Illusion is Reality

Chapter 89

-LOVE is your sick raw biological urge to reproduce trying to dress up in a suit and charm its way through the opera!-

School on Monday was filled with excited whispers. Lee felt himself grinning instead of shying away this time at the things being said. "They caught a sea serpent! I saw it!" "So COOL!" "Do you think those alien girls had something to do with it?" "Naw, they stayed back the whole time, probably didn't want to get caught by those government agents who came to try and grab the monster."

Lee was quite happy to be soaking in all this admiration. His jubilant mood was broken when he spotted Carla, though. She… looked pissed. Lee was a little taken aback. Why was she so angry? Then Lee noticed that while she was looking in his direction, it wasn't him she was glaring at.

He followed her gaze and found her glaring at… Sixer?

Then Carla noticed him watching her and turned away in a huff, striding quickly down the hall. Lee froze in place. Carla really was angry. And… with the things Lee had been thinking about, what with the way his brother saw Carla, how his brother talked about her… Lee was starting to think that maybe… maybe his brother had done something, said something to her sometime that he didn't know about, that was close enough to what he'd said to him yesterday that… maybe Carla had heard. Something that would get her this angry.

It worried Lee a lot. And made him question why Carla had actually broken up with him. She'd said it was because he was stupid, and that was true, but… if his brother had said something to her, told her he thought she was stupid… could that have started something?

...No. No, that didn't make any sense. Why would Carla take something out on him that Sixer had done? She wasn't like some of the other girls; she said stuff straight-out to people usually, even if it might really take her awhile to work herself up to saying whatever sometimes. And she didn't blame other people for other stuff; if she got mad at you, it was because you did something. She'd broken up with him because he'd been too stupid for her, and a bunch of other things that had made him a bad boyfriend; so she was mad at Sixer, because… Sixer had done something to make her mad.

Sixer said he hadn't, though. So… there was something he was missing. ...Maybe Sixer had said something really bad to her, but he just didn't think he had? Lee couldn't imagine his brother lying to him about anything, and Sixer was pretty bad at girls. And… uh. People, in general. (Lee was pretty sure that half the reason Sixer got along with the teachers was because there were pretty straightforward, consistent ways they were and weren't supposed to act. So Sixer knew exactly what to do and not do without thinking too much about it, and he didn't have to really change the script up between teachers.)

"Uh, Sixer," Lee asked his brother, nudging him in the shoulder with his shoulder. 'Are you sure you didn't do something to make Carla mad at you?"

Sixer let out a huff of breath, as he slammed his locker shut. "I didn't do anything to her. She made a stupid assumption - multiple times - and then acted upon it. It has nothing to do with me." (Lee frowned. That sounded like… a conversation that he didn't know about. As far as he'd known, Carla had never talked to Sixer for very long, and never out of earshot.)

And Miz had a very grumpy look on her face as she stared at Sixer. "But you didn't have to be so mean about it to her. She misunderstood." Though, Miz needed to really ask Carla for her side of the story to see how she saw it. Miz was still having trouble really understanding it otherwise. Ah… damn teenage drama.

Sixer turned towards her and gave her a flat look.

"If you knew half of what she thought she was doing, you wouldn't be saying that," Sixer said. He then turned back to Lee. "Believe me, it's better that you're no longer dating her. Crampelter is more intelligent that she is."

("That's just rude now," Miz muttered.)

Lee's jaw dropped. Then he clenched it closed again. "...So you did say somethin' bad to her," Lee said slowly.

"I made it clear what I thought, of what she told me, when she accosted and then cornered me," Sixer told him, adjusting his glasses. "Should I have ignored what she had to say?" he questioned Lee.

Lee frowned. "What did she say to-"

Lee stopped when a hand came down on his shoulder. He turned towards the hand, and came face-to-face with-

-Bill, who was on the other end of said hand, smiled thinly at him.

"It's not important," said Bill. "STOP talking about exes, stupid or otherwise. You DON'T want to do that." And Lee felt the hand on his shoulder tighten slightly, and very very firmly, as he stared the demon straight in the eyes.

Lee swallowed, hard.

"...fine…" Lee muttered, backing down for now. Even if he really wanted to know what had happened between Carla and his brother… he wasn't stupid, he wasn't going to keep talking about it in front of the demon. Not if it would get him mangled by Bill.

"GOOD," said Bill, letting go of his shoulder. "-It's a waste of time. It won't help you. You won't be getting back together with her, ever. Not even if you were the last two living humans on earth!" Bill said, grinning brightly.

"That's a very mean way to put it." Miz pouted at her brother, somewhat annoyed. She wanted things to work out between them.

"Is it?" said Bill. "And here I thought it was a good thing! -You can do better," he told Lee, slapping him on the back a lot more softly than Lee was expecting (which kinda startled him, actually - it felt more like a pat). "And so can she!"

Miz sighed before patting Lee on the back gently. "Well, just focus on being happy and living your best life. Although I'm still a little sad it didn't work out between you two…" Seb's Stan and Carla ended up together after all. Then again, they were very different people.

Speaking of Carla, Miz wasn't quite sure what to do about her anymore. While she'd originally wanted to get Carla in trouble for breaking the project (possibly getting expelled or something), seeing how angry she was at how well Sixer and Lee were doing was just as satisfying. After all, wasn't the best revenge just living the best life and fuck the haters? (Not literally fuck them of course.) Not to mention that if Sixer had been such a jerk towards her, in such a pompous and derogatory way, even if he didn't realize it, Miz could see where Carla was coming from with her revenge plan. Heck, the only sticking point here was that Carla had hurt Lee as part of her revenge plan by breaking up with him in such an awful way. And that was what really made Miz unhappy. Lee was a good kid. He didn't deserve that.

...so… revenge on Carla was finished then? Maybe. Miz decided that perhaps it wasn't all that important anymore. Besides, her anger at what Carla had done had long since burned out. She really couldn't stay mad for long. Heck, she was holding Sixer's hand as they walked through the hallways.

...did she forgive too easily? Perhaps.

But Miz didn't mind. Being angry didn't feel nice. It made her chest ache to hold onto anger. She didn't know how Bill managed it. And the twins were doing fine even despite being disowned so… eh? Sure Sixer missed his chance to go to some fancy school but frankly, did he even really need it? (And it's not like his project was a real perpetual motion machine anyway.)

He still got an education and like seven Ph.D.'s or something, right? Or was it twelve? And he got to meet Fiddleford. Though Miz was starting to get the idea that Sixer wouldn't actually count either of those as a plus point. He was… kind of a self centered dick. With a superiority complex.

AND an inferiority complex. Not the best combination.

But...

Miz squeezed Sixer's hand. He wasn't beyond help. Not yet. He was still young, he could still change. She had to believe that. She had to believe there was still a chance for him to grow up to be a better person...

"Hey Sixer?" Miz asked. "Why do you think Carla's stupid?"

Sixer looked over at her. "Because she can't even tell the difference between me and Lee," he scoffed. (-And that immediately had Lee looking over at him, shocked. "-What?")

Miz twitched (while Bill kept a careful ear on Sixer). "I have trouble telling people apart. I have to cheat with my powers to know who's who. Does that make me stupid?" Miz asked. (Lee was still looking a little stunned, not quite past what his brother had just said to Miz about Carla, while...)

Sixer looked a little taken aback. "But you're not human; that hardly counts," he pointed out. (Because as far as he was concerned, if she had different senses that she relied upon, then telling her not to use them would be like telling someone who was human to close their eyes and then tell two people apart - of course there was going to be an issue!)

Miz whined. "And if I was? If I was human, and I couldn't tell other humans apart, does that make me stupid?"

"Well, yes," Sixer said plainly, adjusting his glasses. He'd rather thought that was obvious.

Miz huffed and let go of Sixer's hand. "Well I guess that makes me stupid. Not worth your time." (Bill eyed them both, but remained silent for the moment.) Miz pulled on Lee's hand and walked away, saying, "Come on, let's get to homeroom," and Sixer blinked after her as she walked off.

"What did I do this time?" Sixer asked.

"You have a high INT but staggeringly low WIS," Miz huffed out at him as she stomped away. (Bill let out a 'HA' laugh with a wide and hard grin, then a "-YES!") Lee gave his brother a helpless look as he was dragged down the hallway along with her.

And Sixer froze in place as he processed that statement. Then he hurried to catch up to them. "-Was that a D, D and more D reference?" he asked her, as he came up next to her side, walking along with them quickly.

"What's it matter? I'm clearly too stupid for-" Miz snipped before Lee sighed and, having picked up on this over the last few days of knowing her, placed his free hand on Miz's head and gently patted her. She calmed but still muttered, "Prosopagnosia is a thing that people can have. It's not their fault! It's not my fault…"

Yeah, Lee didn't want to touch that one with a ten-foot pole. And hey, that wasn't really the problem here, anyway, right? "-Look, I don't think my brother meant to call you stupid," Lee started to say (as he removed his hand from her head, because he really didn't like the way Bill was watching him, ever since he'd started doing that...), but Miz huffed and said herself, "He clearly did."

Sixer looked between them. "Wait- you-" But Miz 'hmph'ed and turned away from him.

"Might want to quit while you still have a HEAD, 'Ford," Bill told him, with an amused (but hard, and almost expectant) gleam in his eye.

And Lee stared at the demon and went chillingly cold, because that demon was angry and just waiting to show it (-like maybe how he'd 'showed it' to Crampelter? or worse?!), oh shit-

"-Sixer, just drop it, okay?" Lee barely managed to not stammer out. "Just stop talking, right now."

"'Stop talking'?" the demon said next, oh so casually. "Oh, but I think he should start talking instead. After all," the demon added next, "How is he supposed to APOLOGIZE TO MY SISTER, if your twin brother can't talk?" Bill gave him a dead man's stare. "He IS sorry that he said that INCORRECTLY, ISN'T HE," the demon said flatly. It wasn't a question.

"-He is definitely very sorry," Lee said quickly to the demon's demand. "Sixer, say you're sorry."

Sixer looked over at his brother and said plainly, "For what?"

Oh, god. His brother was going to die.

"Just, uh, just give me a sec-" Lee stammered out at the older demon, snatching his arm away from Miz, as he grabbed his brother to literally drag him off and away from the demons, to talk. (Read: save his twin's can't-talk-to-girls-to-save-his-life life.)

Miz sniffled. That made Bill look even more… something that Lee didn't have words for, but was really damn terrified of. He dragged Sixer away even faster.

"You are NOT stupid," Lee heard Bill tell his little sister, as he dragged his brother off down the hallway. "Don't EVER let ANYONE try and tell you otherwise."

"But I am stupid. Stupid for thinking that any version of Ford could possibly be nice…" was Miz's miserable reply.

"NO, you are-" But then, Lee saw Bill hesitate for a moment (just before Lee dragged Sixer with him into the boy's bathroom).

"...Define: 'nice'," was the last thing he heard from down the hallway, as the door swung shut behind them.

Lee relaxed slightly once there was some distance, a wall, and an actual door that he could (and did then) lock, between his brother and the demon that could toss Crampelter around like a ragdoll. "Dammit Sixer, do you want to be torn apart?"

"No. That would be a very unpleasant experience," Sixer said simply.

Lee groaned. "Do you even know what you just did wrong?" Sixer blinked. Lee resisted the urge to punch his brother in the shoulder as hard as he could, for being a complete moron. "You hurt Miz's feelings!" he hissed.

Sixer raised an eyebrow. "And?"

"You don't go hurtin' a girl's feelings, Sixer," his brother told him. "Especially not when the girl's got a very protective, really dangerous brother around, who's just waiting for an excuse to kill you for it now!" Lee told him. "You know, the guy who kicked Crampelter's ass last week for fun, and that was when he wasn't all angry like he is now?!"

His brother frowned. "But what did I do? She was asking about a hypothetical situation?"

Hypothetical situation? (The heck?) "-That's not the point," Lee told his twin, then rubbed a hand down his face and sighed. "Look, even if whatever it was was 'hypothetical' somehow, you still made the dragon-demon lady upset because she thinks you said she was stupid. You don't-" Lee rubbed his face again, then dropped his hands to his side, trying not to clench them. "Don't just go off insulting someone like that. And if they think you insulted them, don't argue with them about it, just say 'I'm sorry!' -That's just common sense!" Lee hissed out at him, then finally said something that he'd been holding back for awhile: "This is why people don't like you!"

Sixer opened his mouth to protest but Lee continued on, frustration bleeding through.

"-It ain't 'your hands', Sixer," Lee told him roughly, tired of his twin always blaming that on everything. "It's because you keep pulling shit like this, lately!" Even Crampelter didn't pick on Sixer for his hands anymore when he did it, not really; he did it because Sixer was a nerd now, not a freak. Getting picked on for being a nerd was normal. It wasn't like anybody was throwing rocks at them anymore. "-Everybody else has grown up, yeah? So why can't you?" Just callling people stupid was… Miz wasn't stupid, and neither was Carla! -Yeah, you heard him, he thought it! He might not be dating her anymore, but still!

"I am-" Sixer cut himself off, looking annoyed. "Well, you're one to talk," he seemed to settle on instead. ...Yeah, Sixer. Great comeback, there.

"Look, just apologize to her. Okay? -Tell her that you weren't tryin' to call her stupid, and you're sorry that you hurt her feelings." Lee sighed. "I don't want you gettin' killed for being an idiot."

"I'm not an-"

"-You don't even know what you did wrong!" Lee said in frustration and exasperation. "You didn't know. Right? I had to tell you. -And hey, you're the one who just said that if you don't know something…" Lee ground out, turning Sixer's own words against him.

"That's not what I said," Sixer huffed out.

"It's what she heard," Lee said, and he was starting to think (with a sinking feeling) that it was maybe even what his twin had actually meant. "Doesn't change the fact that you don't know nothing about PEOPLE!" Lee stressed.

"'Don't know anything.' Grammar, Stanley," Sixer said, "And I know enough-"

"No," Lee said, "You really, really don't. -And you know what? The old-man me is right. You need to know about people to get anywhere in life after high school. Because, hey, maybe you really are smarter than everybody else at book-stuff, but you know what? You can't just go off an' live off on your own, alone by yourself, all by yourself, and make it alone on your own dependin' on nobody." It just didn't work that way.

Sixer scoffed at this. "If I wanted to-"

"-except you don't want to, because then you'd have to do everything of everything and all of it by yourself," Lee told him. "Unless you want to add 'growing your own food' and 'making the cloth and needles and thread you need so you can go off sewing your own clothing' to the list." His brother was quiet. "Sixer, you can go off and be as smart as anybody, but treatin' people like dirt is just gonna get you nowhere fast. Nobody has to like you, or help you with anything, you know." And Lee frowned as he thought about the fact that his brother really was heading on down that road right now.

(And he made it a point not to say that Sixer wouldn't be able to make any friends or charm any business partners if he didn't learn to talk to people, instead of just dismissing everyone else right off the bat like he always did. And he damn well didn't say it, because he'd heard what Pa had yelled out at his twin when he'd tossed Sixer outta the house, -He wasn't gonna do that to his brother. That wasn't fair. Those college folks should've at least listened and let him talk about his science fair project thing, maybe let him try and explain-)

"I don't treat people like-" Sixer started to say but Lee just stared at him and Sixer trailed off. "What do you want from me?" Sixer sighed.

"Tell Miz what I told you to tell her." Lee crossed his arms. "And I want you to start actually thinking about how other people might feel at some of the stuff you say. Treat other people like they're people, and not just objects that walk around and exist around you." It shouldn't be this difficult.

Sixer rolled his eyes. "What do you want me to do differently, specifically?" Sixer asked next.

Lee frowned at him. "You mean right now?" Was his brother actually listening to him, here? Lee let out a breath and looked over his brother. ...Huh.

Yeah, okay. "-Like I said, you need to apologize to Miz before her brother rips you apart for hurting her feelings," Lee told him, leaning back against the wall. "And the fact that you didn't even realize you hurt her feelings is why you're an idiot," Lee pointed out, trying to put things in a way that his twin might understand a little easier. "Like how did you not notice that trap? She asks if you think she's stupid and you say yes?! What were you thinking?! You wouldn't like that if somebody said that to you-" Lee began.

"-Okay, whatever! I'll apologize!" Sixer ground out. He didn't look all too happy with his brother, though. "That doesn't tell me what else you think I should be doing differently, though. That's just one single instance that happened just this one time," Sixer complained at him.

Geez. "Sixer, it ain't hard, I swear. Just think about how you'd feel if you heard somebody tell you whatever you're thinkin' about sayin' to somebody else. It's not..." Lee frowned as he rubbed the back of his neck, trying to think of a better way to say this stuff that might actually keep his brother thinking about it. "It's not science-science, it's people-science."

Sixer narrowed his eyes, and frowned at him. "Sociology is a 'soft science'," Sixer said. "It's not a real-"

"-Most people don't think cryptid stuff is 'real science', either, Sixer," Lee told him, crossing his arms.

Lee watched as his brother clenched his jaw and thinned his lips at him. ...Yeah, well. He'd actually asked for it. So, y'know. 'Course he was gonna tell his twin stuff when he actually asked him.

"But cryptids are real! There are two aliens right there-" Sixer tried to complain but Lee rolled his eyes.

Yeah, but most people wouldn't believe it, even with proof and junk. -Hell, Sixer, those two demons haven't really tried all that hard to act human or hide what they are at all, and," Lee waved his arms, "No-one's called the cops or the church on 'em! No-one's called the government to come and take them away! Even the science teach called 'em a couple of aliens, and he's an adult! Did you see anybody try and haul 'em away?"

"...they did for the dragon," was Sixer's petulant reply. Lee rolled his eyes.

"And all they thought it was, was either some kinda new species of animal, or just some super-old mutant monitor lizard - not an actual dragon." Lee had heard what those agents had been saying into their radios. "Point is, even if something ain't a hard science, don't mean it ain't real. And this people-science thing? It's real. People have feelings, and things you say or do can hurt them, and-"

"-Fine! I'll read a few books on practical sociology," Sixer said, throwing his hands in the air in disgust. "-And apologize!" Sixer repeated, at the long warning look Lee gave him. "Just because she's apparently sensitive about this!" He didn't sound all that sorry, but… yeah, Lee knew this was the best he was gonna get.

He gave his brother a nod, unlocked the bathroom door, and the two of them went back outside into the hallway. Miz was looking somewhat glum, and she didn't even look at Sixer when the two of them walked back up to them and Sixer said, "I'm sorry for calling you stupid."

"No, you're not. Sorry, that is." Bill pointed out, eyeing him. ('Great…' Lee mentally groaned.)

Miz sighed. "At least he apologized." She turned to Lee and took his hand to pull him to class, pretty much ignoring Sixer. "It's good enough for now. I guess," Miz said, not directly addressing Sixer as she went to homeroom.

Sixer clenched his hands into fists. He was… upset that Miz was still ignoring him. Even though he apologized. -What was the point of doing it, then?!

"WELL." Bill walked towards Sixer, then circled behind him. "Maybe try NOT LYING when saying 'sorry' next time, if you don't want her MAD at you!" Bill informed him, as he finished his circuit, then strode down the hallway after his sister. (Though, Bill was a little frustrated about the fact that her staying mad wasn't actually a given - Miz had told him that she couldn't stay mad for long, which meant that if Sixer didn't try harder sooner, before that happened, then…)

Sixer huffed and walked to class. Lying? So what. He said an apology! Why should it matter if he meant it or not? And why was she mad in the first place, anyway? It had been a hypothetical question! She wasn't actually human!

Later that day, Carla paused at the sight of the person standing next to her as she opened her locker. She raised an eyebrow.

"You're not with your posse?" Carla asked the new girl, as she began pulling out her books and binders for her after lunch classes.

Miz sighed. "I wanted to talk to you."

Carla narrowed her eyes as she kept retrieving textbook after textbook. "I'm very busy. So if you would just-"

"Ford's a jerk." Miz said simply. "He's a twat. I can understand why you did what you did. He's an arrogant little dick and deserves to be taken down a notch, I think getting him disowned by his father and thrown into the street was a little much, but otherwise, I think what you did was a very understandable response to your frustration." Miz said quickly.

Carla blinked. "I don't know what you're talking about." She slammed her locker shut and then moved away from it, books and binders in hand. ...And Miz got in her way. She tried to side step the new girl and continue on her way but Miz moved to continue blocking her path.

"What I DO have a problem with, is the fact that you hurt Stan. Why? He didn't know anything. He never realized that you thought-" Carla stopped trying to get around her and just stood in place, giving her a full-on 'you'd better shut up about that RIGHT NOW' glare. Miz made a frustrated sound. "He loved and respected you. Still does. He didn't know what Ford did, or what you thought, he just thought you were smart and amazing and even now he still…"

Carla frowned as she realized what the girl was likely getting at, given how she'd been trying to hang all over both of those twins for the past week. "What? You're angry that he won't get over me so you can have him? -That's not my problem!" she huffed out at her. Heck, she wished the girl would just take him! Maybe then-

"I'm not interested in him like that," Miz replied. "But I consider him a friend, even if he doesn't. I don't like seeing him unhappy." Miz sighed. "Even 40 years in the future, when I spoke badly of you, Stan still defended you. So, I just want to know, why did you hurt Stan?"

"Forty what?" Carla twitched. Was this that stupid 'alien' thing again that, for some reason, everybody kept falling for-?!

Carla's eyes widened when the teenager in front of her seemed to shimmer and... she was looking at a little girl now, maybe 14 years of age at most. Carla quickly looked around her but the kids in the hallway were going about their business as if they saw nothing.

"They don't notice us," Miz told her plainly, and Carla turned back to her. "They can't hear our conversation either," she added. "I wanted to speak with you alone. So, please? I just want to understand. There have been too many misunderstandings. Please." She bowed forward at the waist.

Carla looked around again and realized that no one else was even so much as giving either of them a second glance.

Carla frowned as she turned back towards the girl. She didn't know how the new girl had managed to pull this little trick off, but...

She didn't trust any of this at all, though - not one bit. And she wasn't about to stand out in the middle of the hallway and talk about-

So Carla reached out, took Miz by the upper arm, and pulled her down the hallway and into a doorway corner, glanced through the window in the door, then opened it and dragged her into one of the (yes) currently-unused advanced study rooms. (She knew how gossip worked. This girl already seemed to know enough - too much. That meant she had to have talked to Stanford, that- that-! And if Stanford Pines had told her that, then he'd definitely also said- Carla shook her head. The girl was just fishing when it came to Stanford; there was no way she could know what she had or hadn't done. She was probably just talking about how she'd made sure that his project had gotten thrown in the trash; that was all...)

Once the door was closed behind them, Carla finally turned back to the 'alien' girl and told her quietly, well under her breath, "Look, I know Stan didn't know - that's the point," she hissed out at Miz angrily, and she looked back at the doorway as she clutched her books and binders to her chest. She looked angry and miserable.

"He didn't know that you thought he was Ford. He never realized it." Miz replied.

"He should have realized it! He-" Carla cut herself off, shook her head from side to side roughly, and she clutched her books to herself a little more tightly. "It's not my fault! He was wearing Stanford's clothes- the same glasses-!" Carla looked frustrated, almost like she wanted to cry. (Maybe Stan really hadn't known - but she'd still felt like she'd been played around with and used.)

Miz sighed. "I know. He should have realized what you would have thought, but he didn't. He didn't know. I told the older version of him about it and he was shocked. He never realized that…" Miz shrugged helplessly. This didn't happen in Seb's dimension since they were triplets and people were forced to pay more attention to know which one was which.

"But he should have!" Carla told her again, angrily. "That's the point!"

Miz was confused. "But how is that different from you not knowing-"

"-I don't care about how many stupid fingers he has, okay!" Carla snapped out at her. "That wasn't why I wanted to date him! I- I shouldn't have had to- it isn't stupid that I didn't 'check his hands' first, I-"

And Miz's eyes went wide.

"-You wanted to date Ford," Miz blurted out, staring at her.

Carla's expression went through several emotions, most of which Miz had trouble with; they all looked pretty complicated. 'Miserable', however, was pretty clear throughout.

Carla lifted a hand to wipe underneath her eyes a bit at a little of the wetness underneath (while feeling a little foolish that she even had the inane thought that, well, at least she was only wearing eye shadow and no mascara that day, or she'd look like a complete mess…).

"I thought he was smart," Carla said, sounding angry with herself, and also with Stanford. "I certainly know better now," she added far more coldly. Because he clearly wasn't smart enough to realize that other people were worth being nice to. To realize that was important. That caring about other people was...

Miz frowned. "But, you knew it was Stan at some point. You went on a couple dates with him…" and had even called him by name, which meant that… Carla had still dated Stan even after she'd found out?

"I thought Stanford wanted me to," Clar said bitterly, clutching her books to her chest even more tightly. "That I needed to date his brother too, for him to..." Carla looked away from Miz for a moment. "It wasn't like I didn't treat Stanley differently than-" Carla bit her lip. She looked angry and terribly frustrated all over again.

(She hated that she'd been tossed back and forth between them - that she'd thought that she had been - and that Stanford didn't even care what that had felt like, what she'd gone through, when she'd finally confronted him about everything, not wanting to do it anymore, to just and solely date him and him alone, and realized…)

(And, even after all that, and everything Stanford had said, when she'd finished staying home from school and crying herself to sleep for three days straight, until she'd gotten angry, instead of just feeling like she wanted to die of shame, and had decided instead that she wasn't going to let some stupid boy keep her from picking herself back up again after that particular ordeal, and she'd tried to give Stanley himself a real, actual, fair chance with her, despite everything? -She'd realized very quickly that one of the reasons Stanley had apparently been so interested in her in the first place had been because he thought she was smart. ...But his brother didn't think that. And Stanley listened to him. And with the way Stanley down talked himself over and over again, comparing himself to his brother…)

(Carla hadn't been able to take it. Stanley wasn't dumb, but the way he talked about himself was absolutely terrible sometimes. And Carla couldn't help but think helplessly of how Stanley might treat her, with the way he already talked about and treated himself, if Stanford changed his twin brother's mind ('woke him up to the fact that...'). If Stanley started thinking that she was dumb, instead, what that might be like... the very idea of it scared her.)

(And when Stanford spoke up about everything, eventually, and called her dumb to her face, this time right in front of Stanley - because Stanford would do that, he'd practically threatened to before, she'd finally realized. With each passing day, and how the way Stanford had been looking at her had just worsened and worsened… it had all been left hanging over her head like a damned Sword of Damocles, one that that six-fingered bastard was holding onto for a rainy day, with his own 'special' pair of redesigned scissors.

And Carla knew that Stanley wouldn't defend her against what his brother said. He wouldn't call her smart if Stanford called her stupid. He wouldn't tell Stanford that he was the one who was wrong. -Because that would imply that Stanley knew something that Stanford did not. And Stanley… she knew him better than that, by this point. She didn't see him ever getting to that point on his own.)

(-And if Stanford decided to tell Stanley everything... She'd seen the writing on the wall; she knew exactly what was going to happen if she didn't do something drastic. Stanley would never, ever take her side in this, and she knew it, and- it had made her angry all over again. The unfairness of it all; the way she'd let herself fall into this trap - all of it.)

(And a boyfriend who just wasn't going to stand up for her, to his brother or family or anyone else? Was no kind of boyfriend at all.)

(-So instead of waiting for Stanford to ruin absolutely everything for her, she'd dumped Stanley herself first. As hard as she could; she didn't want Stanley thinking he had even so much as a snowball's chance in hell of getting her back - because that would just give Stanford the perfect excuse to tell Stanley to stop trying, and why. And then… Well. It wasn't fair that Stanford should get off so easily, was it? For ruining everything like that, for being such a jerk, for how he'd treated her and talked down to her, for how he'd made her feel about everything when none of it had been her fault - all of it.)

(...For thinking she was too stupid to get any little bit of payback, let alone get away with it.)

(And Carla didn't feel sorry in the least about it. Not at all; not even a little. -Because all she'd done was break his project at the exact wrong moment, using a very similar and practical application of her own science fair project on the use of electromagnetic waves for transmission and interference. A highly-practical application that she had very deliberately not written about in any of what she'd submitted for her grade, or on her poster board, or anything else beyond the set of blueprints she'd made for the little RF 'trigger' receiver device that would heat up when exposed to the right frequencies and a high enough magnitude to melt... while attached to a specialized mixture that was rather chemically-unstable at said high temperatures, to go off and explode inside the base of that stupid device, trashing the insides and letting off a not-insignificant amount of smoke just for good measure. Once she'd finished making everything she'd needed, she'd immediately burned the blueprints in her backyard afterwards, straight down to ash and dust. Every last little piece of it. And then she'd gone through with it, her hand on the button of the transmitter that would set it all off, standing there, listening in from the outside of the gymnasium, hiding in nearly plain sight and waiting for just the right moment, until... She'd gotten her revenge all right, and even more.)

(She'd kept her own submitted project almost completely theoretical, too, with just a token applied demo for the fair - as was requested in the assignment - and what had she gotten? -A pat on the head. If she'd been Stanford Pines, the 'teachers pet nerd' of the school, she would've gotten accolades and praises; those college admission board people would have come to Glass Shard Beach to see her, instead. But no. She was just a girl, not the great Mr. Pines, and so all she got from her teachers was a mere glance and an 'oh yes, that's nice Ms. McCorkle...' and nothing else. And yet-)

(Carla was glad that she'd done it. Even she hadn't realized what an absolute liar Stanford really was before then. She'd heard what a few of those college board admission people had said to each other as they'd been walking out of the gymnasium, leaving the school, and- she was just glad that some real genius-level people had been able to look over what Stanford had done and finally set the record straight on him for everybody, once and for all. He was a poser. A loser. -So what if his project had managed to spin for a little over a week straight, one week wasn't the same thing as perpetual-forever, and he hadn't even been measuring the speed it had been spinning at over the course of that week, to see if it had been slowing down at all! He hadn't even bothered to check his work, the theory against the experimental practice; he'd reportedly only been running it for two days straight before the fair had begun. And yet he'd dared to claim that-)

(Breaking the project was meant to embarrass him in front of those people. Or make him mad later when he tried to figure out what had gone so very wrong and just couldn't do it. She'd only wanted to embarrass and outsmart him. But she hadn't expected what had happened next. Because when those college admissions people had questioned him on his project-)

(-The "great" Stanford Pines hadn't been able to explain his work once it had broken! And it had left Carla with a deep, dark feeling of terrible satisfaction, that he'd been caught out like that. Because she never would have suspected that he'd actually been lying about the science behind his project! She hadn't questioned his work properly; no-one at the high school had, not even the teachers. But maybe they all should have sooner. Because if his equations had been sound… if his understanding of it was real because it was real… then it wouldn't have mattered that it had broken, because the science behind it would have still been sound. And if those admissions people were as smart as she thought they were… it hadn't been. -She'd heard what those people had said about his paper as they'd been leaving the school; they'd all been given copies of it and had read it during the trip, before they'd come. And the discussion had been truly eye-opening for her. -They'd only bothered to still come in to the school anyway - despite what they'd read in that paper - because they'd been in the area. They'd thought they were wasting their time already before even coming in, because...)

(And it mattered. It mattered a lot. Because just like Mr. Harman always said, the science was what mattered there. Not everybody who was booksmart was good at working with their hands, and their teacher knew full well that getting physical demos working could be super-hard even for people who knew what they were doing, especially depending on the project and the physical tolerances involved. And this project hadn't been for their tech ed class, it had been for science class: the science had needed to be sound. That was why the physical demo had been only a quarter of the grade for the project, and practically a toss-away 'easy A' at that, along with the poster board that had been another five; it was the paper that had gone along with everything that had been a full seventy percent of the grade for it.)

(...And Stanford probably didn't even realize yet that the first place award for the science fair had been rightfully been re-awarded to her afterwards, after he'd been caught out like that by a bunch of real somebodys who'd been smart enough and well-respected enough to actually be able to call him out on it finally, and get it to stick. The jerk. He'd never seen her as a competitor or peer.)

(-Well, screw him. The stupid jerk hadn't even tried to apply to any colleges, from what she understood - Stanley would've been talking about it left-and-right while they'd been dating, if he had. Meanwhile, she'd applied to West Coast Tech herself months ago, long before the college's deadline, along with all the other universities she'd been looking into that looked even halfway decent, and with her grades-)

Miz frowned and rubbed her temples, having picked up a lot of what Carla had ranted about loudly in frustration in her thoughts. "Okay. So this was apparently even more fucked up than I thought. Right. Got it." She sighed. "Well shit then." She didn't look any happier than Carla did. "And he's a little twat. He-" Miz made a frustrated sound. "-and goddamn if I don't kinda know how you feel, maybe…" she muttered. "Damn awkward nerds. Why did that have to be my type?!"

Carla let out a startled laugh, as she looked up at Miz and stared at her incredulously. "You like Stanford?" And when she realized Miz was serious, she went from looking incredulous to downright HORRIFIED. "No-"

"No! No-no-no! I don't like him emotionally! Or romantically! He's-" Miz waved her hands angrily. "He tried to peel off a piece of my skin because he was curious about my biology-" (The horrified look got worse.) Miz huffed. "Look, I admit, I find him attractive on an aesthetic level, and whenever he's not being a jerk, he's almost cute, but first of all, he's too young for me, and second of all, he's a twat," she groaned.

Carla twitched, frowning furiously. "He's not a 'twat'; he's a complete fucking horror show of a human being! -And I use the term 'human being' loosely, when it comes to him!"

"Well yeah, he's kinda almost worse than some demons I've met…" Miz groaned. "But he's still a kid, he might still be able to change, get better? Grow as a person?" (Carla snorted, because he was a seventeen-year-old guy to begin with.) Miz made a frustrated sound. "But I don't know how to teach him to be better! Hell, I'm still learning to be better! Since I don't-" She shuffled her feet. "Don't really know how to be a good human… the older Stan's been kinda teaching me? I know he's trying to teach Bill but I can't tell if either of us are doing any better-" Miz cut herself off. "That's not the point, I want him to be better. He's intelligent, he could do so much good for humanity if he was better and…" Miz slumped in place. "And I'm just being naive aren't I?"

"Look," Carla told her, ignoring the 'better human' stuff she didn't really get and just leveling with the girl in front of her, as she adjusted her books in her arms. "Don't go getting your hopes up on him, on anything. He's just not worth it," Carla told her. (And why this girl seemed to think that Stanford Pines was the person to pin the 'hopes of humanity' on… Good lord, there were plenty of other people around out there who'd be a hell of a lot better at it! Because...) "Stanford Pines just doesn't care about other people; he thinks we're all too stupid for him to bother with," Carla warned her. "If he doesn't think you're smarter than he is, well, then he isn't going to listen to you - and he doesn't think anybody's smarter than him." Carla gave her a long look. "You do the math."

"I kinda got that when he off-handedly called his own brother, who wanted to drop out of school and work three jobs to give the money to Ford after he was thrown out, 'stupid'," Miz grumbled. (...Well, Carla could agree with that; Stanford wasn't worth doing any of that for, and he sure as hell wouldn't appreciate it. That would be a stupid thing to do!) Miz folded her arms. "Bill's smarter than him. But little Ford's too self-centered to really care." She frowned. "And older Ford's too traumatized…" She paused. "Could I traumatize him into being a better person? Like a scare tactic?" she asked herself, not really expecting Carla to respond as she thought aloud to herself. "Augh, but Stan would never forgive me for messing with his brother…"

"-Look, I don't know what the deal with you 'aliens' is, but I need to get to class before the bell rings," Carla told her, having noticed that the girl wasn't really talking to her anymore, and wanting to wrap this all up and get going. (At this point, she was a bit relieved that she'd finished eating lunch early and gone off to her locker pretty much right away before Miz had accosted her, or she would have been very late for her next class.) "But from one girl to another? If this 'older Stan' of yours is teaching you to be a 'better human', or whatever, maybe tell him to try taking on Stanford instead. -Don't waste your own time on him. He's not worth the stress, believe me," she told Miz.

"Right…" Miz rubbed her face. "I'll mention that to him, dunno if he's gonna think he needs to, considering the young Stan still loves his brother unconditionally, even with all the shit he's put him through."

"Not your problem," Carla told her succinctly, as she headed for the door to the classroom. "Oh, and one more thing," Carla said, turning back towards her. "Don't bother picking up Stanford's lie about his stupid project," Carla said almost haughtily, "You won't get anywhere with it."

"...I'll keep that in mind." Miz sighed, feeling rather tired.

Carla smiled. "Good." (Because while they really couldn't get anywhere with it, she didn't want to have to deal with it, though. And besides, even if they did somehow manage to prove that she'd done something to it in some way, it wouldn't really matter to Stanford's grade in the long run...)

And then Carla added, after losing the smile: "Because even his 'stupid' twin brother knew that that project was completely bogus himself." Even if she hadn't realized exactly how right Stanley was at the time until much, much later.

(Really, she wished she'd realized that Stanley was the smart twin from the start. Things would have been absolutely perfect if she'd known...)

And with that, Carla let out a huff of breath (at herself), flipped her hair over her shoulder, and strode out the door of the classroom, which slammed shut on its own behind her.

"Well yeah, a perpetual motion machine would be impossible, and if he really HAD succeeded, he would have created infinite energy…" Miz grumbled to herself. "And if he could have done that, he would have just rebuilt the damn thing and 'made millions' or some shit." She sighed. Because, really, Ford's machine wasn't a real perpetual motion machine at all. That wasn't the point though, the point was that the stupid thing ruined the lives of two children. Miz really wanted to set something on fire. This was all so stupid.

The bell rang abruptly, and Miz winced. Time for class; ah, at least she'd eaten lunch already.

Miz turned and left the classroom, might as well get back to her group for now.

Lee looked up as he spotted Miz coming down the hall. "Hey, where've you been?" he asked good-naturedly (but also a little worriedly, because he was pretty sure the demon would take it out on him among others, if something bad ever happened to his little sister in their school). It was a good thing they had study hall this period on Mondays, or somebody might actually care that they were now coming in late to the classroom. (Well, maybe just Miz. He'd had to hit the restroom himself - for real, this time - but he'd put his own stuff in the room already.)

Miz shrugged. "Had to go and clarify something," she said simply. Miz took Lee's hand and squeezed gently. "So, did you finish your homework for English class? I forgot to check on that over the weekend…"

Lee tilted his head back and groaned as they walked together to the 'study hall' classroom.

At the look he got from Miz for that response, Lee let out a sigh and said, "I've got time to do it now." He'd been looking forward to goofing off for the next hour, though. (And now he knew he wasn't gonna get that, because Miz would want to 'check it' now, and… she didn't treat English stuff like she did math. The math stuff, she'd let him screw up himself, as long as she thought he'd 'tried'. But the English class stuff, hoo boy...)

Miz sat herself down right beside Lee in the classroom and stared at him until he groaned ("Yeah, yeah…") and pulled out some lined paper, giving up on getting to relax that period, and getting down to doing the creative writing assignment, instead.

...It didn't really help that she was still ignoring Sixer, either. Lee was gonna get watched like a hawk because Sixer wasn't gonna be able to distract her, and he could see that his brother was upset at being shunned. Lee looked back down at his paper and grimaced as he started to write.

He had seen that a lot when they were much younger, the shunning thing, whenever someone was grossed out at Sixer's hands and didn't want to be around him. (Which had been, well, pretty much everybody except those carnival freaks that one time. ...And, y'know, totally stupid, because Sixer's hands were awesome, not gross.)

Sixer had stopped caring so much as they got older, writing off other people just as they had written him off. Lee had seen the way Sixer closed himself off over time. He'd started acting like he didn't care about anyone else.

Lee paused for a second and frowned, absently tapping his pencil against the paper. ...Well, no, that wasn't it. Sixer really didn't care about anyone else anymore. He'd stopped caring. (Not that Lee could really blame him. And after what pa had said as a parting shot when he'd tossed Sixer out… Lee glanced over at his twin.) Sixer had gotten used to being alone - except for him - and he hadn't really wanted to be around anybody else. He'd stopped wanting friends, or anything else, out of anyone else, really. (Well, other than the teachers at school and their parents anyway…)

But now Lee wanted Miz's attention. And he'd also pushed her away, done something to make her angry enough that she was ignoring him (again), when he finally wanted someone else's attention again. Lee almost wanted to tell him 'I told you so,' but managed to hold back from doing it. (That wouldn't help; it'd just hurt his twin brother all over again.)

And now Miz was giving him all her attention when Lee didn't really want it (and Sixer was getting a really scary level of watchful attention from the other demon that Sixer didn't even seem to be noticing). Lee sighed. -Why did this have to be a thing?

Sixer was seated next to Miz, trying and failing to hide his hurt expression. (Bill, himself, was seated right next to him, WATCHING HIM.) Miz ignored Sixer for a good half hour before she sighed.

"I guess I really am stupid." Miz muttered before turning and looking right at Sixer. (Bill's steady expressionless gaze flicked away from Sixer and over to her as she said this.) "-Look, you are an idiot when it comes to people. You're also a jerk," Miz informed him. Sixer looked taken aback and opened his mouth to protest but Miz pressed a finger against his lips. "Shush, I am talking right now. You will listen, and you will think about it. Once I'm done explaining what you did wrong, I will ask you a few questions to see if you cared enough to try and find the correct answer. If you can't even do that, I will simply ignore you and write you off for being an idiot, just like you do with everyone else in your life."

Sixer straightened in place and felt himself color. He wanted to protest immediately - he wasn't an idiot! - but he managed to keep his mouth closed (largely because it sounded like she'd give him a chance to protest her argument next), and slowly nodded at her, instead.

Miz sighed. She centered herself and took a calming breath. "You don't care about other people's feelings," she said simply. "Heck, you don't care about other people at all." She glared at him. "That is not good. Because it means you're an insensitive jerk who never thinks about how the people around you might feel when you say the things you do." (Sixer frowned; he didn't think that had ever been a problem before Miz.) "-I'm not saying you have to care about everyone," Miz continued, "But at the very least, you could be less of an ass to people. Especially when you actually want to hang out with them," she said pointedly. "Which brings me to my first question: why do you care so much about getting good grades? Why do you want recognition? If other people are just stupid and not worth your time, then why do you care so much about getting their praise and acknowledgement when you, yourself, don't want to acknowledge anyone else?"

(((((((((Quick note, the young Sixer here is an asshole, and we the writers of this fanfic do not agree with his bullshit. He's a twat and should not be taken for any sort of role model at all, ever. There are some very messed-up and subversively-wrong things twisted into Sixer's rhetoric below, so please be very careful as you read. Racism is wrong (and pretty damn stupid, as Sixer does note correctly), but he gets a lot of other stuff here wrong. To correct some of the most major things for the record: there is a very big difference between ignorance and stupidity; socioeconomic status does have a major and severe impact on one's ability to get an education and perform lifelong learning; and a person cannot simply start from nothing and 'make it' in life without multiple chances to make it big and fail and get up and have the chance to try again, and a good bit of luck and opportunity to go along with it, along with the support of others. Single-person success stories are a myth; it's never actually a single person managing to do it all without a lot of support from others and the leveraging of a great opportunity that they saw or found (not made themselves), if you actually go and look into it. Thank you.))))))))

Sixer folded his arms and snorted. "Well." he started. "I don't particularly enjoy the thought of having rocks thrown at me my entire existence," quite literally. "People generally don't attack their betters, when they realize that they are better than them in some way. These subjects aren't hard, so putting in the effort to show that I can do well at them, in the way they want the information regurgitated back to them, is only a matter of course." He was well ahead of his classes, and had been for some time; he'd read any book of any seeming importance and worth in the library by that point long ago. If it wasn't for mail-order booksellers, and monthly academic journals, he'd likely have gone insane from boredom a year or two ago. "If I do well on my tests, people look to that, and compare it against their own scores, and understand that I can do something that they cannot," he said. "Even my parents considered good grades to be important. And it puts me in good standing with the teachers, who generally don't like their better students being bullied into the emergency room."

Miz stared. "Are you… kidding me right now?" She asked flatly. The look on Sixer's face showed he was serious, he actually believed it. "Okay, first of all, the only people who threw rocks at you were the assholes who just wanted to pick on you because they're assholes. No one's doing that to you anymore, they haven't done that in years." (Yes, they'd stopped doing that around the time that he'd started being recognized as intelligent at school. Sixer wondered how supporting his own argument was supposed to be helping her own...) "And you being better than Crampelter hasn't stopped him from still being an asshole towards you, since it was never about the hands, it was just about him wanting to pick on someone smaller than him, always has been." She saw Lee nodding unconsciously out of the corner of her eye. "The high test score is one thing, but knowing the correct answers doesn't make you better. There are people who are denied a formal education. Are they stupid if they weren't even allowed to learn?"

Sixer frowned at her at that. "They are if they're in any way literate, and haven't sought out the information themselves at the public library; nothing's keeping anyone from going there to read whatever they want, if they're intelligent enough to actually think of doing so, and then understand what they've gone and read."

Lee stared at his brother. He saw where Miz was coming from with this question. There were poor kids who couldn't afford school and had to work at the family business, or on farms and stuff; adults wouldn't have the time to read, with two or three jobs, and maybe some extra mouths to feed and take care of. And then there were all those people in those villages in third world countries that didn't have schools or libraries at all. Lee knew about that, so Sixer should know about that, too. Hell, they'd learned about that in Social Studies class. And yeah, Sixer kind of had a point there, but Sixer was also completely missing the frigging point that Miz was making.

So Lee spoke up. "That ain't what she's getting at, Sixer. She means, what if they literally can't? LIke, if they aren't living here in Jersey or wherever, and there aren't any libraries or schools anywhere near where they are? Or if they have to work full-time just to have a roof over their head and food to eat, so they don't have time to go off reading whatever they want," and yeah, Lee saw him about to protest, "And even if they're tired but have some time at night, what happens if the libraries are all closed by the time they get out? She's wantin' to know, do you think people are stupid even if they don't have no way to learn book stuff, even if they wanted to?"

"Well, yes," Sixer said simply, adjusting his glasses. "Because they don't know anything. Therefore, they're stupid." And Lee felt so frustrated at his twin, because what the hell?

"Ignorance is NOT stupidity," Bill said almost too casually, looking over his fingernails, as he not-quite eyed Sixer sidelong.

"Willful ignorance is stupid," Sixer said right back, looking annoyed. "Knowledge is how you better yourself; the application of it is how humanity as a whole had made for themselves the time to do other things."

"...This is true," Bill said very coolly. "But do you know how you all started that cycle in the first place?"

Sixer frowned at Bill.

"Well, not everyone is as lucky as you, with people taking care of your physical needs and supporting you so that you can read and learn to your heart's content," Miz pointed out. "What would you have done if Lee or Stan hadn't decided to help you after you were thrown out?" Because no one else would have helped you, was what she didn't say, but Lee could hear it loud and clear.

"I-" Sixer was a little taken aback. "I went to the boat. I… would have stayed there, to start with…" Sixer frowned. He was a bit less distraught than he'd been when he'd first been thrown out. "School lunches are free for those without the means. And… there is the foster care system. ...And I doubt that the authorities would have been particularly pleased to hear that a seventeen-year-old had been thrown out of their home by their parents. I wouldn't have starved," Sixer pointed out with a grimace. "And I still would have been able to continue to go to school and get my diploma…"

"They certainly didn't do anything to help Stan when he was thrown out in the other timeline…" Miz muttered.

"Stanley doesn't like taking handouts," Bill said casually. "There are always strings attached. And he's stubborn. And going to school would mean seeing 'Ford again, which would have had 'Ford having a fight with him, and possibly Filbrick getting him tossed out of the school -" because Stanley had skipped like it was going out of style, and attending would have just been disruptive for 'Ford, and Stanley might've 'sabotaged' more of 'Ford's work... "- or worse." Worse being not sheltered from getting arrested by the cops anymore when he 'pulled the usual shit' again, by the very nature of not being the kid of somebody in the community (who would silently stand up for him, and then punish him for his shit and make him make it up to whoever later, if and when he got caught at it). "...And Stanley already had what he thought was a clear pathway forward, to getting his 'family' back, which he couldn't have back until then." And in Stanley's mind - from what Bill had Seen when he'd been looking around during that one quick Dreamscape tour of his memories, looking for the combination to that safe - that had included 'Ford, who had drawn those curtains together on him 'that one fateful night' pretty harshly! He'd made it clear that he was standing with Filbrick, not wanting to see him again, at least at the time! (Not until he'd needed him as a 'patsy' of sorts to draw Bill's attention off of him for a little while… or so he'd thought…) Bill leaned back in his chair and glanced over at her.

"He shouldn't have had to do that. It's too sad." Miz looked legitimately upset by this. Lee winced. Sounded like things really had been that bad for that older him. (And now he knew why the old-man him had insisted on talking to their old man, if pa hearing about Sixer still going to their school might have maybe had pa trying to stop him from doing it…) Miz shook her head. "Well, either way, there are people who can't get support like that. They aren't given the chance to gain knowledge or better themselves. Do you still think that they're stupid if they want to learn but just can't get the opportunity?"

"If they were truly smart, they'd recognize the importance of learning, and they'd think of a way to do it. They'd find a way," Sixer said staunchly. "Otherwise, how would the human race as a whole have reached they heights that they have today?" Sixer demanded, glancing back at Bill. "It wasn't as though they had libraries back when the species solely consisted of hunters and gatherers."

Miz rolled her eyes. This was a pain, to try and talk to him. "Well, lots of people died in order for your species to make it this far. Many times they left their notes behind for the next generation to hopefully do better than they did."

"-Yes," Sixer agreed, jumping on that quickly. "The intelligent ones did what they could, despite the fact that they were limited by the technology and knowledge of their times! Exactly!" He smiled, because he believed that, with that, Miz had just proven his point!

"So if you died because you studied instead of eating, would that make you smart?" Miz asked.

"Well, no," Sixer said. "That's why we became agrarians instead of hunter-gatherers, in fact - to become more efficient at food production, and then have more 'leisure' time to work on bigger and better things."

"You're welcome," said Bill. (Lee glanced over at him at that, frowning.)

Miz considered that. "And for the people who had to work so that others could have leisure time? What if the workers wanted to have an education, but if they stopped doing their jobs, other people would suffer? Like if you were working to support a family?"

Sixer frowned at her. "It's not like there isn't a scale of smart to dumb," Sixer told her. "And if I was less intelligent than those who were more capable, of course I would want to support them. -They would make things better for everyone, much faster, which would lead to less work for those below them, so that those in the next rung down could be educated to take up their work and they would be left to stand on their shoulders and reach new heights in everything else that would come next, and so on and so forth." If that was the case, he'd just have to wait his turn; he wouldn't though, because he was at the top of the heap no matter what pa or those stupid college admissions people might say.

"But do you think they're stupid if they don't have an education themselves? Just because they weren't able to get one?"

"If someone wanted an education, and they were truly intelligent - hence smart - then they would be able to educate themselves," Sixer maintained. "Just like everyone before them, from the lowest cavemen to the modern-day man today."

"You know," Miz said quietly. "Back in my old dimension, where everyone were shapes, the government specifically disallowed education for the lower caste." She saw Bill stilling in place. "The lowest caste wasn't even allowed to do more than learn to read."

Sixer frowned. "...Well, this isn't your dimension," Sixer said. "Maybe that's the problem you're having with this concept? -No-one is preventing anyone from getting a better education here," he told her, with confidence. "That would be stupidity itself in the extreme. Everyone here knows better than that." He paused. "I'm assuming that part of the problem in your dimension would have to have been that writing was heavily regulated, so that reading would be useless for the lower castes." He paused. "But you're clearly intelligent. Were you one of the upper or lower castes?" he asked, curious.

"What caste I was shouldn't matter," Miz told him. "And education suppression happens here too." Miz pointed out. "Do you remember a little thing called racism? Jim Crow? On paper, they're no longer around. But in practice, it's still happening. There are children all across America right now, who are barred from getting a proper education for all sorts of unfair reasons." She let that sink in for a bit.

"Look, racism is a problem, and clearly stupid, but it's been a problem for a long time," Sixer told her. "We're working on that," Sixer said, feeling annoyed, "And we are still able to get enough of an education to be able to move upwards from there." (Reading was the first step, and literacy wasn't going unaddressed, or being prevented or suppressed here. And as far as Sixer was concerned, he was in that exact situation: getting himself a proper education by finding ways to get himself the advanced reading and textbooks that he needed in order to do so, largely from the library, until that had stopped being enough.) "And I should think that what caste you were might be pertinent to this conversation," Sixer told her.

Miz sighed before she said quietly, almost shamefully, "My society was based on our shape. The more sides we had, the higher up on the rung we were. I'm a triangle." She paused. "Just a stupid unnatural triangle, that's what they all called me."

"Well, then that is just proving my point about racism being stupid, you know," Sixer told her eagerly, sitting forward in his seat. "You aren't unintelligent, but you were considered lower caste. The 'shape' of one's body shouldn't matter when it comes to intelligence, just like the number of fingers I have doesn't matter when it comes to that, either."

"Racism IS stupid. And your fingers don't matter either." Miz agreed. "But that doesn't mean that anyone who isn't on your level is stupid. Lee isn't stupid, and you shouldn't call him that. Everyone has their own circumstances. Just because they're not a genius, doesn't make them dumb."

"I didn't say Lee was dumb," Sixer said, adjusting his glasses. "I said he was stupid. -Willfully stupid." he told Miz. "He doesn't see the value of even trying to get himself a good education, and that's 'strike one'. He refuses to try and get himself even a basic one, of the quality that they are offering to us, here. He skips school, doesn't take any of his homework seriously, and doesn't bother to learn what he actually needs to learn, even when I tell him what that is, that's 'strike two'." Sixer frowned as he sat back. "Most of what they teach at school isn't all that important or useful," Sixer admitted. "So I've generally let Lee copy most of my work in the past, with enough minor modifications that we can't get in trouble for 'cheating'." (Lee winced a little, as) Sixer rolled his eyes. "But surely, you can agree that it is stupid of him not to take advantage of the opportunity to better himself and expand his mind, on the things that do matter and will be able to help him later in life? He isn't capable of differentiating between any of it, what is useful and what is not," Sixer told her, "But what is worse is that he doesn't ever come to me - who knows what is and isn't important and can tell him - despite the fact that he knows I will do this, knows that I consider getting a decent education important, and knows that I will happily take the time out and away from my own learning to help him to learn whatever he needs to know, if ever he did take me up on it again, like he used to. -And yet, he still refuses to learn! He'd rather spend his time doing other, frivolous things, instead - such as boxing and wrestling, neither of which he is good enough at to make into a real career, and after-school jobs that teach him no skills he could leverage to be earning higher earnings in the future, to have to work less over time rather than more once he graduates, and a here-and-gone-again high-school girlfriend who he insisted upon wasting a good portion of that money on, instead of putting it into the boat he was planning on using long-term as a house and a home once he turned eighteen. -None of that will help him in the long run, not at all, and yet even after I have explained all of this to him in the past," he sent a long look Lee's way, "He still persists in his highly-incorrect belief that all of that is more important than learning, somehow. -And that, as far as I'm concerned, is a very big 'strike three'."

Miz frowned. She wasn't entirely sure how to tackle that one. She glanced over at Bill, but he remained silent, seeming almost disinterested in the conversation at this point. "It is bad that Lee doesn't want to learn as much as he can. But sports aren't frivolous learning. A Stan from another timeline I've visited became a professional football player and he was doing well for himself, rich, successful, loving fiancee and even started his own company." Lee's eyes widened. "But he was prompted to do that by his brother, who encouraged him to stay in sports and work harder on it, try out different sports and find one that he was good enough at to do professionally, and go to college as a business major as a fallback in case things didn't work out on the football side." She kept out the part that it was Seb and not Ford who'd gotten Stan to pursue his hobbies. "So I'm sure Lee could do well if he applied himself, but currently, he just doesn't have the motivation to do so." Lee shrunk in on himself and Miz reached out to pat his shoulder. "Look, I'm not trying to make you feel bad, I know you can do better."

"Lee isn't interested in football," Sixer told her. "What he wants to do is either boxing or wrestling. Boxing is too dangerous; I'm not going to encourage my twin to have his brains beaten out until the point that he's no longer my brother due to the head injuries. Football also has the same problems; one wrong fall and you're out, or worse. And even if Lee had expressed an interest in it, getting seen by a recruiter at the right time for college football leaves far too much up to chance," and it was far too late now for him to try and join the school team here, even if Lee suddenly wanted to go that route. Sixer sighed. "Competitive wrestling doesn't make enough money, or garner enough fame to his satisfaction. And, as I said before," Sixer repeated, "Lee doesn't listen to me when I tell him an education is important! I don't know what that other Stanley is like, but clearly he listened to his twin when he told him to go off and get a business degree." Sixer shot Lee a dark look. (Lee winced, hunched his shoulders, and tried to focus on his essay.) "You seem to be able to threaten Lee into doing his work; perhaps you can convince him that getting an education of some sort is a good idea," Sixer said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms, glaring at Lee all the while.

"Well," Miz turned to Lee. "The older Stan wants Lee to at least get his diploma to start." She paused and then realized she would have to run some damage control. She patted Lee's shoulder gently. "Look, Lee, going to school won't mean giving up on the boat. You can always graduate college and then go off sailing. Stan regrets what he had to go through. He doesn't expect you to go to college, but there's nothing wrong with trying harder to learn more." (Lee shifted in place uneasily at this.) Should she tell him? Well, it might help to give the twins some perspective.

Miz sighed. "The older Stan had to teach himself advanced mechanical engineering and physics from books in order to fix the portal and find Ford. He didn't have schooling, he didn't have a teacher, he had one third of the blueprints and the motivation of wanting his brother back. And he taught himself how to build an interdimensional portal and a genetic scanner to track down 'Ford Pines'." Miz told them seriously. "All on his own." She made a disgruntled face. "And somehow he still thinks he's stupid, even when he's clearly not," she complained. "He can make over $1000 within 10 minutes and still think that he's an idiot. Because he was called 'stupid' all his life and he's stuck thinking of himself that way." It was so frustrating! Miz folded her arms. "Stan is not stupid." She repeated. "And you're not stupid either. But you're unmotivated. And as a muse, I don't like seeing you waste your potential." She paused. "It took Stan 30 years to fix the portal, because he didn't get an education. I'm certainly hoping your Ford doesn't get lost in space, but you shouldn't have to end up in that situation."

Lee was amazed at what the older him could do, but that still didn't mean that… "Look, I'm-"

"If you're about to call yourself stupid, don't." (Lee winced. That... actually hadn't been what he'd been about to-) And Miz barreled on. "If you do something dumb, you can call yourself dumb for doing that dumb thing because everyone can do dumb things sometimes, but in general? You're not stupid, no matter what your brother has told you. You're perfectly capable of learning, which means you're not dumb." Miz snapped. "But you could stand to try a little harder. You're better off than plenty of kids who want to learn and don't have this chance you do. You shouldn't waste it."

Lee blinked. "Uh… well… I was just gonna say that… uh… that..." He glanced over at Sixer, took in a breath…

...and chickened out, looking away from Sixer. "...I'm not that other Stan," Lee said instead. "Even if he could do it, don't mean that I can." He felt a little weird about the expectation that Miz had for him. Even if the older Stan had managed something like that, it had still took him thirty years, right? Hell, if he'd had thirty years to try and fix some portal-thing that Sixer had made… well, was that kinda woo-woo science stuff really all that hard? ...Maybe he couldn't? "It's not like I can do everything that the old-man me can." Miz frowned as she heard part of the other thought that Lee wasn't saying - that he had stopped trying because Sixer got upset when Lee got better grades than him in anything, and so, Lee had stopped trying altogether, so that he wouldn't get in his brother's way. Which was unfair as fuck. And she had already gotten upset at the older Stan for thinking this way too.

"Well, you'll be better off than he was. You aren't left all alone to take care of yourself with no help like he was. And you can learn whatever you want, do as well as you want. You don't have to-" Miz sighed. She'd talk to Lee in private later. "You can do better, so you should try. And don't let anything hold you back from doing so." (Lee looked uncomfortable at this.) Miz told him before turning back to Sixer, and then a determined look overtook her features as she said loudly, firmly and clearly, while looking at Sixer, "You're allowed to be smart too."

Lee glanced between Miz and his twin, not really sure what she was getting at - of course Sixer was smart? He didn't really get why Miz might think he was smart, but that Sixer might not be? -That seemed really off to him. But Miz was looking very firm on this subject, so Lee kept his stupid mouth shut on that one.

Miz told Sixer, "And you, please stop calling your own brother stupid. It's mean, demeaning, untrue and very rude. It's fine to say it as a joke or when you're teasing, but you're not joking, you actually think he's stupid, and that's not nice. It makes Lee think that he shouldn't even try. Part of the reason why he doesn't make an effort is because he's so used to the idea of being stupid that he thinks he shouldn't bother to do better." Which made Lee frown and Sixer glanced over at his twin with a complicated expression.

"But it's true," Sixer repeated. "I just told you why."

Miz glared. "Not according to Einstein." She said simply. "Einstein once said that it's not about what you don't know but about what you do know. And what you're capable of knowing." Miz said, making Sixer jolt in place. "And Lee knows people. He's pretty good at it. And he's perfectly capable of learning more stuff, he just doesn't have the motivation to do so." she glanced at Lee. Then she poked her finger at the English homework he should be doing.

"Not seeing the importance of learning is stupid," Sixer said, sticking to his guns.

"Look-" Lee started to cut in.

"You said it yourself that you think people less smart should support those who are more smart. Lee thought he should support you. And stopped trying to do any learning himself-" Miz was very upset by this whole fucked up situation.

"-Hey!" Lee said, cutting in. He didn't know how the dragon-demon knew that, but- "Look, I know all that education stuff is important, okay?" he said, trying to move this thing someplace maybe a little less bad. "Sixer wants to do it for a living, or whatever, and that's fine. I just... don't. It's not for me, sitting behind some kinda desk and staring at navels all day or writing a zillion things down on paper and stuff. Okay? I want to go out and actually do stuff," Lee told her. "Like, y'know, treasure hunting? Sailing?" He liked doing physical stuff. "I don't need a bunch of homework-school stuff for that," he said. It wasn't like he hadn't looked up a couple things at the library about boats, to repair the Stan O' War, to figure out the supplies he'd need, and how sailing worked, and all the rest of that… "Sixer can just… ransack the libraries everyplace we go, and stick around in the cabin doing his navel-staring and equation-ing, if he wants to. That's fine," Lee told her. "Learning just ain't for me."

"That's a lie. You don't have to learn the same things that Sixer does. And sailing and treasure hunting require specialized education. You already know that. It's why you went and learned how to fix up the boat, the knots for ropes, how to navigate…" Miz sighed. "That's learning! That is STILL learning. It's just different learning. And if you KNOW how to do that, then you're NOT stupid and you need to stop thinking about yourself as such!"

"Wait." Sixer was frowning at Lee now. "...You've actually been taking the boat seriously? The whole 'adventuring' thing?" He'd thought Lee was just… doing it as a hobby. That he'd kept on doing it, even enlisted a bit of his help for some of it last summer, just as an excuse to spend some time with him, and to get him out of the house and out into the sun...

"Well, yeah," Lee said, kind of surprised that his brother was surprised by this. "I mean, we've been talkin' about doing this for years…" He trailed off, making it almost a question. He'd thought… well, Sixer had never said that he didn't want to do it? And Sixer had never talked about wanting to do anything else...

"Lee…" Sixer rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "'Treasure hunting' isn't a realistic career goal…" He looked up at his brother, feeling pained at the shocked and suddenly-uncertain look on his twin's face. "Gold doubloons aren't just lying around on some desert island somewhere, waiting for you to pick them up…" Sixer straightened, and fixed his glasses. "If they were, then someone else would have found them long before you," he informed his twin.

Miz could see Lee's mood worsening as the shock and despair set in. And then Lee shook it off.

"Okay," Lee said, nodding at his brother, "But then why do we keep hearin' about people finding treasure and stuff in the news every so often, if it's all gone?"

"That isn't- Lee, those are from undersea wrecks," Sixer said, knowing what his brother was talking about. Lee had always shown him the articles. "If we were going to do that, we'd need undersea diving equipment, as a start. And we'd have to find a good way to map out all of the potential as-yet unfound wrecks, and try to predict their movement and their most-likely locations, to determine where to go-"

Lee slapped his hands together and pointed at Sixer. "-See!" he said with a happy smile. "That's why you've gotta be the brains of the outfit!" he grinned. His grin dimmed a little after awhile though, because Sixer wasn't smiling back.

"Lee. I'm not going sailing with you," Sixer said, frowning slightly. He still could hardly believe that his twin had really thought that...

"But…" Lee said. Then he frowned. "Sixer, what are you thinkin' you're gonna do instead?" Lee said realistically.

"I'm going to college," Sixer said simply. "Since West Coast Tech didn't work out, I'll have to look into others."

"College costs money," Lee said slowly. "Money that we don't got." Their pa had even scoffed at the idea of paying for college before.

"I can apply for a scholarship, I'm more than smart enough to ace the tests for that."

Lee frowned further. "But the teachers said… that was all back in January, wasn't it?"

"I… may have applied to a few, back then," Sixer said, curling his fingers under his palms, looking vaguely shifty as he said it.

Lee blinked at him. "But pa said-" Lee stopped. Pa had never really stopped either of them from doing something they'd wanted to do before. "The applications had those fees. $20 a pop. Where did you-" then Lee stopped, and his eyebrows went up as Sixer looked even shiftier. "Sixer… those books that you got outta the library, that I was askin' you where your mail-order copies were from-"

"-Yes, fine; I lied about that to get the money from him to use," Sixer grimaced.

Lee sat where he was and stared at his brother, who was still looking all uncomfortable and shifty at... what he'd managed to pull off right under their pa's nose.

"Damn," Lee said. Then he started to grin. "Heh. I'm impressed." Sixer colored. "I mean," Lee said, propping his elbow up, and his head on his fist, grinning, "You even had those packages come in the mail to the house?" Lee asked him.

Sixer adjusted his glasses half-nervously, still blushing. "I kept the old packaging material," he said. "Empty boxes cost far less postage to mail when paying by the pound," he told his brother. "And no-one ever pays attention to the return addresses, just the mail-to address, at the post office."

Lee let out a laugh of delight. "You actually pulled one over on our old man!" Lee crowed out. "And me!" Except… Lee's jubilation faded as he realized what this all actually meant.

"Shit," said Lee. "Sixer- the letters are gonna go to the house-"

"I paid for a P.O. Box," Sixer told him promptly.

"-and we don't got the money to pay for college for you-"

"Merit-based scholarships," Sixer said next.

"-I don't think I can handle the boat all by myself..." Lee said, shifting from 'oh shit, how can I get Sixer what he wants?' to '...what the hell am I gonna do?' And… Lee started to look so lost. Miz reached over to pat his hand.

"Lee…" Sixer began, but Lee shook himself, pulled his hand away from Miz, and then demanded from his twin: "Why didn't you tell me!"

Sixer looked a little shocked at the quick reversal. He hadn't expected Lee to get angry about-

"-I woulda helped you with it!" Lee told him. "The stuff in the boat account- hell," Lee said, rubbing a hand over his face. "Damnit, Sixer. I can maybe keep us over the summer, but I don't got enough money set aside for you gettin' ready to run off to who-knows-where-" Lee groused, "-and for me to be tryin' to handle stuff with you while you're not helping me with the boat, and handling the boat, and making enough money for-" Lee let out a breath, "-and now I'm gonna have to try to find somebody else to sail with me, too!" Lee blurted out before he'd even really realized he was saying it. Which just left him feeling sick to his stomach, because the very idea of doing that was just… practically freaking anathema to him. It was SUPPOSED to be him and Sixer, together forever, taking on the world on the Stan O' War! But the boat couldn't be managed right by just one person; it just wasn't designed and built that way - it hadn't been on purpose from the start.! -He couldn't do it alone, and there was no other way for him to do it. (So that meant… a second person. Who was maybe not Sixer, if he couldn't convince him...)

Sixer stared. "You mean… you… you spent all your money on the boat and worked those part time jobs, all this time, because you actually thought I was going to- to-?" He hissed in a breath, then let out a half-barked out laugh of startlement, "You mean you actually thought that I would just sail off with you into the sunset, and- and that we could actually live off of-"

"-Yes!" Lee exclaimed, slapping the desk at his side. "Drinking water ain't that expensive," he told his twin. "We don't need gas for the boat, just repair stuff for the rigging and sails; that ain't that bad to handle," Lee told his brother; he'd looked into it. "We could fish for most of what we need, for 'extra' food, and sell the rest for more money that we would need for other stuff, like canned stuff, and dried stuff, and water, and laundry money..." he gestured off to the side, "Replacements for stuff; port fees; repairs when we're in harbor; repainting and re-waterproofing the ship every couple a' years; all of it. I made up a list," Lee said. "One of those schedules for stuff? A couple years out," he told his twin. "I didn't want us to run outta something if something went really wrong, like getting a hole in the side, or somethin'. -I was workin' on it. Checking stuff out. Calling around, to price stuff out. Revising the numbers. The math all worked out," he told his twin almost plaintively, who was sitting there straight in place, blinking at him incredulously like some kinda startled owl. Because Sixer had always insisted on that one, right? -If you had the equations right, and you followed all the right stuff and didn't do anything completely never-gonna-work wrong - like treating multiplication like division, or dividing by a bunch of zeros? something like that - then if the math all worked out, and you checked the numbers, checked your work against everything again right at the start of the math… If the math all worked out, then the math all worked out!

"You did MATH? on purpose? -Without being threatened into it?" was what Sixer managed choke out.

Miz sighed as she threw her hands into the air. "Like I said multiple times! Lee only puts effort in when he's motivated! He's not stupid! He just needs something driving him to actually DO stuff!" She turned to Lee. "Seriously, business school, finances. It's math about money! You'd love it!" She could tell he'd thrive in that environment if he cared to try, she could feel it. The same way she could spot talent from a mile away and know what someone needed to truly inspire them to achieve. She could feel her powers buzzing under her skin, it wasn't uncomfortable, not yet. And, yeah, Miz knew that Lee would probably get bored with just handling numbers, but he was good at it. Perhaps something else then? But the older Stan did well in running a business, Lee would be able to do it too...

Lee looked between Sixer, and then Miz.

"...I mean," Lee said, feeling super-uncomfortable at the huge 180 he was getting from his brother here on this stuff (on more thing that one...). "It's not math-math." Not like the stuff that Sixer did - now, that was math. Lee rubbed his hand against the back of his neck. "I mean, it was just… algebra. -We did that stuff in first grade," he told his twin. "And, uh, in high school again, for some reason." He'd never really gotten that, neither. -Like, what was up with that? Wasn't _?_ + 12 = 24 the same as x + 12 = 24? He didn't get why they'd had to go through all that stuff twice. -And then they'd treated it as some new thing all over again in chemistry class with all those chemical equation things again. But it was just, c'mon, you were movin' stuff from one side to another, over and over again! Just…

Seriously. He'd known he had to have been missing something there, but he could never figure out what! ...Which had just had him giving up on everything even harder, because what was the point if he was clearly missing everything that mattered in class? Sixer could explain all the extra things and patterns and stuff to him, sure, but… that took time away from what his twin was tryin' to learn, and his own schoolwork. He didn't want to hold Sixer back! (And the last time that had happened…) -And the stuff the teachers were putting on the board was always the exact same stuff that they had in the books, as far as Lee could tell, and it wasn't like he couldn't read. He usually swiped Sixer's glasses and read 'em all in the first week or so each school year, hoping there'd be something interesting that he might actually be able to actually get this time… Except there wasn't, and when he got to class the teachers would just go over the exact same boring stuff that was in the textbooks all over again, and…

It had left him pretty much hating all of those classes - except Mr. Harman's class, because at least that teach switched it up a little bit sometimes in class, every so often. But in every other class, Lee was left practically staring at the walls until he was staring out the windows, plotting his next 'escape' to go off skipping school to get away from all of this mind-numbing snore-fest, because... -It had been boring as hell. The last time he could remember actually having fun in school was the fifth grade, when they'd still got to go outside and do recess, so there'd be something to look forward each day. And then they'd gone to middle school and, yeah, look what they decided to get rid of there? -Gym class just wasn't the same, when you didn't get to play 'killball' or whatever one-on-one with a demon sometimes, okay? School was hell...

"Financial balances are still math. All the other variations on doing the SAME thing with numbers is STILL math! It's all the same! Humans just call it different things because they like to make different names for the same thing! Algebra, arithmetic, chemistry- You can do that! You KNOW how to do it! I've seen your homework when you actually try!" Miz complained. Because Lee had gotten it right. He DID. He was perfectly capable of doing it! And then he thought he was doing it wrong, because it couldn't possibly be so easy - that they must've just gotten his stuff mixed up with Sixer's again, not actually paid attention to the name at the top of it right. 'Cause that was a thing - they barely even glanced at Sixer's stuff anymore, just gave him the A+'s and moved on to the next one; he'd seen the teachers do that with Sixer's tests at the front of the room before- "Stop talking down on yourself! You're competent and capable of getting stuff done!" Miz nearly sobbed. "Like, dammit, Sixer have you ever LOOKED at Lee's math homework when he's NOT copying you?" She reached over to pull out the homework that Lee finished yesterday and shoved it in Sixer's face.

Sixer adjusted his glasses with one-hand as he took it from her. (Lee hadn't copied him in math class in years; he'd been on advanced math past his regular grade level since they'd hit middle school, and officially turning it in for his own assignments - instead of doing effectively twice the bookwork, the normal classwork and his own self-study - since halfway through high school when he'd finally run into teachers both capable of and interested in grading it.)

And, upon taking the assignment from Miz's hands, Sixer's eyebrows went up a little at it as he looked over it…

...and then his eyebrows went back down, and he nodded as he passed it back to Miz. "Yes, you helped him with it properly," he told her, thinking of what had happened the last time he'd seen Lee actually complete his homework, and what he assumed must have happened again this time, too. "Thank you."

...Except Miz glared at him for it. "I didn't help him with this. I was busy controlling my dragon, remember? Lee did his homework while Stan was taking over the photo line."

Sixer blinked. "So, what you're saying is that he's performing properly at our grade level?" He glanced over at his brother. "Then why in the world do you keep wanting to copy my work?" he asked of his twin brother, frowning.

Lee rubbed the side of his arm. "...It's all really boring?" he said.

Sixer frowned at Lee furiously. He liked the idea of the sheer laziness involved in that even worse!

"I mean, it ain't actually right, is it?" Lee said, gesturing at the homework assignment. Average for their 'grade level' was a C to pass, right?

"...It's fine," Sixer said, rubbing at his eyes under his glasses again. Honestly, his brother sometimes...

Miz groaned and turned to Sixer. "Lee's been BORED for YEARS at school because they were teaching him stuff he already knew and understood and he never felt like there was a point in doing anything!" she huffed. (Lee gave her an uneasy look at this. How did she know he felt like him trying at school was stupid?) "And worse is that he thinks he's getting the answers all wrong because he thinks that it couldn't possibly be so EASY for him!"

"...Well, I suppose that makes sense," Sixer said next, as Lee sat there blinking (because what the heck now?). "I suppose I should've noticed it sooner. He's never seemed to do much worse whenever I've stopped allowing him to copy my work. If he wasn't understanding the material, then he shouldn't have been able to do it himself without expending a great deal of effort in order to catch up, which I know he had not done." It was a somewhat-novel concept, actually. Sixer had known intellectually, and had heard other students complaining of, such a fact, but… he'd never encountered it himself. And since his twin had never seemed to complain of such, only of having to now do the work himself… he'd never really thought about it. "I should have expected him to be able to do something at this low of a level of difficulty."

"Wait, wait, hold up. Hold the phone." Lee was shaking his head. "How difficult is this stuff supposed to be?" His head was spinning at all of this stuff. He'd never talked to anybody about learning stuff before. Like, this was some kinda, learning about learning kinda stuff, or something?

Sixer looked over at him. "For me? -You know when I was given the textbooks for this class," he told his twin. (Lee grimaced. -Yeah, Sixer was pretty damn far ahead on all of this stuff. Was most of the reason why the teachers didn't bother trying to grade his work - Sixer was well into some of those mail-order college textbooks that half the teachers didn't even understand right. Was half the reason Mr. Harman lit up when talkin' to Sixer in class, really. Probably reminded him of all those people doin' all that college Ph.D. stuff.) "But the work isn't meant to be impossible for the other students at our grade level," he told his brother. "It's meant to be rather easy to get an A+."

"It's not supposed to be hard to do any of this stuff, ever?" Lee was blown away by this information. -Because everybody else who wasn't smart like Sixer? Said that this stuff was hard! Then something occurred to him. "Sixer, what did I get wrong on that?"

Sixer glanced over at his brother, who was looking at least a little gobsmacked, and said, "None of your answers are incorrect." At Lee's gobsmacked look, Sixer added "Yes, Lee. Congratulations. You did acceptably on the assignment."

...No errors? But that meant… Lee stared at his brother. "Like… I got an A on it?"

"YES!" Miz rubbed at her face. FINALLY! They were getting somewhere!

"An A+, technically," Sixer told him in reasonable tones, feeling a bit bemused at the way his brother was acting at this. "An A is from 93 to a 96. You got a 100% on this. -As I said, no errors."

Miz turned to Lee and repeated firmly, "You're not stupid. Stop thinking that you are."

Lee stared at Miz.

And then Lee looked over to his twin, a confused question in his eyes.

"You're average for your grade level," Sixer told him with a shrug. Because as far as he was concerned, anyone at their grade level would be able to do that work, if they simply sat down and applied themselves, for once.

Miz rolled her eyes. "Most of your grade level is at a high C+, you're just a super genius so your perspective is skewed."

Sixer raised his eyebrows at this.

And then Sixer began to smile, and he said, "So you think that I'm smart."

At the huff that Miz made at him, Sixer began to grin even more. (He rather liked the recognition, really.)

"You can be as smart as you want, and still be an idiot about things not relating to your specialty." Miz folded her arms and pouted.

"School isn't supposed to be hard? I got a 100%, just like that. School isn't supposed to be hard..." Lee was whispering to himself, almost like he was trying to half-convince himself of the truth of it. (Lee was still working through his own little personal revelation…)

"But you do think that I'm smart," Sixer repeated, eyes gleaming. (As far as he was concerned, given enough time, not knowing things related to 'his specialty' would not be a problem. He'd never encountered a subject yet that he couldn't learn, rather easily, so long as he put in the time and the effort.)

Miz blushed. "Fine, yes." And she couldn't help but add, "It's why I like talking with you about science. But it doesn't change the fact that you're mean. And I can't like you because of that."

Sixer frowned. "I'm mea-?"

-He was cut off by Lee, who demanded, "Hey. Hey-hey, you're not messin' with me, are ya bro?" he asked of his twin. Sixer looked over at him in confusion. "That isn't, like, a 60 or 70 or something really, is it? It's actually a 100%?" Lee half-stammered out, unable to believe that... "I mean, it's- it's not really a 100%, right? Right. -Heh. You got me! Heh!" He rubbed the back of his neck, trying to laugh off the not so funny joke he'd thought had been made at his expense.

Sixer sighed, at the same time as Miz rolled her eyes. ""You got a 100%"" the two chorused out together. And then Miz repeated, again: "You're not stupid. You've never been stupid, the school and the teachers are just BLIND. And you always compared yourself with your brother, who's so far beyond the rest of your grade that it's unfair."

Lee stared at them both.

"...You're really not messing with me, here?" Lee said slowly, feeling very, very lost. "Really?"

"Why would I-" Miz growled, actually growled with a throated rumbled as her eyes glowed.

Sixer quickly reached out and put a calming hand on her shoulder. (It seemed to work for his calming his brother, or at least keeping him from getting in a fight, so…)

"-No, Lee," Sixer said. "I'm not messing with you. When have I ever lied to you?" he asked him next.

"...College textbooks," Lee muttered, crossing his arms and looking away.

"That wasn't technically a lie, that was a-" Sixer sighed at the look on his twin's face. "Fine. Besides that."

Lee bit his lip, still feeling a little uncertain.

"You're doing well enough on your own that I refuse to let you get away with copying any of my homework anymore, how's that?" Sixer said (to which he wasn't quite able to hold back a smile at the immediate complaint of "NOOOOOOO!" from Lee, who collapsed across his own desk in - only half-mock, maybe a quarter-mock, and the rest really-really real - despair at this news). "Like I said: congratulations," Sixer told his twin with no small amusement, as he watched all of this.

"...I hate everything about this already," Lee grumbled out, slouching lower across the desk. "I don't wanna be okay at school; I take it back," Lee said, grabbing at his math homework and missing, because Miz pulled it out of his reach. "I totally copied that down from... someplace by, uh, by usin' my psychic twin powers or somethin'! Yeah." (Sixer rolled his eyes.) "-That wasn't me, really. -Gimmie! I'll do it really-wrong this time!" Lee said, trying to grab at his homework again.

(Bill didn't quite glance over in the direction of these antics, from where he was sitting next to Sixer with his eyes closed.)

(But Bill did start to smile a little bit...)

Miz settled down, her eyes going back to normal and she deadpanned. "No. You can't go back. You're good at school. Welcome to nerdom. -But seriously, business school, financials. You would do very well. You'd get to count money for a living. And you can still do the sailing thing on the side."

"Ugh." Lee gave up on managing to take it all back; he was sunk. "...Count other people's money for a living, maybe," Lee grumbled at the idea of more school, and some kind of 'desk job'. He pulled his arms in to cross them under his head, as he slouched across his desk. "Boring." The only reason he'd been okay with the stuff for the boat was because it hadn't been numbers on a page. He'd had to look stuff up, call around, make decisions, try different stuff out with the numbers to figure out what stuff might work better or worse. Like, was ten crates of beans better than five-and-a-half crates of canned meat? -That wasn't the same thing as all those stupid book problems, where all you were worried about was what cost less, or something; you actually had to figure out how long the food was gonna last, and what was better for you, and whether you were gonna get sick of eatin' the same thing over and over again, and then try to figure out how to split the difference between the stuff, or maybe just give up and go in for a tea kettle and a bunch of those cup ramen things instead...

(...Okay, maybe not give up give up, but hey, you got what you paid for, right?)

"Well then, if you're really all for the sailing and deep-sea treasure hunting as a life career thing, you're gonna have to get a diver's license. Deep sea dives require lots of training and a lot more equipment to do it right too, if you want to be safe about it. I could build you the generator, tanks, hoses, hardsuit, and air filtration needed for it, if you're sure this is what you want," Miz pointed out, shifting gears, because if the boat thing was what Lee wanted to do, then dear lord she was going to tell him HOW to do it. "And to know how to handle and maintain any of that you'd need to go into professional diver training, pass a medical exam, get experience with scuba gear first- there ARE diving schools! Marine courses at the schools that have them- They teach how to use the equipment, what depths you can safely go without needing a submarine - and for some wrecks, they're way too deep for a human body to survive the pressure so you'd need to get a license and training to drive a submarine…" Miz listed off. "And, if you have a professional license as a deep sea diver, you can get jobs in multiple areas, like oceanography, marine biology-" She gave a sly look at Sixer. "And there are plenty of amazing creatures down there in the ocean just waiting to be discovered and documented by humans…"

Lee's head spun a bit at everything Miz was saying. -If this was what it took to find pirate gold, then yeah, he could understand why some people might have a hard time finding it! Then Lee's eyes widened when he caught on to what Miz was doing, adding on that last little piece of it: finding weird creatures was Sixer's 'thing'. Miz was… was she trying to entice Sixer into wanting to go sailing with him-?

"-and a lot of the programs for training divers are hands-on experience with dives into the ocean. There will be plenty of school work if you're gonna learn how to use undersea radars to map out the area when searching for shipwrecks-" Miz could see Lee's eyes go from nearly glazed over to dimming a little bit at the mention of 'more schoolwork, even as Sixer perked up a bit in mild interest himself. "You'd just have to go to college for this for a few years, and once you get your degree and license you'd be free to sail all around the world wherever you want as you search for stuff." Miz could see Lee was struggling with the thought of everything she was saying and implying there, even though he was listening carefully to every single word. She decided to sweeten the pot. "And I miiiiiight~ happen to know the general locations of a couple shipwrecks…" That got Lee's attention again. Miz Flickered just to confirm the location "...like a certain Olympic liner that famously hit an iceberg…" And now Lee was practically salivating at the thought.

Bill was holding back laughter at his little sister tempting Lee.

"Miz," the dream demon murmured, "Don't 'inspire' him too much, now, yes?"

Miz giggled. "Right, calm down there boy." She grinned at the twins, who were both looking a mixture of pretty interested and somewhat-unsure.

Lee was thinking hard. He glanced around, then reached into Sixer's backpack for some paper (Sixer always had extra school stuff on hand) and started jotting notes to himself down, for things he wanted to look into in more detail maybe. (This didn't sound like a two-person job, though. This was starting to sound more like it'd need an entire team of people…)

Lee started to frown a bit as he wrote, and started trying to think of the expenses. (Miz had said college, and that cost money… he seriously doubted anyplace had diving scholarships - that wasn't a sport…)

"And Atlantis?" Sixer asked Miz, as Lee kept on writing.

Miz Flickered. "Spoiler alert, it's not in the Atlantic ocean," was her sly response. Sixer's eyes gleamed almost hungrily.

"You said somethin' about a generator? And air filtration tanks and things?" Lee asked abruptly.

Miz hummed. "They're easily built. I'd just need a little something from you. I don't think I can fully justify this one, sorry." Lee stilled in place. 'Demons, right...'

Lee wavered a bit. "...can I think about it?" he asked the demon. "This is a lot of stuff, here." And he wasn't gonna be able to figure it all out while he was sitting here in this classroom. He'd need to hit the library and look a couple of things up, go talk to people - on the phone, he didn't know nobody in the area who did anything like this. And… this was starting to look a lot more like out and out work to pull off than fun, too.

"Give it all the thought you need," Miz said gently. "And this isn't some end-all, be-all thing. You're still young. You've got options. There are plenty of other things you can do with your life. This is just one option." She paused. "Maybe go talk to some of the fishermen, the ones who go far out into the deep waters. Some fishing boats have radars and diving equipment."

"Ain't a lot of those types around here," Lee said, frowning. "I'd have to sail off someplace with better waters. Deeper waters," he corrected. There were some problems with coral or something, and some places were way too shallow for anything other than a scow, or maybe a schooner, even when the tide was in...

"This would be a lot of work." Miz warned. "Becoming a treasure hunter isn't easy."

"Yeah…" Lee said slowly. He was starting to get that. He sat back in his chair.

And then he startled a bit, as the end-of-class bell rang.

Lee let out a soft curse, as he started grabbing up his stuff and piling it all together (yeah, he'd finished his English homework), then finally managed to snatch his math homework away and back from Miz.

"Well, next class is Social Studies again," Miz tilted her head. "And it's just a review class today, so we can sit in the back and talk if you want to keep going."

Lee nodded, "Oh, yeah. I've got a lot more questions for you on this stuff," the younger of the two Pines twins told her.

Miz nodded. "-And I have more questions for Sixer." She gathered up her stuff and the group made their way to class.

Lee rolled his eyes, as they walked down the hallway together. Was the demon-dragon trying to piss his brother off? ...I mean, maybe Sixer deserved it a little bit for pissing her off and then not actually meaning his own 'sorry' earlier, but...

"But I am better than them! Even you think so!" Sixer exclaimed. "Even if you refuse to go by raw intelligence as a metric, I still study harder and I do better than any of them!"

Miz's look softened. "You do study hard. You work hard to learn. But that doesn't excuse you being rude to everyone. This is why no one likes you. It has nothing to do with your hands." Miz sighed when Sixer looked about to protest.

"That isn't-" Sixer started to say, before Miz interrupted him with: "People hated your hands years ago. But they got used to them, they got over them. No-one cares about your hands anymore. They don't even notice them." (Lee nodded at that. Because it was true.) "Carla didn't care about your hands either, it's why she never bothered to check your fingers; it's why she didn't know." Miz huffed. "And you're twins! And Lee was wearing glasses."

Lee blinked. Wait. What?

Miz saw that Bill was tensing up more than a little. She winced. "Is it okay for me to have this conversation with them?" she asked her brother. Bill looked over at her.

"No," Bill said. (Sixer rolled his eyes; he didn't particularly want to get into this topic of conversation, either. Lee always got so unreasonable about Carla. And he didn't want to deal with the fallout either, it would likely drag on for days.) "You should stop," Bill added, and he didn't look particularly happy with her at the moment.

Miz sighed. "I just don't like tragic misunderstandings. They're not funny."

"Miz," Bill said warningly. "Do you remember what I said to Stanley on the boat, that I didn't want him to talk about? -Don't repeat it out loud, just say yes, no, or maybe."

"Yes…" Miz nodded.

"Do you remember how I cast that 'relaxant and garbled-words' spell on you later?" Bill asked her next.

"Yes." Miz pouted but she knew what Bill meant.

"GOOD." Bill eyed her carefully, as he slid over sideways to be walking right next to her side. "Do you, or don't you, think that talking about Carla is related to what I wanted you to stop talking about to any and all Pines twins, as related to that?" he not-quite demanded out of her.

Miz thought about that for a moment.

-And Bill was right there to get an arm around her waist and under her nearer arm's elbow, when the spell hit her with a much harder 'shove' than she'd felt when first-cast.

Miz gasped and wobbled a little. Her eyes glazed for a bit before she blinked and regained her balance. "...thanks…" she said quietly. Looks like this misunderstanding was going to stay. Sad, but… maybe that's just how it happens sometimes.

"This topic is pointless, and unhelpful," Bill said authoritatively. (Lee frowned at him slightly, because the demon looked tense, and… Sixer seemed to agree with what the demon had just said, but Lee wasn't entirely sure that the demon actually thought that himself.) "We are going to talk about something else, now."

...Except they didn't. They walked down the hallway in relative silence for a bit, and Bill continued to help his little sister along, until she was able to right herself once again and walk on her own two feet. Lee hadn't thought Bill would put a spell on his own sister, Miz looked a little confused as she blinked a lot and pressed a hand to her head.

Finally, they got to class and settled in the back of the room. The teacher didn't mind, it was just a review class and she figured they were going to be going over notes together, the other students had grouped up among each other as well.

"So are there mermaids in Atlantis?" Sixer asked, as they pushed all their desks together.

Miz shrugged. "I don't have to tell you." She didn't sound like she was saying it to be mean, just stating facts.

Sixer frowned. "You're telling Lee just about everything he wants to know."

"Well, Lee hasn't pissed me off." Miz pointed out. "Frankly, you're on your last chance with me already."

"What?" Sixer protested. She'd seemed fine with him last period! He'd answered all of her questions like she'd wanted him to, and she'd even told him he was smart, not an idiot who she'd threatened to ignore! What could he have possibly done between when the bell rang and now, during their hallway trip, to make her angry with him again since then?

"You tried to peel off my scale and didn't even think about how that made me feel, strike one. You called me stupid and lied in your apology to me, strike two. You also still don't see what's wrong with being rude to people. I'm not as mad anymore, but you're on your third try. If you somehow screw this up, I'm not helping you anymore." Miz warned him. ('Screw what up?' Sixer wondered.) "Heck, the older Ford managed to piss my brother off so much that brother stopped helping him." She sighed. "But he still has to, even if he doesn't want to. The older Stan asked him to," she told him, and Sixer narrowed his eyes at her.

"Well, then," Sixer said almost snidely as he adjusted his glasses, and immediately thought three steps ahead to: "If you decide you don't want to do anything for me in the future for whatever reason-" (because he was thinking of her as being completely unreasonable now, and thus likely to be so again to him in the future) "-Perhaps I should simply ask 'the older Stan' to intervene on my behalf as well and make you-"

Lee was on his feet immediately as Sixer's words cut out, yelling frantically, "LET HIM GO!"

Because Sixer's words had cut off because of the single hand Bill had completely wrapped around his throat from behind him.

Lee was standing there, shaking with adrenaline and fear, as he frantically looked down at them both where they were sitting, because he didn't know what to do. If he attacked the demon - he knew how strong the demon was. Being able to toss Crampelter like that, to grab hold of him and lift him like that, to grab his hand and Crampelter to not even be able to move - if he tried to rush him now, all the demon would have to do was close his hand and Sixer's neck would be-

(The teacher wasn't looking at them. Nobody was looking at them. Why was nobody- Oh god. Nobody could see what was going on?! -That suit the demon was wearing under his clothes was visible and glowing blue. Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no-)

"Please," Lee begged Bill, because he didn't know what else to do; the demon wasn't even looking at him, he was still looking at Sixer, at the back of his head, and nobody was gonna help, because they couldn't even see or hear what was going on, and- "Please let him go-"

"Ṕ̠̻̯̯̱̣͌̇̉̀ͦ̚Ê҉̫Ṉ̺̥͍͙̬͚͆͋͊͑Ä͖̹̲̮̪́͛̆͑ͪL͔̖̦̭̙͚ͪŢͮ͌̍̚Y͋ͧͥ̈́ͪ҉̗͖̘̘̼̤̙," Bill intoned deeply, and-

...the demon let go. Not quickly, and not like he'd been paying attention to Lee in the slightest, but he did let go. Though he'd done it more like-

Sixer, who had looked surprised the entire time, let out a slight cough, and twisted around in his chair to face the demon head-on, his expression shifting to annoyance and outrage as he did, and-

...Lee didn't hear him say anything.

After a moment, Lee saw his brother turn away from Bill slightly and grasp at his throat, looking shocked, seeming to...

Bill was looking on at this with half-lidded eyes, and an utter lack of any expression on his face.

Lee shoved himself away from his desk abruptly and moved down to crouch in front of his brother.

Sixer was looking less shocked and more and more frustrated, as his mouth moved, hand still at his throat and...

...absolutely no sound came out.

Lee tugged Sixer's hand away from his throat, and brought up both hands to carefully check him. Sixer flinched away from his touch at first, but Lee didn't see any damage (thank whoever); Sixer's throat wasn't bleeding, and his neck wasn't bruised or anything. He looked... fine.

Lee raised his eyes up to his twin's face and… Sixer looked absolutely incensed, as he lifted his hand back up to continue rubbing at his throat again. (And it was clear that something was wrong.)

"You will not talk to my sister like that," was what Lee heard Bill say next, as smoothly as you please.

"...What did you do to him," Lee said slowly, not looking away from his brother.

"Oh," said Bill, in relaxed tones, "I just used a little of the neurotoxin I used on Crampelter to DROP him, on 'Ford's throat to keep him from TALKING anymore. After all," the demon said, "If he doesn't have anything other than not-nice and completely-UNTRUE things to say, and isn't going to TRY to issue even a token apology to my sister for it, after all that… WHY LET HIM SAY ANYTHING AT ALL?"

Lee swallowed. He turned to face the demon. "You didn't have to do that," he said slowly, carefully.

"Oh, I think I DID," Bill said next as he examined his nails. "After all," Bill continued, "Stanley wouldn't want me KILLING him, stuffing his still-warm DEAD BODY into my hat, and then yanking him out of it to maybe resurrect him back to life at the boat later this afternoon, again. -That Stanford has had more than a few nightmares that he likes to toss at himself that are just close enough to that sort of thing, that I'd have to spend more effort and energy later tonight keeping him from having them again, if I did THAT in front of him! Even if he only heard about it later, he'd still…" Bill grimaced, then waved it off with an, "I'm not doing that."

Lee froze in place.

"Are you telling me that the two choices you were choosing between there were making it so my brother can't speak anymore, and killing him?" Lee not quite squeaked out.

Bill caught his gaze and gave him a very long look.

"He called my sister STUPID," Bill said. He crossed one leg over the other and added, with an unsmiling face, "I would have killed him THEN, on the spot, in the hallway BEFORE you dragged him off," (Lee went more than a little pale upon hearing this) "-But my sister - like Stanley - doesn't like to kill people who aren't trying to kill them first. So I deferred to her own feelings on this sort of thing then, and I didn't kill him right away."

(Bill's low-lidded look became a slightly softer glare, and he gave his sister a slight smile, as Miz gave her brother an affectionate nuzzle for respecting her feelings. "Thanks brother." But once she'd stopped nuzzling him, his expression dropped almost immediately again.)

"-His behavior has NOT improved today since," Bill drawled out at the two younger Pines twins, resting his arm over the back of the chair he was sitting in, and propping his head up on his fist as he looked at Lee.

"Somebody calling somebody else stupid isn't worth killing somebody over," Lee said, placing a hand over the hand in his brother's lap. (Sixer was still clutching at his throat with one hand, while the other was clenched in his lap in a white-knuckled fist. He had his head bowed and was shaking in place, and Lee wasn't all that sure whether or not he was actually scared… or just about ready to take a swing at the killer demon who really was just looking for an excuse to kill people, instead. His brother was crazy-suicidal sometimes, Lee swore.)

"Miz is my little sister is a me-that-is-also-me and, generally, I've found that people who think that I am stupid either try to take advantage of me, or get in my way WITHOUT caring that that's what they're doing, sooner or later," Bill told Lee as if informing him of the facts of life. "I don't particularly feel like wasting my time dealing with or handling any of that, when I can simply and easily solve the problem, by immediately killing them before they become any more of a problem, instead. It's far less work for me in the long run," Lee was told.

"You think killing your problems is okay," Lee confirmed flatly, and that was anything but good. He knew what that kind of thinking led to. Some stuff from history class just stuck with you...

"HA! -And you have a problem with that!" Bill enthused out with a half-smile. "Unsurprising; Stanley does, too," Bill said next. "I wonder…" Bill dropped his fist and cocked his head at Lee slightly, thoroughly ignoring Lee's twin as Sixer slowly turned towards him. "Are you actually concerned with 'morality' like Sixer is, too?" he asked of Lee.

Lee shivered, because the demon didn't mean his twin when he said 'Sixer', he was talking about- so the demon meant that- and that meant the older Sixer cared about this stuff. (Yeah, okay - 'course he did, with the way he kept going off on both demons, right. But it also said something even worse to Lee about how his twin was right now, for having been left off of that demon's list.)

"...Maybe," Lee said carefully, hedging his bets. He wasn't certain where the demon was going with this, but the longer the demon kept talking, the less the demon seemed to be looking like he was gonna be doing anything else that might-

"Hm," said the demon. "Then what do YOU consider to be better: dying once, and that being that in terms of 'punishment'; or being tortured over and over and over again forever and ever, because you just can't learn your lesson and do any better!" the demon said somewhat enthusiastically. (Lee stared at him.) "-The second one sounds a bit like your own definition of 'hell', doesn't it?" Bill said, mock-lightly. "NOW," the demon continued, leaning forward and propping his head up on his fists, elbows on his knees, to grin at him now. "-Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good bit of getting even just as much as the next demon, when someone has been particularly annoying to me, BUT," Bill leaned back again, "As much as I enjoy the cute little pun-and-callback I was able to make out of my name here in your NOT-so-delightful little language, I am not actually interested in spending every last IOTA of MY time torturing every last tortured mind, body and soul, in all of existence that is 'deserving' of a little payback for their every last transgression against me! I have far better-worse things to do than to busy myself with that," he told Lee. "-Like I said, kid: it's a waste of my time," Bill said.

"...Pun and callback?" Miz asked interestedly. She'd heard the first explanation Bill had given for his name on the rooftops a few nights ago, but this didn't sound the same?

Bill glanced over at her and smiled almost indulgently.

"Bill Cipher," the demon said. "Ever heard of 'Bill Zebub' and 'Lou Cipher'?" (Lee stared.) "Otherwise known to most humans as-"

"-Beelzebub and Lucifer," Miz not quite giggled out, suddenly getting the joke.

"Baal-Lord of the Fliers and of the Heavenly Dwelling," Bill smiled, thinking of his 'Nightmare Realm' and the very worst-best he'd been able to make of it in the meantime, despite everything, "And the Morning-star, the shining one, Bringer of 'Light' to the intelligent masses," Bill said cheerily with a smile, splaying a hand across his chest. "After all, who better to QUESTION EVERYTHING and fight a stupid god, to eventually WIN and make all the unfair and stupid things better and better, to break EVERYTHING that needs to be broken in the very-WORST kind of way!" And he'd been cast down pre-emptively almost, in his first search for something better, ascending higher (and higher and higher) in (a frantic search for help) a search for an answer to the question of-

Lee shivered as he listened to this. Because this demon was literally calling himself not just a demon, but a combination of two names for the Devil himself-

-and he was talking about fighting a war against God and breaking… breaking what? holy shit-

-and the demon seemed freaking happy about it. Holy shit. -Holy shit. (Lee shivered again in place.)

(And he didn't like the long, intense look his brother was tossing the demon's way any better either…)

"I've met the types of demons who torture the souls of Sinners until they were deemed punished enough to be reincarnated," Miz mused as she tilted her head to the side. "I'm not big on that kinda thing myself. Torturing souls that is, I have gone for some punishments to the people who did things I didn't like. Like those poachers who hurt Xanthar's family." She wondered if that was good or bad? If she was punishing bad people? But it somehow didn't make her uncomfortable when she punished people, the mere act of malicious intent that she had for them made her powers buzz happily. Well, she didn't kill the poachers! Just petrified them and left them in a museum. Miz glanced over at Sixer. "How long is this going to last?" she asked her brother, then paused. "Would Stan get mad?"

Bill let out a laugh. "This is a penalty, and it keeps him from DYING, because it'll keep him from continuing to do the things he'd be doing next that would have me killing him!" Bill shrugged as he said, "Stanley will understand. -He'll probably say 'good job, kid!' for not killing him just now." Because if he'd said it for what had happened with that Stanford that morning at first, then he'd definitely say it for this! (Hopefully without any of those STUPID 'head-pats' that he didn't like, this time.)

Lee pressed his lips together. Because, yeah, maybe it was better for Sixer to stop talking before he got himself killed, and the stuff he'd been saying was… awful. And Lee just didn't know how to handle what these demons had just said about his brother right now. They couldn't be… right, could they? Sixer didn't like the idea of killing people - Sixer had been shocked about the Sibling Brothers, when he had shoved them off of that cliff and they'd sort of thought they might be dead at first, just like he had been - and… that was a moral thing, right? To be worried about killing people?

Lee had known his brother didn't think much of anything of the people around them. -But that was a hell of a far cry from the demon who'd freaking paralyzed his throat because he didn't like what he was saying, whose only reason for not killing his twin had been 'because it would annoy my sister and/or make her and Stanley sad'. (Seriously, you wanna talk about no morality there, well-)

"You're not gonna do anything else bad to him, right…" Lee said slowly, and almost leadingly. "I mean, he's gotta answer stuff in… I dunno, writing now. What if he writes stuff down that you don't like?" Lee said flatly next, still pretty pissed off at the demon (and planning on bringing this shit up with the old-man him, who couldn't be okay with this junk!) but knowing that all he could do right now was try and figure out where all the lines were, and help his brother stay within them, at least until the end of the day, when they got back to the ship...

Bill thought about it for a moment. "...WELL," said the demon after a long moment. "I suppose I could just scoop him into my hat still-alive. -But he'd come out again without remembering anything in the meantime; no time will have passed for him," Bill told him, "And it would ruin Miz's 'mission that she chose to accept' of making sure you both attended school each and every day while we're here. -He won't see or hear any of the rest of the lessons today!" He paused for a moment. "I could just paralyze BOTH his HANDS, instead?" Bill offered good-naturedly (and an angry gleam in his eyes), as if granting them a boon.

Sixer shuddered in place, going dead white, and clenching his fists together. Lee went quiet, and didn't look much better.

"He wouldn't have learned anything from this penalty if he went in the hat. And he needs his hands for class," Miz pointed out kindly. She really was too merciful, wasn't she. Miz was also trying to stay calm and hide her own feelings about Sixer's 'threat' since she didn't want Bill to get any angrier if he knew how upset she really was about it.

"Hm," said Bill. "Well." The demon clapped his hands together. "Then perhaps little 'Ford here had better BEHAVE," the demon told them, grinning at them both.

Sixer shivered again, staring straight forward. (He still looked like he wanted to try punching the demon in the face. Damnit, Sixer…) Lee put a hand on his brother's shoulder.

Miz gave him a sad look. "Sorry. But this is better than dying, right? And you can take this time to think about what you did to upset Bill."

"AHAHA! Don't make it too hard on him, Miz!" Bill told her. "He is FAILING at being human right now! He needs a REMEDIAL course," Bill said next, leaning back in his chair, at his desk. "-Let's play a little game here, shall we? Here's a HINT! Analogies, word association, fill-in-the-blank - LET'S GO," he told the brothers. "I'm upset, because my little sister is upset. My little sister is upset, because…?"

"Sixer called Miz stupid and then lied about being sorry about it," Lee said quietly, not liking this 'game' at all.

"DING DING DING!" Bill half-crowed out, grinning. "Very good job! ONE of you two was actually LISTENING to her, earlier. -Really, little-'Lee'," Bill said, propping up his chin on a fist and smiling at him, "It's a bit of a CHEAT to be letting you sit alongside your brother for a REMEDIAL course YOU don't need, isn't it? -Especially when you're already operating on the post-college equivalent class-level for THIS one!"

"He means you know how to be human." Miz told Lee simply. (And Lee didn't like what that implied they thought about his brother.)

"Oh, THIS one doesn't just 'know how to be human, Miz,'" Bill corrected her. "No, THIS one knows 'how to interact with PEOPLE', in general!" Bill grinned. "It's much more difficult to get it right across other intelligent species! But boy," he told Lee with a widening grin, "YOU'RE doing a BANG-UP JOB at it!"

Miz clapped quietly. "It's official! You're a person!" she told Lee. "And you know how to talk to other people. -Your brother still needs to learn this." (Hell. If this was supposed to be an 'official' evaluation from a couple of freaking demons... Lee really didn't like what they were implying about his brother, now.)

"Sixer's a person-!" Lee protested.

"That 'Ford," Bill pointed at him, "Is TERRIBLE at communicating to get anything he wants." (Sixer clenched his jaw, not liking the reminder about what had happened at the science fair, and what his pa had said, and now with Miz and Bill-) "He can't even communicate in a way that keeps him from getting himself nearly KILLED, or otherwise maimed, for angering not one, but TWO someones who he KNOWS could AND ARE both perfectly capable of killing him ON A WHIM," Bill blew off.

"Just because you think killing is-" Lee started to say.

"Ah-ah-ah!" Bill said, shaking a finger at him. "Before you say ANYTHING ELSE, tell me," Bill intoned, and he looked incredibly, scarily serious again. "How do you think Crampelter would have reacted to little 'Ford here, telling HIM that HE was 'stupid' to his face?" Lee got quiet. "-And then clearly LIED to him about being 'SORRY' about it next, LATER, after he'd had a chance to really THINK about it? -Go on, I'LL WAIT!" Bill told him almost cheerily, at the end.

...Damnit. Lee didn't have anything to say to that. Hell, what could he? 'Crampelter isn't a friend, but Miz kinda is, so that makes it okay?' -That wasn't gonna fly!

"Are you paying attention, little 'Ford? Or do we need to coach this all in 'history lesson' class terms, for you to finally start PAYING ATTENTION to what is RIGHT IN FRONT of you, that we have been literally telling you TO YOUR FACE?" Bill drawled out, a bit more dryly, as he kept on staring down at Lee.

"Humans are social creatures. They only made it this far because they helped each other. Cared for and supported each other," Miz said gently. "Lee is very good at caring for his brother. But Sixer, for all his intelligence, can't even understand the basic fundamentals of socialization. Like a human infant in their early developmental phase. No self-actualization at all," she lectured. "I don't want to talk about the Id, Ego and Superego because Freud was wrong about many things, but perhaps you'd understand it better if I used those terms?" Miz tilted her head before looking over at Bill for his opinion.

"HAHA - NO," said Bill. "You SEE, Miz, that's not quite right," the demon told his little sister. "It's why I used the 'Crampelter' example just now. Little-'Ford here," Bill gestured at him, "Does know better than to say something like what he said to YOU, to HIM. -He knows how to treat someone he doesn't like, who doesn't like him, who could hurt him. What he doesn't know how to do," Bill said ponderously, as he leaned back in his chair, "Is how to act towards someone who he thinks should like him, who he wants to have like him, who could also hurt him. -His only experiences with THAT, up until now, have been his parents - now on his 'enemies' list! - and... his twin." Bill sent a short glance over Lee's way (and Lee wasn't liking this already). "And look how he treats HIM." (Lee tensed in place.) Bill glanced back up towards Lee's twin. "Not like a BROTHER at all, if you ask me." Bill's eyes sharpened. "Because as far as I'M AWARE," Bill continued, a slight buzzing undertone entering his voice (that set Lee's teeth on edge), "One does NOT treat a BROTHER WORSE than they would treat AN ENEMY." (And Lee stared, feeling a little lightheaded and dizzy, at the way the demon was glaring at his twin brother now.)

'What?' Lee thought, as he tried to defend his brother. "Sixer doesn't-"

"He's just been leeching off you, making you take care of him without ever giving you anything back in exchange. He only knows how to take what he wants and then discard you once you're no longer useful to him." Miz said sadly. "Which is a shame, you'd think someone of his intelligence would know how to be grateful to the person who helped and protected them. You've coddled him. It's nice that you love him and protect him, but he's gotten to relying on you instead of doing anything himself. And more than that, he doesn't appreciate the things you do for him."

Lee glowed at her. "It's not like that at all-!" Lee tried to say. Sixer didn't rely on him for anything-!

"Sixer has no respect for you, or your feelings, or your love," Miz said simply. "After all, he has to be the best, the smartest, and you let him. Because you care about his feelings and don't want to hurt them. But he doesn't care about yours at all. He's been calling you stupid for YEARS and…" Miz leaned forward to give Lee a firm look. "...you're not. Please tell me that you at LEAST understand that now?"

Lee looked away from her and stayed silent. (Grades weren't everything. And his twin was smarter than him. And even if the teachers really had been grading his stuff right, whenever he actually turned it in… the demon-dragon didn't know what she was talking about. Neither of them did.)

"And because you wanted to spare Sixer's delicate feelings," Miz continued, "You purposely stopped trying to do well in school. Because you're afraid that you might do better than him, and make him angry at you-" (Lee stared at Miz in horror. How did she know about- wait, no, that wasn't right! Sixer had told him- and he'd read what Sixer had done! The teachers had only given Sixer a lower grade that time because they hadn't understood-!) "-just like he was when you did better than him all those years ago."

Miz saw Sixer's frowning and outraged look. She turned to him and sighed. "You're brilliant Sixer, you really are. But you're not the only one allowed to be smart. Lee's not at your level, but he's intelligent too. But he purposely sabotaged himself for all these years because you're the smart one, and he didn't want to take that from you."

(Miz had said this same thing before, when she'd been mad at Ford. Mad at him for not appreciating Stan's brilliance for being able to do what he did: rebuild the portal, build a genetic scanner, get the stabilizers working-)

(It frustrated her, just as much as what was happening with Lee did. Stan was a very intelligent man, who put himself down constantly, who never considered himself to be halfway intelligent, who still, in his own thoughts, referred to himself as stupid - because that was what his brother had told him, for years and years and years until he'd internalized it. Until he'd believed it.)

(And Miz hated that fact with every fiber of her being.)

(And sure, it was hypocritical of her to think so when she, herself, constantly called herself stupid in her own head, but that was just her low self esteem and depresive thoughts talking. She knew that. She knew it was unhealthy as fuck, but for the life of her, she just couldn't help it. Besides, no one was allowed to call her stupid except herself! She wouldn't allow anyone else to call her that!)

Lee was looking away, not really wanting to hear this. It wasn't-

"But he can still learn, can't he?" Miz asked her brother. "If he's really so smart, he should be able to learn how to be a person?"

Bill hummed as stared at Sixer. "HMMMMMMM~" the older demon hummed out, bobbing his upper torso back and forth a bit. "Maybe if we let him try to answer a few of these questions, we can see just how bad he is! And how much CATCH UP he'll need."

Sixer's face was clearly an outraged expression of 'But I can't talk!' which made Bill cackle. "Oh now, really," Bill said, putting his chin on his fists and leaning forward. "Are you really telling me that you can't figure out any other way to communicate with others without speaking? -Your twin told you one way how to do that, earlier!" Bill told him, then cocked his head at him. "Were you not paying ATTENTION to him?" (Sixer seethed.)

"WELL, that's fine!" Bill said, clapping his hands together. "Let's have us a little 'human sociology' pop quiz!" ('Oh shit,' thought Lee. How had they overheard-?!) "Don't worry! You've had SEVENTEEN YEARS to study up for THIS one, so it should be a BREEZE! -We'll even make it even-EASIER for you than that," Bill practically purred out. "-This is multiple choice! All questions can be answered with a 'yes', a 'no', a 'maybe', or an 'I don't know'! -READY?" Bill grinned out. "Question one! -Is it acceptable for someone to go about treating their own sibling WORSE than an enemy?" And the two demons stared at Sixer unblinkingly for his response. (Lee bit his lip and tightened his hand over Sixer's hands, hoping his idiot twin brother didn't do anything to get him maimed by the demons. ...C'mon, Sixer. Don't be stupid here. Don't go trying to tell off the demons...)

Sixer shook his head once; 'no'.

"Good!" Bill clapped his hands. "Either you understand this much, or you were actually PAYING ATTENTION to ME, earlier! WELL. Either way, that's BETTER than I thought! Good job!" He grinned so wide it looked as if his face would split.

...And then, thank somebody, the bell rang.

Bill looked up and over, the grin dropping off of his face, as if it'd never been there. "HM." The demon paused, then looked over at the two Pines. "WELL," he said, "We can pick this up LATER, I suppose." Then he smiled rather widely, showing teeth. "After all, you need to try to keep up on your non-REMEDIAL lessons, too!" Bill said brightly, practically kicking his own bag up into his hands, before shouldering it. (Bill also made a short gesture and eye-flick, that turned off the visual- and sound-altering tech he'd had his suit handling for him. It wasn't as though he'd forgotten what Stanley had said about not wanting him casting spells on the school grounds.)

Miz reached over to ruffle Sixer's hair a little before taking his hand and squeezing gently. "I believe that you should be able to be a good person. It's not too late." She hoped at least.

Sixer frowned furiously, refusing to look at her, and yanked his hand away from her roughly.

Lee frowned at Miz, pulling his arm back closer in to him, then looked up at his brother.

"We'll talk to the old guys at the boat," Lee told his twin under his breath. "Okay? They'll fix this. It'll be okay. We just need to get through the school day with them," because Lee just bet that the demon-dragon wasn't going to let them skip class to go there any earlier. "Okay?"

Sixer looked down at him with almost a glare. He didn't look happy - especially not with the way he was tossing his things into his backpack that roughly - but...

Lee let out a breath, and slowly stood up.

And he and his brother slowly followed the two demons out of the classroom, to their next class.