Illusion is Reality

Chapter 92

-It's very confusing-

The next morning at breakfast, during which Miz cooked a large spiced vegetable medley - with chopped nuts, corn, carrots, potatoes and some alien plants that Dipper didn't recognize - for her brother and herself, Dipper and Mabel grilled their grunkles about everything that happened during that week that they'd missed out on, while the portal had been closed before opening again.

"You really sent Bill to high school?!" Dipper gasped out He'd thought he must've misunderstood Great-Uncle Ford the night before - they'd all been tired, and Dipper couldn't imagine him being okay with Bill doing that, when he didn't even want the triangle demon going into town! Stan chuckled while Bill made an annoyed chittering sound in between bites of his breakfast.

"No, seriously," Dipper said next, super-worried about this. "Why would you even do that?" he asked his grunkle and great-uncle both. "-How many people died?"

"None," Bill said. "Zero people died from my attending that school. -No thanks to Sixer, here," Bill muttered out next, shooting Ford a rather flat look (and Ford looked away, not quite wincing).

"Seriously?" Dipper said skeptically, while Mabel was giving Bill an intense look - which the dream demon was avidly avoiding, while also trying not to look like he was avoiding it at the same time.

"Bill and Miz both attended," Stan told them both. "Had a bet with Bill about whether he could survive the week without killing anybody, and he did. Miz had a mission to make sure the younger set didn't try skipping out on school again; she managed that too." Speaking of which... "-Good job there, Miz."

Both the twins looked over at Bill and Miz now, as Bill started patting-petting Miz on the head (for Stanley, to go with the 'good job', since Miz was out of arm's reach of Stanley right then). Because, seriously? Two demons at a human high school? Together? At the same time?! Dipper didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the idea.

Miz giggled. "It was fun! And~" She leaned in to grin at Mabel. "Despite their utter fear of him, I actually noticed a few of the kids there… crushing on Bill," she mock-whispered.

Mabel gasped at this news and then started making a sound only dogs should be able to hear.

Bill, for his part, sputtered at this news and straightened up where he was sitting in shock. "WHAT?!"

Miz nodded sagely, having overheard ALL sorts of thoughts coming out from the kids around the school (as well as some of the both terrified AND intrigued expressions people made when looking at Bill, whom they all thought was a teenage girl). "There were some girls who thought he was 'really cool' after he beat up Crampelter - that guy preyed on lots of girls at the school - and a few guys who were like 'I want to be stepped on by her'-" Miz was cut off by Bill stuffing one of the pancakes Stan had made for everyone into her mouth.

Bill's right left eye was twitching as he pulled his hand back away from his sister, having achieved said 'shut up for a minute' objective via temporary rolled-up pancake insertion into said little sister's mouth. The older demon's shoulders came up and his eyes narrowed in annoyance at the thought that there had been humans getting squirmy feelings for him. UGH.

Stan was muffling his laughter, holding his mug of coffee up to hide it a bit. Mabel was still squealing, while her brother looked a little green.

...Ford also looked a little horrified by this apparent fact.

Miz chewed and swallowed the pancake and pouted at Bill. "What? I think it was kinda cute."

"No! It's STUPID!" Bill told her. "None of them are my type!" he snarled out. "I was giving none of those human 'sex signals' out," Bill told her. "No pheromones, no open-display posture, no gesticulations, no verbal social cues, NONE. -That should NOT have happened," the triangle demon grumbled out, before shoving another forkful of vegetables into his mouth, and crunching down hard on them, while making an annoyed and rather ugly chittering sound. (He prided himself on effective communication, and the idea that maybe he hadn't been… He was going to have to review his bodysuit's sensor history for this now, to see what Miz might be referring to, and he was NOT looking forward to doing so.)

Miz shrugged. "From what I've seen, people tend to get crushes on other people whether or not the other party is interested…" she deliberately did not give Dipper a teasing look about Wendy. "Well, it was a fun week. I haven't been in school for a really long time. It was so weird to be back." She frowned a little. "A lot of guys were crushing on me too. But it was less of a crush and more lust. I think the only guy who was legitimately crushing on me was Ben." Huh. Actually, she should go ask Mary how Ben was doing. He seemed like a very sweet boy.

Stan raised an eyebrow at her. "So, you're okay with this Ben guy crushing on you?" Weird, he'd thought she was oblivious to that sort of thing, what with her friend having told her he loved her not registering at all.

Miz shrugged. "I was in the form of a very voluptuous young woman. And I was friendly with him. It wasn't a serious crush, he was just happy, and a little terrified, that someone like me was paying attention to him." she pointed out. Dipper frowned. "Wait, voluptu-what?"

And Miz activated her cybersuit's hologram function to make herself appear to be in her older form.

...and Dipper went bright red and slapped his hands over his eyes. "AAAAAAH! TURN BACK! TURN BACK!"

Miz dismissed the hologram with a confused look. "Huh? Wasn't the reaction I was expecting?" She wondered if maybe Dipper was afraid of sudden shapeshifting. He might have trauma from that shapeshifter after all...

Meanwhile, on Dipper's end, his poor teenaged hormones were rearing their ugly heads and the boy just wanted to crawl into a hole. Those curves! This was so messed up!

On the other hand, Mabel was nodding sagely. "Ooooooooh. O~kay. -Girl, I can see why that Ben guy was so smitten!" she said with utter seriousness and a head nod.

Stan's snort was badly hidden behind a bite of pancake. Ford was rubbing his face with a hand. He rather understood what problem his grand-nephew was going through just then, and felt a great sympathy for him.

Luckily, the breakfast conversation was quickly steered away from that, moving from high school shenanigans on to what the twin's favorite grunkles had been doing during the day themselves. (-Spoiler alert: it had mostly been making money and fixing up the boat.)

Ford talked about the kitchen he'd wired up by moving the solar panels from some of Miz's machines to the deck (and Miz's machines to the lower deck themselves), and rediverting their power to be able to run and charge other things - such as the bank of fuel cells added to the lower deck as well, which he'd made from a few other things he'd found at some of the hardware stores and also the town dump. Stan himself talked up the long list of things he'd done to earn more money from the suckers along the boardwalk, and explained the Con they'd pulled off with Dragon-Miz.

The four of them all carefully avoided talking about all the… other stuff that had happened, though - the sorts of things that would have upset the twins (and had upset the two older ones). Miz didn't bring up Carla; Ford didn't bring up the science project. Stan didn't bring up anything about who was thrown out of the house and who wasn't, or any and all of the rest of it. Bill kept quiet on all of that, and then some.

Eventually, they all finished talking their way through the (sanitized version of the) vents that the niblings had missed, and also their respective breakfasts. Miz helped with clean up - claiming that she'd used the plates and pans for cooking, so she should clean them. Stan saw no problem with that; he usually let the kid help out, and he didn't mind having Miz help him with it this time, instead.

As soon as she'd finished (quickly) cleaning up 'her' plates and such from breakfast, though - and Stan finished up the rest - Miz almost immediately asked (before anyone had really left the kitchen table), "Can we play Dungeons, Dungeons, And More Dungeons today?"

Stan chuckled at this. "Well, if the niblings want to play that old nerd game with you... I don't see why not." The kid had managed to do that with the niblings a couple times by this point without any major issues, so he didn't see why Miz not being able to do the same.

Ford twitched, having thought that Stan hadn't been serious about that when he'd brought it up in the other dimension. Mabel looked at Miz in surprise and the beginnings of excitement (but then hesitated and glanced over at Bill), and Dipper...

Dipper lit up with a smile that rivalled a Pines family fireworks display on a summertime 'family fun day'!

...at least, he did for the first second there. Then he got over the initial happy rush of someone expressing interest in his favorite game of all time, and frowned at Miz suspiciously. When he realized she didn't seem to be making fun of or joking at him, he glanced over at Bill for a moment, and then looked over at Ford with a complicated expression.

"I can DM. I do that with my friends back home," Miz said as she bounced in place, capturing Dipper's attention again.

That left Dipper wincing though, and immediately looking to Great-Uncle Ford again, worried at what his reaction might be.

"-Absolutely not," Ford said quellingly. "You are not DMing anything!" he told the man-eating demon. Because if there was one thing Ford was absolutely certain of, it was that giving a demon free-rein at doing anything that left them 'in charge' of anyone - let alone with clearly and openly more power than you did over the situation at hand - was an absolute and unmitigated disaster-

-Stan shot Ford a long look. "Miz ain't Bill, Ford," Stan told his brother. "And having Dipper tryin' to roll up a bunch of new characters and other stuff so she can play with everybody in some kinda last-minute one-off game is gonna be a huge hassle, takin' forever," because he knew that Dipper didn't have anything that he'd consider 'workable' ready right now for something like that, given how the kid played the game, right then, "And sidetrack the whole thing he's got going on there, with that 'current campaign' or whatever," Stan told Ford, which his brother ought to already know, if he thought about it for two seconds. Besides…

"If she's offering to DM, I'm thinking she already has something or another already worked up that might be usable," because most nerds didn't do that unless they did. Stan looked over at Miz for a second. "And I'm thinkin' that maybe I'd like to see how she does it," he said next, waving his hand at his brother. (He'd learned a lot about the kid by watching how he'd played the thing with the lot of them. ...And he was pretty sure that Dipper and Mabel had, too.)

Ford went a little stiff, and a little still.

"...That is not a good idea, Stan," Ford said slowly.

"Nah," Stan said. "I'm thinkin' it might be a great idea," he told his brother, "Just so long as we get a couple things straight first, and all the ground rules agreed-on before anybody goes jumpin' into anything feet-first," Stan told him with a chuckle, before turning back to Miz. "Will there be any brain eating in this game? 'Cause I'm thinkin' we'd all like our brains to stay where we usually keep 'em," he half-joked. Stan was relatively sure Miz wouldn't do anything like that, but, y'know, better safe with demons than sorry.

Miz shook her head. "It'll just be a board game. No shrinking players down and making them actually fight the monsters or anything like that," she assured him. (Yeah, guess she'd looked into them all enough with that 'magic eye' of hers to have seen what all had happened last summer then. Good to know.) Stan nodded.

"Yeah, good. -Better check your rulesets and variations, though," Stan said. "Make sure everybody's on the same page, and all that."

Ford looked like he wanted to protest but Stan gave him a flat look. "Ford, it's just a nerd game. In fact, it's your nerd game. There's no reason not to let the kids go off and have a little fun," Stan told him next, and Ford bristled.

"You shouldn't ever play a game with a demon, there are always stakes involved-" Ford reiterated, yet again.

"-and we can play it with the same stakes we do with the kid, which is for information," Stan told him next, as he shuffled over to the fridge to pull out a soda. "That sound good to you, Miz?" he asked, then waited for a nod out of her before turning back to Ford. "I want to see how she plays it. And I'm thinking the kids might, too. -We're gonna work this all out, before anybody agrees to it or even throws the first dice roll," Stan told his brother next. Just the same as they had with the kid.

"You can sit this out if you don't want to play," Miz told him. She didn't look very happy as she said it, though. "Do you have to always assume everything I do is automatically evil?" she complained. "I could be collecting seashells on the beach and you'd be wondering what nefarious plots I'm planning with them!" and Ford had to stifle a twitch, because he had been eyeing up the pile of seashells and rocks that Miz had slowly been adding to over the last week in an out of the way corner of the boat's deck. Said shells had been placed inside her own Hat along with that sandcastle before they'd left, too. Ford didn't know where they were now, though; he hadn't seen them since.

-And of course he was going to 'sit this one out', because: "I don't play games with demons!" Ford objected to her tersely. "And you are a demon, who claims to be an alternate version of Bill Cipher," Ford said, pointing at said local triangle demon, "Fully admitting that you are trying to be more like him yourself, attempting to emulate both his thoughts and his behavior! -Why would you think I would ever want to 'play a game' with you?!" the older scientist ground out at her, not pleased with Miz in the least.

Miz actually looked a little hurt by this admission. Dimensional counterpart or not, they weren't the same entity. "I just wanted to play DD&MD…" she said quietly. "And just because I'm a Bill Cipher, doesn't mean we're exactly the same. You're nothing like that younger Ford after all…"

"Ford-" Stan said quickly, because he knew this was gonna get ugly real fast now. (Bill glanced between them both.)

He was too late.

Ford felt a bolt of outrage course through him, and he shot to his feet. ('Shit', thought Stan.) "You have told all of us yourself that you are trying to be more like the triangle demon who tormented me for years-"

"Because 'Bill Cipher' has a role in the world. How do you think Gravity Falls even formed?" Miz fisted her hands in her shirt. (The kids started to lean away from them both.) "There are things I need to do to ensure the plot moves along properly as it should…"

-And Miz stopped and jolted in place as Ford slammed his hands down onto the table in front of him, looking absolutely irate. "-There is NO ROLE in this world - or any other - for a being of MASS DESTRUCTION and sheer CHAOS to have to play!" he yelled out at her. "Not least of which was just proven by the very existence of the dimension that we just exited last night, a dimension that had no Bill Cipher in it, EVER!" Ford told her next, adding insult to injury - and meaning to. (Bill's eyes narrowed at him, down to almost to the thinnest of slits, and his shoulders shifted and jaw worked for a moment… before settling down only slightly again, which Dipper and Mabel both noticed and had them starting to look alarmed...)

"I don't plan to torment my Ford once I have one! As long as I can get things to happen as Ax and Time Baby want, I'm free to use my own methods to get there…" Miz trembled. "And I don't want to hurt anyone if I can avoid it. But Dad told me that-"

"-STOP," Bill said abruptly, and Miz looked startled and stopped talking. Bill had his hands steepled in front of him. (Dipper and Mabel quickly exchanged sideways glances.)

"Miz, one minute," Bill told his sister (as that Stanford bristled right in front of him), then Bill turned his head slightly, to look over at- "Stanley," he said next, "Is this lack of consensus progressing in the same way as the first loud discussion that Stanford had with my little sister at dinner the first night she was staying with us as my sister here?" Bill said cooly.

'...Well, shit,' Stan thought, internally impressed, because he hadn't thought the demon-kid would have caught that one on his own. (Kid also looked like he was practically biting his tongue on something he really wanted to say, too. This was definitely new.)

Externally, Stan had a bit of a frowning scowl going on - that he was directing at Ford and Miz, not the kid - as he said, "Yeah, kid. This fight that's going on here, tossin' a whole bunch of mental attacks back and forth during the whole thing, is sure goin' downhill pretty quickly." (And hey, 'nice try' at trying to call this whole thing something that it wasn't. Stan wasn't about to let that one fly with the kid, there. Trying to call it a 'lack of consensus' or just a 'loud discussion' - like hell. But as for the rest of it… the kid wasn't wrong.) "And I'm thinkin' you're not all that sure how to not start arguing with her and makin' stuff all that much worse, other than tryin' to call a 'time out' and maybe trying something else that might go a little better this time maybe, yeah?"

Bill nodded once.

The kids were looking to Ford, holding hands under the table, and they began slowly relaxing as they watched Ford taking breath after heaving breath, hands still palms-down on the table, beginning to regulate his breathing as he went and calm himself down.

Miz didn't look much happier than Ford, though she was looking down at her hands gripping the bottom of her shirt as she worked to calm down, herself.

"You lookin' for a better solution from me, here?" Stan said to the kid, and added almost leadingly, "Or, y'know, just some other option?"

The kid nodded once. "Yes, either," the kid said to him as calmly as Stan had ever heard him, while slowly lifting a hand to place it on top of Miz's head, a light but unmoving touch, as if to help her calm down and stay calm, too.

...Okay. (Hell, it was nice to have some backup this time, here.) "Well, Miz listens to 'stop's better from you than she does from me, and Ford listens to 'em better from me than almost anybody else, so that's what we'll start with here, yeah?" Bill gave him a long flat look, then nodded once. Good. Great.

Stan turned to Ford. "Ford, are you wanting to play this game with her? -Yes or no, just that."

"No," Ford said tersely. He didn't look at all happy at having to have repeated himself like this.

Bill glanced over at Miz. "Do you want to play with that Stanford?" he asked her.

Miz shook her head slowly. "No…" though she sounded disappointed as she said it.

"Ford, are you gonna try and stop her from playing your nerdy game with other people?" Stan asked him next.

"It's not my-" Ford stopped and took in a deep breath. "It isn't wise-" Ford began again.

"-Not what I asked," Stan said almost warningly, giving Ford a long look. "Are you gonna try and stop her from playing it with somebody else, any more than you've tried to stop the kid from doing it?"

"...No," Ford ground out eventually at them all, sounding like this was some huge concession (and possibly some sort of terrible failing) on his part.

...Yeah, he'd thought the context might help a little there. "Good," said Stan. "Then we don't got a problem, here, when it comes to this nerdy game that one of you is wanting to play with some other people, here," Stan said heavily. "Ford don't wanna play; Miz don't want him playing with her. Everything else? -You two can table the rest of that for some other yelling match, some other time," or, y'know, never. Never would be good for that one. (Stan knew that his brother wasn't going to get through to the dragon-lady on this one; not like this. He'd told her the same thing straight-out twice, and she didn't seem to be hearing him, or what he was trying to say. So…)

"Ok…" Miz took a deep breath and breathed out slowly. Then she turned away from Ford and clapped her hands together, as if using that as a segway, and looked over at the kids. "Okay, so who's going to be playing? I can get the character sheets drawn up, unless you already have your own? It doesn't matter what level you are, I can adjust the difficulty of the encounters for it."

Dipper looked over at Stan. The old man gave him a lopsided smile. "It's fine. Just one of those single, one-session games should be alright, right?"

"...Standard rules?" Dipper said slowly. "Or…"

"We'll all go over the rules first, sure," Stan said, trying to keep down the smile.

Dipper's eyebrows went up, and Mabel let out a little giggle. Bill was decidedly poker-faced over this, and Ford was left blinking and sending Stan a quick glance.

"I'm good on anything between version 3.5 to the current edition," Miz told them. "The older editions are too broken to play," what with having the Players calculate the weight of their inventory and adding that to their speed and agility modifiers, and height above sea level being a factor in their ability to breathe...

"Uh huh," Stan said, giving absolutely nothing away. "Well, that'll probably work out, y'know, in a way. -Dipper, maybe grab your newest copy of that manual or whatever for her to check, make sure it's all the same stuff from her 'set, too," Stan told him.

Dippr blinked at his grunkle. Well, if Grunkle Stan thought it would be safe, and that just going by the standard ruleset would be okay…

Dipper bit his lip, decidedly did not look at Bill at all (standard ruleset, right), and sent Great-Uncle Ford a somewhat-apologetic look, before nodding at his Grunkle and running upstairs to get one of his character sheets, his DDNMD box with all the standard starting materials (game mat, player's rulebook, basic miniature figurines…), and all of his dice, pretty much everything - except for his own binders and all the graph paper that made up his own campaign material. (His new one wasn't done yet and he definitely didn't want to spoil things for people.)

"So Dipper's playing, who else?" Miz asked.

Mabel raised her hand. "Will there be a hot elf?" she asked.

Miz giggled. "Well… there miiiight be a vampire~" and Mabel lit up and immediately agreed to play too.

Miz looked delighted.

"Would you like me to play, oh little sister of mine?" Bill asked her himself. At that, Ford shot Bill a look that Miz didn't quite catch, and when Miz happily and enthusiastically said "Yes!" ...

...Ford let out a sigh, pinched the bridge of his nose, and intoned, "I'll be watching the game, as usual." He'd done it before because he'd had to keep an eye on Bill and what he was doing, with Dipper DM'ing and Bill liable to do… well… the sort of acting out that Ford had come to expect out of the demon at every turn. (Except in those games that Bill was 'just' a player in, and Dipper was 'in charge'…)

This time was going to be different, though. The demon was going to be DM'ing this time, and Miz… with Bill playing? Stan was setting them all up for…

Ford sent Stan another look, because he damn well hoped his brother knew what he was doing here…

Miz raised an eyebrow. "You're all free to watch," she said simply. "So where can I set up the board?"

"Might as well do it out in the living room, here," Stan said, gesturing at the 'family room' behind them, beyond the kitchen area. "Not like this should be running past dinnertime."

Ford sent Stan a glance as he watched his brother decidedly not say anything one way or the other about whether he might potentially play the game himself.

Dipper came back downstairs with his DDNMD box, and plonked it down in the middle of the living room floor, while Miz glanced over at Mabel, as she got up from her own chair to go sit down next to her brother. "Do you have a character?" Miz asked. "I can help you write up one. What Class do you wanna play as?"

Mabel considered it. "Welllllll~" Mabel said. "This is a new one-time game, right? So we should probably just make new ones up, just for this! So I guess, maybe~… a Healer?"

Miz nodded. "Well, in a campaign with undead, it's always good to have a Healer."

"-I know, right!" Mabel grinned out at her as she shot out of her chair and headed for the living room, and Miz blinked at how quickly the teenager took off.

The rest of them got up and all made their way to the living room, as Miz talked Mabel through her character creation. "I'm gonna be bumping everyone up to level 5 so it'd be more fun to play. You'll have more skills and HP." Mabel nodded at that while Dipper changed up his own character sheet, leveling it up to 5. "So stats, a Healer generally needs high Wisdom and Charisma…" Miz said as she wrote up Mabel's character.

Mabel giggled. "Charisma!"

"-Hey," Stan said. "Check the nerd-book first. Make sure the rules are the same," he reminded Miz, as Dipper pulled out the handbook and dutifully held it out to the demon-girl.

A quick scan and a nod later, Miz handed the book back to Dipper. "It's the same, but the names of things changed around, I've got the correct terms for this dimension's version of the game memorized now."

Ford sent Bill another look, as Bill folded his legs under himself and sat down next to Mabel on the floor, on the side opposite from where Miz was currently sitting - effectively putting himself between Mabel and Dipper for the moment.

Bill ignored Ford's look at this choice of his, and instead reached out and took a blank character sheet from Dipper - who eyed him as he handed it over, along with a pencil - then looked down and away while seeming to be very interested in his own character sheet after that.

Turning back to Mabel, Miz grinned. "Don't underestimate Charisma! It's the stat for being able to talk to people, it affects the Persuasion skills!" She pointed at Stan: "High Charisma and Wisdom with points in Strength." Miz moved her hand to point at Ford: "High Dexterity and Intelligence, terrible at Wisdom saves. Wisdom is the stat you use to defend yourself from Psychic damage." Ford twitched at what was effectively a verbal slap-in-the-face insult, while Stan looked over at his brother. Huh. That was… an interesting way to put it. The kid had said similar before, but the kid had left out all the extra explanation that Miz was tossing out there along with it here.

"Maybe keep the insults to a minimum, yeah Miz?" Stan told her. "Unless you want to piss off the kids to the point that they don't wanna play with you anymore, 'cause you can't stop takin' potshots at Ford long enough to actually DM the nerdy game right," Stan noted, and pretended not to see the look that Ford was giving him for it. (-Yeah, he'd said it to Sixer, sure. But Sixer wasn't the only person there who he'd thought maybe needed to hear it…)

Miz blinked. "I wasn't trying to…" then she paused and tilted her head. "Ah, okay, sorry. I won't talk about his Stats."

"Believe me, you don't need to. I've already outlined that to him, long-since," Bill told her, as he finished putting the finishing touches on his own preferred-choice of character, levelled up to Level 5 - what an absolute steal, not having to even start out at the bottom with a simple Level 1 character, HAHA!

Miz continued to gently steer Mabel through character creation, explaining the special skills, how her Armor Class worked and how to calculate damage. Mabel knew a lot of this from when Dipper had DM'ed with her and Grunkle Stan and Bill now, using the actual rules as opposed to just rolling to save him from Probabilator. She wished that they could just grab Dipper's laptop and go with the Genjitsu variant that Bill had coded up for them, though, because that let them just use straight up english text and descriptions for stuff when casting spells - just like they'd been able to do when the infinity dice had gone off and made everything weirdly real. Bill's online website-program thing had also let her get a set of character stats and items just from answering a bunch of questions on 'gamelike scenarios' and letting Dipper ask them in a fun way and then type in her answers for her, but…

...the newer DL (Dungeon's League) ruleset variant that Miz was talking about wasn't so bad for this character creation stuff, either - it streamlined everything down to some really simple math!

Dipper had always complained about the standard DL variant though, and had refused to ever play it since it took all the really fun math out of everything - which was really one of the biggest reasons why he wanted to play it, besides the cool adventures!

...which was also why Mabel had never played the game with him before last summer. The DL variant also no longer allowed Players to be rewarded Gold from finding treasure in the game, either; instead, everyone in the party, regardless of how much or how little they did during the game, would all receive the same amount of Gold and Experience points at the end of said game. (...which Grunkle Stan hadn't liked himself, when he'd first heard of it.)

And in the DL variant, Magic Items were only available via purchase with Treasure Points that they got rewarded after each session, to keep things from getting 'too convoluted' during the game as they played. So even if they found a magic item in the game, they couldn't actually own it until they purchased it with Treasure Points. (...which Grunkle Stan also would've objected to, if they'd ever gotten that far in the explanation before Bill had chimed in with his own recommendation that first session, with his special 'multiverse variant' that hadn't been introduced to their own dimension yet. It had had a many-to-one translation from 'simple American English' to the right sort of output of math that wasn't any different from the ruleset they'd been using, so Dipper had been able to use the variant for Mabel's and Stan's own stuff, and use the 'normal' math for his and Bill's own.)

...And then to add insult to injury, multiple people in the party could purchase any magic item found over the course of the game at the end of the game, which Dipper insisted was 'stupid' since 'in the story of the game' there should only be ONE of that item: the one their party had found. (Apparently this rule in the 'make it super-easy to play' variant had been put in place to keep the party from fighting over an item that multiple people might want, since everyone could have one if they 'bought' it. -But it broke immersion and didn't make any sense Lore-wise!)

At the unhappy look on Dipper's face at Miz telling them she wanted to use the DL variant for her DM'ing session, Miz told them that she would be only using the newer DL ruleset for the combat and encounters while keeping the old Loot system, because she found it unfair as well. ("They made it so I wasn't allowed to keep my Windvane Spear because it was a 'story' item that was only allowed for the campaign it came with! Like, how stupid is that? As if my character would just give it up after finishing off that campaign! And I even bought a customized figurine of my character with the spear!")

Once they'd all finished establishing what all the rules would be - a mix of those from the standard rulebook that pretty much anybody human would be playing in that dimension - Miz pressed her finger to the game board and said, "I'm going to use a visual overlay; it's easier than drawing and erasing the map everytime we change locations."

Mabel blinked at the tiny little village that grew out of the board. It expanded until they could see all the miniature buildings, marketplace and even tiny little figures walking around. "Whoa, how'd you do that!" Mabel gasped out, while Dipper and Ford flinched back.

"No weirdness-!" Dipper complained quickly before Ford could even get a word out.

Miz's tech suit was glowing faintly. "They're just holograms! Not magic or weirdness at all!" she huffed. "Pyronica gets bored when there's no visual stimulus, and I had a human DM once who would bring in a whole set of blocks to build the setting and dungeons as well-"

"It's fine, kid," Stan told her with a smile. "You're just wanting to make this more fun, right?" He glanced at the board. Huh. He bet the kid would've set this up for Dipper, too, if he'd had his suit all made up at the time; probably a good thing though, that the kid hadn't. "As long as no one gets shrunk down or has their brain eaten or is gonna get hurt or killed or anything, we should be good," Stan told her. "-And the only thing anybody wins out of this besides playing the game is any info they get while they're playing. Sound good?"

Miz nodded, "That's fine." (Ford glared at Stan but didn't comment. He was not looking forward to seeing what he was expecting to see happen during this game - not in the least.)

Bill shifted in place where he was sitting on the floor and looked over the board, as he handed his character sheet over to Miz. (He didn't need a character sheet for his own calculations, since he was perfectly capable of keeping track of all his stats in his own Mind. That said, Miz would need a copy of it for herself to start with, to ensure a lack of… 'cheating', as one might put it, so-to-speak.)

Bill blinked as he stared at the area where Miz had 'put down' the figures she'd made for this, where Mabel and Dipper's characters were already standing. Dipper was playing a Halfling Druid and Mabel was an Elven Healer. And Bill waited to see if…

...and his own character appeared there shortly, looking just as he'd described him - a female Human Sorcerer-Bard, standing at the entrance of the town alongside the other two characters. Miz quickly explained the setup: that they were travellers who had just gotten into town.

Stan did a little more back-and-forth with Miz on the do's and don'ts of the rules and the way the game was going to be played - for Ford's own benefit and own peace of mind, mainly - and then they all settled in for the game, with Stan watching the action going on from the sidelines too. There weren't really any more surprises before they began.

By the time they got started, everybody was expecting what Miz was going to be doing to handle the gameplay - for instance, instead of describing the scene like a normal DDNMD game DM'er would have had to do, Miz was instead simply changing the image being projected on the ground as their characters moved around the board, and then let the players decide what they wanted to do. They were also able to make Perception or Investigation rolls to reveal more of the map as they went.

(What none of the Pines were all that sure about was what Bill might pull during the session, because…)

Dipper, more used to DMing than playing, accidentally stole a chicken almost from the get-go, leading to their entire party having to run away and out into the woods to get away from the authorities. Mabel teased him about it mercilessly, as they all regrouped and had to return to the town in disguise to continue exploring. ("How was I supposed to know the chicken would follow me?!" Dipper complained, frustrated by his Druid's passive Animal Friendship effect apparently Charming the chicken into following him around. Since they'd all been bumped up to level 5, his character had a lot more Skills to keep track of, and Dipper hadn't really gotten used to them all yet.) And Miz made it rather clear from some of the NPC chatter that they'd need to stay in disguise, too - at least until the heat was finally off of them. Stan found it all pretty funny. (Ford hid his face for a moment, not finding it funny in the least.)

As normal as the town seemed from Miz's environmental descriptions, the party soon realized there was something very wrong going on from her descriptions of the people: the townsfolk were skittish and worried. They were deliberately talking around certain subjects and were clearly hiding something. Ford was already suspicious and Stan had to stop him from speaking up with a whispered "Look, these kind of adventures are supposed to have some kind of mystery going on, yeah?"

It took many Persuasion checks - most of which were performed by Bill's character with the most success (...as usual...) - to get one of the villagers to finally tell them what was going on.

"...been two years since that vampire moved in, somewhere on the outskirts of town. We fear for our lives every month when he comes into town and snatches a few people up for his meal! We've never seen any of them again," Miz narrated for a weary looking NPC woman that the party was questioning. No one in town wanted to talk about it, fearful of scaring away merchants and other travellers if the word spread that this town was the personal hunting grounds for a vampire.

"Why haven't you hired a vampire hunter?" Dipper asked. He was a little worried at first, but having the scene zoom in with all the characters walking around made it almost like watching a movie, except he got to interact with the story. That was pretty cool.

"We've tried! But none of the adventurers we've hired have ever returned. And with the vampire abductions continuing to happen, it's pretty clear that they failed," Miz said as she clasped her hands in front of her chest (the motion following through to the NPC woman as well). "I'm afraid I will simply be sending you brave, adventurous heroes all to your deaths just talking to you all about this, but I don't know what else to do! The vampire took my sister and I'm sure she must still be alive! The fact that the vampire only hunts once a month must mean he keeps his victims alive for at least a while!"

The NPC woman gave the Player's characters a pleading look.

"I don't have much to give-" Miz gasped, wiping away an imaginary tear as the hologram of the woman followed her movements with real tears. "But you would have my utmost gratitude! I would give you free room and board within my house whenever you are in town-" Miz made the figure of the NPC woman look around with a pained expression. "And my life savings of 50 gold."

"Of course we will help!" Dipper said firmly. "We don't need your gold."

Bill rolled his eyes and sent Dipper an annoyed look. He was starting to regret having cast that spell that allowed him to share his persuasiveness with all party members. "We don't need your gold in advance," Bill said. "We'll discuss any further payment, such as gold, along with room and board for all three of us supplied by you where you live forever, once we've handled your abduction-by-vampire problem and returned."

Dipper shot Bill an annoyed look right back. "Are we really charging this lady for saving her sister's life?" he hissed.

Bill sent Dipper an even look. "She put so many loopholes in that you should be bleeding out your ears just at hearing it. -I'm being generous by NOT finalizing the terms before we go out there, risking our lives for this thing. We are doing something of value. We should be compensated for doing so, properly."

"Bill-" Dipper began, but he stopped and almost winced as Bill called a 'whisper check' and Mabel rolled a perfect 38 for him.

Bill let out a huff of breath that was almost a sigh, then turned to Dipper and said, rather straightforwardly, "Pine Tree. We don't know what her house is like. We don't know if she'll keep it in good upkeep. We don't have a definition of what 'board' entails - which could be anything down to a few grains of salt, a piece of moldy bread, no cheese, and dirty pond water to drink. We don't know if she owns any other properties here or elsewhere that might be significantly better than 'her house'. We don't know if she has funds other than her 'life savings'. We don't know how much more gold we could get, if we told her to get the whole town to 'pitch in' for a payment, since this is a whole town problem. We may never be in this town again, and this 'room and board' is only good for her house in town, so if she moves or her house burns down - if she even has 'a house' instead of 'an inn' or anything else - then she would be getting off scot-free with nothing at all paid to us for our efforts."

Dipper groaned. "Bill, I don't think it needs to be that exact. And if we get room and board, we don't have to rent out rooms at the local inn if we end up needing to come back here to rest before we finish the session. Most adventurers are gonna be heading out to travel to different towns anyway, so it's not like it's a big deal." he crossed his arms. "It's not about the rewards she gives us, it's about helping her and this town, by getting rid of the vampire that's been killing them."

Bill gave his a slight evil smile. "I never said anything to her about getting rid of the vampire," he told Dipper. "Just the abduction-by-vampire problem. -Leave our options open," Bill said. "We don't know why the vampire is taking people. And we could broker a deal where people go to the vampire voluntarily." The ending 'you idiot' Bill ended that statement with was heavily implied.

Mabel was glad that she'd moved to sit between Bill and her brother after she'd gotten her character straightened out with Miz, before the session had started. "Look, we just want to help the townspeople so they're not being eaten anymore."

"Not necessarily," said Bill. "They don't have any other monster attacks in the area. The vampire is probably taking care of that; they're very territorial. -If the vampire is eating the humans living here, then getting more of them to give less blood per person over time could set up a mutually-beneficial relationship between the town and the vampire. Killing the vampire would just leave a power vacuum for another, worse monster to fill," Bill shrugged off.

Dipper was getting a headache from this. He was smart enough not to object that this was just a single, one-off game, though. He knew by now that when Bill played a character, he played that character within the session seriously - in 'the long view', as if the session would never end. And that when the dumb dorito chip was being that insistent about something, while knowing full well it was 'just a game', that Bill was trying to make some kind of a point...

(Dipper secretly found it a little admirable and funny that Bill got so into the game sometimes, but it was also still really annoying. Especially when it ended up being the second one of those things, because once he finally figured out whatever point it was that Bill was trying to get at… none of them ever really liked it. Dipper had practically flipped the board a few times over some of the stuff that Bill just kept pulling on them when he was-)

Dipper pulled in a breath, then let it out slowly.

"Mabel?" he said, "What do you think?" Because Mabel had seemed to handle Bill pretty okay whenever she'd been playing while Dipper had been DMing things. And a lot of times, she was able to smooth things over as a player, that Dipper had been about ready to quit over as a DM-

"I think we should talk to the vampire first," Mabel said firmly. "Bill, you can talk vampire, right?"

"Creature Of The Night is one of my language proficiencies, yes," Bill said, and Dipper slapped a palm to his forehead.

"Mabel-" Dipper began.

"-Player-to-player," Bill said, glancing over at Miz. At her nod, Bill then pronounced, "Miz has said within Stanley's and my hearing that she does not like 'murder-hobo' campaigns. I have already given her several suggestions for how to deal with 'murder-hobo' players, which she also does not like," he said next, side-eyeing Dipper with lowered eyelids, and Dipper blinked.

Dipper frowned at Bill. He didn't really know what that term meant, but he could sort-of guess what Bill was trying to say from the rest of it. "-Fine! We'll try talking with the vampire, or whatever!" Dipper said, tossing his hands up in the air. "But when it tries to eat us, I'm saying 'I told you so!'" the teenager frowned at the two of them. Because this was DDNMD, not Gravity Falls! Trying to talk to stuff that was classified as 'monsters' got you nowhere in the game!

Bill nodded once, then turned to Miz and said, "Player-to-player over. Whispering over."

And they continued on with their play.

"I thank thee for agreeing to help," the NPC said before giving the three of them directions to where the townsfolk thought the vampire's lair was. ("To the south of the village, within the mountain valley.") None of them knew the exact location, but it was pretty clear that part of the adventure was the players figuring out where it was.

The party wandered around a bit in the mountains and forests, they came upon a pack of wolves. Mabel's eyes lit up with a "ROLL TO PET THE PUPPY!" and tossed her dice for a 29 (with a +3 for Animal Interaction for a 32) and managed to pet the largest of the wolves.

"No, Mabel, you don't PET them!" Dipper groaned.

Mabel blew a raspberry at him. "Dip-Dop, you're a magic nature guy. Aren't you supposed to tame animals and stuff?"

Dipper frowned. He was starting to regret the druid character type he'd gone along with for the campaign, if he was just going to get razzed on it every chance they all got, for the rest of the afternoon. "Mabel, they don't drop EXP unless we slay them!"

"-EXACTLY! So why not just follow the rules!" Bill said, with a cheerful brightness that was very 'high-energy' for him. "After all, if you want a lot of EXP, you just need to kill EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE you meet! NO QUESTIONS ASKED! RIGHT?" and that, along with the very-wide grin Bill was giving him over Mabel's head and his tone of voice as he said it, made Dipper pause for a moment, going still.

Miz took this time to speak up, "The DL ruleset grants a set amount of EXP at the end of each session, meaning that killing things or not killing things won't change how much EXP you get. This rule for the DL variant was made so that Players would try out more options in dealing with encounters than simply murder-hoboing their way through the game." She shrugged. "I hate their Loot rules so we're not playing by them, but the EXP rule I like because it places more emphasis on roleplaying instead of combat. That's why I suggested it." Miz looked down at her lap. "Of course, it doesn't stop players from choosing to kill, just because they want to."

Dipper looked over at Miz, staring.

Then he felt something almost akin to shock, as he slowly turned his head to stare back up at Bill again.

And then he looked away and tried not to wince. -Because he'd fallen for it. Again. -Bill had pulled something similar during one of his campaigns before - not in the specifics, but...

This time, Bill had straight-up told him - warned him, really - that Miz liked to play differently as a DM. Bill had gone meta again, taking into account how the players and DM wanted to play, and then playing off of that. When Dipper had been DM'ing, Bill hadn't said it straight-out until Dipper had literally tripped over it and then called him out on it. -And now? Dipper was kicking himself, feeling angry with both the demons, and himself. Because he realized he should've known better.

And what was worse was that this time, they'd both told him straight-out what was going on first, long before Bill had challenged him on it, and Miz had made it absolutely clear herself what she was doing. Killing was a choice in this game, the way Miz was running it, not a requirement to get anywhere.

Dipper shifted in place, feeling uncomfortable. Then he clenched his jaw and glanced away, feeling even less happy than before. Because now? Now he was starting to get an idea of what Bill had meant, when he'd said what he'd said the last time that they'd played, about not feeling challenged by the scenarios Dipper was running...

Dipper had thought Bill had meant the difficulty level of the monster encounters, that they were still too low for him even after Dipper had figured out what was what with the standard rule set basically being broken and cheatable from the start - which Bill had actually told him straight-out, too, after Dipper had demanded to know how he'd kept on managing to win every single encounter Dipper tossed at him somehow...

...it was why Bill had handed over a non-standard set of rules for creating all the monsters and traps and encounters after having finally gotten called out on all that. It was also why Mabel always rolled the dice for Bill, from there on in. Because Bill was an expert at cheating the rules by the rules, too. And the way Bill had made the rules for DDNMD...

Dipper let out a breath. He was still trying to get over that one. That Bill had made DDNMD, and introduced it to nearly every dimension himself, on purpose. And then wanted to know if Dipper liked the game, if he thought it was fun. (...Dipper knew that he was taking it better than Great-Uncle Ford, but that wasn't saying much. Especially since Great-Uncle Ford was still in denial over it, because Bill had really only heavily implied it, not outright confirmed it. And...)

...It was just one game. He could see how Miz DM'ed it, and see how things went from there. He didn't have to like it, or DM his own games the same way.

He pulled in a slow breath, and let it out again, then shook his head and glanced back up at Bill, and...

Dipper blinked. Because the demon hadn't been smirking at him as he'd been watching him work through all that. He'd just been watching, and smiled just a little at the end there, before turning away.

Confused, Dipper looked over to Great-Uncle Ford, but… he was watching Bill, looking just as stunned and off-put as Dipper felt.

(...Maybe because Great-Uncle Ford set up his games as EXP-grabs, too.)

Dipper frowned a little in uncertainty, then turned back to Miz.

"Okay," he said, biting the bullet and going along with it all for now. (Hey, he was a DM; he knew how this stuff worked when a player actively tried to play counter to a campaign. He didn't want to get his character dropped in a 'magical hole' that came out of nowhere, or worse. That'd leave Mabel playing the game alone with two demons, here, while trying to figure things out.) "So Mabel's petting them now. -Are they all acting tame right now? Or do I need to keep any of them off her, from attacking her," he Dipper asked Miz asked firmly.

Miz rolled a few dice behind her DM screen. "Well, they're kinda confused. Don't see you as a threat, and Mabel's petting roll was high enough that the one she's petting, who happens to be the pack leader, is pleasantly surprised by the comforting touch."

"-I, for one, think that our druid, who has a higher Animal Interaction skill than I do, should roll a Perception check on exactly what types of wolves these are, in this pack," Bill put out there, and Dipper winced, because he'd absolutely hated it when Bill had pulled that during their sessions, giving Mabel rather far too perceptive 'hints' at something he suspected, that had pretty much always been dead on, to Dipper's ever-present and ongoing annoyance as he'd DM'ed...

So Dipper sighed and said, "Perception check on the wolf pack, for classification." At the look Bill sent him, he added, "Each wolf in the pack." Dipper rolled his checks and announced them. He got over 28 for each.

Miz rolled a few more dice, then said, "Three timber wolves; they're normally in forests, but they've been pushed farther out from their usual habitat." Miz rolled one more time. "And one werewolf, which Mabel is currently petting."

Dipper stared, while Bill made a sound that sounded suspiciously like a snicker.

Mabel's eyes lit up. "What, really?!" Mabel said excitedly. She made her character hug the pack leader. "Aww~ I'm sure you're a handsome guy, aren't you~?" she cooed at the wolf.

Bill grinned. Dipper slapped his forehead.

They heard something that sounded suspiciously like a cough out of Grunkle Stan.

"-Wait, can the werewolf one talk? Can we ask him questions?" Mabel asked excitedly, starting to really get into things.

Miz raised an eyebrow. "You can ask him," she said neutrally. Mabel squee'd.

"And the druid can likely translate," Bill added while looking at the ceiling, rather than over at Dipper.

"Okay." Mabel looked back at the board. "Hey mister wolf, my name's Mabel! What's your name?" The image of the large wolf her character was still petting let out a soft "Ruff," while wagging his tail. Mabel turned to Dipper with a pleading look and the teenager rolled his eyes before casting 'Commune with Beasts' on the whole party. Miz flicked her fingers and the wolf's short barks morphed into english.

"It is very nice to meet you. I've had that itch behind my ear for a few days now. Can't reach it with my paws and the full moon isn't for another week!" the werewolf laughed. "My name is Remus."

"It's nice to meet you." Mabel hugged him. "So, um, would you mind answering a few questions?" she asked. Remus seemed to shrug. "Well, if you could scratch a little lower along my neck…" He gave Mabel an honest to god puppy-eyed look. The girl giggled and scratched the wolf as requested, Mabel the player moving her hands in the air in front of herself as her character copied her motions. "Ah yeeees~" Remus closed his eyes with his tongue hanging out. "Thank you kindly, milady."

"Ehehehehe he called me 'milady'!" Mabel almost wished she was shrunk down into the board so she could pet him for real. But she also knew way better than to voice this out loud.

"Do you know anything about any vampires that live in the area?" Bill asked straight-out himself.

"Aye, that guy." Remus grumbled. "Moved in several moons back. Set around claiming this place as his own." He seemed quite miffed at that. "Challenged me to a fight, didn't like my pack being on his 'front lawn' or some nonsense." Remus's ears drooped. "I wasn't at my best, that's the only reason why he won. Jerk," the werewolf huffed out.

"Oh, that's sad." Mabel pouted. "Well, he's been causing a lot of people problems, so we're gonna go find him and give him a stern talking-to! Do you know where his house is?"

Remus shrugged. "He's hidden it with magic. Even my nose can't scent out where the exact location is. But…" The wolf stood up and turned his head to point off into the woods. "It's in that direction. I can tell because there's still the scent of blood and humans from when he captured some villagers from that village nearby a few days ago." Remus huffed. "The only upside to all this is that the vampire hasn't bothered any of our prey. My pack has a smaller hunting ground now, but there are still plenty of deer." Remus butted his head against Mabel's hand. "If you're really going to talk to that guy, be careful. He's strong."

"Strength isn't an issue," Bill said neutrally. "Do you want to come with us? It would be easier to renegotiate your territory boundaries in-the-flesh. We could translate for you, so you could do so while you're in your stronger position."

(Dipper looked over at Bill and blinked, as he realized that the demon was referring to how the wolf-form of the werewolf was actually more powerful in a fight overall. Most players worried about the human form being contagious if their character was scratched, bitten, or otherwise outright cursed by a werewolf with their dying breath, but a vampire as rolled up by the standard ruleset wouldn't have that problem, DL variant or not.)

Miz rolled a few dice behind her screen. Remus shook his head. "No, I have to protect my pack. Can't go running off on them. And I'd rather not take them into the vampire's den thank you very much. But if you can talk to the guy, tell him that I'm perfectly fine with leaving him alone, I just want to have some of my home back."

"Will do. Thank you for your help." Bill made it a point to 'direct' (read: explain that) his character tipped his sorcerer-bard's hat at Remus, before he started walking off in the direction indicated. "You two coming, or what?" Bill half-taunted them over a shoulder.

Mabel gave Remus one last hug before following after him.

Dipper rolled his eyes and almost stayed put out of spite, but then gave up at the look Mabel was giving him and followed along, too.

...And of course the next thing they did was run into some bandits. Miz almost looked apologetic as she shrugged. "I rolled for encounters and you got bandits."

"Drop yer valuables and maybe you'll get away wi' yer lives," the bandit leader sneered at them. His band of four other bandits jeered and brandished their weapons menacingly. The party was going to be surrounded if they didn't back up.

Dipper and Mabel both glanced up at Bill, who looked perfectly composed at this, wondering if he was going to...

"I cast 'Invisible Party', with a three-second delay in activation, and then pull out my staff and cast 'Ghost Call'. And then we run," said Bill.

...okay, guess not. Mabel and Dipper glanced at each other. "We run, too," said Dipper. "-Alongside Bill, and not any faster!" Mabel said with a lit-up smile.

Miz rolled Search checks for each bandit. "Most of them fall for your ruse. One of them knows where you are, but she's not gonna make the effort to go after a spell-caster's party while her companions are being set upon by ravenous ghosts and ghouls from the nearby forest cemetery and she can't see them." Miz informed them. "If you continue running you'll get away from them."

"I activate the 'flight' charge on my staff, and cast 'Lighten Load' on Pine Tree," Bill said next.

"-And we all get on the staff!" Mabel said with a grin.

"And I mount the staff and help Shooting Star get on," Bill said next. "Shooting Star, roll for-"

Mabel rolled and exclaimed, "Twenty-five!" and looked at Dipper expectantly, and her twin sighed and said, "Fine. I get on, too."

"-With higher than a seven-roll on the 'Lighten Load' spell, poundage should be below the limit, with our characters and the DL variant's calculations on inventory weight," Bill noted. Dipper had to hold back a groan. The DL variant on weight was much easier, and far more liberal on the load limits and calculations. Which was one of the reasons he didn't like it - it made it way too easy for the dream demon to get away with this sort of stuff!

"I fly us all straight up to the thirty-foot ceiling for our weight total, and turn around to fly us over the bandits," Bill said next. "Shooting Star, roll for Concentration-"

Mabel rolled, and she and Bill both grimaced at the five. "I'm rolling for Perception checks and Intuition checks every twenty feet!" Mabel chimed in next, used to this sort of thing by this point. Usually her character didn't get to be the one on the staff with him, which meant Bill didn't have to do a Concentration roll to see whether he needed to focus on flying instead of being able to both fly overhead and gather data at the same time.

Miz chuckled. "Well, the staff is going to dip down a few feet every thirty seconds-"

"-I cast Feather Fall on the party," Bill said next, and Miz pouted.

"...Dip down three feet every minute," Miz muttered, after a few dice rolls behind her screen, and a sigh, after checking Bill's character sheet and the stats on his staff a bit more carefully than she had initially.

Bill grinned.

"Search grid pattern?" Dipper asked, resigned to this situation. He didn't really want to think too much about why this wasn't any more fun being on the beneficiary end of it, instead of the receiving end at the DM. If anything, Dipper almost felt worse...

They did have to land before Mabel and Dipper - each performing their checks over and over again - were able to find the vampire's lair, but with a few hints from Bill on what to ask, they were still, at least, able to narrow down the area significantly to exclude locations that they could be sure that the lair wasn't in.

Once they'd landed, Mabel handed over a mana potion to Bill, and he had his character drink it on the spot. It didn't get him back any more 'spell slots', but it did shorten the timer significantly for raising his spell efficacy level back up a bit - from two hours in-game to three minutes instead - for whatever spells he was potentially going to be doing next. (Dipper rolled his eyes, because that should have required a stamina potion, too, and reduced the number of spells he could cast in a row until the next long rest they took. But because they were going by the 'simpler' way, way too easy DL variant...)

"Well, at least we won't be running into anything else anytime soon!" Mabel said enthusiastically, because they hadn't spotted any more encounters nearby, or in, the smaller area they had left to search

Dipper sighed, and got on with it.

Stan and Ford were quietly watching all this. Stan was happy to watch without jumping in as a 'peanut gallery', even though he was used to playing at this point. Ford seemed to be frowning off and on quite a bit, like he usually did with the games he'd watched with Dipper DM'ing for him and Mabel and Bill. Nothing new there, really.

(Mostly, Ford was wondering why the man-eater insisted on playing a variation of the game that discouraged EXP gain. Who was she trying to fool with this fake 'non-violent' gameplay scenario of hers? -That was hardly realistic of any sort of real-life situation at all! The monster races in DDNMD were monster races for a reason. There was no reason to try and treat the killing of imaginary monsters in a game as some sort of moral shameful failure at 'proper' gameplay. And when Ford tried to think on what the demon's ulterior motives might be, outside of the actual game itself...)

(-Surely it was all just a trick, to try and make them think that she might actually care about more than just killing things to further her own transient whims, in 'games' such as this one, or of any other type - such as their own not a game existence in contradiction to how demons refused to treat their own lives and the lives of anyone else as anything other than one long series of throwaway risks and gambles, with out-and-out mass-murderbeing nothing more than something to laugh off, if not outright about, as part of the 'fun and games'...)

The party eventually found a cave entrance. From the Investigation checks they rolled, it was deduced that this cave was in fact the vampire's lair. When Mabel complained that vampires were supposed to have grand mansions, Miz rolled her eyes and replied, "Not all Vampires are aristocracy." Miz seemed annoyed at this stereotype. "Besides, the only ones with mansions are the vampire Lords and such. Those would require a full campaign, not just one session." Miz then grumbled about a mansion with traps and living armors that had apparently killed one of her characters in an old game she played. (Dipper couldn't help but snort with amusement. He really hoped that her DM that game had gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that one. ...instead of, y'know, getting murdered by an angry demon who'd just lost her character.)

The party made their stealth rolls and snuck inside. Mabel wanted to charge in yelling 'HELLO! ANYBODY HOME?" to the rafters - or, well, stalactites - but Dipper managed to convince her to go for the less-boisterous approach.

Meanwhile, Bill was laying down explosive traps that they could set off on the way out if things went to 'heck in a handbasket', as Grunkle Stan liked to put it.

...Which was also usually the job of Grunkle Stan's character, not Bill's, now that Dipper thought about it. (Dipper looked over at Bill and wondered what he must have given up in his inventory to be able to… And then Dipper remembered. Right. They'd all started out at Level 5, not Level 1. Ugh… so Bill must have added all sorts of amazing items to his inventory...)

(Dipper looked away, grimacing, and wondered if he could manage to snag Bill's character sheet from Miz after this. It'd be a good idea to get an idea now of the sorts of stuff Bill was going to try to pull in their upcoming campaign, once Bill moved up to a higher level from his current - as-yet still unallocated - Level 3 character - having only just moved up from his current Level 2 at the end of the last session that had ended the previous campaign. Dipper hated getting constantly blindsided all the time by the stuff that Bill kept on pulling on him; he really needed more time looking over Bill's inventory in advance of those sessions in order to plan against him better… but Bill always seemed to mix things up on him in town, swapping out all sorts of junk that left Dipper unsure just what he was planning on pulling this time, and eventually frustrated all over again when the dumb dorito then did it, because it always, always felt super-obvious in hindsight that of course that had been what Bill was going to do...)

They walked down the dark cave tunnel, Dipper's character (Tyrone) cast 'Firefly' to give everyone a bit of light so they could see. Bill's character (Bill) was rolling Investigation checks every nine feet in search of secret passages and other errata. Mabel's character (Mabel) was taking this time to check over her spell list.

"26," Bill called out after Mabel rolled the dice for him again, "Plus my skill modifier, makes it 36," just two shy of the highest number the DL variant capped everything and everyone at, a 38. Miz nodded at him as a section of the cave wall shimmered and a tile appeared with an image of a Snake on it. Further investigation showed that it wasn't a button and no one could do anything with it. So the party moved on. Bill found several more tiles as they went, all hidden in different sections of the wall: a Hawk, a Lion, a Wolf, a Crocodile, and a Shark.

"What are these for?" Dipper asked, frowning.

Miz shrugged, "I can't tell you. You have to figure it out yourselves." Mabel nodded at that. It made sense to her. They managed to sneak past another pack of wolves - far less friendly and a lot more murder-y than the ones they'd run into outside the cave, as confirmed by Dipper's druidic-based skill-check - and found a few corpses in the cave beyond them, which Bill noted aloud had likely been dumped there by the vampire after he'd finished with them, to feed the wolves said vampire had likely tamed to be useful to him as guards and watch-wolves. (The bodies were blurred out somewhat by Miz, so that the gory details weren't visible. Luckily, she'd thought about what her sister would think of showing something like that to a pair of thirteen-year-olds, before showing it in full.)

Bill's Medical check (a specialized subvariant of the Investigation check, which of course he had, too...) showed that those bodies had been drained of blood. Dipper grimaced at the news. "So this really is the vampire's lair, then."

They eventually got to a dead end. Oddly, it had been a straight tunnel with some twists and turns - not a maze like Dipper had been expecting - and there was no more tunnel to go down. But there was a wall with a bunch of tiles with animals pictured on them. And these ones looked like they were buttons.

"So… we push the ones that we saw on the way here, right?" Mabel asked. Dipper leaned forward to get a better look at the wall. "I think so. Everyone stay back, I'll press a button from afar." They all backed off as Dipper used his own wooden staff to poke the Snake tile. It pressed down and stayed down. They all waited warily but nothing happened.

"So…" Mabel looked around. "We can press the other buttons now?" Dipper nodded as he reach his staff out to press the Hawk, Lion, Wolf, Crocodile and Shark, in the order that they'd found them. Nothing happened. Dipper made a frustrated sound. "What are we missing?"

"I didn't succeed in all my Investigation checks," Bill said simply. (...Yeah, because anything below a '38' was something Bill considered a 'failure' for an info-check.) "We probably need to press more tiles. If I had to make an 'educated' guess..." Bill hummed for a bit, then continued, "We probably don't have to press the puzzle tiles in the order we saw them on the way in, because it's just a straight-line tunnel. We could go back and spend more time on each section of wall until we found them all in order; that's not a very secure 'password' to get in. So there's probably some other pattern to which tiles need to be pressed or not, to get in. Something a vampire would think of as obvious, in case he had other guests coming to visit."

Dipper nodded, that made sense. Vampires almost never fought each other in DDNMD, given the lore, so there would be no reason for one to make it hard for some vampire they didn't know to get in. Which meant they simply had to find the pattern to which animals needed to be pressed or not.

Rabbit Deer Crocodile Zebra Giraffe

Elephant Tiger Snake Hawk Gazelle

Shark Owl Bear Wolf Lion

Mabel gasped. "Ooh! I know!" She raced forward and began pressing the tiles as Dipper freaked out. "Wait, Mabel!"

"-and~ BOOP! Done!" Mabel sat back and grinned as the wall beside the tiles shifted forward slightly, and then slid away to reveal another corridor. Dipper stared. "What? What did you do?"

Mabel shrugged. "It was meat-eating animals versus the plant-eating ones!" she chirped.

Bill nodded as well, with a smile. "Good job, Shooting Star," he told her. (Dipper blinked at this, because Bill had said that almost the same way they'd all heard him do it with Miz. Except… Mabel didn't seem to think that it was weird for him to have told her that at all. Why...?)

The party faced a few more puzzles as they continued on, including a pitfall trap that required some careful searching for a switch that flooded the pit with water, so they could then swim across. (It had been a rather forced solution. The ceiling was too low to fly across, since the minimum starting height for a staff-flight like Bill's - no matter the weight limit - was a mandated initial rise to ten feet in the air due to the DL variant they were using. That said, the vampire himself would likely just turn into a bat and fly across. Vampires generally couldn't swim, after all, which made the trap little eyebrow-raising for Dipper. ...At least, it was until they spotted a boat sitting in the next stretch of hallway before the next room, and Miz made an offhand comment about "How else would he transport the people he's captured across such a trap?")

The party had a few hair-raising minutes (for Dipper and Mabel, anyway) when they almost lost Dipper's character to a bad dice roll - he failed an Acrobatics check for another trap. The floor fell away and he could see the spikes at the bottom of the trap. His use of the 'Vinewhip' spell to grip onto the waist of Bill's character saved his life (as did Bill using his own staff to brace himself, instead of cutting or burning the vine off of his own character in spite). After that, the twins both stopped trying to run or walk ahead of Bill down the hallway, moving instead at a much slower Bill-set pace, one that allowed Bill to stay in front of them and properly check every last inch for more traps after that point. (Bill, for his part, did not comment on this beyond the initial complaint that he'd made - as he usually did with Shooting Star - when they'd both started doing the exact opposite of what he'd recommended when it came to traps and his own maxed-out Inspection capabilities. Because the more-general Perception skill only went so far, and when he'd had to choose between Investigation and Inspection when it came to maxing things out… well, it wasn't as though he hadn't had an idea of how things might go and what he should probably prioritize in a one-off character, for a 'vampire'-related campaign...)

With letting Bill lead like this and him being as frustratingly thorough as usual, with no Grunkle Stan telling him otherwise, they actually had to stop about partway through their search for lunch. (The kids were getting antsy, and Bill was staring to snap at them more and more - "Don't rush me!" - for trying to 'rush him'.)

So they took a lunch break, as per Grunkle Stan's 'mandate', and they mostly ate in silence pretty quickly before getting right back to it.

...And, finally, they eventually actually got to the vampire's den.

"How dare you invade my home!" the vampire sneered, as he spotted them immediately when the Alarm runes he'd placed around the doorway lit up.

Dipper raised his staff. "We're here to rescue the villagers, you monster!" (Bill rolled his eyes.)

The vampire grinned. "Oh? A rescue mission?" He brandished his hands and the 'kidnapped' villagers all stood up. "What if they don't want to be rescued?" The villagers all had glazed expressions and faint smiles on their faces. Dipper grimaced. It was clearly a Charmed effect.

The villagers the vampire had kidnapped were enthralled by his Charm and he ordered them to fight the party. Mabel and Dipper had trouble with that, not wanting to hurt the people they'd come there to save. (Bill just went around smacking the Charmed people in the head with the end of his now-electrified staff without comment, downing them one after the other after the other.) Mabel declared this to be 'unfair', but Miz shrugged. "Well, that's just how it goes sometimes."

Ford muttered bitterly about how Miz must have experience with doing this type of thing, and Miz bristled. "I don't mind-control people!"

Stan let out a sigh and stepped in before things got ugly again. "-Ford, you didn't go knocking Mabel when she killed a couple of bandits in one of Dipper's games, or Dipper for playing that crazy necromancer guy for everybody else to fight, what with all the 'rabid humans' and zombies. Let them just play the darn thing."

Finally, after the last Charmed person was downed - by Bill, because he'd been paying attention when Miz had said it was going to be an undead campaign with at least one vampire in it, unlike the twins who hadn't specced any real non-kill options for either of their characters for it - Bill had his character stride up to the vampire and tip his feathered hat. "Well, well, well. That was a very rude how-do-you do! We come in here and get accosted by your rather boorishly-mannered human brigade, and here we just wanted to talk!" the sorcerer-bard said to the vampire smoothly.

Ford winced heavily at this, almost a cringe. Stan glanced over at him.

Miz rolled a few dice, then rolled her eyes. The vampire huffed. "Well, you did invade my home. And your friend called me a monster! I'm allowed to try and throw out an intruder who's trying to steal my food. I went to a great deal of trouble to acquire them all, you know!" The vampire glared at Dipper.

"They're not food! They're people!" Dipper protested, gripping his staff. The vampire raised an eyebrow, because, to a vampire, those were one and the same.

"-Very tasty people, with whom I unfortunately share a species, but luckily don't have to share my intellect with, let alone converse with, if I don't want to," Bill sighed out, casting a glare Dipper's way.

Dipper glared back.

"Some people are not so very enlightened, despite being halflings and elves who have no real stake in said potential for being part of your food supply," Bill added, and Dipper nearly slapped himself in the forehead as he remembered that neither of those species were considered particularly appetizing to vampires. (Not when compared to humans or dwarves, since the more innately magical a species was, the harder the blood was for a vampire to 'convert' as it digested it.) "So, really, when it comes to a discussion, they're more of the unthinking and inedible 'muscle' to get me here in one piece to talk to you, rather than the 'brains', if you catch my meaning."

"So, if you're really here to talk, then talk." The vampire sat down on his chair, crossing one leg over the other primly. Dipper took this chance to look around the room and blinked at the fact that it really looked like a house on the inside, here. It actually… kind of reminded him of that makeover that Mabel had given the Handwitch's cave, but less… colorful.

"Tell me," Bill said, "Exactly how annoying is it to have to feed and water these easily-Charmed idiots, only to have them still drop over dead on you, one after the other, within the span of a single lousy month?"

The vampire groaned. "It's the worst!" he complained. "You know they can't survive on just eating rats and things? They need fruits and vegetables and all sort of other stuff, or they start getting sick. And they drank half the water out of my spike trap reservoir just the other day! -Do you have any idea how hard it is to refill that thing all on my own out here?!" the vampire griped out next.

Dipper stared at this. (Ford slowly pulled his knees in towards his chest, then buried his head in his hands. He looked like he wanted to be literally anywhere but sitting where he was, listening to what he was, just then.)

"Well-" Bill began, with a grin on his face and lacing throughout his entire tone.

...and Ford shuddered in place.

"-Hey, hold up," Stan said, feeling more than a little worried about his brother just then. Dipper and Mabel glanced over at him, then over at their other Great-Uncle, and they both didn't just stop at looking worried at him - they both shoved themselves to their feet and moved over to sit down beside him, on either side of him.

Mabel snuggled in close. Dipper sat very close by him, not quite comfortable enough to do what Mabel was doing without something of an invitation from his Great-Uncle.

"Ford…" Stan said slowly, as his brother took in several deep breaths, and then let them out again.

He saw his brother shake his head twice, but not raise it, and Stan glanced over at the kid, who had only now turned to face Ford, blinking.

"Bill-?" Stan began.

"-No," Ford said quickly, and he sounded a little shaky. Stan frowned at this.

Bill blinked slowly, and then his eyelids fell a little low.

"Other dimensions he hasn't talked about to you yet, I'm not supposed to talk about first. Remember?" was Bill's contribution to this mess. "I could talk about a few things here-"

"What?" Ford breathed out lifting his head abruptly, then looking more than a little alarmed. "-No!"

"-but that Stanford doesn't know about any of the things I did here that are similar enough… to…" Bill trailed off, then looked away as his expression shifted around several times, looking as though he was about to - but not quite going so far as to - choose (or transition) between a nasty wide grin and an annoyed frowning grimace.

Ford was looking pale as anything now, and looking at his hands where they were gripping the sides of his knees, his knuckles were almost white.

"Don't-" Ford began, as he went paler, and paler. "You can't-" And paler still. "Don't-"

"...talk about anything in your Mindscape?" Bill said slowly, as his expression finally began to levelling out. "That counts as 'events in this dimension' too, you know."

"Don't-" Ford said, and he sounded even shakier.

"Bill-" Dipper began, sounding like he was winding up for a 'stop'.

Miz sighed. "Should we take a break?" she asked, looking around at everyone.

Bill closed his eyes for one long moment, then let out a sigh.

"My character pulls out that fireball scroll from my side pouch and casts it," Bill said, sounding neutral, even though his expression was one of pure annoyance, as he turned back around to look at the vampire his character was facing. "Aim centered on the vampire's feet; unique boots make a unique easy-to-focus-on target there, shouldn't be able to dodge that as a target too easily, even if the 'talking monster' does make his 'shrink-down-into-a-small-bat-before-I-die, oops that didn't work because he didn't aim at my head or chest like an idiot!' roll."

Miz rolled her dice, grimaced and the vampire screamed as he ignited from the five-foot radius fireball that hit him, unable to make his DEX save (neither into vampire bat form, nor to dodge away from the high-level 'homing' fireball spell either given the target Bill had defined).

Dipper and Mabel winced as the vampire burned. The fire blurred out the details but it wasn't a very nice image either as he died and slumped over, dead beyond undeath. Undead had a weakness to Fire damage after all, and taking a Fireball head-on… after rolling a crit fail on his save (adding insult to injury) was...

"Congratulations, Pine Tree," Bill said blandly, pulling his knees up to his chest and resting his arms and then chin on them himself. "You get your dead vampire. Hooray. Problem 'solved'."

"Kid," Stan gritted out at him, slowly rising to his feet, because how the hell was that helping-

"He's better with watching me killing people than talking at them," Bill said flatly, as he watched the vampire's corpse finish burning and crumple down into dust, and then closed his eyes fully. "In case you hadn't noticed that yet."

...It didn't help that when Stan glanced away from the demon, fists clenched at his side, to look at his brother...

...that Ford did seem more relaxed already, as he stared at the still fairly grisly-looking scene. -Not that Ford was relaxed relaxed - Ford wasn't looking relieved or anything like it - but he wasn't hunched over quite so much anymore, and he wasn't gripping at himself quite so tightly, and...

Damnit. What the hell... "How the hell is you talking to other people worse than…" Stan wasn't getting this at all. It wasn't like the kid had been doing anything completely out there, with this. The kid hadn't been trying to mess with Ford. And yeah, this thing had been a little messed up, with the vampire talking about people like 'livestock' and the kid (in character) not calling him out on it like Dipper had been. But the kid had made it pretty clear real early on in the campaign what he was planning on doing once they'd gotten to that dumb old vampire in its lair. There were no surprises there; he hadn't sprung anything ugly on the kids at the last second there. And hell, Stan had been more worried about what the kids might think of it than Ford, up until Ford had… It had just seemed like your standard negotiate-and-grab to him, with maybe a setup for some stab-in-the-back later if need be, in case the vampire-guy tried to pull some kinda double-cross or them or something. Stan had pulled some fast-talking stuff during some of their sessions, and...

Then Stan blinked as he realized... he had pulled all the fast-talking stuff during those sessions. Not the kid. The kid had let him take the lead in everything, including the talking. Stan had effectively been the party leader for those sessions - either him or Mabel, while Dipper had been DM'ing. The kid had been playing a supporting-role almost exclusively, every single time something had come up, and had always passed things over almost immediately to Stan (or Mabel, if she went and cut in all bubbly-excited and stuff over things), once the Persuasion stuff worked well and long enough for Stan himself to...

"Some fates are worse than death," Bill said, looking down and away from the hologram in front of him. "Guess what one of those things that causes those 'fates' is, that that Stanford consistently puts on that list, right at the very top of it."

...Oh. Oh, shit. Stan looked over at Ford, who was… refusing to look at him at all now.

Oh, goddamnit. That- shit. -No wonder Ford had completely lost his shit at Stan 'taking the kid's side' in that other dimension. Because with the way Ford had acted over the thing that had happened with the demon-kid talking to that teacher, and the way Ford was acting about stuff now... He must've thought that the kid had talked him around, into-

Stan almost told Ford off all over again - that the kid was on his side, not the other way around. But he stopped himself, barely, because he knew that wouldn't help. Ford didn't see it that way; heck, the kid barely saw it that way himself. And Ford would just think… hell, that he was lying, maybe, if he tried to say otherwise? Because that was maybe what somebody the kid had talked into doing whatever for him would try and trick Ford into thinking, for him?

Hell, Ford had got paranoid about this kind of stuff, still, even before Bill had come back; that Stan might be being controlled by Bill and lying to him, or pretending, or something. He'd had a couple bad nights on the boat, way back when, a whole bunch of months ago now, where he'd practically tackled Stan to the bed and demanded to (read: forcibly ripped off Stan's glasses and then physically held him down to) perform a check of Stan's eyes, looking for 'yellow slits' or whatnot...

(After the first couple of times, Stan had mostly just given up, rolled his eyes, and let him do it, instead of trying to shove back or complain or anything else. It had been easier - and less stressful on Ford, who had pretty much refused to calm down until he'd checked Stan over - to just let Ford do what he'd needed to do, to convince himself that stuff was really fine, and all that. That Bill wasn't controlling or in-control of his brother, and really-truly-actually still gone. But now…?)

Stan let out a deep sigh. Damnit, this was worse than he'd thought. Having Ford check his eyes out again wasn't going to fix this one, not when Ford was afraid that the demon-kid maybe might've done one of those convincing-inspiring 'enlightenment' things to him.

...And now he was starting to see the larger problem, of the kid not killing his problems anymore maybe making Ford lose his damn mind over the kid not doing that. ...Which was really just great there, leaving the kid damned if he did, and doubly-damned if he didn't, when the 'didn't' was what Stan wanted out of the kid most days. (Damnit. No wonder the kid thought he wouldn't be able to pull this thing off, to get Ford to go along with this stuff, why the kid had insisted Ford was going to be a problem to the agreement that Stan couldn't 'solve' - not really protesting all that hard from the get-go, but only after Stan had started insisting that he-)

Stan let out a sigh and scratched the back of his head.

"I'm thinkin' we can probably call the session done now, yeah? If nobody says 'no' because they want to keep goin' to figure out the rewards back at town at the end," Stan said, looking around at all of them. The twins nodded, and Bill didn't respond. (Damn. That was a big one, the kid giving up the chance to negotiate terms on a payment come due.) Miz seemed to shrug it off, luckily, taking down the hologram and starting to clean up her DM area behind the screen, thought she didn't look entirely happy as she did it - either at the ending outcome, or at having to leave it there.

"Kid," Stan said slowly (as the kids slowly relaxed as they realized Ford was feeling a little bit better), because damn it all, if he didn't ask this now... "There a reason why you haven't talked about anything that happened inside Ford's head-"

-Stan was taking a quick reflexive step back, and he didn't really realize why until about a second later, when he realized Ford was on his feet and-

"-That's why," Bill said, turning his head to look up at them both - with a very pale Ford standing not two feet away from Stan, shaking in place and halfway through the swing of a punch, barely keeping himself from following through on it, even though Stan had already visibly and physically backed down from asking his question.

"...Grunkle Ford?" they both heard Mabel breathe out, and Stan watched as his brother went even oaler still.

"It's okay," Stan said slowly, as he tried to keep his breathing even, rather than panicked. "It's okay, Ford. I won't ask…" (And Stan wasn't entirely sure how he managed to keep his voice mostly level there. Because Ford had looked about ready to take his head off at the neck with one punch and still kind of did…)

"And I won't tell you if you do," was Bill's (surprising) contribution to that. "Not unless you override Pine Tree, who is against mental attacks, and that Stanford sees that as one, clearly." Bill looked away from them both and stood up slowly himself, brushing himself off. "And maybe not even then."

"...Yeah?" Stan said, and he wondered why Ford was looking even a little more panicked at this, even as his brother began to lower his arms...

"Yes, 'yeah'." Bill let out a slight huff of breath at this, one that Stan couldn't even call a laugh if he was being charitable. "And you people think that I can't keep secrets. Really."

"Fine," Stan said, blinking at this. This was new. (How much of this was because of…?) He forced himself to take in one slow breath. "You keep on doing that," he ground out at the kid. Because, hell, that wasn't what he'd been expecting, right there. Not outta the kid. But...

"I-" Ford stopped mid-sentence, shivered in place again, a bit wide-eyed, then swallowed. "I'm… going to my bedroom," he said finally, as he slowly pulled back away from Stan, and Stan couldn't help but wince at the way his brother was balancing on the balls of his feet, like Ford was (still) expecting a (physical) hit from any direction. (...So he'd been meaning to take the first swing first?) "You can finish out the session if you'd like," Ford said lowly, as he backed up, then half turned away from them as he began to walk off, "But I am not watching or listening to any of it."

Stan watched him go, as did the niblings. Miz stopped what she was doing, and glanced back up at them. (Bill, meanwhile, seemed to be thoroughly ignoring him.)

Dipper glanced around at them all, shifting from foot to foot and feeling unsure how he should feel about any of this.

Stan looked after Ford, then looked down at the niblings and let out a deep sigh.

"Yeah, okay. Might as well finish it all out, then," Stan said, making the decision there and pulling the trigger. "Figure you all can take the five minutes or whatever to do that, make it a clean end to the session or whatever." He slowly walked the few steps back over, to sit back down where he'd been sitting before, in his chair.

Dipper didn't really want to do that, and from the look on her face, neither did Mabel, but...

(Dipper really didn't like weighing 'five minutes and Great-Uncle Ford will probably be feeling more calmed down without us there, than feeling worse because we're there with him and he's feeling so bad that he can't hug us, and worse because he'll flinch away again if we try' against a 'what if this time he actually needs us right now, instead?' Knowing that Grunkle Stan probably didn't really want them stopping the session part-way if they could help it - because he'd not wanted Bill to walk away from the table as a player from a game without a 'clean end' either - because he didn't want to set a bad precedent for future sessions that Dipper would be DM'ing...)

...At least Bill himself didn't look all that thrilled to be finishing it all out either, even if Miz perked up a little.

They piled up the ashes in a small bag as proof, Bill generally not doing much other than what Mabel asked him to do - and even then not being very vocal or 'high energy' about it. (Dipper guessed that Bill was still pissed off at using the fireball scroll instead of finishing the deal he'd wanted to do; Dipper didn't really get why that was, though. He'd thought that Bill liked doing both things equally: making deals and killing people, or whatever.)

Even when Dipper and Mabel helped the villagers up and led them back out of the cave, got them all back to the village safely and had a celebration in honor of their success, it felt worse than hollow to Dipper.

Mabel didn't look like she'd enjoyed this ending either, though Miz tried very hard to make it better, having Remus and his pack become allies with the humans in the village, protecting them from other monsters in exchange for being left alone to their territory in the woods.

The NPC woman had a tearful reunion with her (luckily, still-alive and fine after the Charmed status wore off after the vampire's death) sister, and she thanked the party profusely. The mayor of the village granted them a lot of gold and even their own plot of land within the village. Still, Dipper couldn't really feel happy with any of it. ...And he was starting to think that it didn't actually have anything to do with playing with Bill in the same party, or having the demon who'd hurt their Great-Uncle before (multiple times now) DM'ing it, or…

Dipper hadn't really been enjoying the game before Great-Uncle Ford had lost it at Bill being Bill. And now he just felt distracted and worse as he worried about what their Great-Uncle must be thinking of them, continuing to play the game without him watching, continuing to play it through with the two demons even though he had felt...

They got to the end of it, and both Stan and Miz called it. Mabel was up and out of the living room almost immediately, heading for Grunkle Ford's room like a shot.

Miz took her time in packing up everything, then handed it over to Dipper and looked down at her lap.

"You know, back when I was human, there was a boy in my group that most of us didn't want to play with," she spoke up, as Dipper took his things back from her, and Dipper paused in place. "He wasn't a bad kid, a little annoying maybe, but he always treated the game like he could do whatever he wanted without consequence."

Dipper frowned at her. "...Okay?" he said, not knowing where she was going with this. (Was she talking about Bill?)

"Like he never treated the NPCs like they were people." (Yeah, okay. Definitely not Bill, then. Bill treated NPCs like people; he just didn't treat people very well.) "And he would get mad when they didn't do what he wanted them to do." (On second thought… were they talking about stuff not in-character in the game, or…?) Miz smiled wryly. "Like when he wanted to ask an NPC girl out on a date." (Dipper blinked at her, feeling kind of weird about this already.) "He came to her with flowers and all but demanded that she go out with him. She turned him down. He insisted, claiming that he killed the man who had harassed her a while back, as if she owed him a date for doing so." Miz's smile turned more bitter. "She refused him again. And, since she was at work, had security escort him out of the premises. So every one of us at the table told him to stop, because he was being rude. But he made his character wait outside the girl's workplace until she got off work, at night, and then tried to follow her home." Miz was outright glaring at this point.

Dipper frowned. "Um… okay," Dipper said. "So the guy was being a real creep and a jerk. Why are you telling me this?" (And it was about this point that Dipper slowly glanced around and realized that Grunkle Stan was no longer in the room…)

(He was fine; Grunkle Stan was probably with Great-Uncle Ford in his bedroom down the hallway. That was within yelling distance, and then some. And it wasn't like Bill or Miz could go casting 'no sound' spells inside the mystical barrier, down here...)

"We kicked him off the table. For obvious reasons. But not before the DM was forced to have his character arrested and sent to an asylum, to show the kid the consequences of his actions."

"...Okay?" Dipper said. That seemed like a standard kind of DM response to bad behavior at the table, to him. What was wrong with kicking a bad… wait. She wasn't trying to say that Great-Uncle Ford had been acting…? -He hadn't even been playing! And she'd been the one to upset him, along with Bill, not the other way around! Dipper's frown started to turn into more of a glare.

Miz shook her head. "The problem was, the kid never realized what he was doing wrong. He didn't see why the NPCs and the three girls, including me, in our game group, were so upset by his behavior. Because he didn't see why it would matter what he did in the game, since it was just a game." Miz looked up at Dipper. "And you know, for someone who can just throw around their power to do whatever they wanted, like killing people for EXP or being able to just buy magic items that can let you reshape reality itself, that type of mentality is sadly quite common."

"Because it's a game," Dipper said, frowning. "But if everybody at the table's okay with letting loose once in awhile, what's the problem with that? People play 'bad guy' characters that are evil sometimes, too." That was what the alignment system was for.

"OH? -You should be careful when you talk about DDNMD with that Stanford from now on, Pine Tree," Bill said, staring off and away through one of the windows of the Shack, not really facing him. "He might think you're starting to sound too much like ME."

Dipper was taken aback at this. "You don't play DDNMD like that." At least, he hadn't since they'd been playing… Wait. Had Bill played DDNMD with Great-Uncle Ford? (...Oh no. If he had, then that would explain-)

Bill looked over at him, then, and then rose to his feet, giving him a wide, wide grin.

"Really, Pine Tree," Bill drawled out at him. "Why should I care about what happens in some silly game? -With you, with Shooting Star," he said, gesturing about, though not looking away from him all the while, and Dipper glared, "With that Stanford, for thirty-three years and counting…" Dipper took a step back, eyes widening. "Why should I care about consequences, when everything is so much fun! -Murder-hobo that vampire," Bill gestured down at where that hologram had been, feeling more than a little off-balance all of a sudden, "Toss that puppet off of that water tower-" (Dipper went straight-backed, sucking in a quick breath.) "Why not? -There isn't really any difference there, between any of it, is there, Pine Tree?" Bill said to him, "As long as it's FUN?" he added, getting right up in his face with that grin.

Dipper flinched, shaking his head at Bill - who was being- why was he?! This wasn't-! He could see the look in Bill's eye, and he was being-

-sarcastic, even if he didn't look or sound like it otherwise, you had to look at his eyes to really see it and check, and Bill was being-

And Dipper felt confused and dizzy for a moment, at the way Bill had been jumping back and forth between the DDNMD game and reality, reality and the game. But only for a moment.

And then Dipper finally got it.

"That's… you…" He shivered slightly in place and slowly looked away from Bill, and over at Miz. "That's a little like..." He swallowed. "A demon. ...Right?" Because Great-Uncle Ford… some of the things that he'd said, down in the basement… treating everything like a game and not caring, because… people weren't real people to them?

...Just like how the NPCs in DDNMD didn't really matter ...unless the other players thought that maybe they didn't want to play things that way, that session?

"Welcome to The Game," Bill practically purred out at him, as he straightened up and tossed his arms out to the sides in an all-encompassing gesture, grinning even wider. "We can die, but that's half the fun! -After all, we don't stay dead like you do!" Bill dropped his hands and leaned forward towards him a little bit (and Dipper fought the urge to back up away from him, though he did clutch the DDNMD box to his chest and lean back a little bit). "Why worry about the little people living and dying and doing anything and everything in-between," Bill added, still grinning widely at him, "When you can just spin up a new role, and try and try again!"

Miz sighed. "I don't like games where you're forced to kill in order to progress. But most games are like that. Especially RPGs." she shrugged. "And sometimes, life feels like an unfair RPG…"

"-Among other things!" Bill enthused out at him- at them both.

Dipper twitched. "Real life isn't a game!" he told them both, to which Miz sighed.

"Tell that to the people who think it is," she grimaced. Immortals and gods, those who were powerful enough to do whatever they wanted without anyone being able to stand against them...

"-Demons, not 'people'," Bill said. "Unless they're delusional or worse! -Let's be clear about our terminology, here. Don't want to get Pine Tree all confused about things!" he said next.

Dipper glanced between them. "Do you think real life is just a game?" he asked Miz roughly. He had it from Great-Uncle Ford already that Bill Cipher sure did, and the way Bill was acting just then was doing anything but proving Great-Uncle Ford wrong.

Miz sighed. "Well, I don't…" She paused. "Well, I don't go around killing people willy-nilly for fun or 'EXP', my dimension doesn't grant it for killing people. But I won't lie and say I haven't gotten frustrated and taken out my frustrations on people before. But I don't kill them. My dimension has Time Baby breathing up my ass about rolling back stuff, so I can't just make it so the things I've done never happened. I have to live with the consequences of what I do. And there have been people I've killed when I lost control of my powers, which was my fault and I still feel bad about." Miz grimaced. "And dad snatches up the souls of anyone who dies, so I can't bring them back to life unless I'm right there to grab onto them before he does. So I can't just go around killing people, nor do I want to. Even if dad wasn't snatching stuff up, I don't like to kill innocent people because I don't like how it makes me feel bad."

Dipper stared. He'd barely followed any of that. She had a Time Baby that was stopping her from messing with time, okay, but… her dad was stealing people's souls? The heck?

"I-" Dipper was starting to feel a little freaked out. He wanted away from them now.

"Look, I like people, most of the time. Even if they don't like me back." Miz rubbed her arm. "And I can go around and do what I want, if I wanted, I'm strong enough. But it makes me feel bad. Emotionally. When I do that." she seemed almost embarrassed to admit it. "So whether or not everything might be a game…" (Or a children's cartoon show...) "I don't…" Miz rubbed her face. "I don't think of you as 'just some NPC', alright? You're a person and I respect that." Because Dipper might be a cartoon character, but Miz still thought of him, and everyone else she'd ever met in this life, as a person.

"And you're my Zodiac," Bill contributed to the discussion with a smile. "You're mine."

"R-right," Dipper said a little shakily, as he backed up a step. "I'm, uh, I'm gonna go see Great-Uncle Ford now..."

And with that, he turned and quickly walked off and out of the room, DDNMD box clutched to his chest.

Miz watched him go and sighed. "Why is he so afraid of me?" she asked quietly. "Why is everyone always so afraid of me?"

Bill placed a hand on her head. "Because you're capable of hurting him."

"...even if I've told him that I won't?"

"Yes." Bill nodded. "He doesn't trust you. He has no reason to. And he's smart enough to know that you could just change your mind at some point, and he wouldn't be able to do anything about it."

"And how is making me feel unwelcome supposed to prevent me from changing my mind…"

Bill turned his head to look down at her. "Do you feel unwelcome?" he asked seriously.

Miz rubbed at her eyes. "Sometimes. But I feel like maybe I've done something to make people not like me. And I don't know what it is."

Bill chittered with an annoyed look. "Well, if that Stanford wasn't being so difficult..." Then Bill shook his head. "Your problem is likely me," Bill told her next. "People who know me make certain assumptions about the people I associate with. So…" In most dimensions, that meant people being very careful to fall all over themselves to please, or else. It also meant a lot of fear, overall. Sometimes, it meant a great deal of respect, too - but that was almost restricted solely to dimensions in which Bill had almost complete and utter overwhelming control. Ones where he was worshipped, almost like a god...

"...but I don't want to not associate with you, just because they don't like you. I like you." Miz bit her lip. People who stopped being friends with their friends just because they wanted to be popular were awful people and she wasn't going to be like that. She liked Bill. He was her big brother now, and she loved him. He… he wanted to be her brother, he wanted to be her family- that...

(He had accepted her so easily, wholeheartedly loving her back and trying in his own clumsy way to be a good brother to her, even when he had no idea how-)

"I wouldn't be angry with you if you did," Bill told her. He would be sad, yes, but not angry. "Just tell me first, and I can help." Because he would help her sell it. (It would be difficult to talk with her after, what with him not being able to get into the Mindscape currently, because of the anchor currently holding him down, but…) She was his little sister. If improving her reputation meant her distancing her reputation from his own, somehow, then...

"If I was the type of person who would throw away someone I loved just to get other people to like me, then I'd really be an awful person." Miz leaned against Bill, pressing her face into his chest. "I'm not going to do that. I love you big brother."

"I love you, too," Bill told her easily. "But that doesn't mean that you have to agree with me in fights with others, or defending me to others, all of the time. -That's MY job as big brother, not yours." Bill smiled and patted Miz on the head again before he had to head off to deal with some of his stupid human-ish body's needs. (For one thing, there was the bathroom, and for another, more food. He was paying a little closer attention to his stupid human-ish body these days, and when he started feeling that particular version of annoyed… that usually meant more food was needed.) Miz took a glance out the window and saw that the sun was beginning to set.

The game had lasted for most of the day. They'd taken a lunch break in the middle and the sun was going down now. It was almost time for dinner. Miz was slumped over a beanbag chair in the attic while everyone else was getting ready for dinner.

"Did I do good? Or did I mess up again?" she asked herself about the DDNMD game. No answer came since she was alone in the room, but Miz sighed and rolled over.

There was something she'd been putting off. Mostly because she still wasn't sure how to do it, and partially because it was so awkward.

Apologizing to that Stanford.

After meeting Mini, and hearing about what sort of person Fister had been...

...well, that Stanford almost seemed nice in comparison. And was definitely a better brother to Stan than his original brother. Not that Stan knew.

Miz sighed. She wasn't even all that mad at him anymore.

So she didn't have an excuse to not apologize.

"Uuuugh~ this is gonna suuuuck~" she groaned.