass shard she'd encountered thus far (of which this beach was named for good reason) to use in making stuff, there was still plenty of awful shit embedded in the sand around here. Discarded bottles, shoes, plastic toys...
Well, there was a pretty big audience now; it looked like it was time to step things up a notch. DragonMiz spotted the perfect target: a broken beer bottle. She wandered over to it, making sure to look like she was just searching for more food to gulp up, and... 'stepped' on the bottle, making sure that the cops were paying attention when she did it, and saw clearly what it was that had happened. -Then she faked a shriek of pain and reared up, thrashing around on the sand.
"Fuck!" one of the cops spat out, eyes going wide as he grabbed his partner and they both dashed back another good half-dozen yards, dodging a long whip-like tail as it swung around wildly.
The people watching reacted much the same way, running away further and screaming again when the beast started thrashing around more violently, smearing black 'blood' along the sand as it howled out horribly in pain. Its tail whipped around again, and the cop with the gun yelped as the long appendage (longer than he thought it was) smacked the gun out of his hands. He tried to retrieve the weapon quickly, but jumped back (nearly losing his footing as he scrambled backwards in the sand) when the tail whipped back around the way it came, smacking his gun even farther away from him in the process. "-Shit!"
"Get back!" the older cop cried out, quickly grabbing his partner up by his arms and then pulling him farther out of the way.
The two men were left panting in the sand, well out of reach of the tail. And at this point, they weren't sure what to do. The beast was obviously in pain and distressed, which was a bad thing for any large animal to be while near humans. They knew that, and they also knew that they just weren't equipped for this.
That was about when the kids showed up. Sixer took the bookbag from Lee and handed it off to the older Stan as he walked past him in the crowd (with a muttered, "Don't break it any further," to him as he went) before looking over. He let out a breath, and then took another one in almost reflexively. Because he'd thought that the dragon would look just like Miz had before. He hadn't expected...
"What's that?" he asked eagerly, (rather easily) getting right into the act. (Not that it was completely an act for him at this point. Because this? This was… -He was really looking forward to this, now.)
Miz stayed back while the younger twins approached the cops and gasped. DragonMiz was dragging herself away to put some distance between herself and the scared cops, bleeding black blood out all over the beach, and...
"Don't worry, that's just an illusion; I'm not hurt," Miz reassured the twins from where she was standing farther back, staying by Stan for the duration. (She was using an 'aural illusion' to 'throw' her voice a bit, allowing herself to speak directly into their ears.)
When the cops realized that they'd just been approached, they both turned to quickly address the teens, worried for their safety. "-Stay back!" the older cop began, as the younger cop began to shoo them farther back towards the crowd again. "We're going to contact animal control-"
"No need, we'll capture that beast!" a snobbish voice called out, interrupting the cops. Everyone turned to see two blond twins standing nearby, apart from the crowd, with smug expressions and fancy clothes.
Lee recognized them, even after all this time, and he groaned out, "Ugh, you guys again?"
The Sibling Brothers laughed obnoxiously as they turned towards the 'injured' animal. "Well, you might have cost us the Jersey Devil," one of them said. "But we'll be the ones to claim THIS one!" said the other. With that said, the first of the twins turned to the large creature and fired his net gun. DragonMiz roared as it fell over her.
Stan, who was watching this from a distance with Miz, hid a grin behind his hand. He'd gone over this with them all as one of the 'high-probability possibles', as the kid liked to put it. (-And they hadn't even left it that much to chance, either, with the 'dragon' showing up and 'running around' for a bit before school had let out and making sure a few cops were in the area. Stan knew those annoying idiots had cops on their 'payroll' to let them know what sort of junk happened around the area, and anybody who would've been listening to the police scanner would've heard-)
It was all going just as he'd planned out with Miz and the younger twins yesterday.
Stan grinned. He knew what was gonna happen next. (-And it'd serve 'em right, too.)
DragonMiz reached out and clawed right through the thick net with her claws, as if it were toilet paper. The 'injured' beast then turned towards her 'attackers' and let out a full-throated wide-mouthed screeeeeeeeeeeeech!
And the sibling brothers paled and started to scramble away, yelling, when the beast lunged for them - clearly seeing them as a threat to be taken out.
Taking his cue with a half-acted, half-improv decision, Lee rushed forward with a loud, "WATCH OUT!" and tackle-grabbed the beast by the tail.
DragonMiz made sure to halt, acting as if Lee had managed to stop her. She turned to hiss at him instead.
"Hurry up and get outta here!" Lee yelled out, then grunted in effort as he pulled on the tail, digging his feet into the sand and holding on hard. (DragonMiz wasn't just going limp, she was actually pulling against his hold a little, needed to make it look realistic after all.)
DragonMiz stilled the rest of her body, rearing her head up on her neck with her fins fanned out, looking about ready to strike like a snake.
Lee loosened his hold on the tail at this. "Heh, good monster… easy now?" Lee grinned with 'false' bravado as he backed off just a little and patted the tail he had been holding, taking a slow step back along it, then another, hand out and down low. (The old-man Stan had drilled the two of them on their acting for this, but in facing this down… it wasn't all that hard to pretend, Lee was realizing.)
-Especially when DragonMiz snarled and turned her entire body around to go after Lee instead.
The people in the crowd back along the boardwalk (now partially-cordoned there by the cops) all screamed as they watched the sea monster make its lunge, sure that this brave foolish boy was about to get mauled.
"Woah!" Lee yelled as he ducked and dove out of the way. DragonMiz was making this look real, swiping with her claws as she twisted her long serpentine body around; Lee was forced to keep dodging.
Sixer took his cue, ducking under the one cop's arm and running forward to help his brother. He slowed down significantly as he approached the creature, then reached his arms out and crouched down and in on himself a bit, to appear small and unthreatening. "Shhh, shhh, calm down…" he said, trying to 'soothe' the creature.
The dragon didn't charge Lee again, but Lee still had to run back out of reach to get out of the way of another (stationary) claw swipe. (It was the back left leg that was injured, which simply meant its front legs were free to attack.) "I don't think that's gonna help, bro!"
DragonMiz, following Lee's movement, caught sight of Sixer out of the corner of her eye, and seemed to startle, turning her head around to face Sixer instead. She hissed and backed up again, trying to keep both teens in sight at the same time.
"It's just hurt. And that jerk attacked it," Sixer said, only barely loud enough to be heard by some of the onlookers. "I've read about what to do with injured animals! And cryptids!" It wasn't even a lie, he had read all sorts of books about strange and unusual animals.
"This ain't a cat that got beat up by the local kids!" Lee hissed out at him in a theatrical-sounding 'whisper' that carried across the beach.
But... the beast had stopped attacking, its large eye flicking back and forth at the two of them.
Sixer nodded. "Well, first off, we shouldn't spook it any more. So… back up a bit," he told his brother. Lee nodded and carefully, backed away. "And maybe…" he said to Lee, then leaned in a little closer and whispered something more lowly to his twin that the rest of the onlookers couldn't hear, and Lee nodded to him grimly, before giving him a light 'good luck' punch to the shoulder, turning, and then jogging off.
Sixer then turned back towards and continued talking to the 'injured' animal. "Hey, it's okay. You must be hurting, right? Just calm down, okay?" He stayed back, kept himself crouched low to the ground, and made sure to speak softly.
DragonMiz twitched as she stared him down for several long minutes, watching, and listening, before finally beginning to calm down.
That was when Lee came back with some hotdogs. "Hey, think these will do it?" Sixer turned his head slightly to look at Lee without really taking his eyes off of the beast.
"Yeah, generally you're not supposed to feed a hurt animal, but that's just for the ones that have internal injuries. But this one's just got a cut paw, so I think feeding it would help in this case. From the look of it, it came up on land because it was hungry." (Sixer had raised his voice a little so that the onlookers could hear him. ...He hoped he was projecting properly. He didn't want to have to explain himself all over again after the fact, just because they couldn't...)
Sixer felt his brother walking up beside him, watching DragonMiz tense and back off a little. "Most animals are just looking for food, so this thing must have been attracted to the beach because of all the food being left around." He was still speaking loudly enough that people could hear him. "So perhaps giving it something to eat will help keep it docile until animal control gets here."
Lee nodded as he carefully crouched down (emulating his brother) and shuffled a bit closer. "Hey, you hungry big guy?" Lee asked, practically crooning the words out to the creature. DragonMiz was watching the twins carefully. "Here, I got some yummy snacks for you~"
Lee carefully took one of the hotdogs and placed it down in the sand. Everyone saw how the creature's eye shot down to look at it before glancing back up at the twins.
Everyone was quiet as they watched the scene play out, holding their breath. (The Sibling Brothers glared from where they were standing - much farther back with the crowd now - wanting to go and try to get the unknown creature for themselves but even they knew that agitating the animal with so many onlookers watching would get them in trouble.)
Lee put the paper plate full of hotdogs down, and then he and Sixer slowly backed off, away from the pile. DragonMiz glanced up and down between them and the food. Them, and the food. And once the humans were far enough away from the pile... she slowly crept forward and sniffed at the offering.
A long black tongue reached out and wrapped around one of the snacks, pulling it into the maw of sharp teeth. DragonMiz continued eating the food, chomping down on them cautiously. She soon polished off the whole plate.
...And then that large eye blinked and the creature slumped over into the sand, breathing softly.
"Heh. Looks like those tranqs in the food worked." Lee said proudly.
Sixer nodded at his brother. "Good, now I want to get a look at it's injury, hopefully it isn't too bad." He slowly approached the large beast, who was laying on her side, breathing quietly.
Seeing their chance, the Sibling Brothers moved away from the crowd, making their way forward across the beach. They tried to approach, but even with the 'tranq's in her system, DragonMiz stirred and growled. -She wasn't asleep, just drowsy.
Lee (still standing a bit farther back as Sixer approached) noticed her bad reaction, then turned to glare back at them. "Hey, back off, you're upsettin' it again."
"We're professionals and we should take this beast off your hands-" one of the Sibling Brothers started to say-
-but a hand suddenly came down on each of their shoulders, and they craned their heads back, startled, to see a grumpy old man holding them both back where they stood.
That 'grumpy old man' was Stan, who spoke up after having made his way over after them. "-You'll scare the dang thing and get hurt, is what you'll do. Really, you shot a big stupid net at it; what makes you think it'll want you bein' anywhere near it?"
The annoying blond duo looked like they were going to protest, but the cops were right there, and had seen this all go down, along with all the onlookers. In fact, the older cop was coming forward from his self-imposed 'crowd control' duty, glaring at him. "That useless net of yours just made it more angry. I don't want you puttin' anyone here in danger by agitating it all over again. If that thing rushes the boardwalk-"
The two blondes looked around. With all the glares from the people around them, especially when the large beast started rumbling softly as Sixer, then Lee, managed to approach it and Sixer began petting it gently... the blondes realized that they weren't going to win this one. They scowled, but stayed back as the Pines twins essentially soothed the large creature with a belly rub.
The onlookers began to relax, cheering and clapping quietly as Lee cleaned and bandaged the beast's paw, while Sixer kept it busy and distracted with the petting he was doing.
Lee spoke up from where he was crouching, as he finished up his bandaging. "It's not that deep; should be healed within a few days. And then the big guy should be good to go back to wherever it came from." Said beast was continuing to purr in content at Sixer's ongoing soft petting, making the police slowly relax as well.
"Well look at that. Impressive work, boys," one of the officers praised (as Lee moved away from the beast to be able to talk with the cops in something other than a loud call out across the beach, leaving Sixer by it to continue petting it and keeping it calm). "But that was incredibly dangerous and you really shouldn't have put yourselves in danger like that."
Lee gave the cops a shrug. "Well, I kinda reacted before I thought 'bout it."
"Well, thanks for your help boys, but we should get animal control here now." The younger beach cop told them. The other one scoffed at that, saying, "Or the government; this thing's gotta be a new species or something."
Sixer was giving the beast a belly rub, but he was also well-aware that Miz (in her humanoid form) was watching him closely. He wasn't going to mess things up with her this time, he was going to be the perfect gentleman. ...Besides, this solid light construct wasn't the same. Sixer thought about how it felt to pet the real Miz; she was warm and petting her left a pleasant tingle in his fingers - her scales had seemed to buzz beneath his hand, and it was all so fascinating. This projection was nothing like her; it felt lifeless. Sure it felt like a real animal, but after feeling the sheer power buzzing around Miz's scales, this just didn't compare.
That was about when the reporters showed up.
The older Stan had stepped in at some point to help the twins spin the story, and he was doing a great job at getting them all the praise and recognition for their brave actions that they would have deserved for such a feat, if it had truly been real. (Lee was in awe at how well Stan could - and did - play the crowd. He and Sixer were pulled up to have their pictures taken and it was AWESOME.)
Sixer watched as Miz hung back a bit, not quite vanishing into the crowd, but being pretty careful not to be caught on camera herself. Sixer wondered if there was a reason for that, as Miz turned and moved farther off…
... oh, wait, from where she was headed (read: making a beeline for) a bit farther down the beach, Miz was just wandering off to go get some more food. Hm. Sixer still hadn't figured out why one demon liked to eat and the other one didn't… and also why one would only eat vegetables. (...Some demons could only eat vegetables? What was that about?)
Lee was out and out basking in the attention, and once Sixer got over his initial hesitancy at having so very many people looking at him, he did so as well. And it was pretty clear by the end of things, as Stan slowly handed off more and more of the question-answering to the twins, and then the reporters finally wrapped up (still looking pretty enthusiastic about the whole thing), that the twins were going to be front page news by tomorrow. Lee (feeling a bit of relief at getting past the first hard part of everything) looked around for his old-man self, and...
...The older Stan had set up a place for the tourists and locals to pay to take a photo of the beast. -Heck, Lee could see that he already must have made at least $50 in the last 10 minutes, given the number of groups of people crowding around what looked like polaroid pictures. (...Holy shit. If this was the kind of stuff the older-him did for a job then Lee could see how he was making bank! The older Sixer caught monsters and then the older Stan did the business part of it...)
With the reporters now gone, Miz made her way back over with an armful of food, and more coupons stuffed in her pocket. (She was stockpiling in preparation for something.) Miz tossed another bunch of fries in her mouth. She was preoccupied with something other than the dragon now, though.
Miz wanted to make some saffron.
Miz had never cooked with it before. It was always too expensive for her to get, back when she was human. Miz wanted to know what all the fuss was about. And if she didn't like how it tasted, well, she could always sell it. Heh. Saffron was literally worth more than gold. Fancy that. (Well, considering saffron was the stigma of a specific breed of crocus flower, and each flower only had three of them… and they had to be harvested by hand individually from each flower once it blooms… yeah, ok, she could see why it was so expensive.)
But was it worth it? ...Well, even if she didn't like the taste, creating saffron was actually easier than gold (not in terms of atomic structure, just in terms of how much she needed to get the amount needed, after all, an ounce of saffron was already worth more than an ounce of gold) and would have a higher sale price so… win/win!
...There was also another project she was working on, concerning her solid-light construct. Miz had thought of a new idea that she really, really liked, but she knew she would need to talk to Stan about it first, later, before she could know for sure if it was a good idea or not. -Essentially, she wanted to fully animate the dragon construct. Not quite 'giving life' to it, but… similar.
-Because, as Miz's thought process went, if the dragon DID escape and flee back into the ocean, it would entice more tourists and cryptid hunters into the area, and if there were more sightings, it would help to promote cryptids as a 'thing' that was real because there would be plenty of evidence of such things (by way of this particular singular thing - those photos weren't JUST for making more money). That would lead to more support and credence for little Sixer's wishes for his future career as a 'monster hunter'. ...Of course, it would also mean that he'd have to be a little more secretive about his own research in Gravity Falls in the future in order to avoid the area getting swamped quickly by other cryptid researchers, but… eh~ that was fine too.
(Plus, with more money coming into town, they could afford to clean up the beaches, to prevent their local cryptid from hurting itself and, therefore, want to stay around the area to attract more tourists and revenue.)
The beach was packed with people again, now - even more than there had been before. Miz watched as the police showed up to try and keep people away from the now-stirring dragon. Sixer was back to petting it again, soothing the beast and keeping it pacified so that it wouldn't spook and then lash out at people. It was all very well done; Miz was surprised at the younger twins' acting ability. ...Or, perhaps, they really were just trying to keep the people from getting too close to the construct, afraid someone would realize it wasn't actually a real living creature if they did.
Finally, the crowd died down enough that Miz (who'd grown bored long before this) headed back to the boat, humming as she used the stove in the cabin to whip up a nice dinner for them all. She made some food for the Stans (all four of them), but kind of figured they might not eat her cooking; no matter. She looked down at the salad she made for her brother as well. "I don't know if I'm using this saffron correctly," she said to herself.
Miz set the rest of the food to the side for a moment and sat down to try out her salad. She was chewing on her salad, which didn't have pepper (she just didn't like spicy, she would add peppers to Bill's salad when he got there), and making smacking sounds with her mouth as she scented out the saffron in the mix.
"Hm… it's not bad? I like basil or chives better," Miz decided at last. "Well, I'm probably not using this the way it's supposed to be," she spoke aloud to herself.
Miz wasn't all that disappointed. She could just sell the clump of saffron she'd made. Would be cool to see how much it was worth. She looked at her little bundle of carotenoids. It wasn't even difficult to make. Mostly Carbon and Hydrogen with some Oxygen. Gold was much more annoying to make from scratch, being much heavier in atomic mass. Also, she could build the saffron from just grabbing the elements from the sand and air around her, versus making gold which would require converting the sand into a different substance altogether. It used much less energy than making the heavier element, and Miz was taking this time to more closely examine how much energy it was draining from her versus how much she was self-generating.
Self-generating normally consisted of converting the emotions she absorbed from others into pure energy. Since she wasn't allowed to do that right now until she learned to fully separate the emotions from herself, she'd only been feeding on her own emotions lately. She could also gain power from Knowledge and learning something new. ...Well, she had been learning some interesting things here and that helped a lot. There were also Deals, but she hadn't made any while she was here.
...and she probably shouldn't be making Deals while she was here, either. ...Or once she and her brother and the older Stans got back.
She'd been thinking about the whole 'disconnect from the Karma system' thing and was wondering if it would work, or rather, she didn't know HOW to go about doing it. Also, a small part of her was worried that maybe dad wouldn't be happy if she went and did that without asking him first...
She was a little worried about that. She didn't want to upset dad… and she was also quite convinced that her brother would be annoyed that she still valued Ax's opinion on what she did with her life. But…
Well, she didn't have to worry about that right now, she could figure it out later.
Once Miz finished up eating, she went out onto the deck to sit and wait for the others. She didn't have to wait too long; she looked out across the beach to see Stan and the others coming back now as the sun began to set, the crowd of onlookers and tourists finally leaving for the night. Ford and Bill arrived at the beach themselves not long after that, and started making their way across the beach to the boat, too.
Miz waved as they approached, and got up to let down the rope ladder for them. Once they'd all gotten themselves to the boat and up onto the deck, close enough to hear her without her having to shout, she told them all, "I made dinner for you, if you want it? If you don't, there's still plenty of ingredients."
Stan gave her a nod. "I hear ya." They all re-entered the cabin, and Ford frowned at her words at first. When they all got inside the cabin's galley, Ford frowned a bit more down at the food she'd made (a spinach salad with saffron and some hamburgers) that was laid out across the table, looking it over. Then Ford did a double-take and glared down at- "Is that saffron?!"
"I was curious what it tasted like." Miz shrugged.
Ford twitched. "Where did you get it?" he asked, already knowing the answer. Neither he nor Stan had bought any of that at the store when they'd been stocking up on supplies, which meant-
Miz opened her mouth, then closed it and sighed. "You're mad and I'm annoyed…"
Ford glared. "I didn't ask you how either of us feel, at present. -Don't dodge the question."
Miz groaned. "I scanned and made it. Like a copy and paste." She frowned. "I didn't want to spend money on something I just wanted to test out. I don't know if I like it enough." And it wasn't like she was getting caviar or something. Saffron was a plant. They were strings of CHO in various shapes. A plant!
Stan could see Miz's mood dropping and interrupted. "Ford, you don't have to eat anything you don't want to," Stan reminded him, then told the younger twins, "Maybe we'll skip the salad. -What are the burgers made of?" he asked Miz.
Miz glanced away from Ford. "I made them from some of the supplies you bought…" she told Stan. "I didn't ask first, I hope that's okay?" She was giving Stan a mild worried look.
"That's fine. It's good that you're making use of the stuff I bought." Stan told her. It was good that she was relying on him more instead of making everything herself. He noted that Miz seemed relieved to know that she wasn't in trouble for cooking without asking first. Geez, this kid. "If you're hungry, you can get food, or cook food. You don't have to ask for permission." Stan reminded her, then joked, "Just don't eat everything all at once; make sure there's still some left for the rest of us, yeah?"
"Okay." Miz glanced down at the burgers. "Are you guys not going to eat those? I made them to be shared. They're not mine," she said carefully, glancing over at Bill to check if she was doing this right.
Bill took a moment to use the control unit at his wrist, checking them using his suit's sensors (just for complete thoroughness), then smiled and patted her on the head, letting her know that she was doing well. "They're not yours," Bill agreed, with a nod.
Sixer walked right over and picked up a burger, ignoring the older him's unhappy frown as he took a bite. "It's delicious," Sixer told her.
Miz blushed faintly, wiggling in place. "T-thank you…"
Bill frowned at this and glanced between them, then glared at Sixer, before ruffling Miz's hair. "We need to talk about your standards!" he huffed out at her. "AGAIN!"
Lee groaned. He nudged his brother. "Stop flirting with the demon," he muttered to him.
Sixer blinked. "I'm just letting her know that her cooking isn't bad." Frankly, Sixer was surprised how easy it was to get a reaction out of the younger demon. A compliment here and there was all it took...
...and he wondered: if he just pressed her just a little more, could he possibly get Miz to...
"-Ack!" Sixer yelped when Lee elbowed him harder. Sixer huffed and moved away to sit down and continue eating.
Miz looked confused. "Wait, that was flirting?"
Stan sighed as he went over to get some stuff out to make dinner for the rest of them. "Don't worry about it," he told Miz. He knew that Sixer hadn't actually meant it in a 'dating' way.
Ford was giving both Sixer and Miz a look that was equal parts annoyance and incredulity. Did neither of them realize that that was… even he realized that was...
Miz continued eating dinner, shooting Sixer some curious glances. Bill didn't seem all that happy about things still.
Stan sighed again. "Don't worry about it," he repeated, this time to his brother, as Ford refused to lose the look.
Damn these kids.
"Sis. We need to talk about your standards." Bill told his sister after they'd finished cleaning up everything from dinner. (Ford and Stan had eaten separately from the others; Sixer, and then Lee, had eaten what Miz had made, except for the saffron, while Bill had stuck to the salad again. Bill and Miz had taken cleaning duty that night.)
The plates were now washed and put away, and Miz had taken a moment to quickly build a shower unit for the boat belowdecks ("Because you're all filthy and I can't stand it!" Miz had justified), one that was 'plugged into' the holding tank for water below. The humans were off getting cleaned up, and the demons were more or less left alone to their own devices up on deck, getting ready for bed and sleep.
"My standards and my squirmy feelings are not exclusive." Miz set about arranging the blankets again, fluffing and pressing them until they felt just right. "And I'm not into little Ford that way. Or the older one. Just 'cause I like the way they look, doesn't mean I'm going to go for them." She shifted her clothes into her pajamas (which was just an oversized t-shirt and her underwear with nothing else) and flopped onto the nest. "If it were, I'd be dating already."
Miz stilled in the middle of stretching to get comfortable. "Huh. I've never dated anyone before. Are my standards too high?"
"They're not high enough," Bill shot back. "Not if that Stanford or 'Ford can get you feeling squirmy things for them, when they aren't hitting even half the points on your list." Bill had thought he'd told (read: warned) her about this before. He narrowed his eyes at her. "They're not good enough for you," he declared, "So you shouldn't be so affected by them! You need to work on that!" Because as far as Bill was concerned, her standards weren't actually standards, if they could be circumvented, or otherwise ignored in that only a few of them seemed to apply at all and they kept getting overridden for no discernable-to-him reason at all.
"...He likes my food…" Miz mumbled. "And he trusts me enough to eat it…" which made her incredibly happy inside. "Lee likes it too, but he doesn't always want my food."
"...Is that really that important to you?" Bill asked her as he thought about it.
Miz nodded. "The path of cooking is the path of life. To cook for others makes me happy. And if people enjoy my food, it makes me feel good."
"HM," said Bill. "So if they looked like they weren't enjoying it, that wouldn't become a squirmy-feelings problem for you, then," Bill determined from this. He thought for another moment, then said quite seriously, "I'll add that to the glasses, too!"
Miz pouted. "Having people not enjoy my food would probably make me upset…" She shuffled over so Bill could lie down next to her in the pillow-blanket pile and... Miz blinked in surprise. "...Why do you smell like Ford?" she asked. Her imagination was already going wild but she made sure to wait for Bill's response before jumping to conclusions.
Bill stilled for a moment, then rolled his eyes as he flicked his fingers - casting a spell to clean himself and his bodysuit (so that he didn't need to shower, but would still be clean, and thus remove the 'Sixer smell' from him). He was trying to use less magic, in solidarity of a sort and wanting to set a good-terrible example, what with his sister needing to try to use magic less. But this was one of those exceptions, since it would be rather difficult to clean the suit without using magic . So he did this before he laid down beside his sister, taking her word for it when it came to the smells around her. He wasn't about to bother with smelling himself to determine how bad it was. (Ew, noses.) "Well...
"I probably smelled like Sixer because I spent eight hours in a small enclosed space without much ventilation with him earlier today, and because he never washes his stupid clothing properly," Bill noted, with another eye-roll. "And then, after I sat down to think for awhile, I woke up to the idiot practically SMOTHERING ME with his coat."
"Huh." Miz blinked. "That sounds like it was… something." And damn but she couldn't help but think that Stanford giving Bill his coat as a blanket was actually almost sweet?
"Yes," Bill said, sounding annoyed as he shifted in place and restlessly dropped himself down onto the blanket with a 'thump'. "It was a 'something'." Bill closed his eyes and let out a huff. "He's already warm enough for enough-warmth," Bill muttered, as he got himself situated next to Miz. "He DOESN'T NEED to do stupid coat-things like he's trying to DISAPPEAR me into a stupid journal-pocket someplace. The idiot."
Miz was sure her brother wouldn't like her interpretation of the coat thing as Ford trying to be nice, though maybe she was misunderstanding something, so she simply nodded without saying anything.
Bill fell off to sleep shortly after this, and so did Miz as well. A soft lullaby drifting through the air...
Illusion is Reality
Chapter 88 part 2
-Seriously I'm gonna run out of Bill quotes-
Ford was laying flat on his back in his bunk, staring up at the ceiling. He knew he would just toss and turn, unable to fall asleep, if he didn't finish doing what he knew he needed to do right now, but he also didn't want to give into the urge, either. Worse, the problem was that he was unable to fall asleep in the first place, not that he would have trouble staying asleep once he fell asleep. He hated to admit it, but the nightmares had stopped; he hadn't had any since Bill had- and he had- at his brother's bequest, and… really, that just made him even more upset by this whole situation.
It was both better and worse than it had been before, the root cause of all this. -Which was Bill, really, (and when was it not?) but…
...now, Bill had something to hold over Stan's head that he knew was going to be effective. Stan had nearly punched Bill in the face over it. Ford's ability to sleep and breathe properly upon waking was contingent largely upon Bill continuing to do something that he clearly wasn't required to do, and...
(...yes, he'd been fine sleeping when he'd fallen asleep right next to Stan on that couch in Mr. Harman's basement, literally side-by-side - as Bill had implied was another workable option for whatever reason - but…)
(...Ford still didn't quite know how Stan had gotten Bill to not say no, to instead start to do whatever the dream demon was doing to him again? - or rather, to continue saying 'no, but' over and over again to Stan, but do it anyway...)
(...and Ford had seen how difficult a time Bill had had at saying 'no' to Stan there, and… Stan had expected it, and… was what Stan had said he was trying to do to Bill... actually working?!)
...and that brought Ford back to the thought of: why did the demons seem to listen to Stan at all in the first place?
(Ford would much rather have said 'no' and refused Bill's so-called "help", for a multitude of reasons. But Stan had been insistent, and he was trying to do the opposite of expectation sometimes, and… he had seen how Bill had been trying to use him as an excuse...)
(...Ford hated that he'd had to hold his brother back from attacking Bill, but, quite frankly, he hadn't wanted to see Stan die. Bill had used the kids against him during Weirdmageddon, which Ford had not thought Bill would do, up until Bill had realized that he cared about them, and vice-versa, and then- but Bill had never gone after someone else that he, Ford, personally cared about before, in an attempt to get him to fall in line and do what he wanted...)
(...and Ford knew now that Bill was not actually above that sort of thing; his, and Stan's, "good behavior" towards him, as it were, were only having the mere effect of not prompting Bill to change his mind that much sooner, moving from 'playing with' them to hurting them instead… and they didn't have control over Bill's whims, and wouldn't have any sort of control over what the demon would do, once he decided that this particular 'game' wasn't interesting or fun anymore, and then…)
Ford did not want to be used as a pawn in Bill's game against Stan. But Stan had quite literally set him up to be just that. ...And Ford had gone along with it. (He hadn't expected to find it so difficult to say 'no' to his brother later, after he'd said 'yes' to what he wanted before…)
He should have said 'no'. He should have taken it back. (Bill already thought he was an 'inconsistent' 'liar' anyway; one more 'change of mind' and 'bad decision' added to the pile would hardly have fazed the demon at all, Ford thought.)
Ford pulled in a breath, and then let it out slowly.
...He could admit that up until today, he hadn't been sleeping all that well before - not since Bill had come back to life - but he'd also been unable to remember his dreams very well, either; during those first two weeks, his problem had been one more of waking nightmares than anything. When he had managed to fall asleep during that time, however briefly, he'd not remembered the exact details of what he'd dreamed, but he had awoken with feelings of overwhelming panic and persistent dread every time, feelings that had had him steeling his resolve, to drive himself even harder, to try and find a way to kill…
Ford breathed.
Stan had already fallen asleep on the other bunk, and Ford couldn't help but envy his ability to do so without intervention or fear of what might await him inside his own mind. (Hubris, most likely. Thinking that he could control Bill somehow...)
...Worse, Ford had to be careful with the amount of noise he was making. He didn't want to wake his brother up again - not least of which because Stan would likely get on his case again about his restlessness and un-slumbering state so very late in the evening.
Ford glanced over at his brother, then reached down to feel his breast pocket (and a few items he'd slipped into there from his coat), as he rolled onto his other side - back to his brother - and tucked himself a bit farther down under the covers. And as he did so, Ford felt frustrated that even without the nightmares, waking or sleeping, he still couldn't calm his mind enough to fall asleep peacefully on his own...
...unless Bill or Stanley was sleeping right next to him...
(...unless someone was sleeping right next to him…)
...unless-
Ford kept turning over and buried his face into his pillow, grimacing. Damn Bill. -Damn Bill, damn his brother, and damn just about everything.
He wanted to go home.
Ford pulled his face away from his pillow, thinking he'd indulged himself in unproductive anger long enough. He had work to do. -Work to finish, really.
Under the covers, Ford pulled out from his breast pocket a small notebook, a pencil, and a penlight, and he flipped the notebook back to the last page he'd been writing on by feel, as he flicked on the soft, dim but visible light.
And, almost against his will, his thoughts drifted back to earlier that day, when he and Bill had gone to Mr. Harman's house while the younger twins and that man-eater had done their act at the beach at his brother's discretion and largely also at his direction.
Ford grimaced. He didn't like anything about this, The fact that the house seemed perfectly normal. The fact that Mrs. Harman answered the door like nothing was wrong, rather than their having to break in. The fact that Mr. Harman was in the house, downstairs, and seemed...
"Oh!" Mr. Harman said, as Ford not quite gingerly followed Bill himself down the staircase and into the basement room. "You're here! How was school today?" the man asked with a smile.
Ford sent him a very long look.
"That bad, hm?" Mr. Harman said, his smile slowly widening into a grin.
"That was not very well-done of you, Mr. Harman," Ford told him, crossing his arms. He didn't particularly like how jovial the man was being about everything, or how Bill was making a slow circuit of the room, seeming to focus on just about anything but the man he'd supposedly come here to evaluate the state of for Stan.
"Ah, well," Mr. Harman said, "Can you blame me? It was going to have to be a free study period otherwise, being so last-minute, and that sort of class without proper supervision would be..." he said, and Ford had to stifle a grimace at that (because he was right, and not least of which because Bill had been present in said classroom).
"It still wasn't a good idea," Ford said while trying not to think of what had nearly happened with his younger self attempting to break open the device that he'd made and activated, in order to-
"-You didn't burn down the building, did you?" Mr. Harman asked of Ford next, blinking at him curiously.
Ford stared at him. "...No."
"Hm," said the teacher. "You didn't fail at keeping the students from burning down-"
"-No!" Ford protested. "The school building is fine! -Why would you think that-?!"
"Well, you were being a bit reticent about it just now," Mr. Harman said almost breezily, as he turned away from Ford to pick up a pencil and scribbled a bit on a notebook page in front of him, "What else was I to think?"
Ford stared at him.
"I mean," the teacher said good-naturedly. "It isn't as though it hasn't happened before."
Ford was absolutely aghast. "Someone's burned down our school building before?!"
"Well," said the teacher, "Maybe not that particular school building." (That got a "HA!" out of Bill, and left Ford shooting the demon a glare.) "But I've no doubt it has happened before. You hear stories, you know?"
It was about that point that Ford realized that his teacher's other-dimensional counterpart was teasing him.
...Ford ran a hand over his face.
"Well, if the school's still standing, and nobody got hurt, I'd say you did a rather good job as a substitute teacher; don't you?" Mr. Harman told him. "Especially with a classroom full of advanced-study high school students."
Ford wasn't sure if he wanted to laugh or cry. (Not least of which because Sixer had nearly-)
...Ford decided to walk over to the opposite side of the room and sit down on the couch instead.
"You've used the room twice today," Bill noted, having made his way over to the control device he'd set up for the room.
"Oh, yes!" Mr. Harman said, turning towards Bill, as Ford lifted up his head in alarm. "Really, my wife is a genius," the man said almost reverently.
Ford realized with a start that Mr. Harman had said the same thing earlier today in the school's main office, and it hadn't made much sense at the time. So Ford asked him slowly now, "...What do you mean."
Mr. Harman looked over at him and blinked. "Well," he told Ford, "You see, my wife thought that it might actually be more useful to use this thing," Mr. Harman gestured around at it, "As something of a holiday retreat."
Ford stared at him.
"...I don't understand," Ford said. Because really, and truly, he didn't.
Mr. Harman blinked at him again. "Well, this room works on the principle of allowing two extra 8 hour 'shifts' every twenty-four, correct? So, in three days, that's another two full days, or forty-eight hours, added. In a three-day weekend, one can get a five-day break," Mr. Harman said simply, "And my wife was rather cross with me that I hadn't been taking care of myself, and I haven't really been spending as much time with our son lately as I would like, so…"
"You stockpiled food and water on the shelves," Bill noted, walking away from the device and over closer to in the general direction of Ford. (And then Ford frowned as Bill ended up coming to a stop at his right.) "You've spent almost a full day down here already."
"Yes," Mr. Harman said happily. "It's not quite the same as going to the beaches, but one makes do." He seemed quite proud of… his wife for this?
Ford tried to wrap his head around this, and failed. (Not least of which because not two days ago, the man had seemed...)
"You've been spending your time down here with your family… instead of working?" Ford said slowly.
Mr. Harman looked over at him. "Well, so far I have. And Mary thinks that it might actually be better that way; spending at least half of these 'shifts' together down here, where we won't be distracted, and my 'work time' upstairs when I can be more easily interrupted." (And Mary was very likely the name of his wife, Ford presumed.)
"...I would rather have thought that the opposite would be considered, ah, more ideal," Ford put out there, blinking.
Mr. Harman gave him an odd look. "Really?" The idea seemed as odd to him, as his (wife's) idea was to Ford.
Ford shook his head, trying to let go of it for now.
"How are your equations progressing?" Ford asked him next, because if Bill wasn't planning on properly evaluating the man himself...
"Ah!" Mr. Harman lit up at the mention of his work. (...Just and solely 'lit up'; the fanatic light Ford had been expecting to see in his eyes wasn't-) "It's been going splendidly, thank you."
And Ford waited.
And waited.
And waited.
...And then realized that that was all Mr. Harman was going to say about it, which left Ford feeling a little… odd.
"...Did you want to talk about it?" Ford prompted him carefully, feeling as though there must be landmines here in this conversation somewhere, ones that he just wasn't seeing. (Ford hardly noticed when Bill wandered away from his side again, to peruse another part of the room.)
"Oh. You're interested in seeing them?" Mr. Harman said, with a slight frown.
"Please," Ford said with a bit of strain, feeling his chest constrict a bit as he stood up to walk over and-
-he ended sitting down on the couch again, as Mr. Harman scooped up the notebook Ford had seen him scribbling in and walked it right over.
And Ford felt a little odd as he sat on a basement couch with a person who was effectively his old science teacher, and watched the man flip past at least twelve pages of notes to-
"I didn't realize you were interested in this sort of thing," Mr. Harman said, as he landed on- "Ah, here it is. Now mind you, I haven't made much progress since yesterday evening, but-"
Ford stared.
"-What did you just flip past?" Ford couldn't help but ask him, and the man looked up at him (stopping mid-sentence) and blinked.
"Oh, just those equations that the Miz-alien put up on the board," Mr. Harman waved off. "Now-"
Ford listened as Mr. Harman walked him through what he understood of what Bill had given him so far, and… oddly, he didn't quite feel like slapping his hands over his ears and screaming until his ears bled. (He also did not feel like... ripping the binder from John Harman's hands and-)
(Ford came close, mind you. But not quite far enough to actually feel the compulsive urge to do so.)
"-So, you see," John Harman ended, "I'm still working on defining the holographic nature of the universe, in order to be able to truly understand the 'camouflage' method that your Bill-alien is using for his suit."
Ford blinked down at the notebook, and then he rubbed his fingers against his eyelids for a moment, as he tried to think of a good way to put this.
...so instead, Ford went with the direct route (even as he cursed himself for doing it). "Do you want some help with that?" Ford asked the man, and braced himself for...
Ford blinked, as Mr. Harman blinked at him, then simply smiled and said, "Thank you, no."
...And Ford waited for the punchline. Or the 'oh, ha, I'm just kidding!' remark.
But there wasn't one.
"You… don't want any help at all?" Ford asked the man slowly, blinking owlishly at him. "Not even from Bill?"
The man blinked back at him and scratched at his hair. "Well…" he said, "I suppose if I get stuck again…?"
Ford stared.
Ford opened his mouth to… protest? He really wasn't entirely certain what to say, when faced with this. But despite his complete inability to determine what, exactly, to say to the scientist sitting there with a book full of Bill's equations in his lap - let alone the ability to describe any of what he was feeling just then - the teacher sitting at his side still seemed suddenly become enlightened as to what he was trying to say to him, somehow.
"Dr. Pines," the man said good-naturedly, with an undertone of amusement in his voice. "If it's all the same to you, I'd rather figure the rest out for myself."
"But… I…" could help him with it. Ford has seen fragments of information that would be helpful - some of it had even been on those blackboards he erased, on some of those other, earlier - and together, they could likely get much farther than if they each-
Ford let out a breath. Because that wasn't precisely necessary, under the current circumstances.
"-You do realize that Bill could simply give you the completed equations, don't you?" Ford said next. He knew, just knew that he should be leaving this alone, that what he was saying here was likely horribly dangerous, might even leave the man prone to a relapse of some kind, but- wouldn't it be better to have that happen now while Stan was around than-
"But what fun would that be?" John Harman said next, and Ford startled in place, feeling rather uncertain all of a sudden at... "Einstein could hand special relativity to a caveman, but that would do him no good. I could hand a physics textbook with every theorem and proof fully filled out to my five-year-old son, and he wouldn't actually understand what he was reading." The man shifted in place and gave Ford a long look. "You do understand what I'm getting at here, don't you?" he asked of Ford. "-I'd like to understand it myself."
Ford couldn't help but give him a helpless look, and he saw Mr. Harman sigh. "If I don't figure it out myself, there's no point. I won't get it," he told Ford. "I want to understand this. Truly understand it," he told Ford. "Besides," he said with a smile, "It's rather fun to play around with the equations, and see what falls out of them."
"But…" Ford shook his head, then let out a sigh. He'd always found it far easier to start from the completed equations first, and then attempt to determine what they meant from the proofs and their further mathematical manipulation. Yes, he could generally work out the initial derivations and proofs on his own, but he'd much rather work with someone, to…
(And then Ford had to stifle a grimace and glance away from Mr. Harman, as he belatedly remembered Bill's words: 'The better ones like to figure things out for themselves.')
"...So you understand the earlier equations already, then?" Ford asked, trying to think of a change in subject that might not be so ill-received as to have the man-
"Hm? Oh," Mr. Harman said next. "No, actually. But that's all right," Ford was told. "I don't see how they're relevant to any of this work."
Ford not quite froze in place.
"...I think they might be," Ford said slowly, then kicking himself as he worriedly started to wonder if he was actually somehow doing Bill's work for him-.
"Oh, perhaps at some level, yes," the man told him, waving it off - literally waving it off - and Ford could not help but stare incredulously at the man as he was told, "But it's really not all that interesting. I'd rather focus on this."
Ford barely kept his mouth from dropping open.
"But- that-" Ford blinked his eyes closed for a moment, then gathered himself and reopened them again. "...Might I see that notebook for just a moment?" he tried. "I myself am a bit curious as to what those equations say themselves."
Mr. Harman eyed him. "Well, perhaps you shouldn't have erased them off of all those chalkboards, then," he said almost leadingly, which left Ford wincing.
...But then Ford stared at the notebook that was being held out towards him.
Ford glanced up at the teacher, then gingerly took the notebook from him.
"Ah, thank you," Ford remembered to say, as he turned it over and flipped it back to the first page again.
Ford didn't read much of it. He stopped and literally closed his eyes rather quickly, in fact.
He closed the notebook, while he still had his eyes closed, and then said, "...Bill?"
"Hm," he heard.
Ford pulled in a breath. "Exactly what did your… 'sister' do in the classroom that these equations discuss?"
"Oh," he heard from the human in front of him instead, as he felt the notebook gently pulled from his hands. (Ford reopened his eyes.) "She did something with a 'viewing portal'; it was apparently supposed to allow one to see atoms in both this dimension and another one? She was trying to prove to me that antimatter here was simply matter from that other dimension accidentally bleeding over into this one," the science teacher told him. "She wrote a good number of equations on the board, which were then all almost immediately obscured by whatever she did to create the visual effect she then made; Bill rewrote them for me in a way that made a great deal more sense." (Ford swallowed, hard.) "It was somewhat interesting, I suppose? Not something I'd be able to do myself without mechanical help, not being an alien, I believe."
"...But you could make a mechanism to do it then, with these equations?" Ford asked slowly, staring at him.
And yet, Mr. Harman's interest in doing so seemed to be, as far as Ford could tell, completely nonexistent. -And that seemed to be even more evident when the next words out of the teacher's mouth were: "Well, perhaps I might be able to find a method to apply that 'camouflage' of your alien friend's to real clothing at some point, I suppose."
"Oh," said Ford. "Well…" He searched for something to say. "I suppose that pure theory is…?"
"-Oh yes!" Mr. Harman cut in, and he was off and talking on the subject, eyes shining brightly (but not feverishly) as he went, and...
And Ford couldn't help but to stare helplessly at him as he talked, because...
The man just didn't understand. He didn't understand, and he didn't seem to want to understand. All he seemed to care about was one single, miniscule aspect of one particular subject that was not even necessarily ever going to lead to any useful application of the concept, because he wasn't at all interested in taking his level of understanding of things even that far-
And suddenly, Ford realized that the man's thinking was small.
And then Ford realized what he'd just thought, and a chill went down his spine.
"...Is something wrong?" Mr. Harman asked him, somehow picking up on Ford's distress - because that was what it was: distress.
"You… you don't care about…" Ford had to stifle a flinch as he kept going. "...the wider aspects of this… do you." He pulled in a breath. "That 'viewing portal'... isn't simply an unrelated theoretical construct, it's..."
Mr. Harman frowned for a moment, and then his expression cleared.
"Stanford," he said good-naturedly. "I'm not interested in absolutely everything. I do have my limits, and my preferences, you know." He gave Ford a slightly-lopsided smile. "I'm not you."
Ford shivered in place. He hadn't thought-
-suddenly, the scope of the man seemed so very small that it scared him-
-was this what Bill thought when-
"It's all right," Mr. Harman told him. "You don't have to be satisfied with just one topic, yourself." And the man gave him a smile as he said, "I don't doubt you found two, or even three specialties, to explore yourself at their true and full depth, when you attended college and earned your advanced degrees. You always were one of my best students."
Ford had nothing to say to this. He simply looked down and clenched his hands in his lap and remained silent.
Ford let out a shaky breath. He was still trying to understand.
(And what would the man say if he'd told him he had twelve Ph.D's? ...That he'd gone for nine or ten of them too many?)
It pained him, that Mr. Harman had seemed to be missing the most vital points of something that he was supposedly, apparently trying to understand. Miz (if she hadn't been lying to him, and the equations proved out) had made a viewing portal to another dimension - which had been, quite frankly, just another type of visual 'illusion' similar to Bill's 'camouflage' in its own underlying aspects, if not the specifics, if what he'd begun to understand from those equations had been anything like correct. And yet, the teacher had completely disregarded the connection. He'd been almost completely turned off by it.
Ford himself had felt himself starting to lose himself in the equations at the beginning of the notebook when he'd first started to look through them. Yet Mr. Harman had no interest in them whatsoever. Would he ever read through them again?
And as Ford lay where he was in his cot, he hunched his shoulders as he made a few more notes to himself on his small notebook pad, as he continued trying to note the differences between Mr. Harman and himself and their reactions to all things science - distinct differences that he'd never even realized had existed until now... but did they, really? Things in this dimension, the entire dimension itself, somehow seemed just a bit east of off, and-
But Ford couldn't help but feel shocked and almost… disappointed. That his old science teacher just… wasn't interested in anything more. In learning more. That maybe wanting to learn more, learn everything, wasn't quite… normal.
By the dim illumination of his penlight, Ford frowned as he flipped back a page and read over his earlier notes to himself on the subject. -Primarily, on some of the things that he'd heard Bill say before.
...and secondarily, on what he'd begun to realize about Bill beyond what he'd known about the dream demon before, because…
Ford had thought that what Bill did to people was just how Bill was. But… Mr. Hartman wasn't reacting anything like the same way now as he had been before when Bill had been pushing him - not anymore - and he didn't seem likely to fall right back into the same 'trap' of addiction as he had before, either. Not without Bill explicitly pushing him. Which meant that Bill had to have done it purposefully.
...and likely hadn't gotten it right the first time, either. Mr. Harman hadn't been interested in Miz's equations, but it looked like those had been the first things that Bill had put on the board. Ford had never seen any of Bill's victims right at the start of things with the dream demon; he'd only stumbled across the aftermath of it all, what had seemed to be very far into whatever Bill had done to them, when they were already far too far gone to be saved.
...So did that mean that Bill had had far more impact being unanchored and able to influence them from the Mindscape first for whoever knew how long, directly? Or did that mean that Bill had just hit, and missed, and kept on going until something had finally stuck?
(...Or had Bill used those first equations in that different form - however differently that he had written them from how the other demon had presented them - written them in a very specific way to prime whoever was reading them, in order to use them as a springboard to begin the process of-?)
Personally, Ford was starting to wonder if perhaps it had been a bit more 'hit or miss' than anything else this time, given Mr. Harman's reactions and complete disinterest to some of those very things now. (And, from the state of the board, and when Mr. Harman's handwriting had started figuring into things.)
And Ford thought this now, not least of which because he remembered how Bill had not quite 'shotgunned' him the morning prior, in figuring out at least part of what his nightmare had entailed. Bill hadn't been able to read his mind directly - there was that, at least - but while Ford hadn't been in the proper frame of mind to really think about it at the time, Bill's eyes had tracked left slightly, multiple times while he'd been cycling through topics. It reminded Ford a little bit of what Stan had told him once about how to 'cold read' someone, except… it was clear that Bill had been looking at some set of readouts from the sensors of his suit, rather than determining things from Ford's own facial expressions.
...Which meant that Bill could still track human thought processes, at least indirectly, and adjust what he was saying and doing to try and push someone to a point which he wanted them to be pushed. It was, and had always been, intentional.
Ford pulled in another breath.
Bill couldn't read his mind directly - not through the plate in his head - but between whatever sensors the dream demon had in that suit, and whatever the metal plate in his head had (apparently) been purposefully designed by Bill to leak out at times...
Well. If Ford's mind wasn't necessarily off-limits, then his thought of potentially gaining some mean sort of advantage against the dream demon (while said dream demon was anchored down to a body and not able to move into his Dreamscape) by trying to keep all of his thoughts inside of his head - to write absolutely nothing down, to prevent Bill from finding it out - was and had been largely a futile effort. ...And it had made it far harder for him to think his way through problems. (He realized a bit more consciously, now, after talking through more than a few things with Dipper, that while Dipper needed to write things down for himself to… well, to feel better, to get things out of his head and - seemingly - to lower his own anxiety levels…)
Ford might not have the same pressing need or drive to write things down as his grand-nephew did, precisely, but he enjoyed doing so, and he'd found over the years that it did help somewhat when he did so and he did feel better afterwards…
(He'd rather gotten used to Bill, as part-and-parcel of his existence, violating his privacy at every turn by reading anything he'd written and laughing at him over it later: taunting him, attempting to defile his personal musings with his own scrawlings, and more. He was perfectly capable of putting up with Bill writing all over his journals himself, but... the derisive commentary that the demon had usually made later on most of it in the Mindscape (and then Dreamscape) had been- well, frustrating and enraging to say the least!)
(He'd gotten used to Bill knowing things - knowing everything, really. Knowing everything at all, except him. That didn't mean that he had to like it, or put up with it silently without a fight, though. And-!)
...Writing things down now did have a potential horrible effect, though. Now that Bill was beginning to use other people - other family members - against him, it was entirely possible that, if he wrote down something that Bill read and didn't like, that Bill would then take it out on...
Ford stopped himself and forced himself to pull in a deep breath. To let it out slowly. (He couldn't quite meditate for calm or peace anymore; Bill had ruined that for him a long time ago, but controlling his own breath had always been…)
...It wasn't doing him any good not to jot down notes to himself on the things Bill had said, in order to properly decipher them. It wasn't helpful not to record his own thoughts on paper, so he could look at them together more objectively, and look for the patterns in them.
It was still hard to determine what might be 'safer' to write down or not. He didn't want to give the demon a ready-made excuse to hurt the niblings or his brother over something he didn't like. But he was going against old habit of not doing that, though. Ford was used to writing down everything, regardless of potential 'impact'; Bill seemed to treat all things equally when it came to his derision, even things that Ford considered to be of dire importance. -He wished he could say that he'd updated his third journal once he'd returned home and retrieved it from his grand-nephew as an act of defiance of some sort, but the truth of the matter was, he'd been tired and weary and angry, and nothing he'd written down had been anything that he'd thought that Bill himself had not known already, or would care about. Bill had not escaped the Nightmare Realm yet, and it had been almost a petty act that was the equivalent of figuratively spitting in Bill's face - his most common and usual one on the other side of the portal, really.
Bill didn't think his writing was any good, or useful in any way. And still Ford continued to do it anyway.
When Ford had gotten back, he'd consciously dove into all his old habits again, and that had been one of them. He'd left his last and most-recent journal behind in the 'Better World' before making his suicidal attack run on the Nightmare Realm, and Bill Cipher himself. He'd thought to leave it behind as something that might speak to his legacy, to let it be one last thing that Bill would never be able to get his hands on, no matter what might happen next.
And once he'd gone through Stan's rather untimely portal? Once he'd seen that swarm of demons racing for it, made his choice, and made his way back instead of attempting to finish Bill off, once and for all? -He'd wanted to feel as though he was back home again, that things were normal again in some small way. He'd wanted to recapture some feeling of safety, in having returned to Gravity Falls, after all those years away from home and on the run. Even though it was the worst kind of lie. Except then he'd tried to make it true, despite all odds and Bill's further taunting that he couldn't do it. And so he'd Bill-proofed the Shack, and taken his journals back, and he'd tried to engage in his own research into the weirdness of Gravity Falls yet again...
...running after some semblance of normality, after years on the run and never staying still in one place for very long...
He hadn't been sleeping very well at the Shack, either. And, admittedly, at this point, he looked back on how he'd been acting back then, before Bill's Weirdmageddon had hit, and he cringed - and not just because of his treatment of Stan. Because the way he'd been acting...
...he'd almost been playing a role.
And he hated that. He hated admitting that. The very thought was- Some of the things Bill had said, multiple times to him, over the years, had been about-
He felt like he was finally starting to wake up again, after years and years of-
Ford pulled in a quick breath, and nearly choked on it. He closed his eyes for a moment, even as he was already under the covers, already unseen, as he felt them begin to burn.
Ford regulated his breathing.
-Bill had used to LAUGH at him for 'playing the hero'. And now, the role seemed so very large when Stan had 'played' it - really, had taken it on and taken Bill on - but… when Ford had been trying to do it, tried to take on and 'play at' that role...
Bill had used to laugh at him over it. Called him a flat caricature of himself, on more than one occasion, in the middle years of his interdimensional travels. And that particular laugh? Had been incredibly derisive.
Bill had thought it had been cute, what Ford had been trying to do.
Bill didn't laugh at Stanley, though. Not Stanley. Never Stanley. Only at him.
-His right-hand man.
Ford let out a shaky breath and reopened his eyes. He jotted down a few more notes to himself, on the topic of 'hands', with slightly shaking hands as he tried not to think about-, then flipped back a few pages...
...to a list of things that Bill had been avoiding talking about. A list of things that Bill had actively prevented the demon 'Miz' from talking about, as well.
Namely, a list that all boiled down to two things, really, now that he was staring at it all down on the page: the science fair project and whoever and however it had been sabotaged, and what Bill had actually wanted out of his Deal with him and the portal.
Ford wasn't particularly inclined to try and dive into the specifics on his Deal with Bill, to try and answer that last one. He couldn't imagine that that sort of discussion would go over well with the demon - it certainly hadn't the last time - and Ford doubted things would go any better if he tried to bring it up again now, even if he managed to get Stan to potentially try to 'run interference' for him on it. The very thought of discussing his Deal with Bill at all - let alone in front of other people - made him highly uncomfortable, and he doubted that Bill would say anything more useful now than he already had on the matter - with quite a good bit more of the usual cursing and anger, besides.
But that didn't mean that he couldn't try and figure out what was so very wrong about what had happened with the science fair project himself.
And it wouldn't stop him from bringing either of these things to Stan's attention before they left.
Because it wasn't as though Ford had forgotten what Stan had told him: there was something that they needed to figure out here, before they went back home again. Otherwise… something would happen there that would… lead to Bill causing what precisely?
Ford didn't know. But what he did realize now, at the end of this - the fourth - day, was that when Bill had said 'three days' to the other demon at the start of everything that was going on in this dimension, Bill hadn't been referring to anything here.
Because today was the fourth day. He'd been with Bill nearly all day that day, and Bill...
-Ford felt something shift in the room, and he stood up abruptly at the sound of-
"-What...?!" Ford exclaimed, looking all around the room to try and determine what had just...
He glanced over at Bill, who had lifted his head up and blinked.
"What did you do," Ford said slowly, with no small dread, as Bill turned around to face-
-the device that controlled the room. Not him.
"...Bill?" Ford said, feeling an odd wave of uncertainty, as Bill outright ignored him and strode over to the device that was sitting on the corner of the desk on the other side of the room from them.
"He turned the shift on with a delay," Bill said, as Ford walked over almost cautiously, to stand behind him and look down at-
Ford frowned. The display was counting down from eight hours, and-
Ford almost asked, 'what? why?' of Bill. The only reason he didn't, was because Mr. Harman hadn't said anything to either of them before doing what he'd done, so asking the question would be rather inane and unhelpful at this point. (...neither of which were things that Bill tended to react to all that well.) So instead, Ford moved his train of thought on to a question Bill could potentially answer, and said:
"Are you telling me that we're stuck in here for-"
Bill blinked up at him, and Ford held back a groan at the thought that they just might be. (He also held back something of a scream, because he'd only thought he'd need to spend the next two hours or so following Bill around; four at the most. And now? Now that time had increased by a factor of four-)
"No," said Bill. "We're not STUCK in here. I could crash it EASILY."
Ford nearly let out a breath of relief, until the frown on Bill's face and the lack of immediate action from the dream demon caught up with him. ...And also the specific wording.
"...Then why aren't you 'crashing' it, then," Ford said slowly, in descending tones.
"Because I'm not an IDIOT," Bill said. "And I don't feel like spending the next eight hours after THAT making a new one."
Ford watched as Bill poked at the interface for the time-shift control device, then glanced around the room.
...Frankly, he couldn't believe that Mr. Harman had ditched them down here. Let alone...
"I thought this was only supposed to allow for two activations in a twenty-four hour period?" Ford not quite demanded out of Bill. Had his science teacher actually managed to find a way to outsmart-?
"-Not while I'm down here," Bill said. "And it's in debug mode." He sounded more than a little annoyed, as he pulled his hand away from it.
"So we really are stuck down here," Ford said, feeling like he'd just heard a death bell toll for him. Because he was stuck down here together with-
"No," said Bill. "I told you; I can crash it whenever I want, if I have to. We can also use the stairs."
Ford stared at him.
"What?" said Ford.
And then he had to watch as Bill turned around, rolling his eyes at him, and said, "The base of the stairway and the upper-door act as a two-door airlock." Ford's brow furrowed, and Bill let out an (annoyed, what else would he be with him) sigh at him. "The staircase is a transitionary zone. You walk in down here, it's at this 'speed'. You walk up to the top and open the doorway, you're at the outer-everything 'speed'."
Ford frowned at him. "You didn't tell any of us that before." And that seemed like it would be very pertinent information that would have been excellent to know before this!
"I explained it to Stanley so he would understand it, and I explained it to that teacher so he would understand it," Bill told him, hands on his hips. "It's not MY fault YOU'RE-"
"-then why are we still standing… Is that why we heard the door slam?" Ford said to Bill, thoughts shifting abruptly as he realized what he'd just heard earlier.
...Bill was giving him that long expressionless look (that Ford always hated and dreaded because)...
Ford glanced over at the staircase (empty all the way to the top, with the door closed) and struggled with himself for a moment, not quite torn between demanding Bill explain how opening the door wouldn't just freeze the person traversing the distance in place (relative to the basement-time, until the 'shift' in the basement had ended) - and how said person could move into the kitchen at the top of the stairs without getting 'stuck' in the doorway as part-and-parcel of that - and...
(- was the lack of a 'freeze' avoided due to some sort of delayed slow-down process as they ascended the stairway and exited the door? was there a transitionary 'airlock zone' right outside the doorway that acted in a similar fashion to the staircase? but how did that account for the door actually closing again? -)
...alternately, marching right up that staircase and- and-
"I see," said Ford. And with that said, Ford turned on his heel and marched right up the staircase.
He was at the top of the stairs, frowning furiously to himself about Bill's lack of priorities in the order in which he gave out important information during proper discourse (as usual) and had his hand on the doorknob, when he glanced over his shoulder and-
-realized that Bill was not anywhere behind him. The stairwell was empty.
Ford paused.
He waited a moment, then two, then three. Bill failed to materialize at the bottom of the stairs, and he didn't seem to be making his way over across the basement room to do so; Ford couldn't see him-
Ford slowly, carefully, removed his hand from the doorknob.
(It occurred to him that he'd nearly exited the room and left Bill all alone and to his own devices, for eight hours of time. Ford didn't want to think of what Bill could do in eight uninterrupted hours-)
Ford pulled in a breath, and it took him a moment before he slowly, step by step, began making his way back down each and every stair of that staircase, all the way down and back into the basement. Where Bill was.
And when Ford re-entered the room, it took him a moment before he realized that Bill was sitting on the floor, leaning back against the wall, with his eyes closed. He had one leg tucked almost under him, and one leg pulled up close to his chest with his arms loosely wrapped around it. He looked (almost) relaxed. (Almost.)
Ford stared.
"...What are you doing," Ford said slowly.
"Thinking," he was told by Bill, without the dream demon even so much as slitting his eyes open even a millimeter, or turning his head towards him in any way.
...Ford was at a loss.
He stood there for a long moment, awkwardly, and then...
...He looked away. He'd told Stan he was going to keep an eye on Bill, that he would follow him around that day, watching him, and... he'd nearly left him alone for eight hours of time just now. And the only possible way out of this would be to… somehow convince Bill to... (but since when had he ever been able to do that?!)
Ford shook his head slightly, and looked back to Bill. "Can't you think outside of here?" he asked him somewhat peevishly.
"'Out there'," said Bill, "Things just keep on HAPPENING. -In here," Bill said, his eyes still closed, "I have a little less than eight hours to think about WHATEVER I WANT."
'...without interruption' was the implication there, Ford knew. Bill had been - and likely still was - fully expecting him to leave the room. He didn't want to be around Bill, and Bill knew that. And the dream demon certainly hadn't called out with any sort of taunting 'hey! where are you going, Sixer!' or similar, to try and stop him from doing so.
Bill was wearing a cybernetic exoskeleton-bodysuit with (at minimum) further defensive armaments, advanced sensory features, and built-in life-support enhancements. If the demon didn't want him to leave, Bill could quite literally have used a small portion of those miniature 'robots' that he'd used in science class today to completely immobilize him and drag him back downstairs before he'd even gotten two steps up the actual staircase, never mind the door at the top. -And that was if Bill didn't feel like getting up and physically grabbing hold of him and bodily dragging him back down the stairs himself. ...Not to mention the magic Bill had at his disposal at-present.
But Bill hadn't done any of those things when Ford had ascended the staircase. He'd simply sat down against the wall and closed his eyes, instead. Which meant...
...Bill didn't want him there.
And Ford most certainly did not want to be here.
Ford turned on his heel and began marching right back up the staircase. Step by step.
After all, Stan had said it himself - he didn't have to deal with, or handle, Bill if he didn't want to.
Stan had said that, because Stan had promised to take care of that himself.
Ford didn't have to try to do it all himself. Not anymore.
Stan hadn't stopped him from going off this afternoon, alone with Bill. He'd known that Ford was going to follow him around today after school; it was entering the school and engaging with him directly that Stan hadn't known about or expected, and neither had Ford. And Stan hadn't told him to even so much as keep his distance from the dream demon.
Ford came to a stop on the top step of the staircase, facing the closed door in front of him.
He and Bill both wanted the same thing, for once. Why shouldn't he get what he wanted?
(Stanley wasn't here to intervene. This was the safest and best option, wasn't it?)
As long as he got what he wanted, did it really matter if it seemed to be something that Bill wanted, too?
Ford raised his hand up to the doorknob.
Did it really matter? Did he really have to fight Bill and each and every single turn? Was it so terrible a thing, that by doing this, Bill might just be getting something that he himself wanted, too?
Ford's hand tensed against the doorknob-
...and then slowly went slack.
Yes. Yes, it was.
Ford let out a tired, frustrated sigh, and he let his forehead bump against the door in front of him, as he let his hand fall back to his side.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and breathed, as he tried to push back the burning sensation of tears in his eyes.
(It wasn't fair, really. That he had to do this...)
Ford leaned back, and he took a moment to compose himself, before he turned away and slowly walked his way back down those stairs again.
He glanced around the corner as he walked past it. Bill was still sitting there, eyes closed, looking less tense now. ...Actually, the dream demon seemed relaxed, almost.
Ford felt his jaw clench. He absolutely hated that Bill got to feel- even sometimes-
Ford stopped himself, unclenched his fists, and shook his head from side-to-side roughly.
And then Ford took those two steps forward and sat down right next to him, refusing to acknowledge the danger of doing so, of staying down here, just as he refused to give in an inch.
Ford let go of his pencil, to rub his hand across his face. He knew it was stupid, to have (and follow) that knee-jerk 'must oppose him at every turn' reaction to the demon, every single time Bill was there, and present (in any way), and seemed to want something. It was a knee-jerk reaction, to want to oppose him. To try not to give in to him, to not let Bill get what he wanted. To attempt to stymie the dream demon in some way.
It was stupid not to think things through in more detail than that. -Especially when Bill had, yet again, changed up the script on him yet again, just to make things that much more difficult all over again for him.
(It had been even more stupid, Ford realized now, to have given in to his brother without really thinking that through, either.)
Bill said nothing as Ford sat himself down next to him. He didn't move, and he didn't acknowledge Ford's presence in the slightest.
Ford felt increasingly uncomfortable and wrong-footed about this - more than a little off-balance - but he still stubbornly continued to sit beside Bill. And if the demon didn't like it, well, tough! Ford would stay right here and…
...and what exactly? Annoy the demon with his presence? Distract him from thinking for eight hours straight? Bill didn't seem annoyed or distracted by his sitting there in the least. And purposefully antagonizing him would likely only lead to Bill then acting out while Stan was not around to stop him, and then-
-Ford was starting to see why Stan had looked at him like he was an idiot, when he'd 'volunteered' to watch Bill for the day. (What he didn't quite understand was why Stan hadn't tried to stop him. Because Bill-)
Ford felt even more uncomfortable as he sat there, as Bill continued not to say anything.
Several times, Ford pulled in a breath to say something, and… didn't. Largely because he simply could not think of anything non-inflammatory to say to him.
After about five minutes of discomfort, and false stops and starts, Ford finally told himself he was being completely ridiculous, and simply said, "Bill."
...Bill didn't respond.
Ford looked over at him. Bill just kept breathing, and purposefully ignoring him, and-
Ford clenched his jaw and looked away from the demon. He closed his eyes for a moment... and tried not to shiver in place, because the very worst of his nightmares about Bill had generally entailed the demon ignoring him as he-
Was the demon just ignoring him now as some sort of play? Just to get a rise out of him? Just to make Ford feel like he was unworthy of notice? Like he was-
-Fine. Fine! Two could play at this 'game' of his! Ford wasn't required to speak to the demon to watch him. He could simply sit where he was in silence, himself!
...And not purposefully antagonize the demon that was sitting next to him. And not have to listen to Bill say something that antagonized him right back. Without Stanley around to stop either of them.
It occurred to Ford, as he glanced off to his side, away from the demon, that perhaps sitting in silence for the next eight hours was possibly the best of a set of horrible circumstances. ...Because, really, the only alternative was for Ford to either leave himself (and leave Bill to his own devices for eight hours) or to purposefully try and 'mess with' the control device for the time-shift, break it because he was trying to mess with it (because that had been one of Bill's built-in 'safeguards', that it would break if someone tried to alter it in a way that might actually work)... and then have a very annoyed and angry triangle demon on his hands, because Bill had already made it clear to him earlier that he did not want to spend the next eight hours (in normal-time) working to fix it again.
Ford let out a breath. He'd made a decision; he should simply commit to it. (He always felt better and more secure when he did that.)
So Ford settled in place, into a more comfortable seated posture (while trying to ignore how similar to Bill's own posture it was), and pulled out a small notebook and pencil.
...Because if nothing else, this should get a rise out of Bill now. If his writing something in front of the demon didn't get the demon speaking and annoying him, then it was likely that not much else Ford could do, short of enacting physical violence, would get a rise out of the demon for the duration of this eight-hour period.
Ford grimaced slightly as he flipped it open - it was blank; he'd only gotten it (and the pencil) the day prior from one of the Cottonworth's stores that Stan had insisted on visiting for little bibs and bobs of odds and ends, for some reason - and tried to determine what, exactly, he should start writing about.
After a while, he tried simply moving his pencil around near to and in front of the page without actually touching the paper, almost as a test, deliberately not looking at Bill as he did so.
Bill didn't stir.
...And Ford let out something of a tired sigh.
Antagonizing and taunting the demon to draw his aggression (with the equivalent of a bright red flag) being out, Ford shook his head at himself, and stopped trying to think so hard on the subject of Bill Cipher. (Because that never ended well...)
Ford instead put pencil to paper and just started doodling and writing anything that came to mind, to get around his slight case of stress-induced mental writer's block.
...which really meant that Ford defaulted to sketching and writing commentary on everything and anything that was physically surrounding him. And after not too long awhile, Ford started making short sketches of parts of their surroundings - the desks, the shelves with their supplies, the control device for the time-shift spell...
...Oddly, the longer he doodled and jotted down nothing in particular, the better he felt, and the more he relaxed - despite Bill sitting next to him.
It was after a good while - ten minutes, at least - that Ford realized that he'd actually forgotten that he was sitting next to the dream demon, when he was startled out of his thoughts and writing when something bumped up against his arm.
And then Ford remembered.
Ford stopped moving his pencil across the notebook paper. He held himself in place, and he closed his eyes and pulled in a breath.
He let it out slowly. Because of course Bill would not leave him alone. Why would he ever think that-
...and...
...Bill wasn't saying anything...
Ford realized he was waiting for the demon to say something that just wasn't coming for some reason.
Ford reopened his eyes and slowly moved his arms down, with his hands' contents, to his lap.
"Bill," Ford began. "If you're going to say something, just say it."
No response from the dream demon.
Ford clenched his jaw, then unclenched it, and turned his head away from head-on, to face the demon that was leaning up against his side. "Bill-"
Then Ford stopped and blinked.
...because Bill wasn't actually looking at his notebook. Bill was...
Ford stared down at the dream demon. Because Bill… was slumped up completely against his side. Bill's head was practically tucked up against his left arm; it was at completely the wrong angle to view…
...And yes, Bill's suit's sensors could likely reproduce the contents of his notebook for his perusal, no matter which way he was facing, but...
Ford carefully ducked and craned his head to the side, moving his arm not at all, and realized…
...Bill's eyes were still closed.
The demon was… asleep?
-No, he couldn't be! This was just some sort of-
Ford felt half-frustrated, and half-repulsed by this. (And admittedly quite angry as well - just because Bill was wearing a protective suit that would prevent Ford from actually doing him any real physical damage did not give him free-range to impose upon his personal space in such a manner, or to-?!)
Ford had the sudden and nearly overwhelming urge to shove Bill off him immediately-
-and he actually started to raise his arm to do so, to elbow him off of him, when Bill stirred a little at his side, in a way which made Ford freeze. And in that time, the demon simply repositioned himself and settled back down, and…
This wasn't some form of play or play-acting. The demon was actually asleep. Ford had seen this sort of thing on-camera enough, and out on that roof and the deck of the Stan O' War, for long enough that he recognized the restless almost-discoordinated limb movements. The odd head-neck shifts. And… Bill was actually asleep.
Ford let out a breath in disbelief as he settled back in place, arm held steady.
And Ford considered the greater aspects of this situation which he'd found himself in.
Bill was asleep. Ford could either shove Bill off of him, or let him stay where he was.
Ford's first inclination was to shove the demon off of him. If he did that, Bill would likely wake up, feel antagonized (and rightfully so, since that would rather be the point of performing the action), get aggressive with him, and it would lead to a fight that Ford would almost certainly not win, in any respect of the word.
If Bill did not wake up right away, performing such an action might potentially set off some of his suit's defenses. That would likely go even less well.
If Ford didn't follow his natural inclination to push Bill off of him, though, then what would happen?
...The demon might sleep for several hours before he woke up, leaving Ford alone for the duration. And if the demon didn't like the fact that he'd fallen asleep on Ford, well… Bill would only have himself to blame. And Ford could quite calmly point that out to him, giving the demon no excuse to start something with him without 'breaking' the rules of whatever 'game' Bill was playing with Stan with this 'agreement' of theirs.
...Despite what some demons might say about him, Ford was not a stupid man.
Though Ford did carefully raise his arm up and away from his side - not willing to surrender an entire arm to the demon for hours at a time - and carefully watching as Bill… still didn't wake up, just settled in at his side a bit more fully instead, right up against him.
Ford let out a half-annoyed sigh. If Bill wasn't going to wake up to that and leave him alone…
Ford carefully lowered his arm a bit, though still kept it raised up enough to keep his elbow and such largely above Bill's head.
He switched knees and held his left arm (and his notebook) to leaning up against that, as he picked up his writing again, Bill breathing slowly at his side.
...It wasn't as entirely uncomfortable as he'd been expecting it to be. Bill was a slightly cool presence at his side, and...
...Stan had said something about Bill 'running cooler' than most, hadn't he? And Bill had said… he'd only agreed to sleep next to him on the floor of the living room that first time because...
He'd called Ford a living space heater.
Ford frowned down at the demon.
Because that… wasn't quite right, really. Not for human bodies.
Ford moved his pencil to his left hand (along with his notebook) and slowly, and rather experimentally, moved his right arm and hand down and around, to carefully and lightly-
-Ford froze in place and stiffened as Bill literally collapsed up against his side, making a soft 'burr'ing sort of sound as he did so.
He'd… he'd only been trying to take his temperature, moving his hand in towards Bill's temple. He hadn't-
Ford stared down at this in pure disbelief, wide-eyed at how Bill was… was practically snuggled up against his side, now.
This.. this couldn't be… This...
...And then a thought slowly came over him.
And Ford slowly lowered his hand to the top of Bill's head.
Bill unconsciously let out a soft huff of breath, but he didn't move much. Just did that odd head-neck movement again and made a sound that-
Ford felt a slight chill go through him. He'd heard that particular set of chittering noises before. Bill himself had made them.
...But it hadn't been the set he'd made for his own name. No. It had been the set he'd used for...
Ford swallowed, and he carefully removed his hand from Bill's head.
He heard Bill make an odd sort of clicking-cheep under his breath that sounded more like a soft protest than anything, and...
Ford tilted his head back and closed his eyes.
...And he thought on what Dipper had told him.
Bill couldn't have a brother. He couldn't have had one. He didn't know the first thing about having a sibling, what that was like.
He wouldn't have treated him, or Stan, or the niblings anything like how he had, if he had any sense at all of what he'd be destroying if-
-The only thing that made sense was that Bill was confused on the issue, somehow.
And Bill had said something about that, too, hadn't he. He'd outright admitted it, once before. -He'd said he'd Seen something, and 'gotten confused' for a very long time...
It would make sense, if Bill had Looked into another two-dimensional dimension at some point, and Seen something that had mirrored his life enough that...
Ford let out an breath, and pulled his head back down to level, turning it away from Bill. -It would make sense that Bill might be confused on more than one thing. The demon was certainly confused about him, and what he wanted. It only stood to reason that- well.
Of course, when had Bill Cipher ever made sense. -Never, that's when.
And of course, there was also the fact that Bill was insane.
So, if Bill thought, was confused enough to be convinced that… he might have, at some point had a brother...
Well. That would leave Bill with the idea of having a 'brother' without ever having had to cultivate or understand the responsibility of having one, wouldn't it.
...and that had likely led to Bill considering 'having' a sister and actually thinking he might be able to do it. Stan had given him the idea and the other demon had latched onto it. And now Bill was… actually trying to be a proper sibling to the younger demon. And yet-
Ford let out a tired sigh. -It wasn't going to work, and Bill should know that. Demons didn't act like...
Except that sometimes the two demons did almost seem like they really did care about each other, and-
-the dream demon was going to get burned by this badly, wasn't he. And Ford couldn't even say that he was looking forward to it, because...
Bill was well and truly asleep. Ford grimaced and ran his hand over his face. ...Bill wasn't actually a 'demon' from the Outside, was he. -Ford had heard stories of Outsiders before, monstrous larger-than-life individuals who did as they pleased, nations rising and falling at their pleasure, and simply…
Ford sighed. In retrospect, the figures on those stories sounded quite a great deal like demons in general, but he'd never actually quite made the connection before.
He didn't like to think about it, but demons were capable of great 'good' as well as great evil. They could spend centuries building up a race of people, making them rise to soaring heights...
...but the problem was that, sooner or later, they grew bored. And when that happened, they knocked down everything they'd helped to build, like a toddler gleefully knocking down a tower of blocks that they'd built up for the sole purpose of being able to do just that.
And hadn't Miz mentioned she'd had worshipers? And a planet of people that she'd created and looked after until they turned their backs on her? And were subsequently destroyed?
Bill was the same. Only Bill did such things in far larger scope. Ford had seen-
Ford let out a breath. Bill hadn't knocked over any of the ones he'd showed him in the last thirty years yet , at least. (Not as far as Ford knew, and news like that - especially news about Bill Cipher - traveled fast through the multiverse.) But the way the denizens of Bill's galaxies and dimensions acted towards other demons... in many cases, just letting them kill them without issue or protest...
-smiling about it as they died, so fanatically devoted to Bill that they looked forward to enjoying the experience of dying at the hands of-
Ford swallowed hard, trying to keep down bile.
He closed his eyes and forced himself to wait until his stomach settled, focusing on his breathing, and the color of concrete under his boots, the heft of the weight of his feet when he moved them slightly, the smell and taste of the air in the room around them...
Slowly, his stomach settled. Slowly, he reopened his eyes.
Stanley had no idea what he was trying to control and bring to heel. And Ford couldn't explain it to him. Not without damning himself in the process.
And, at this point, Ford was too tired from fighting for so long to tell Stan the truth. To try to warn them all properly, and then lose his family and his friends over it as they questioned him and realized how and why he knew all of these things.
-what he'd done-
(-what Bill had done-)
(-what Bill had made him do-)
-what Bill had used him to do-
Ford shivered in place.
And then he glanced down again at the dream demon at his side.
And Ford had another, absolutely terrible thought.
He shouldn't do it. Really, he shouldn't. But...
Bill had messed with him so badly over the years. Wasn't it just fair to try and get at least a little of his own back?
Ford got a slight, slightly mean smile.
...And he carefully pulled the left side of his trench coat back, out from under the demon.
And once he'd gotten it loose, and the demon had fussed and finished curling up right against his sweater-covered side, he slowly pulled it back into place.
And he wasn't quite whistling to himself as he went back to his drawing and writing, and the demon at his side slowly began to restlessly stir in fits and starts...
Ford sighed ruefully. ...In retrospect, he should have remembered how the niblings had told him about how Bill had kicked off those covers on the deck of the boat, when the other demon had tried covering him with them. Stan had said something to that effect before, Mabel had let him know the details of when Bill had complained to her about such earlier, and… it was rather clear that Bill still wasn't quite over it yet.
Bill had woken up rather abruptly after that, and gotten very annoyed with Ford for having 'tried to smother him with his coat'. Ford had taken it with what he believed had been quite a great measure of aplomb.
He'd calmly responded to Bill - apologized for waking him up, in fact. It hadn't even been a lie, quite - he hadn't been trying to wake Bill up, in doing what he'd done. He really had been trying to make the demon a little warmer.
And frankly, he'd been looking forward to seeing whatever confused and off-put response the demon might make at finding him in the (rather, incredibly) compromising position that the demon had put himself in, that Ford had only partially-enabled by his silent non-uncompliance.
It had turned out both better and worse than he'd expected.
Ford grimaced and let out a breath. Bill hadn't fallen asleep right after that again, settling down again elsewhere to curl up into that loose-ball sort of posture that he'd taken the last time that he and Stan had been down in that basement with him, to fall asleep. No, Bill - after his initial ranting at Ford for trying to smother him (which he hadn't) - had stopped and stared at him for a good long minute of time.
And then Bill had intoned how that had been INTERESTING, and tricked Ford into holding his hands up in such a way that...
Ford shivered under the covers. He never should have listened to his brother. He never should have agreed.
He never should have said yes.
Ford quietly lay in place for awhile, thinking about what had happened.
...And then he flipped back a few pages in his notebook to what he'd written there, after Bill had finally fallen asleep yet again, and stayed asleep through the next several hours of time until the time-shift had ended.
'Zodiac'. 'Left-hand, facing inward'. 'Right-hand, facing outward.'
'Facing inward' was like... facing Bill, right in the face, facing the Zodiac Circle from the outside. Looking at it on the cave wall.
'Facing outward' was like... facing away from the cave wall, with Bill at your back. Looking out in the same direction that Bill's Eye was gazing, looking...
Looking outward, as if you were on Bill's side, at his side, right there along with him…
Looking outward, at and on Bill's side. Hands-up, pressing out as if you were trying to escape the wall. Reach up your right hand, to press out, to push out, and...
Looking inward, opposing Bill, standing and staring at him head-on. Raise up your left hand and try to push back against him, to stop-
...It was all a matter of perspective, wasn't it? -Except it wasn't. Not for Stanley, and not for Bill.
Are you on my side or aren't you?
You're supposed to be on my side! -Which was really just another way of saying: you're mine, so why don't you act like it? Why won't you do what I want? Why won't you do what I tell you to do-
Ford was on his brother's side. Bill was, ostensibly in some way, on Stan's side.
And when Bill had grabbed up Ford's hands in his own, lacing their fingers together and frowned in concentration-
-they'd both lit up blue.
Ford had jerked back, and Bill had let go immediately himself. He'd looked surprised.
He'd called it interesting. He'd walked away from him and begun to pace.
-He'd started making chittering noises to himself, working his hands and fingers, and downright looking confused at times as he'd muttered to himself in fragments of languages that-
Ford had stared.
And then another realization had hit him with the force of a semi-truck.
(-Not the realization about left- and right-handedness, or Bill's frustration and lack of insight into the matter. Thinking Ford was supposed to be his 'right-hand' man because he'd refused to think that Ford was and could or should be anything but 'on his side', whether he liked it or not - no, that had come later, after Bill had fallen asleep again and Ford had sat down to resume his writing, left along with his own thoughts…)
No, the realization that had hit him then had been…
...that there was a seventeen-year-old female human girl with short, two-tone black- and blue-colored hair, standing and pacing back and forth in front of him, in that basement, muttering to herself as she paced, looking confused and frustrated and...
Ford had never seen Bill look confused before. And when that had happened...
Ford hadn't known what Bill was supposed to look like. What that would look like - confusion - in his Eye, on his front face, his limited expression, the arrangement of his thin stick-like black limbs, how he would be floating...
Ford had realized what he had, and hadn't been seeing.
And he realized what Stanley had been seeing for all of this time, instead.
Stan had been seeing a teenaged boy, and then a teenaged girl; he had no idea what Bill was supposed to look like, in each and every one of his various and mercurial moods.
Ford had encountered Bill enumerable times on the other side of the portal, and not just in the Dreamscape or Mindscape, either. Sometimes, he'd had the unfortunate luck to encounter Bill when the demon had been inhabiting the body of one of his many, many (far far too many other) puppets of his. And, over the years and decades, Ford had gotten used to visually (and automatically) mapping what he was seeing when Bill was inhabiting those bodies, to what Bill actually looked like. -What Bill would be doing in the Mindscape, what he would look like, how he'd be moving around and gesticulating, if he hadn't been bound by a more-rigid physical body instead.
Ford hadn't actually been seeing what Stan and the others had been seeing, whenever they interacted with and talked to Bill. Not in the same way. Not in the slightest.
They had all seen a teenaged boy-or-girl, moving around and acting largely in teenage-boy-or-girl-ish ways.
While he, himself, had seen...
-It was terribly dangerous, his family being exposed to Bill when he looked like this, for long and extended periods of time. Not least of which because Bill was not a teenager, not a girl, not a human being, and the demon had no sense of decency, morality, anything like approaching human empathy (for humans or anyone else), and simply no concept of restraint.
But Bill looked like he did. Because he looked like they did, now.
Ford had actually spent some time after that, down in that basement, trying to sketch Bill as he saw him. Realistically, as he physically was right now. ...And yet stick-thin arms and single too-large eyes kept sneaking their way into his sketches.
He wasn't quite there yet, but he would be. He realized that he'd need to be able to pay attention to what Bill was 'actually' visibly doing, in order to properly combat it in the future, the impact it might have on his family, on anyone else who was seeing his as… something that he wasn't.
And it was of pressing and dire importance that he did work to combat the effects of that, of that image of Bill, mentally and physically.
Because humans were pack animals. They grouped. They bonded, and tried to find similarities in each other, the longer they simply lived in close proximity to each other. And when the 'fear of the other' didn't get in the way… (and it wouldn't, with Bill looking human enough that the sight of him wouldn't inspire anything but a sense of familiarity, over a long enough period of time...) They generally tried to get along. And when a sociopathic individual entered their midst, the first and most natural basic instinct of most humans was to placate, capitulate, and conform to their wants and demands...
...because sociopaths were highly dangerous individuals that would lash out and injure or kill on a whim - not caring about the physical damage or personal cost most sane individuals cared about having inflicted upon themselves in the interim, so long as they doubled-down until they overpowered you, got what they wanted, and won - and the common basic survival instinct that most humans had to that was to stay below notice, give them what they wanted, and hope that they passed you over without paying the least bit of attention to you, to not harm or to at least not actively hurt.
But attempting to placate Bill wouldn't work. Bill wasn't going to leave them alone. He'd only demand more, and worse, over time.
And Bill, by any measure of the word, was a sociopath by human terms and measures. He had no empathy for humans; Bill and his own wants were all-important to him, he didn't care about pain, and other human beings were nothing more than objects or toys to him. Bill didn't treat people like people, with their own autonomy and their own self-actualization - worthy of respect and a right to have and control their own existence without his terrible interference, simply for being alive.
Bill had to be stopped. But Stan… when Stan looked at Bill Cipher now, he saw a kid. A teenager that was lost and didn't know how to function in human society, and...
...no. No, that wasn't quite right. Stan knew at least some of the dangers, but… Stan thought he could handle them. Likely because Stan had encountered other dangerous individuals in his past and survived them. Ford remembered what Stan had yelled out at him, so very long ago, before being shoved into the portal. He'd spent time in prison in three different countries. What he'd had to deal with there, and what his brother might have been involved with to get himself tossed into jail before that...
Stan had never talked about it, and Ford had never pressed him. But he knew that Stan believed that he could handle most everything, after surviving what he had for those ten years before Ford had contacted him, and he'd shown up on his doorstep in the middle of winter, answering his call for help.
Stan was playing a very dangerous game here with Bill, for stakes he didn't truly understand. Ford hadn't even understood them, until Bill and that other demon had started talking about time travel and time- and age-reversal and bringing people back to life...
Bill wasn't going to let them go. And Stan couldn't handle Bill like he had any of the human criminals he'd known. Bill wasn't human. He didn't react like a human did. Didn't think like humans did.
Patting Bill on the head a few times might be slowly training or teaching Bill's current body to become used to the sensation and react to it accordingly in a human-like manner, but that wouldn't have any effect on Bill himself. Bill was a being of Mind, a being of pure energy. Bill didn't let little things like what was happening to the body he was currently sitting and squatting within, like a spider pulling puppet-threads in its web, impact him in any meaningful way.
(And Ford still wasn't sure how that younger demon reacted to things, she seemed to take more stock in physical sensations, but it could all be an act to seem more human, to trick them into giving her sympathy.)
Ford himself wouldn't fall for any of that, though. He knew what Bill was, and did. And he also knew what Bill wasn't. Bill wasn't some human teenager deserving of his basic needs being met, and the demon knew it. He was-
Ford blinked.
And then he flipped to another page and wrote that down. And stared at it.
And then he wrote down what Stan was doing for Bill. And he stared at that again.
...Bill knew that he didn't deserve any of it. The demon wasn't stupid; he knew that Stanley wasn't meeting his basic day-to-day bodily needs, just because. Bill knew, just as Stan knew, that Stan didn't have to do it.
In fact, Stan had every reason in the world not to do it. After what Bill had done, and tried to do, to his family...
And yet Stan was doing it all anyway. He'd practically forced it on the demon, and Bill had… taken it, yes, but…
This wasn't… this wasn't placation. Bill never would have thought to demand such from them in the first place. Which meant...
...This wasn't placation, and it wasn't some kind of offering, peace-full or worshiping or placatory or otherwise. This was more of a… favor? From Stan? That could be rescinded at any time, except...
Stan had said that, no matter what, he was still going to do this for Bill. Food, clothing, shelter, and schooling. (And yes, Ford had realized not too far into things that Stan had made the definition of 'schooling' flexible enough to account for punishments in the form of 'penalties' when Bill acted out in ways that not a one of them liked, but…)
...Was the 'game' that Stan was trying to play with the demon one of, 'try to act like a human kid, and I'll treat you like one?'
That didn't make any sense, though. Bill clearly did not want to play such a 'game' of any sort with Stan or anyone else, with the way that the demon had continuously - and repeatedly - protested the label.
Stan was giving Bill something that the demon wanted, and could go out and get himself, but had not and would not have asked for himself.
...No. No, actually. That wasn't quite right. Bill didn't quite want it, even if his body needed these things in order to keep working properly, for Bill to continue to survive, and Stan...
(No, that wasn't quite right, either. Technically, Bill could quite possibly change the 'ruleset' acting on his own body, couldn't he? If he could make it so he, Ford, didn't have to breathe to survive, then...)
Ford pulled in a breath, and jotted a few more thoughts down, as he mused over these things in more detail, all over again.
And it finally occurred to him, as he took a step back from everything, that maybe it was… a similar sort of problem as Bill had apparently been dealing with, with Ford's own Deal with him, prior.
Ford hadn't wanted just and only someone to act as and be his 'friend', as part of some deal - not some simple transaction, 'you'll give me this, and I'll give you that'. Friends weren't something that you paid for, to have around you. No. -He'd wanted someone who clearly wanted to be his friend, Deal or no Deal in place. Bill had been right about that, embarrassing as it was.
And Ford hadn't realized that that could be a transaction, too; he'd thought he'd just been solidifying something they'd already had, making it official, at the time. Not...
And that was the problem. Bill didn't just want his Zodiac; he wanted them on his side. Bill already considered all of them to be wholly and uniquely his. ...But that didn't mean that they had to like him, or want to get along with him. And Bill knew that. Bill realized that.
The demon knew full well the difference between willing, and unwilling, help. He knew the difference between willing and unwilling interference in his affairs. Ford had seen people loyal to Bill work with and for other demons, sometimes at Bill's bequest, sometimes not as they were forced into servitude instead-
-and then turn around and stab those demons in the back the very first chance that they got.
Bill knew the difference, Bill wanted his Zodiac to be working for him with him? - for whatever reason - and Bill… had seemed excited down in that basement at the prospect of Ford now being 'on his side', because they were both on Stanley's side in things, now.
(They'd both been 'aligned' in not wanting something. Stan had convinced told them both to do it anyway. And they'd done it. -Ford had said 'yes' to something, to Bill, because he hadn't said 'no' to Stan. He should have said no. And now…)
Ford flexed his hands.
Bill had only been confused, and then frustrated about everything, about how it had come about, because he didn't understand how Stan had done it.
...Because apparently, Bill had realized that that was going to be the 'deal'-breaker for the agreement: Ford remaining outside of it completely, and not coming over to Stan's (and thus his, Bill's) side, also. That was apparently what Bill had thought that Stan was not going to be able to pull off. And...
...Stan wasn't just giving Bill things grudgingly. Stan was actively making sure that Bill was being given food, clothing, shelter, and schooling. Stan was acting, by all accounts, like he wanted to give Bill these things, not just like he was merely giving them because he thought he had to… and would then be looking for a way and a reason to stab Bill in the back as soon as he could later.
...And refusing to perform the circle with the rest of them likely fed further into that.
Stan was likely trying to convince Bill that he, and the rest of his family, were not a threat to Bill, by doing this. By showing this willingness to… get along with him.
...It wasn't going to work. Bill had expectations for his 'friends', and they were demonic in nature. Stan wasn't going to be able to live up to any of it, and he wasn't going to want to do any of it.
Ford let out a breath, and jotted down a few more notes. He was going to need to remember all this, for the next time he got a proper moment alone with his brother. He didn't want to leave anything out.
You're supposed to be on my side! -Which was really just another way of saying: you're mine, so why don't you act like it? Why won't you do what I want? Why won't you do what I tell you to do-
Ford shivered in place under the covers.
And then he froze in place for a moment (and nearly held his breath), as he heard Stan shift in place under the covers, across the cabin from him, in his own cot.
...Ford slowly let out a breath, as he heard Stan settle back down again.
'Just a little more...' he silently promised himself, and his brother. 'I just need to write a little more down, and then I'll be able to fall asleep, Stan. I promise.'
Bill might want them 'on his side' (or apparently, potentially 'on Stan's side with him' - something which Bill had not seemed to be lying about for the moment, and that Stan would need to know almost immediately when a good moment alone with him arose), but… Bill hadn't actually needed anyone to be 'on his side' before: not any person or thing, and not any demon - singular or horde of them or otherwise.
Bill had done perfectly fine for himself in the past without having anyone actually 'watching his back' without being willing to stab him in it, and Ford doubted that such had changed at all in the slightest with this latest 'return' of his, human'-ish' body (that Bill also complained about incessantly) or not.
Bill didn't need them, or anyone, to be wanting to work with him, in order to do anything or get anything he'd wanted to get done done in the past or present, and Ford doubted that that would change in the future, far-flung or otherwise. No, not in the slightest.
So what was Bill doing with all this, then? Ford couldn't imagine that Bill actually cared about the long-term consequences of his actions, demon or not. In Ford's experience, if Bill wanted to do something, he simply did it; if Bill wanted something, he went out and got it, willingness of whoever was involved in the situation or not be damned.
...And the fact of the matter was, Bill could obtain food, clothing, shelter, and schooling for himself, he didn't need to rely on others to do it, and Ford could not imagine Bill putting up with Stan, or the niblings, or himself, and all their own various wants and demands, for those things, when he could simply expend a slight amount of effort to obtain all four of those things for himself, and not have to deal with any of them on their own level, by any ways or means. It didn't make sense.
Bill didn't make sense.
Then again, when had he ever?
'I ain't surprised. The kid's emotionally stressed,' Stan had told him two nights ago along their own personal timelines, during that night they'd all spent down in the basement together. Stan had said it in response to Ford's surprise that Bill had fallen asleep almost immediately upon Stan managing to half-order, half-convince the dream demon to take a nap first, prior to working on that specialized 'time-stop' spell-device of his...
Stan hadn't really explained it beyond 'the kid' being sure that he was right (well, of course Bill thought so), and being told he was doing it wrong and could do better (though why Stan would think Bill would care that he'd been told anything like that, was beyond Ford…). And that 'the kicker' had been that Bill… had actually acted almost as though maybe he had begun to realize that he'd been doing something wrong? (...Not that Bill actually cared about anything like that, either. The idea was simply ludicrous. Ludicrous.)
Ford severely doubted that the idea of doing things less well than he 'should have been' doing them (really, he shouldn't have been doing them at all!) had (or would ever truly have) had an impact on Bill Cipher in the least. -Frankly, Ford thought it far more likely that Bill had been feeling a similar strain on his own 'human-ish' body during that session with the teacher, as Mr. Harman had been feeling himself, and that that was what had tired Bill out.
But what was true about this whole situation was that Bill was holding back with them. He wasn't being 'as bad as he could be' with any of them; he actually seemed to be even holding back with the niblings, at times. Ford knew what being 'played with' by Bill was like, and it was NOTHING like-
Ford pulled in a hard breath, and he resisted the urge to curl into a ball under the covers, even as he did shift in place slightly, unable to stop himself from reflexively curling in on himself a little bit. ...Purely for physical comfort and warmth, of course. The covers weren't that thick, after all...
'Emotional stress', really. Ford shifted in place under the covers. It was far more likely that Bill had tired himself out, and was moving back to his 'old' habits of sleeping for at least twelve to sixteen hours a day. (And yes, Ford had timed him from the video feed. Bill either spent that much time supine per day, or seemingly asleep -though now, Ford was starting to believe that, during those times, Bill was actually asleep. Because he'd seen Bill on the deck of the Stan O'War, and that rooftop, and down in the hold, and now for a second time on the concrete floor of the Harman's basement, and… he had, in fact, been asleep.)
And as far as Ford could tell, Bill sleeping did not actually translate to Bill being able to move outside of the confines of his current body, potentially due to the anchor he apparently had on his back.
...which, according to Dipper, Stan apparently had a strikingly similar-looking tattoo of, on his own back - one that Stan apparently also denied having, but definitely knew that he had, and wouldn't let anyone look at. Ford hadn't quite had the opportunity to ask his brother about it yet - though he'd meant to on several occasions before; he tended to become distracted in the moment when he was already in something of a bad mood, and every time Stan had accosted him to talk lately, that had been his state of mind at the time - so Ford made himself another note in his notebook to remember to discuss it with him.
It would likely be easiest to manage before they left here, since they were sharing a room again, but… now that he thought on it, even when they were on the Stan O' War, Stan had been careful not to show him his back. Even when they'd been swapping clothes in the Fearamid, Stanley had...
Ford frowned. then mentally shook it off. He'd just ask Stan directly. He'd determine how to proceed from there, once Stan told him whatever he thought and felt about the matter..
Ford let out a sigh, and flipped forward in his notebook. He quickly jotted down a few points next, on the status of the health of Mr. Harman - good enough, considering what Bill had put him through, though apparently his mental state and capabilities still needed some time to recover. Given that apparently the man had thought that he (Ford) and Bill ('the alien') might have somehow needed or wanted the 'alone time' together down in that basement, to work something or another out together amongst themselves, as his excuse for doing what he'd done with setting up that delayed-activation third time-shift there…
Ford let out another sigh, finished jotting down what were more mnemonic notes to himself than actual explanations of anything that had occurred, and then moved on to quick notes on what had happened in the next two and a half hours after that.
...Really, it had been almost a whirlwind tour of the globe, courtesy of Bill and several portals with green-colored event horizons. Apparently, they were 'scientific' in nature - science-based, not magical - and thus Bill had felt perfectly justified in using them to jump himself (and Ford, who was following him) all over the globe as he picked up fruit preserves and black tea in England, mandarin oranges and green tea fresh from China, blini and sour cream from Russia, dijon mustard and Savora and charcuterie (among other cheeses) from France, some sort of lingonberry spread in Sweden, several different types of cookies and breads from a bakery in New York (of all places), several different types of beverages from an open-air 'bar' in Hawaii, and (rather unbelievingly) matzo crackers and matzo ball soup from a deli tucked in the corner of a city in another part of New Jersey not too far away from Glass Shard Beach.
Ford had pointed out that Bill didn't eat most of these things himself, and after the second time that he'd tried to point that out, Bill had given him a look that had Ford resolving to just let the lunatic demon buy whatever he wanted, 'inedible' as he liked to put it, or not.
Bill had paid for it all with gold out of his hat, the goods he'd bought (in rather significant quantities, no less) had all disappeared right back into it, and no-one - not a single, solitary person - had complained to the fact that Bill was decidedly not using the proper coin of the realm in any single country that they had visited. Not a one.
(Yes, Ford knew that there was some truth to the fact that gold was the closest thing in the multiverse to a universal currency, but even this had been ridiculous to see, and have to watch.)
Bill had been nothing but polite to each and every one of those bakers and craftsmen. He'd spoken with a native-speaker's fluency in the language being used at each location, and… really Ford was hardly surprised by any of it.
What was surprising was that Bill hadn't been trying to show off. (Ford knew what that looked like, and it always turned out horribly for him.)
He had followed Bill on his portal-enabled 'jet'-setting little shopping trip (Ford could hardly call it an adventure, as it hadn't exactly been exciting), to locales that he and Stan simply hadn't gone nearly as far inland to see, and...
Frankly, if Ford had been spending the time with someone who he'd actually liked, he might have actually enjoyed it.
Once the impromptu 'shopping trip' had been over, Bill had 'science'-portaled them off to Egypt next - for a meal-break, apparently. Given the Mediterranean diet at the hotel where they ended up lounging on pillows as they ate (well, Bill lounged; Ford 'just sat'...), it wasn't much of a surprise once Ford saw what Bill had ordered: all fruits, vegetables, and legumes, and no meat (or mushrooms) whatsoever.
Bill had spoken to him hardly at all during any of this. And he hadn't spoken much more as they'd finished their drinks (tea, in Bill's case, of course, and something called Qasab, in Ford's, that had been quite sweet, cold, and energizing) and then they'd both taken what would be their next-to-last portal to...
Ford had to set down his pencil and notebook for a moment, and cover his eyes as he let out a sigh.
And after awhile, he was able to reach out and pick them both up again.
...Bill had taken them to Gravity Falls, Oregon. Not the town, but somewhere quite specific in the forest, underneath it: the spaceship crash site. Because apparently one existed in this dimension, too.
Bill had, quite frankly, spent no time in absolutely decimating the site. They'd simply shown up in the hallway outside the control room, Bill had explained as he'd walked, and then… Bill had done what he'd intended to do. And Ford hadn't stopped him.
...Frankly, if Ford had thought of it, he'd have done it himself. But he hadn't. Bill had.
It had been something Bill had wanted to do, wanted as an outcome, and Ford hadn't been able to bring himself to stop him.
...Because Bill hadn't wanted the local Stanford Pines to ever have access to the proper technology to potentially be able to put together a working interdimensional portal at any point. Ever.
And Ford couldn't help but agree with him. The Stanford here was… wrong in some way. The way he acted... He made Ford feel uncomfortable, just being around him, now. There was something… that… That younger him was NOT him.
And when Ford had declared that, finally, straight to Bill's face, expecting an objection, or perhaps a laugh… "Yes," Bill had said, instead, while not even looking at him, as he'd continued doing whatever he'd been doing with the alien panel he'd been working and tapping away at. And Ford had been stunned into silence.
"It's a different dimension, Sixer," Bill had told him. "Don't expect everything to be the same."
"...Because you weren't really here?" Ford had said slowly, wrapping his arms around himself and feeling slightly lost. Because really, the only main difference Bill had remarked upon as being a difference between their dimension, and this one, had been...
"Yes," Bill had said, again without looking at him, as he'd yanked off that panel. "I wasn't really here."
Ford had felt a terrible mix of relief and confusion and dread at what Bill had just told him. And as a result, he hadn't tried to talk with Bill for the rest of the trip. (...Not that he'd been trying to strike up a conversation, civil or otherwise, with Bill at any point really, before then. But...)
Bill had finished what he was doing, which Ford really couldn't find it in him to argue with, and then they'd green-portaled right back to an alleyway at the corner of the far end of the boardwalk of Glass Shard Beach.
...It had been the near-end to the boat, though. And then they'd both simply… walked up to the boat with the others, and been met with the sight of the other demon on-deck, and...
'Well. Not quite,' Ford thought dourly, as he added one last line to his notebook, before quietly flipping it closed and tucking it, the penlight, and his pencil, back in his breast pocket.
Because the one thing that Bill had said to him, almost as a parting shot, as they'd made their way to the boat...
...in response to Sixer's snark-filled and under-the-breath comment to the two of them, asking who had been looking after whom...
...had been for Bill to say that he had been babysitting 'that Stanford', because apparently Ford was so very low on the totem-pole of the 'hierarchy' of the priority-list that the two lowest on it (Dipper and Mabel) had been taking care of him and worrying about his health...
...and that because their health and well-being was dependent to some extent on his, and Ford was under their care and protection...
Ford had protested rather strongly under his breath at Bill. Bill had merely replied that he shouldn't have been surprised at the news, since Melody had really been called in to babysit him, and not Bill. Bill contested that he himself was wholly capable of not missing sleep or forgetting to stop and eat at mealtimes without prompting, unlike Ford himself...
Stan had cut in with a sigh, telling them both that Melody was looking over them both, but… It had still left Sixer giggling, Lee looking more than a little bit concerned, and Ford feeling more than a little snappish, as they'd all gotten themselves back up onto the deck.
(The quick rejoinder-slash-'report' by Bill - to Stanley - that Ford hadn't slept much again that afternoon, or eaten very much of the 'light snack' Bill had made sure that they'd both sat down and ate afterwards, as they'd been climbing the ladder one after the other, also hadn't helped Ford's mood all that much.)
Ford knew that it was wrong, as he burrowed himself under the covers a bit better - head poking out a bit this time - but he'd still felt an uneasy yet almost heady kind of satisfaction, as the last thing he'd written down in his notebook, as confirmed by Bill:
This local 'Sixer' IS NOT ME.
Ford let out a breath and closed his eyes.
And he carefully tried to keep himself from dwelling on the fact that, apparently, it was Bill's interference that had somehow made a difference, to make him different, in his own dimension, to make him far more different than…
Saturday morning came early, and as Miz and Stan had planned together to have happen the next morning, after they'd all had breakfast together - and to several exclamations of glee from Miz, upon seeing what-all Bill had bought for her to be able to scan, use, and eat (from somewhere, the kid was being not quite cagey about it by carefully not-saying anything, but when Stan looked to Ford, his brother just shook his head slightly where he was standing with his arms-crossed, leaning up against the countertop by the doorway, so he figured it couldn't be too much of a problem)...
...the boys were left to run the 'attraction' to charge tourists to get a photo of the dragon for the day.
Stan wanted to see how well Lee could sell it, how well he'd be able to handle himself and others - dealing with customers, charming the schmucks into parting with their cash, all of it. Stan figured he could step in or give more lessons if he needed to, but… hey, you learned by doing. And Stan wanted to make sure that he got the good stuff that actually worked down early, just in case...
Miz, on the other hand, was more focused on the other twin. She wanted to see if little Sixer could learn to talk to people. After all, being a successful scientist wasn't just about being book smart; you needed a level of charisma to get anywhere in life. Heck, his hero Tesla was as successful as he had been mainly due to how intense his personality had been. Tesla had been eccentric, but he'd also known how to charm people into letting him get away with being the weirdo that he'd been.
And yeah, if Sixer wanted to get anywhere in life, he'd need to learn how to talk to people better - Stan agreed with her on that point. Sixer had seemed a little miffed at their evaluation of his ability to socialize, but Lee had outnumbered him, agreeing with the other two instead of him.
Stan watched the twins at a distance, and as he kept half-an-eye on the kids, Stan also kept up a conversation with Miz.
"So you're thinkin' of making that dragon illusion thing, like, what? A local cryptid?" Stan asked Miz as he sat with her on the beach.
(The kid and Ford were back at the boat, doing who knew what. Stan wasn't too worried; his brother didn't seem 'addicted' or nothin', and neither of 'em seemed to be at each other's throats, even after being left 'all alone' to each others' company the previous afternoon. Hell, Ford hadn't even seemed that annoyed, until Sixer had said something that had had Bill getting all… y'know, demon-y talk and stuff at them. And the two of 'em had both survived yesterday together without killing or maiming each other to death or disfigurement, so Stan figured Ford and the kid could probably handle not-killing-themselves-or-each-other-maybe for a second day in a row, right?)
(...Eh, the two of 'em were both out on deck, and sound traveled. He'd hear them fighting, if anything went really wrong...)
Miz nodded. "Like how that one town's got the mothman or something. I know Jersey's supposed to have the Jersey Devil, but the dragon's cooler, more noticeable, and I can ensure that it won't attack anyone. I can make it so that it'll stop being solid if anyone gets too close, so it literally couldn't hurt anyone."
Supposed to have a Jersey Devil? -They absolutely did! ...Uh, assuming they hadn't scared it off after that thing with the Sibling Brothers and the net, way back when. But… yeah, a 'real' attraction would be too dangerous; Stan had learned that from the Shack. (Hell, you couldn't even get the a gnome to play nice for a day, even for a whole jar of jam. The crazy little buggers couldn't keep it together for more than a few hours without trying to bite the hell outta anybody who got too close to 'em. And don't even get him started on that Mothman guy...)
So Stan thought about it for awhile, before he said, "Well, wouldn't people get suspicious, if it ain't all that solid? How're you gonna keep folks from thinking it might be somethin' other than what it is? And how're you planning on setting up this safety thing, here? Y'know, specifically?"
Miz tilted her head. "I can set it to be able to put on a Perception Filter to escape and leave the area when it gets surrounded."
Stan sat back and shrugged. "Kid, why do you need it to get close enough to people that that's even gonna be a problem? Just make it keep its distance and always be non-substantial, all the time. Loch Ness monster does just great drawing tourists in, and it's camera-shy as anything," Stan told her. "You'll need a good hook for why the thing's insubstantial here, though," because Nessie had all that natural fog over by its lake; Glass Shard Beach, not so much. "Like… maybe it's made outta fog for people who it don't trust? Something like that? -The keepin' it insubstantial idea's good for keepin' people from getting hurt outright," Stan told her. But he wasn't so sure about the rest of it, and, "You gotta have a reason for it bein' like that now that people'll buy, too. Because everybody and their dog saw how it got hurt stompin' around on the beach yesterday, and how the twins were able to grab and touch it all over, and clawing at that net instead of fogging right outta it..." Sta said said leadingly.
Miz nodded at that, accepting Stan's input. "Okay. So there wouldn't even be any issues with people getting hurt. Fog would make sense. Or sea foam." She looked over at the ocean, calculating how that would work. "Like, maybe it only takes physical form when hungry, hence why it came up on land. Since there's less food in the oceans?"
"That's a good start," Stan told her, the master storyteller of the Mystery Shack sitting back, relaxing, and having a little fun at him getting to be the one poking at holes in stories for once, instead of some of his more smart-alecky of customers being the ones to try and poke holes in his. "But why would it come up onto the beach this time, when it usually eats stuff outta the oceans?" Stan asked of her next.
Over with the younger twins, Lee was counting out how much money they'd made from having Sixer lead people closer to the sedated dragon to take a photo of it. The animal control guys had finally showed up that afternoon, but they'd all been actually pretty honest about how they all weren't so sure how to handle a creature as large as DragonMiz. (New Jersey wasn't exactly known for its beached whale problems, and whales tended to not have lots and lots of rows of sharp and pointy teeth or a slew of wicked-looking claws.) The dragon had protested being touched by anyone who wasn't one of the twins, so they had been at a loss as to how they were going to safely move it.
"Well, its leg was only cut up a little from the glass," Sixer had pointed out. "I've looked at it's paw, the cut isn't deep. It should be healed up within a few days if it doesn't try to move and hurt itself."
The animal control guys had understood his point, "But we can't leave it here in the middle of the beach," one of them had said.
Sixer had nodded. "I can try and lure it slowly to an out of the way part of the beach with some food," he'd told them. "I actually don't think it's dangerous. It seems more curious about humans than anything else." He'd scratched the dragon's head to prove his point, and the animal control guys had all watched the beast, as it rumbled and nuzzled its large head against Sixer's hand.
And that was how animal control had ended up leaving it alone, and how Sixer and Lee had managed to move the dragon down the beach, set up a small area for people to come and 'See the seadragon' (pun courtesy of Lee), and begin running their own little beach attraction for money - instead of the impromptu thing that Stan had done out on the beach the previous day, which had only been a 'take pictures of', not 'take pictures of or with', kind of thing. (Though they charged more for taking their pictures with their camera for them, getting them actually in the frame, as they kept the dragon calm enough to be cool with it.) They were doing pretty well, too.
After Miz and Stan got finished talking, Miz had decided to put herself on 'food duty', going off to bring back 'food' for the dragon from time to time (all illusions, of course).
Lee grinned a little and hammed it up, when even some kids from school ended up coming by to gawk at it.
Miz was quietly preening (from where she was sitting on the beach by Stan) at the awed looks her dragon construct was getting. Yes! Be amazed! Look at how impressive it was! (And, unlike Bill, she actually noticed when Stan saw her getting all excited and excitable, and started patting her on top of her head. ...And she purred a bit, quietly, as she slowly began to calm down, under Stan's not-quite-petting head-patting.) She resisted the urge to just nuzzle against Stan, he wasn't her brother, it would be weird.
The younger twins were enjoying their moment in the spotlight, as it were. Their fellow classmates were so amazed by it. Miz was quietly scanning everyone to see what they thought, how impressed they were of the twins…
...Carla was there, and she was pissed...
Well... Miz wasn't quite sure what she'd been expecting...
Miz had been having trouble figuring out how to drop the fact that Carla was the one who broken Sixer's project. She was torn between telling or not telling people. Stan hadn't wanted that knowledge spread. Ford clearly wanted to know but hadn't really had the time to investigate himself. Lee was all for just forgetting about it and working to try and support his brother. Sixer… wanted to know but... he was still of the opinion that it was 'better this way' and that sort of mentality made Miz a little worried. She'd already told him not to abandon his brother, but she wasn't sure he was going to listen.
Well, even if Sixer DID go off to college on his own, leaving Lee behind without a single glance, at least Lee would have the boat. And wasn't going to be out on the streets, starving and getting mixed up in the crime underbelly out of desperation. This was something that Miz and Stan both agreed on, not letting Lee turn out homeless for ten years like him or without a high school degree. (Stan had been pretty vocal at dinner, the last time Lee had tried to bring it up, about how people tried to shaft you on pay if you didn't have your diploma.)
(Lee had been surprised at how vehement the two of them had been about it. Ford himself had ended up a little bemused - though mostly suspicious - at the man-eater acting so much like she actually cared. If Ford hadn't known she was a demon, he felt he might have even made the mistake of believing her...)
Miz got up and made her way over to the twins, in her older teenage form once more, since there were some classmates around.
"Hey Lee. How's it going?" she asked. He looked up from where he was counting the profits, eyes gleaming at all the sweet, sweet greenbacks that they'd been making hand over fist - literally.
"Good! Is this what older me does all the time? This is amazing," Lee told her.
Miz giggled. "Well, he's sorta retired now, passed the torch down to the next generation as it were…"
"He's got a kid?!" Lee asked, eyebrows raising. He hadn't exactly thought about anyone or anything about 'life after Carla', yet. (But if the older him had a kid… well, hey, he had to have gotten over her eventually, right?)
Miz paused. "Not in the traditional sense. He didn't really get the time to really settle down and start a family; the older Ford kinda got into some trouble and was lost in space, so Stan had to spend 30 years fixing a portal to bring his brother back to Earth…" she mumbled. "Though a different Stan in another dimension actually stayed together with his Carla, things went down very differently there and he had a son with her, but that's not the point right now-"
Lee's eyes widened. "Uh. Right, that..." He remembered that she'd mentioned that before, the thing about fixing a portal. (The another-him staying together with Carla was new, though. Made him feel kinda weird about his own ex...)
Miz was going to tell him not to worry about it, but then thought better of it. There was something she was worried about.
"I don't know if that'll happen here, since we've changed things already. -The portal, I mean." She frowned. "But more importantly, please take care of Shermie," she told him. "Even after Sixer goes off to college and you're off on your boat, please make sure you keep in contact with Shermie. Please make sure that Shermie would have a way to contact you, if they were ever in trouble."
Lee blinked, confused about this sudden change in topic. "Uh… well, yeah. Of course I'll keep in touch with Shermie? But Shermie's just a toddler…" Lee frowned as him saying that didn't seem to leave the demon-dragon looking any happier at anything. ...Which meant he must be missing something. "Okay, look. I'm stupid, remember? What are you sayin' here, straight-out."
"You're not…" Miz started, then stopped, and sighed. "Visit your mom sometime, meet Shermie when they're older. Make sure that… if something happens in the future, you'll be able to take care of Shermie. That there's some place where Shermie can go to find you for help when they need it," Miz told him quietly, making sure that neither of the Fords could hear. "Also, you're not stupid. The older Stan self taught himself to build an interdimensional portal without ever getting a college education. He's not stupid and neither are you."
Okay, Lee was stupid? But he wasn't that stupid. He didn't try to touch upon his own level of intelligence (or not), and instead went straight for the important stuff that she'd just said. "What's… what happened? Will happen?" Because they were from the future right? Lee was getting really worried now, because... "Is something gonna happen to-" his ma and pa? Was something gonna happen to his family? His Ma? Why would he need to be able to help Shermie- Was his pa gonna throw Shermie outta the house at some point, too? Was he gonna have to… take care of Shermie himself? With Sixer? If so, then the demon-dragon had better tell him-!
"Shhh!" Miz shushed him, glancing around to make sure that none of the other Pines were listening. "Look, this is just a precaution. And your family will be fine. Just that…" She sighed. "You know those two kids who were here before? That first day? Those two are Shermie's grandkids."
Lee's eyes widened again. -Little baby Shermie's grandkids? That was… wait. Lee frowned. If those two were Shermie's GRANDkids… and Shermie was just a baby now… and the older thems were what, 60-something, maybe? Only 60-something, and grand-uncles? Then that meant that...
Lee got quiet as he looked down at Miz. "You mean…" Oh. Oh, man. ...Yeah, their old man would not be happy about that...
Miz nodded. "Yeah, teen pregnancy. Needless to say, your father wasn't happy." (Lee grimaced.) "And well, back in the other dimension, Shermie ran away, went to Stan and he took care of them, made sure Shermie was alright, and that the kid was alright."
Lee nodded slowly. "Right. So… you just… want me to make sure that this time around, I'm still around here someplace for Shermie to go to for help," instead of out sailing on his boat in the back beyonds of who-knew-where, looking for treasure. Miz nodded. "You can still go sailing, but it would be nice to have some location like a house or a base that Shermie could find you at." Lee frowned. "Why can't my brother know about this?" Lee asked next. Because Sixer was gonna be around this time to help - or he'd better be, instead of lost in some other-dimensional place, or Lee would sock him one in the jaw for being so stupid as heck! - but... it was pretty obvious to Lee that Miz didn't want Sixer to know about any of this stuff, at all.
She sighed. "If you want to tell him, you can, just do it after we leave." She sighed again. "I really don't want Stan and Ford getting into another argument about it. So, just don't bring it up until after we're gone." And she sounded so weary that Lee sighed and nodded.
"Alright, I won't bring it up with Sixer until after you guys leave." Lee didn't exactly blame her, either. He'd seen those guys argue at each other a couple times now, and it hadn't been pretty. He didn't want to be the one to accidentally start something else up between them. (that would be really messed up.)
Miz gave him a grateful smile. "Thanks," she told him. With that said, she turned away from him and began making her way back to the boat, grinning as she went. -Ok, there was one worry addressed. It would be sad if the twins weren't born in this world… like they hadn't been born in that other dimension…
She clambered up onto the deck, and glanced over at the older Ford. Yet another difference between Stan and Ford's dimensions that, hopefully, they wouldn't notice. Not until they got back, so that brother could bring Stan's brother back to life and… hopefully Stan wouldn't be too mad.
...and Ford wouldn't be able to do anything about it. He'd realize that this Stan wasn't his brother, that he wasn't home, that he was still in the wrong dimension, and then...
Miz thought about that. Was it… mean to not allow that Stanford to try and go home to his own dimension? Because Bill needed him here - well, there, with the rest of them - because he was part of Bill's Zodiac. But was that… mean? She shook her head. She shouldn't care so much about what that jerk wanted… but why did she still feel so bad for him?
Miz sighed. Whatever, this wasn't her business; it was between Bill, that Stanford and Stan. They could deal with it all themselves.
...besides, the last time she'd tried to butt in on their business, she'd just made everything worse.
Like she always did when she got in an argument between adults…
Miz shook her head. Right, that wasn't important.
She walked over to Stan (who was also back on top of the boat again, not sitting on the beach, or she would've gone over there) and sat down next to him. After a bit of companionable silence (underscored by the sound of low-grade grumbling from Bill, who was sitting at the opposite end of the deck from Ford, now, with Stanley sitting about halfway in-between them in a nice folding beach chair, soda in-hand), Miz spoke up. "The government agents will be here tonight."
Stan nodded. "Was expectin' them earlier." It was fine; they'd planned for this. Friday or Saturday night, it made no difference (...well, except the amount of money the younger twins got to fleece off of the locals). Miz knew what to do for her part.
Stan finished off the last of his soda, then stood up with a groan. He folded up the chair, carried it over to stow it away again, and tossed the can while he was at it, and…
...he took his sweet and leisurely time getting himself down the ladder, to let the kids know what was what, and that it was time to get rid of the makeshift booth, and finish setting things up.
And hey, if these government guys were as stupid as the ones who'd arrested him back in Oregon? This was going to be annoying.
"...well… THAT happened," Stan deadpanned as they all watched the dragon escape into the ocean. The government agents were shouting in disbelief and frustration.
And the man (supposedly in charge) standing next to Stan groaned out, "How did-?"
Stan shrugged. "Eh, I guess its paw was healed."
The agents had come, just as Miz had said they would. They'd demanded for the twins to hand over the dangerous creature so they could bring it back to the labs for testing. Sixer and Lee had played their parts well, protesting rather loudly, "No! You're just going to cut it open!"
Some of the tourists and locals had also protested. They'd grown a little attached to the creature over the last day and a half, what with the creature acting quite docile once they'd started contributing their own food to feed it. (All the real food had been teleported away by Miz into a subspace she'd built into her OWN hat, copying her brother, to snack on later.)
DragonMiz had still been somewhat skittish before then, but had calmed down after people continued to be non-hostile towards her and feed her all that yummy food - like those hotdogs! Sixer and Lee had always been nearby to give her some scratches and soothing words.
And, the end result of all of this? -The dragon had captured the hearts of the people. And those same people had then become very upset that the government had been going to take her away.
So some people had blocked the agents' path, and others had urged for the twins to get the dragon to safety. There had been some struggle back-and-forth, the agents being afraid to open fire when there had been so many civilians nearby on what was a very crowded beach, besides. The police in the area hadn't wanted any violence to break out either. The commotion had startled the dragon, who had thrashed around on the beach a bit more, and was eventually herded towards the ocean by the twins, where it dove into the water and had finally swam away.
...to the consternation of all the agents that had come to take it away, up to and including the one standing there groaning at Stan's side right now.
Stan hid a smile. Well hey, it looked like they'd done it. (Not that Stan had worried all that much about the three of them being able to pull it all off.) Hell, the onlookers were even cheering. (Heh. Crowd participation was always kinda fun, when you were able to really pull it off right.)
Stan stood there and watched, as the agents cursed and ran off back to their cars, grabbing their communication devices to begin barking orders to stuff like some helicopter pilots, and the coast guard. Stan left them to it - not like they were gonna find it again - and turned away to make his way back to the kids.
"Well, looks like the dragon escaped," he said to them with a Mr. Mystery smile.
"Looks like it has. Well, maybe this is for the best," Lee said with a shrug, as he patted his brother 'consolingly' on the back. "Hopefully it's goin' back to wherever it came from."
"I suppose so…" Sixer said himself, rather dourly. It wasn't even all that faked. He wanted to study that solid light projection more, how did that even work? Light? As a solid? Sadly it became insubstantial if any damage occurred that Miz didn't approve of and he never got a chance to really inspect it.
After making a show of gazing out at the ocean for a while, they all walked back to the boat. Once they were within the bubble of the perception filter, Lee bent over his knees and started laughing. "Holy shit! That actually worked?!"
"Yup." Stan grinned. "So how's it feel? Your first con?"
Miz was wiggling cheerfully. "Did I do good?" she asked. Bill patted her on the head with a smile.
"Yes. You did great," he praised her, and Miz looked very pleased with herself.
Ford was pinching the bridge of his nose. "This was a risky plan. Lying to the government," and getting one of the demons involved, but no-one had listened to his concerns on that front before, so why repeat them now when he knew they'd be completely ignored.
"Like you did when we mind-zapped those agents that one time?" Stan raised an eyebrow. Ford had even used Mabel's drawings as his 'important documents' for that little act.
Ford twitched and gave his brother a sour look. "This and that are different," he defended himself. "I was trying to protect us! After whatever you did to bring them down upon our heads," Ford grumbled.
"Yeah, whatever," Stan shrugged, ignoring the mild jab. "We didn't get caught this time, no-one was hurt, and hey, a bunch of people paid out the nose for some really unique pictures, and a story to tell. It's all good."
"And we're rich!" Lee grinned.
Sixer rolled his eyes. "Several hundred dollars isn't going to last us through the rest of the months left until graduation."
Lee scoffed. "It's still more money than I've ever held at one time." Yeah, he technically had more than this in his bank account for the boat, but held in his hands all at the same time? He'd never earned so much, so quickly, and actually gotten to hold all that cash!
"Actually, with the other profits from the newspaper interviews you and your brother did, you've got over a thousand dollars altogether," Stan told them, having kept track of all the transactions. "Still ain't THAT much, but it'll last you if you're careful with your spending." Stan turned to nod at Miz. "The coupons should help with keepin' the costs down on food. The boat's pretty self-sufficient now. The rest of the school year is paid for, in terms of school lunches," which Stan had gone and paid off while he'd been in the office Friday morning and had the cash-money on him, "So all you need to do now is remember to eat and sleep, attend your classes, and do your damn homework," he said, giving Lee a pointed grumpy old-man stare, "And then turn it all in on time, take your final exams, and graduate."
Lee saw Stan glancing at him while he said that. Right, yeah. Lee still wanted to work, but after Miz had told him about how the older him had been kicked out and never graduated, and the older him had told him about the really-low-pay thing... Well, Lee kinda understood why the older him wanted him to graduate so much. Wanted him to do the thing that he'd never been able to do. And… fine. Lee would attend school. If they really had the money to stay afloat, then...
"I want to be sure that we have enough, though," Lee told the older him.
"Write up a budget, just like we did with the boat," the older him told him. "I'll look it over; give ya some pointers." (Upon hearing that, Lee relaxed a good bit.)
"I'm hungry," Miz declared. "There's a food challenge with a cash prize happening at that pub down on Main Street." She looked at Stan. "Can I go?"
Stan nodded at her. "Yeah. Go get some food, kid. -Bill, you wanna go with her?" The kid nodded, and they both set off together. (Stan saw the look Ford sent after them, and Stan grimaced and waved him off, too. ...Not like he could stop Ford if he tried, even if his brother looked about as happy at following the demons around as Stan was at the idea of them maybe ganging up on him, again. ...Eh, what the hell. Give him a minute, and he'd follow after them, too. Grab a few extra things to make the hold a little more homey, after that.)
After Miz and her brother walked off, Ford in a slow striding pursuit, Lee sighed and turned to the older him. "Miz is trying to earn more money for us, isn't she?" The older him nodded.
"She'll probably try and hand you the cash, sayin' that she doesn't need it or nothin' herself," a lot like the demon-lady had done with all those coupons. A kinda roundabout way of helping, that maybe wouldn't set off that karma thing of hers.
...Since it wasn't money she was getting because she wanted it, just earning because she was eating a lot - which was what she was really wanting to do, eat herself full - then she could just decide that the money and coupons she received for doing that were kind of a side thing, not important - if Stan was understanding that karma problem thing right. He'd talked with her a little bit more about it today, off and on when they'd been sitting together on the beach, and…
If he understood it right, because she wasn't claiming those coupons as the point of her eating a lot and winning the challenge, and because what she wanted out of those food challenges herself was to eat a huge amount and that was it, then she could give the stuff she won from doing that away to somebody else with no problem. ...Yeah, Stan felt like he had a better handle on this stuff and how it worked now.
Miz wanted to help. But because of that karma junk, she couldn't help. Not directly; not without her karma-whatever stuff making her itch and feel bad. So she'd had to do it in a roundabout way, with the coupons and the washer and dryer, and all the rest of it. Stan worried a little bit about this junk, because it sounded like a serious problem - a hell of a lot worse than she seemed to be thinking it was - but Miz seemed to be handling it all well enough, for now.
Stan remembered what the kid had talked about, though. If this 'good' and 'bad' stuff was impacted by other people, and stuff could change over time, and somebody could only fool this system-thing for so long...
...Well, he could probably just leave it up to the kid. The demon-kid didn't like the idea of stuff maybe boomeranging back on his little sister any more than Stan did. Though Stan was more worried about the possible blowback on everyone-else around her, like his family, than her. She would 'come back to life' after exploding, all on her own, but his own family sure wouldn't…
"You'll need to think about whether or not to take it from her, though," Stan told him. "Cash is a kinda different thing." Coupons came with strings attached, because they had to use them that way. "Cash isn't coupons; you can use it for anything." And taking handouts was a little… "You better make sure you know whether it's an actual 'gift' with no strings attached, or some kinda loan," he warned the younger him. "You might need to even stuff out with her still, at least a little." That''d be safer for everybody involved, if he understood this thing right; transactions worked differently, if you were really doing it tit for tat.
Lee rubbed his arm at the mention of a 'gift', then winced at the talk of a 'loan'. "I don't actually gotta pay her back, right-?" Then he paused and thought about what Miz had asked of him. Take care of Shermie. "-Wait, nevermind, I think I know what I need to do for this stuff to work out even." And, yeah. It wasn't like it was something he wouldn't have done anyway, if Shermie was in trouble.
Stan raised an eyebrow at him but Lee waved him off. "It's nothing. I got this."
Stan frowned. He wasn't so sure about 'nothing' from a younger himself, but he wasn't gonna dig into it right then. Instead, he sat the twins down and had a quick talk about their finances - and not just because he wanted to give Lee a better example of how to handle a budget.
That was when Stan revealed to them exactly how much money he'd been making along the boardwalk this whole time.
"What? You're joshing me-" But then Lee gasped when Stan flipped the lid off of the crate that they were using as a table, right in front of him, and they saw…
And then the older him pulled out a wad of cash from a pocket… and another wad of cash from another pocket, and another... and Lee saw with his own two eyes the sheer amount that his older self had actually managed to earn within the past few days, that his older self was only now adding that single day's take to the full crate and pile of.
"We… we can't take this!" Lee stammered, even though he really, really wanted to...
Stan snorted. "Well I ain't got no need for any of it," Stan told them truthfully. "S'not like I can use this cash back in my dimension," he said, lying just as easily to the two of them in the very next breath. He sat back and folded his arms. "We're not staying here forever. We're gonna leave and go home, and then all this cash would be nothing more than dirty slips of paper. Can't use this stuff back home, anyway," Stan lied again, easily.
"But this is-" Lee didn't feel right just accepting all this cash. "How can I pay you back for-"
"Stay in school. Graduate. Work in the meantime if you really gotta," Stan directed specifically at Lee. "I know you talked to them already about me makin' you miss work for the next week or so," Stan told him, though he'd gone around and talked to each of his bosses personally first, making sure that they knew what was up. Word got around town quick, and Lee had gone to talk to them all in person himself, bein' responsible about things, but Stan had still wanted to make sure that they were gonna be okay with Lee missing a few nights that week, and that weekend, as he settled into his new routine - and weren't going to give him any guff, trying to get him to work any longer shifts or hours until after graduation was over and the summertime really hit. Hadn't told Lee about it at all; he hadn't wanted the argument, or the push back on it.
"I can't stop you from working the jobs you've already got," Stann told him. "But you make sure you get your homework done, and don't go skipping school anymore until the end of the year. After that? I don't care. You'll be eighteen in June; you can do what you want then, and nobody'll be able to say boo about it," Stan told them plainly. Sixer looked down at the crate filled with cash, neatly sorted into stacks of the same domination and held together with a rubber band. "Look you two, I'm going to have to trust that you'll be alright." Stan told them. "I ain't your boss, I ain't your parents, there's technically nothing stopping you from droppin' out of school. But you shouldn't. You shouldn't have to go through what I did."
Lee winced. He didn't know exactly what the other him might have gone through, but from what he was picking up, it hadn't been good. After all, Lee had heard that stress made someone age faster, and well… the old-man him looked at least ten years older than the older Sixer. (Or at least, he seemed more…)
"Alright," Lee said, letting out a breath. "I'll stay in school. I'll graduate. And… then what?" Lee asked, looking up at him.
Stan shrugged. "Heck you askin' me for? -Like I said, it ain't my problem after you graduate. You'll be an adult." They'd be turning eighteen just as their last final exams were finishing up, and classes were gonna be over, forever. "So, you're gonna be makin' your own decisions, then. No lookin' to anyone else; it's all on you."
Lee pulled in a breath as he thought about it. "Yeah, okay. That's fine." He glanced down at the stacks of bills again. "So... I just gotta graduate?"
"Yeah. That money there is for keeping you and your brother in the clear up until graduation. If you still have any left over once you've graduated, eh, keep it for whatever else you feel like," Stan told them. "That's where the budgeting comes in."
Lee was deep in thought. "Like a deposit for a house…"
"Whatever you want. I won't be here to say nothin' about it. Just remember that a house is a lotta work, more than you might expect, and it'll keep you tied down, whether you want it to or not. It's a bigger investment than the boat," Stan told him. "Won't be able to buy one and sign all the paperwork until you're eighteen either, if that's what you want." Stan shrugged.
After a bit more deliberation. Lee nodded. "Fine. So, this is just bribe money to get me and Sixer to stay in school." He laughed. "I'm good with that."
And that would be that. Lee was going to stay in school, graduate like the other him wanted, and then… and then he would go sailing with his brother, like they'd been planning to since forever. Shermie couldn't get into any teen pregnancy trouble until… y'know… teenager-hood was a thing. So that was maybe gonna only happen at least eleven or twelve years from now. He'd have time to buy a house and plan, to be able to take care of Shermie okay, if he ended up not being there to stop it, in case the thing did actually happen. (...Was stopping it the right thing to do? That would be taking care of Shermie, too, right?) -But that was a long ways off. He and Sixer could go sailing in the meantime, doing the treasure hunting thing!
He'd need to sit down and talk to Sixer about where they'd go first, though; it was their boat, and their home right now. He realized that he hadn't actually talked about this stuff with his twin in weeks, with how focused Sixer had been on his science fair project. As long as he kept in touch with their ma, he could still keep in touch with Shermie, too, no matter where they were, or what they did. ...Well, once Shermie was old enough to be able to communicate.
And… staying in school would pay off the old-man him for his help. Taking care of Shermie in the future would pay off Miz for her help. Lee felt the uncomfortableness inside him at taking all of this money he was just being handled for nothing, settle and slowly dissipate. Because it wasn't actually for nothing; he was gonna be doin' stuff, family stuff, to earn this. (For one thing, getting his diploma sounded like he could make more money to take care of him and his brother, if the treasure hunting thing ended up not working out.) It made him feel better to have a way to pay them back, to not be in debt to them, for all that they'd done for him and his brother. To feel like he was useful in some way. So, yeah. He could do this.
"...Just, y'know, remember that if you want to go treasure hunting anytime soon, that gold is some kinda… rare metal," the old-man him cautioned him, and Lee nodded.
Lee would keep this all in mind. And once the older thems had left, he'd tell Sixer about the Shermie thing too. Shermie was their sibling, they would be ready to care of Shermie in the future. And if Sixer tried to make a stink about it for some unknown, dumb reason, then... well, tough. Miz was counting on Lee to do this. She seemed legitimately worried about Shermie ending up in trouble, and maybe not having anybody to go to for help, like the older thems had done for him and his brother. And Lee would do it, and not just to pay Miz back for her help. Shermie was family. Shermie was going to be counting on him to do this, too.
And if it really ended up being some huge problem with Sixer somehow, that it just wouldn't work out for whatever reason? (Like, baby screaming keeping him awake when he was working on something science-y that was gonna make them both millions, like he'd been muttering about to himself lately?) Well… then Lee could figure out a way to take care of Shermie himself, for the both of them.
After all, Shermie was his little sister. Lee wasn't going to let her down.
