Illusion is Reality

Chapter 99

-Try restarting the universe-

Miz was napping peacefully in Mabel's lap. The teenager pet her gently even as Bill laid curled up nearby - not fully asleep, but relaxed. Mabel liked the demons like this, quiet and calm. They seemed almost harmless this way… almost. She wasn't ever going to forget how dangerous they actually were, no matter how cute they appeared right now. (And that was really, really cute!) Mabel wasn't sure why Miz had suddenly wanted to be a cat (or why Bill had gone along with being one himself if he wasn't going to let anybody pet him as a cat like Lazy-Eye Susan did while he was being human"-ish"), but she liked how kittyMiz was… easier to distract with simple things like this, like feathers and string, sticks and thrown balls and petting. It made Mabel wonder if maybe whatever body Miz was in affected how she behaved? Because if it did…

...well, Bill probably wasn't the same way. Mabel was pretty sure she knew why Bill wasn't letting anybody get near him right now. When he'd been a huge triangle-pyramid-demon-thing during Weirdmageddon, they'd had trouble fighting him, even with the Shack, hitting him with anything in anything other than the eye. But in a human"-ish" body, Bill had ended up really beat-up-able these days, and he'd yelled at most of them not to touch him, up until he'd gotten that suit-thing he was wearing. And then he'd basically been untouchable and unbeatable again, at least physically. But Mabel was pretty sure he wasn't wearing any kind of suit as a cat right now though, which meant he was probably 'physically vulnerable' all over again and stuff… and wouldn't want any of them touching him again, because he'd think that they were going to grab him and hurt him. Bill might have laughed off Grunkle Ford beating him up like that out on the porch before when her grunkle hadn't been sleeping really well, but if he'd actually not cared about getting hurt, he wouldn't have started wearing that suit, so...

...anyway, Miz didn't seem worried about any of this stuff at all, and that wasn't super-surprising to Mabel - the two of them really did seem to be different on a lot of different stuff. And maybe this was one of those things? Because sure, Miz had been pouncing around a lot indoors that one time after all sorts of stuff, and she'd liked Susan petting her on the head too, but… Miz had definitely acted differently as a dragon in that other dimension than as a cat now or as a human. Which meant that she did act differently sometimes. And with her headband blocking a bunch of stuff that Miz felt was natural, too… it made Mabel wonder what Miz was like in her triangle form, too. Because that was a form that Miz hadn't shown to any of them so far (at least, not that Mabel knew of).

And she should have one, right? Because Miz had said that she was a Bill Cipher. Just… a different one? From a different dimension, with a different background… and Mabel knew what alternate selves were like; she'd met the other Mabels that one time in that MAB-3L dimension. Most of them had been nice, kind of like her in some way, but Anti-Mabel had been pure evil and her opposite in practically every single way. -She'd even hated cats! And with what those Anti-Ford and Anti-Stan and Anti-Mason had all been like in that Anti-Mabel's other dimension… Mabel couldn't help but wonder just how similar or different the other Bills were, too. (Especially Miz and Bill compared to each other, when they were both being their worst and most horrible(?!) selves.) Mabel had only met Miz so far for comparison to Bill, so she didn't really have a good idea of how different Bill Ciphers usually were from each other.

...well, okay, maybe there was that Anti-Bill, too. But Bill insisted that that all-floaty purplish kind of square wasn't a 'him-who-was-also-him AT ALL', (...and Anti-Bill wasn't just creepy, he'd treated her even worse than Bill did...) so Mabel really wasn't all that sure if Anti-Bill counted as an alternate Bill Cipher, too.

...Oh, hey wait - there was also that Seb guy too, right? That super-silly guy that Miz had been with the last time Miz had been here before and made that big beautiful bouncy castle just for her? ...Was Seb another Bill? Mabel honestly couldn't remember. If somebody had asked her cold, 'Is this Bill?' she would have to say no, but… if she had to compare Seb to Bill and Miz? They'd all kinda acted sort of similar to each other, three of a type. And so Mabel frowned a little as she kept petting Miz as she thought - had Miz mentioned that before, that Seb was another Bill, too? Had Bill said it instead? - but she couldn't remember if she really had or hadn't heard that or not. Even if they all did sort of act crazy-ish in the same way...

Meanwhile, KittyMiz stirred a little, beginning to wake up from her cute little impromptu nap, rolling over and stretching as she readjusted her position. Mabel (even though she was trying to keep herself from being deterred or distracted by this oh so very cat-like display, still) 'awww'ed at how cute it was, at how KittyMiz was being.

And after awhile of general stretching (and getting gently scritched behind the ears a bit as she did so), KittenMiz twitched and cracked open her eyes. "Uuuuh?" Mabel winced. "Sorry. Didn't mean to wake you." She really had been trying to not wake her up, even as she'd kept on petting Miz in her lap in her sleep.

"-ss' fine…" KittenMiz yawned. "You're comfortable," she told Mabel.

The teenager giggled. "It's probably my sweater. It's soft," she told Kitty!Miz as Miz purred, nuzzling her face up against said sweater.

"It iiiiiisssss~" Miz said, before she relaxed up against Mabel's side. "I like you. You're nice." Miz murmured sleepily. "Screw what the unicorns say… they're nothing like the ones in Those Little Ponies anyway…."

Mabel took the unicorn comment in stride - she didn't care what they thought of her anymore - but at that last part she blinked. "You watch Those Little Ponies?" She hadn't expected that. She'd thought Miz only watched anime cartoons?

Miz rolled over again, and began kneading at Mabel's sweater. "Yeah~ though it had a different name back in my original dimension. It was called My Little Ponys. But the show's pretty much the same in terms of atmosphere… all the characters are different though… still cute ponies…" (The equivalent show in this dimension was far more diverse, with more boy ponies right from the start. It was nice - it didn't take away from the female characters either; they shared equal amounts of screen time and had their own separate adventures too. The show still out-and-out shattered the Bechdel test, and then some.)

"That sounds nice." Mabel was relieved to hear that Miz liked cute and happy shows like that, too. She'd been a little worried over Miz's taste in movies and TV. Fruits Basket was cute… but some of it was really, really, super sad and kind of dark. (...which Miz had claimed was the point. That they were sad, and then they got better.)

"-though I liked the fanmade Friendship is Witchcraft spinoff a lot too," Miz purred. "I relate so hard to those characters."

"Which ones?" Mabel asked, curious despite herself, hoping that a sweet cartoon show about ponies would be a safe topic to talk about with her. (Most things weren't safe to talk about with either Bill, she'd been finding.)

"Pinkie mostly. She just wants her family back." Miz settled down, partially dozing off again. Mabel stiffened a little at the mention of demonic family (because there was that brother that Miz had said that Bill didn't want to talk about, and Bill was sitting right there; Mabel was pretty sure he was awake)...

...But Miz didn't say anything else (and neither did Bill), and that was good, so Mabel slowly went back to petting Miz again as she talked. "...well, my favorite character is MoonShimmer. She's really pretty," was Mabel's input. Miz giggled, then said:

"MoonShimmer's a giraffe."

"-I know, that's what makes her cool!" Mabel told her, grinning, and the two girls began discussing the show. (And while Mabel was doing it, she was glad that Miz was sticking to only talking about stuff from the cute pony show and completely staying away from any and all other, darker topics.)

"I think I'm further along than you, so I should probably avoid telling you spoilers," Miz told her. It left Mabel startled, then pouting.

...and she tried using the big-eyes look on Miz as she said: "Just one spoiler would be fine, right?"

Miz looked up at the other little 'queen of the household' and… in the end, she just couldn't help it.

Miz hummed, as she seriously considered it. "Well~" She grinned up at Mabel. "If you're suuuuure~?" and Mabel could have backed down, but she didn't. "Yup!"

"-MiracleNote gets married!" Miz wiggled as she told gave her just the one spoiler, looking so very smug as she did it.

Mabel's jaw dropped. "Really? Who does he marry?" Her shipping chart depended on the answer. But at this, Miz continued to look smug.

"Not telling~ you'll just have to wait and find out~"

"TinselTop? ScarletJewel?! Munchy?!" Mabel guessed in rapid succession, her eyes getting progressively wider and wider.

But to this, Miz covered her mouth with both of her little front paws. "Nnnnnnope!" she purred out. "I'm practicing not telling people stuff!"

"But that's just for other stuff!" Mabel whined out at her. It wasn't fair; that was maybe only half a real spoiler! "Tell meeeee~" But all Miz continued to do was proceed to giggle through her paws. Mabel pouted. "Why'd you tell me if you weren't actually going to tell me?!" she complained. PetalKick? It'd better not be PetalKick! They'd had a whole arc about how she and MiracleNote wouldn't be a 'thing' because they were childhood friends and he thought of her as a sister-

To this, KittenMiz huffed out a breath and told her, "The fact that you want to know is what makes it practice for me to keep mum about it." Miz curled up in place in her lap. "And something like this is a harmless topic to practice on."

Mabel groaned before letting her head drop back, before letting her arms and back follow suit, splaying herself across the flat (dirty) boards of the porch. "Why'd you have to pick this? I'm going to be thinking about it all daaaaaay!"

"That's the point!" Miz insisted. Mabel groaned again. "I did ask if you were sure you wanted to hear it." Miz pouted, hoping Mabel wasn't going to blame her for this. After all, she'd brought it on herself! Miz had even warned her all about it!

Mabel kept guessing names for who MiracleNote would have married. "...Am I at least close?" she complained a little bit, hoping for at least a little more of something to go with it. (But Miz's only response to her was, "I won't say anything one way or another.") Mabel sighed. -This wasn't really fun at all anymore; it was practically torture, now, not knowing. And how long was she going to she have to keep on distracting the demons for, anyway? When were Dipper and Melody going to be back?

"Don't worry so much," Miz assured her. "This will be a pleasant surprise for you to look forward to! Not all surprises are going to be this innocent."

Mabel frowned a little, not missing Miz's last mutter, and made a mental note to tell that one to Dipper, and her Grunkle Stan. But she didn't ask to understand more; she knew better than to ask them herself by this point. And-

-then Mabel glanced over as she levered herself up on her elbows a bit and saw what Bill looked like, compared to Miz. ...And Mabel decided to stop asking Miz about anything at all for a while; Bill was looking kinda tense for some reason, and not in a good way. She wasn't sure how long he'd been eyeing them both like that, but...

Bill was (still) watching Miz from where he was lying, watching her and Shooting Star out of the corners of his eyes. But when Miz stayed quiet for several long moments, saying nothing more than what she already had there, and with Shooting Star not pressing his sister any further, he flicked his eyes away from them both and relaxed back down again, lowering his head and closing his eyes.

His sister really DID need to practice holding back information, and Shooting Star needed to learn patience and when a time was a bad time to ask certain types of things. This was good practice, for the both of them. And they were both doing well. WELL… much better than they had been before.

Dipper and Melody eventually came home from their shopping trip and, once they were back, Mabel had high-tailed (HAH!) it outta there, post-haste. With her favorite head-scratcher gone, Miz had made her way back upstairs with her brother to hang out up in the attic until dinner time, whereupon she and Bill went downstairs, she ate some fish (while Bill ate a mix of carrots, peas, and green beans) off of some plates on the countertops that Melody had prepared for them, and then they both went back up to the attic again to sleep. Miz took a bit of that time before bed to review what she'd learned from Dipper and Pacifica's conversation out at the market (because she'd wanted to know, and pulling up information was EASY once she'd gotten used to how it worked here) before her curiosity was settled and she could sleep easy.

By the time the next morning rolled around though, and another cat-friendly (thus very small portioned and bland-tasting) breakfast, Miz was already bored of being a cat; so she shifted both her form and sex into Jan. Then he stretched and sighed in relief. "Ah~bipedal-ness how I've missed you~" Jan purred as he slumped back over the pillow he'd spent most of his time lounging on as a cat up in Bill's room.

Bill looked up from where he was lying down, lounging across his own pillow, having woken up a while ago from yet another nap after breakfast, but had been content to just lie there thinking with his eyes closed. "...You're bored of being a cat?" he asked her, blinking open his eyes to look over at Jan. That had seemed rather quick to him. ...Then again, his little sister did seem to enjoy shifting between and trying out different forms a lot.

Jan nodded, spreading his four arms out around him as he leaned back and got more comfortable on the pillow. "I missed having fingers," he pouted. "Can't cook without 'em." And as much as he liked the fact that Bill could eat while inside one of the vessels he made, it wasn't quite the same as cooking food just for his brother. Jan looked over at Bill, fully relaxed as he continued on sunbathing in the light coming in through the attic window. Briefly, Jan wondered how long he was allowed to stay here. The GlitchBill was gone. There was nothing keeping him here except his own desire to stay with his big brother.

And no matter what Stan said about how he was welcome to stay since he was Bill's family, Jan was pretty sure that none of the humans actually wanted him here. Mabel was perfectly nice to hang out with, but she didn't like Miz as a friend. And while Jan thought Soos might like him well enough, that was about the extent of it; he was pretty sure that most of the others just tolerated him, at best. Jan wouldn't deny that part of him (most of him actually) was quite annoyed at this, because he'd been trying hard to be on good behavior. No rampaging, or forcibly shapeshifting anyone because he was bored and needed some way to let loose his powers! Did they not realize how much self-restraint that took? (But that wasn't the issue here. People didn't like him because he kept talking. Never shutting up.)

(And if Jan had complained to any of the Pines about the 'self-restraint' it took within earshot of Ford, he would have immediately pointed to that as the entire reason why no-one should trust him. That it was all just a front. Proof of what he'd been saying all along. That what the man-eater really wanted to do to them all, and the town around them, was to-)

Jan pouted, feeling frustrated. Why, he'd even been trying to stick to one form for the majority of his stay, even when it made him feel stifled and constrained, more so than the headband and the bracers. Being forced to be 'female' for so long was just…!

But then Jan stopped for a moment and frowned to himself in thought. He... hadn't realized how uncomfortable it would feel to have to be one sex/gender for so long. He was used to just switching whenever he felt like it. And whenever he switched genders as a triangle, it wasn't like anyone noticed.

Jan had stayed as 'Miz' when around all the people here for their own sake of mind, though, just trying to be good for his own brother's sake, to get along when he was clearly trying to do the same. ...And he'd also stuck to being and remaining as 'Miz' for so long because he hadn't wanted to switch it out on the kids too much, just in case it got too weird for them. Plus, since Miz 'looked' like she was around their age, he'd thought it would make them more comfortable around him.

All his human-ish forms were 'technically' supposed to be 27, technically. (Though, Jan wasn't all that good at telling apart age anymore.) Frankly, Jan, Xin and Yun looked like young adults though, somewhere between their late-teens and mid to late twenties, depending on posture and clothing. But Miz looked… like a kid. And that should have helped them all to like him! Miz was cute! Cuddly! Nice! -It had worked for him back home just fine! WHy wasn't it working for him here?!

It wasn't his fault that they all didn't like him - he'd tried just about everything that he could to get them to like him better! He'd even tried being a cute and cuddly small cat - the kitten thing wasn't just a whim after all! Everyone loved kittens, who would ever be able to hate him when he was so small and cute? Mabel loved cats! It should have helped to get the humans to relax around him! But it didn't work; NOTHING had worked! It was so ANNOYING! Why should he even try if-!

Fine! Whatever! If people were going to be wary and suspicious no matter how small and vulnerable he made his form, then he wasn't going to bother. If it didn't matter what he looked like for how they treated him, then he should just do what he wanted! Hence, he was now in his Jan form, four-armed and all!

Hm… would it be too obvious to just walk around in a clearly alien form, though? He didn't want the government getting called on him. ...Eh, he looked nothing like a triangle though, it shouldn't be a problem. Besides, this was Gravity Falls, they should just Nevermind All That. And as for the tourists? Well, Perception Filters were a thing. Jan didn't like hiding his body though. Miz might be self-conscious about some things, but Jan was created specifically to be 'attractive' (at least according to his own tastes in Bishounen) and he had no problem with showing off in front of others. So things like hiding his body just felt annoying to him. He was beautiful, he was created to BE beautiful! And he didn't feel right with the idea of having to hide himself from people. Jan shook his head. His form was literally a work of art that he had crafted, and he loved showing off his art to other people. It was a strange way to feel about what was essentially a body he was wearing - which, to him, was just a vessel, essentially a physical form he wore (like clothing but not) so that people could see and interact with him. But to people like humans, who cared a lot about who they were as a person, and tied that identity in with their name and their appearance... someone like him who would simply swap out whenever he felt like it, changing not just physical forms but name, gender identity and persona...? Well, it would probably make people feel uncomfortable.

But Jan was already used to putting on a different persona with different people and in different situations, back from when he'd been human. He… she'd done it all her life. After all, she'd been Zyun-Jan to her family and V҉͎҉̷҉͎҉҉҉͎҉̷҉͎҉i҉͎҉̷҉͎҉҉҉͎҉̷҉͎҉c҉͎҉̷҉͎҉҉҉͎҉̷҉͎҉t҉͎҉̷҉͎҉҉҉͎҉̷҉͎҉o҉͎҉̷҉͎҉҉҉͎҉̷҉͎҉r҉͎҉̷҉͎҉҉҉͎҉̷҉͎҉i҉͎҉̷҉͎҉҉҉͎҉̷҉͎҉a҉͎҉̷҉͎҉҉҉͎҉̷҉͎҉ to everyone else. Swapping out names wasn't anything new for her. (And she hadn't even had a name as a triangle anyway, right?) And the person she'd been around her parents had been different from the person she'd been around her siblings or friends, or around teachers, classmates, customers, her coworkers… she'd still been the same person, but also different in terms of behavioral output. The adults around her had told her how she was supposed to be around them. Demure, obedient, quiet, a good girl who would stay out of the way and stop bothering the grown ups with silly stupid questions while they were busy. 'If you want to know something, go find out yourself instead of bothering us with your curiosity…'

So wasn't that normal, though? To put on a different persona with different people? So this thing that Jan did now, wasn't really all that different. Was it?

-Well it didn't matter, Jan was tired of being Miz, so he was going to be Jan for a bit! Who cared anymore anyway. -Not him!

Jan sighed, leaning back on the pillow with one hand draped over his face. "...I wanna have a concert." He wanted to sing and dance his frustration away.

...And Bill got a slow cheshire-cat GRIN where he sat.

He stood up on his pillow, stretched a bit in place, then ADJUSTED himself, and-

-slipped his Self right out of that 'cat' vessel and back into his stupid human-ish body - and then stretched inside that again afterwards, to help dispel the 'rubberband' feeling a bit.

"WELL," Bill told him, letting go of his stretch to relax again, before slowly sitting his no-longer-vacant body up again into a more straight-up sort of posture. "I did mean to do this at some point, ONE time or another. -I didn't get it done before I lost signal again," he told Jan rather cryptically, with an odd sort of sigh, "But..." Bill's eyes lightened up a bit brightly. "It SHOULD all be ready by now..."

Jan blinked and looked over at him.

"What's ready?" Jan asked her brother.

And Bill's grin grew even wider.

Jan went downstairs with Bill, feeling a little apprehensive about how the humans might react to his other form. But aside from Dipper being confused about who he was for a bit, and Mabel's slack-jawed and blushing face, the kids seemed to accept it without much trouble at all. Dipper even wanted to inspect the shifting patterns of melanin along Jan's skin. ("How are you doing that? You're inside the barrier, so it's not magic," Dipper noted with a thinking frown.)

Stan had simply told the twins that, yeah, sometimes Miz wanted to be a boy, that he'd done this before in the week in the other dimension that they hadn't seen, and that this particular form was called Jan. Bill, himself, had blinked in surprise when he'd learned that she'd thought switching forms might be a problem. (It wasn't as though she hadn't done it before multiple times, to his Mind and way of thinking.)

Ford, on the other hand...

...well, he simply rose to his feet from his chair without saying anything, to turn away from Jan and walk straight out of the room…

...and there was a slam of a (presumably, bedroom) door shortly thereafter. Jan had twitched at that, but turned away with a soft huff as he folded his arms. Stan sighed and scratched his cheek.

"Yeah, don't mind him," Stan told Jan. "He's still not really all that happy about the kid bein' all female and stuff, and…" Stan shrugged. "Probably reminds him of…" But then Stan stopped and frowned. He'd been about to say that it was probably just some demon thing he didn't lik, or that maybe Ford thought he was getting 'teased' by Jan, since the kid had sort of mocked him to that effect about one of the supposedly possible effects of his 'going female human' before. But Ford hadn't said anything about what Jan-Miz had just done, or 'warned' the kids about something to do with it this time, and he hadn't really said anything about it much on the boat, either. "...Uh, gimmie a minute," Stan told him. "-Kid, babysitting duty, yeah?" Stan added next, gesturing to the older of the two demons as he got up himself, and walked off after his brother, to go off and talk to him.

"Mm," said the kid in acknowledgment, as he leaned up against the counter to put the kettle on for hot water for some tea.

"...Ford?" Stan called out as he knocked on his brother's door. He didn't hear much more than a grumble. "I'm comin' in," he said next, because Ford had said he could come in whenever, and he turned the doorknob and did just that.

Ford was lying on his bed, glasses off, with his other hand over his face.

"Ford…" Stan closed the door behind him, before walking over to sit down on the bed next to him. "You wanna tell me what's going on?" Stan asked him next.

"You are actively helping them both gain worshippers, and a stronger foothold in our own dimension as gods," Ford grated out angrily at him, but he also sounded a hell of a lot more tired than he should, too.

Stan blinked. "Huh?"

To this, Ford rolled over in bed and stared up at his brother in disbelief, after putting his glasses back on and realizing his brother wasn't joking - he really was confused at - "Stanley," Ford began, "You just saw what the man-eater looked like, walking into the other room." Zero comprehension from his brother. "You had those tourists worshipping them, just the other day. -You set that all up for the two of them!" Ford told him, as he struggled to lever himself up. (And perhaps this latest development was in some way his own fault, for not better explaining the dangers of such a thing at the time-)

Stan scratched his cheek. "They were just cats, Ford," he told his brother. "Folks like petting cats. -That ain't worship." Not really. Seriously, what the heck?

"Adoration is a type of worship, Stan," his brother told him next, like he thought he was just spouting off basic facts, and Stan frowned at him until he said, "The two things that give demons the most power are adoration, and fear."

"You mean respect and fear," Stan corrected him.

Ford, who was still smarting over the fact that his brother had actually had the audacity to suggest he sit in on and watch as Bill received untold amounts of downright worship from a bunch of random strangers, given his history with Bill-

"It's fear and respect, that the kid wants," Stan continued on, to Ford's horrified amazement. "Kid never talks about wanting adoration, or whatever."

And Ford stared up at his brother in pure disbelief.

"That's not-" Ford began, but he was quickly cut off by "-It's all the kid talks about, Ford," and it left Ford feeling stunned and concerned.

"That's not how-" it works for demons, Ford started to tell him but Bill wasn't quite a normal sort of Demon, now, was he? And-

But when Ford tried to protest again and began to stall out slightly at the uncertainty that began to engulf him, Stan told him, "Look, kid didn't actually let anyone pet him during that whole thing. You don't gotta worry about nothin'." (And Ford grimaced - because, yes, he knew that, he'd been watching from the video feed and if he'd seen Bill do anything like that, he would have immediately intervened, Stan's own brand of 'oh, this will be good for them' reasoning be damned.) And now Stan was starting to think that maybe this was part of it, too - that maybe the kid had also known what Ford's reaction was going to be about- "He only-"

"-sat like some kind of ancient Egyptian idolic statue of some sort, garnering awe and fear, and refusing to let anyone get even close enough to touch him," Ford told him while feeling a great deal of disgust, much of which surely entered his tone as he explained it, "While receiving offerings in a bowl on an altar placed below him. Watching it all the whole time." It hadn't quite been enough to be considered out-and-out worship of Bill, but it had come disturbingly close. Far, far too close. (If Ford hadn't been more worried about the fallout from intervening right in the middle of the tour, with all those innocent people around…)

(And as for that that man-eating… whatever she was, that being had clearly been getting something out of it. -Yes, she hadn't been brainwashing them outright, leaving them in an almost drugged-out kind of stupor while out-and-out begging for more, but some of the absolute worst of the worst could be far far more subtle in their designs, and Bill… would not have put up with that. The triangle demon considered this dimension his, and Ford knew - absolutely knew - that Bill would not put up with that from anyone, "little sister" or no. ...It was the only reason he'd held himself back, and kept himself strictly to watching. Because Stan was fine, and Dipper and Mabel were fine, and Bill himself had only and merely, almost...)

(It still gave Ford a bad taste in his mouth. It had had him gripping his arms, sitting in that chair and watching tensely, while all the while wanting to just close his eyes and look away and not think about- how he'd used to worship Bill himself-)

Stan paused. Well. Yeah. That had been kind of the point. But...

"...This is really a problem with demons and junk?" Stan asked Ford slowly.

"Yes!" Ford told him, with no small exasperation (while stifling a shudder).

Stan let out a breath. "Okay," he told his brother with a shrug, as he rubbed the back of his head. "Guess we won't be doin' that one anymore."

But before Ford could begin to feel any relief at his brother's easy pronouncement on that one at all, Stan added, "So what's the problem with what M- Jan looks like, then?"

Ford twitched. It left him quite aghast; he wasn't sure he should even need to point this out, it was so obvious, but- "That form was clearly made to engender worship in anyone looking at them, upon sight! Did you not see the way Mabel looked at the man-eater when they entered the room?! And Dipper, as well?!" Dipper had resisted it somewhat, but it was clear to Ford that it had been difficult for him, and- Ford had seen it all before. What the man-eater had done the day before hadn't quite worked on the niblings the way that she'd intended, so today she must've decided to try and- and- Did Bill truly not realize what she was trying to do? Because that was the only reason Ford could think of for the dream demon's utter lack of response to her doing that, and- And yet Stan was looking at him like he didn't- "I know what I'm talking about, Stan! I've seen it before!" Not that he wanted to talk about it, but with what was happening in the other part of the house, right now-

"So Jan's a little attractive, in a weird androgynous kinda way," Stan shrugged. "What does… how is that some kinda huge 'worshipping' problem? Mabel ain't worshipping him. She's like that with any cute guy she sees."

"Adoration is a form of power and worship for demons," Ford repeated, beginning to lose his patience, and then Stan said:

"Thought we were clear about these two not really bein' demon-demons, or whatever."

And Ford clenched his jaw at that. (That was something he still didn't want to think much about at all.) "My point still stands, even if they aren't… Outsiders... they're still a type of demon."

"And the kid thinks he gets what he wants outta respect and fear, not adoration," Stan said, like it was effectively closing the subject.

"-And the man-eater seems to eat up anything resembling adoration, while wanting a form of it that seems to edge into borderline-love," Ford pointed out, feeling quite sick as he did so. Because only the very worst demons worked on individuals, to slowly and painfully (or quickly and deliriously) send them into such a state - for them, and them alone, solely - and it was ugly, to see what became of those poor people then.

Stan straight up had to do a double take. "...Ford…" Stan said slowly, "Jan, Miz… I'm pretty sure that dragon lady wants to be loved because they're lonely. That's… a human thing, you know?" It made Stan feel weird and really off-balance, sayin' this sort of stuff out loud to his own brother. "Everyone wants to be loved. Right?"

But Ford looked away from him, uncomfortable, one hand grasping his other arm by the elbow, almost half-hugging himself.

"It's not love that any demon ever truly wants, Stan," Ford told him quietly. "I told you before, they just aren't capable of it."

"Well, the dragon-lady certainly seems to want it," Stan pointed out. "Pretty sure she ain't lying about that."

"And what the man-eater calls 'love', I have no doubt that we would call something else," Ford said moodily.

Stan let out a sigh. He wasn't gonna get through to his brother on this one today, was he. "Ford…" But he had to stop there. The dragon-lady was desperate for something, and it went well beyond 'love' - that was true. Kid was desperate for something a little different, and the dragon-lady didn't fill up that hole for him; she was more of an… addition to it, off to the side almost, kinda. (And Stan could tell that the dragon-lady had noticed that too, at least a little bit. He was pretty sure that was why she sometimes went off taking on the 'older sister' role, instead of the 'younger sister' one sometimes, for him. She was trying harder to be a better kind of every kind of 'sister' to the kid to make up for it.) And if he tried to convince Ford of this one, right now...

...he didn't want the kid coming after him later, for telling stuff to Ford that his brother might end up trying to use against him, or Miz. Because right now, they were kind of a weak point for each other. Stan knew that; he'd been taking advantage of that, leveraging that a bit.

But Stan wasn't too sure what 'taking advantage of that' might look like for the demon-kid and the dragon-lady, if Ford was the one trying to do it.

So Stan kept his stupid mouth shut on that one, and decided to move on to talking with his brother about something else, instead.

Dipper frowned over at Bill, as Grunkle Stan walked off and left Bill to his tea making at the stove - and him and his sister to the demon's "care" while he did it - but Dipper didn't bother objecting to getting 'babysat' by the crazy demon this time. It had kind of looked like Great-Uncle Ford might've really needed Grunkle Stan to go after him, and Dipper hadn't been about to stop that. Besides, they were all still in the Shack, and within yelling distance. The demons couldn't do anything to either of them without getting in trouble almost immediately, so they wouldn't even try to do it this time, right?

Mabel, meanwhile, went up to Jan and asked, "So, you're a boy now? Or are you still a girl? Are you not female but you're still a girl, like how Bill is female but still a boy, now?" She was kind of almost hoping Jan might still be a girl, even though Jan kind of seemed a little more like a boy now to her, because it had been kind of nice having more girls around the Shack? But if Jan was a boy now, then that was fine, too! She just wanted to know, so she wouldn't get it wrong!

"I'm a 'he' right now," Jan said as he smiled down at Mabel. "I was a female girl as a human, but even then, I wasn't really all that attached to being a 'girl' or being 'female'. So now that I can shapeshift, I can just switch whenever I want. I… actually tried to stay more or less the same while here, since from what I remember as a human, they tend to get… uncomfortable when someone just switches around."

Mabel gasped, slapping her hands to her own cheeks. "But… what other people think doesn't matter! You should be what you want to be, whenever you feel like it!" She thought it was cool that Mi- um, Jan! - could turn into cats or cute boys or whatever she/he wanted whenever she/he wanted to!

At this, Dipper tensed, because… well, he saw how Bill's shoulders kind of did a small thing right there when Mabel had said that, and he was pretty sure that if Bill was still looking like a cat right now, his ears would've just perked up like-

("That's not an 'okay' to stick any of us in another body, Bill," Dipper muttered out at him, hoping as he said it that Jan - who seemed to have way less control than even the dream demon - didn't hear, because... "Grunkle Stan said you've got to talk to him first before anybody even thinks about doing anything like that anyway, remember," Dipper reminded him firmly, to which Bill just rolled his eyes kind of sarcastically and stopped doing the shoulder-thing, pretty quickly.)

"Back when I was human, people got attacked or hurt for switching." Jan grimaced. "It was awful and unfair."

Dipper winced at Jan's words and looked away, shuffling his feet a bit. He knew what the 'dragon-lady' was talking about, there, and... "That… happens here too, sometimes…"

"Ugh, really? Still?! What the heck is wrong with people?" Jan scowled as he ran a hand through his hair. "Like, sure it's an issue with some aliens, but most of the multiverse is pretty open to the idea, probably because of all the shapeshifting species there are…" of which he kinda, sorta, had had a hand in… just some small genetic tweaks here and there, some ambient Weirdness leaking out into the world around him, changing and inducing mutations that fell in line with things he enjoyed… Well, it hadn't hurt anyone, and a universe that was more open and accepting of people being 'different' could only be a good thing, right?

Jan was sick of all the blood wars he'd Seen (and been forced to take part in). It was all so stupid. ...Well, he wasn't being fair, there were many factors that went into why wars happened. But it often boiled down to one group just not liking the other group or wanting something from them and not wanting to ask nicely. Well, he'd stopped bothering to try and stop the wars anymore, it was an exercise in futility. People just ended up hating him instead - which he hadn't actually minded too much, since at least it had meant that they would stop fighting each other anymore... to focus on fighting him instead. But it was stressful and he'd just… stopped doing that, for his own sake of mind.

Jan shook himself out of his darkening thoughts, as Bill finished setting up a teatray for himself and began shooing the two younger twins out the backdoor of the Shack. "So, what's this mysterious 'ready' surprise thing?" he asked as he followed Bill out and onto the porch. (The twins came to a stop next to them: Dipper frowning, and Mabel curious, as usual.)

Bill made a chittering sound in something like delight. "WELL!" He kicked the cooler out from under the couch, and set the teatray down neatly on top of it, before waving a hand out at the yard broadly. "It's not quite finished yet. I need to get a few things from Stitched Heart first, buuuuuuut…" He paused for effect.

Jan thought for a bit before the lightbulb moment hit. "Oh~ does this have to do with that really cool stage that you liked?" His eyes sparkled.

Bill let out a "Hah!" before filling and picking up a teacup and striding down off of the porch and into the yard, the twins (and Jan) following behind him. (Curiously: Mabel. Suspiciously: Dipper.)

"Something like that, but I've been working on this with Shooting Star. We made an EVEN BETTER stage!" Bill flung his arms out with a very wide grin (yet not spilling a drop from his teacup as he did so), and-

-a rather large number of security drones from the spaceship suddenly materialized right in front of them in the middle of the yard, as Bill's 'cancellation' command to the drones had the 'invisibility' hologram those drones had been projecting (to mask their presence) suddenly waver, and then abruptly come crashing down.

Dipper jumped back in alarm at the sudden appearance of the droids - which he freaking recognized from the alien spaceship as super-dangerous, thanks! - and then yelped slightly as a GIGANTIC slab of metal slammed down into the grass-and-dirt yard in front of them edge-first, right away next. ...It was quickly set upon by the drones, several telescoping arms from several interweaving their ways around and along the edges of the huge metal slab, at a slew of odd bars and long indentations that seemed embedded in the side of the thing. Dipper could only look on and stare as the droids worked in an odd sort of unsynchronized synchronization, grabbing onto the slab firmly and then slowly seeming to lock themselves in place against the underside of the sideways-listing slab, before slowly working together to raise and rotate it up and over. They pulled it up off and out of the indentation it had made in the ground where it had hit, to tilt and tilt until it was almost level - and then perfectly level - with the plane of the ground below it, as several more droids still continued to circle around, doing somethings above...

Dipper stared open-mouthed at this display, as he finally realized exactly what it was he was looking at, and Mabel (who had already known all about this) made a squealing sound of absolute glee. "It's ready? -IT'S READY!" Mabel yelled out happily, grinning as she ran forward and immediately started clambering her way up the side of one of the droids, then the locked-in-place arm-tentacles, to climb her way up onto the top of the metal-floored stage, wanting to take a good look around at the whole thing...

"Mabel! -Wait!" Dipper called out frantically, as he scrambled right up after her, worried (largely because he knew exactly what those droids could do-).

"Yes," Bill called out simply, answering Shooting Star's question, even as she vanished up and out of his direct line-of-sight (though not the 'sight' that his suit's readouts were giving him, combined with all the output he was getting from his drones as they continued to put the final touches on everything as they worked according to HIS laws, carrying out HIS instructions to meet HIS sets of specifications). "All the production and programming is done, now. I just need the speaker system and the mics from Stitched Heart," Bill said (more to his sister, now), as if this was an everyday common occurrence. And then, and only then, he finally took a sip of tea from his cup, feeling rather pleased about the whole thing. (Of course the tea was for a celebration. It had taken his a while to figure all of this out. The materials alone had been-)

"A proper stage!" Jan enthused, clasping his hands in front of his chest with a faraway look. "I haven't had a real concert in a while…" Then he pouted. "Would I be allowed to have a concert?"

"I don't see why not." Bill shrugged. That was what a stage was for, after all. And it did need some breaking in to become one.

Jan frowned in thought. "I suppose, if I replace my fireworks with illusions so there's no fear of anyone being injured…" He nodded to himself. Then his head came up further. "Oh right, isn't that Woodstick festival thing coming up? Do you think I could perform?"

Bill turned and blinked at his sister. "...It is," he said slowly, but that was several weeks away. "You don't want to use my stage now?" he asked. Certainly, it wasn't really a proper stage yet until someone actually played something on it, and he hadn't exactly made it in the first place with his sister specifically in mind, but… it had been her post that had prompted his initial stage-building challenge to those three idiots in that other dimension in the first place, and… well, she was here and WANTING to use one, and... well...

Jan had to stifle a grin at the not-pout thing Bill was doing just then.

"I suppose we could float this up over it, and STEAL the show from each and every last one of them, instead," Bill muttered out next, trying to find a compromise for her. It would truly be a LITERAL upstaging as well, their stage floating literally right above that one. He'd been planning on putting on the show over the town square, though - or at least the better part of the airspace nearby! Bill wanted an audience for this one! Breaking a stage in was supposed to be LOUD! -And FUN!

Jan grinned. "Well I did mean that I wanted to use your stage, both for fun and for that Woodstick thing. They have all those hot air balloons anyway, so what's wrong with having a stage up in the sky as well?" He leaned over to nuzzle Bill a bit (which had Bill looking considerably better-slash-happier almost immediately). "We could perform together, if you want. And this stage can move, so we could fly around to find the spot with the best audience."

This had Bill humming softly, and immediately moving on to thinking about the logistics for pulling this off properly using his stage for the show - the final performance during Woodstick, but also the practice sessions that would need to happen before that, which could of course start happening just that afternoon that very same day… and what he would need to do (and not do) in order to 'get away with' doing it with Stanley, while also handling keeping both Shooting Star and Pine Tree around, since he had been tasked with 'babysitting duty' over them for the afternoon...

Jan looked on during all this and found it adorable how much his brother was trying to plan this out.

"Can I perform with you?" Mabel asked them both rather excitedly as she looked down at them over the edge of the stage. "I kinda want to do karaoke with Grunkle Stan and Dipper again. And maybe even Grunkle Ford too!" She didn't know how much Grunkle Ford might want to do so on a stage Bill that had built, but it couldn't hurt to just ask him and Grunkle Stan, right?

Bill looked up and blinked, then looked between his sister and then Mabel. "I... wouldn't be against performing together with you," he said to Shooting Star. Performing together with his sister was obviously a no-brainer; of course he would do that. But performing songs with Shooting Star for an audience? He remembered what had happened during that 'sock opera' of hers! ...Then again…

Bill thought for a few long moments about humoring Shooting Star's idea (first and foremost whether he even wanted to try and do it with her, while also weighing and comparing a few things that had happened before that point, and what he expected his own Zodiac's reactions to be to the thought and actuality of this, given what had happened previously with Summerween and the currently-on-hold science lessons thus far and DDNMD session and all the rest of it, really), then Bill nodded once.

"Well! Performing with Stitched Heart was fun," Bill noted. "And with Shooting Star, it may even be fun too." (Shooting Star wasn't really meant for that sort of thing as part of his Zodiac, though, Bill thought. Music stuff was more his and Stitched Heart's thing… and also potentially that Stanford's thing, too - but Sixer was being inconsistent and continually annoying, so Bill doubted he could get that Stanford in on this whole stealing-the-show stage-performance thing - he wasn't holding his stupid human-ish body's breath on that one anytime soon. Compared with Shooting Star in that way...)

Jan clapped his hands in delight. "We'd have to choose a song line up! And costumes! And dance choreography!" His eyes seemed to sparkle as he got into the idea. "You can tell me what you want to wear, I can create clothing-" Jan bounced in place as he grinned down at Mabel.

Mabel gasped in delight. "Can you create stuff based on sketches?" she asked. Jan nodded. "I used to draw pretty clothing all the time as a human, kinda wanted to go into fashion for a bit during college, but I chickened out…" Jan admitted. "I didn't think I was good enough…"

"Whaa? You shouldn't give up on your dreams!" Mabel frowned. That was sad. (Dipper frowned slightly at this. ...Actually, hadn't Miz said they'd also given up on being a teacher, too? How many dreams had they supposedly given up over time? Were they just lying again, or… how many times had this other Bill changed his mind?)

Jan, for his part, just shrugged. "Well, even if I couldn't do it as a human, I have all the time in the world now to pursue my interests. As a human, everyone always asked me 'But how would you make money off that?' to all my hobbies. I've had my parents tell me that I wouldn't be able to make money off art… and… my mom supported me anyway but I guess… that might have stuck with me... the fact that they didn't think I could do it… dad always laughed at me..."

"Parents are stupid," was Bill's contribution to this.

Dipper frowned. Both at Bill's dislike for parents, and for how Miz/Jan's parents had dismissed their passion. "That's… not right," he couldn't help but admit, tugging down a bit on his cap, as he sat down on the side of the big metal stage.

"They weren't being mean. They were worried for my future," Jan told them with a shrug (as Bill gestured at two of the circling drones to have them descend and extend their telescoping arms as quick makeshift 'seats' to lift both himself and his sister up to the stage, for an easier chat). "They always asked me to think about a career choice. And… it was my own fault for not knowing how to turn my interests into profit. My friends suggested selling my origami work, and that sort of worked, but it wasn't a stable source of income." Jan paused as he got his footing under him on the stage, and waved the drone off. "Wait, am I bringing down the mood again? Sorry, I'll stop." He didn't want to upset them all again, not so soon, not when they were going to do something fun today.

Mabel frowned a little and reached forward to gently take and pat the back of Jan's hand. "Yeah, a little, but we can talk about something nicer now. Like what songs we should perform!"

Jan nodded quickly, wanting to get away from the not-happy topic. "Well should I let you choose? Or should I just go with whatever I like?" Jan wondered. "I could pull up a list of all the songs I know, you can see if you know any? Or you tell me what songs you know and I can learn them?"

Bill relaxed back in his crazy chair made of security droid tentacle-arms, floating in place only a few feet over the stage, sipping his tea and watching Mabel and his sister look over a songlist floating above Jan's hands - when he wasn't sending looks over Dipper's way - and Dipper frowned and shoved himself a little farther away from the edge but remained seated himself, also watching. Meanwhile, the two sisters of the four of them got right into discussing music and clothing, with Jan dancing on the stage to show Mabel some choreography at one point. Dipper didn't particularly like how any of this was going. Mabel was getting waaaay too excited about everything, and seemed to be losing track of exactly who they were dealing with here. It left Dipper just fretting with nerves over the whole thing. He didn't trust it, not one bit. This 'floating stage' idea and this 'musical takeover' - really, the way Bill was handling all this in general - reminded him way too much of the inside of the Fearamid during Weirdmageddon. ...Honestly, the whole thing with Weirdmageddon, really.

But as Dipper watched Mabel a little more, he realized that she actually wasn't getting too out of hand, here. He remembered what that sock puppet opera last summer had been like - what Mabel was usually like during all of her major craft projects, really. She wasn't just blurting out a bunch of crazy things like she usually did, then backing down off of them; she just wasn't saying them in the first place. ...She was being careful what she said around the two demons who might actually carry it out. So… she was handling the demons just fine. ...Huh.

-But that didn't mean that he could just leave her alone with them! And he wouldn't! That was crazy-dangerous. So he sat on the stage, eyeing them all, with his journal out and at the ready, and took copious notes on their activities instead.

"-e still need to ask Stitched Heart to perform with us!" Jan nodded to himself. "He's actually not that bad. Impressive guitar work for a teenager."

Dipper let out an involuntary snort at this, and Jan raised an eyebrow when he heard it. "What? He practiced long and hard to learn how to play. And he likes it."

Dipper winced. "Sorry," he responded, not knowing what else to say. "I have trouble believing Robbie is any good." Not that Dipper had exactly heard any of Robbie's music aside from that time he'd tried to brainwash Wendy with some music that he hadn't even written himself, but he didn't exactly think that Robbie could've written anything that was actually good. Just by looking at those posters alone, he was pretty sure it was all really bad to have to hear, real cringe-worthy stuff.

"Well, this'll be a good chance for you to actually hear him play!" Jan told him brightly. "And not something overly edgy like he generally prefers to do…" Jan paused and tilted his head. "Though, I wonder if he's skilled enough to do Dragon Force covers?"

"Stitched-Heart is capable of playing absolutely anything," Bill informed them all, as he took another sip from his cup. "He's done the hardest of the classics; he can handle any of this." (And that left Dipper blinking and looking over at him as he remembered - Wendy had sent him a few of those old posters from when Robbie'd been performing classical choral music when he was really little, right? Then again, how good could Robbie have been at age… whatever, a whole bunch of years younger than he and Mabel were right now, if he'd guessed Robbie's age right from those posters.)

Jan and Mabel continued playing around on the stage for a bit, while Bill finished up his cup of tea and then pulled up his main physical interface (the imagery being displayed and actions-read from the easy-access control panel on the left forearm of his suit) and finished checking on the final calibrations and integrated performance parameters. And once it looked like he was done...

"Well, we should go find Stitched Heart and get this started!" Jan cheered. "We've got rehearsals to prepare for!" He and Mabel had all sorts of outfits planned out already!

Mabel was thrilled for this to happen, ready to get this show on the road! But Dipper was grimacing as he texted Pacifica to warn her of the arrival in town of the possible impending floating 'fortress' they were all currently sitting on. Then he texted Wendy next, too.

Robbie shouldered his guitar case and opened the door to head out for the day, then stopped short, hand on the doorknob, as he realized somebody was standing out on the porch outside the screen door, standing out on his back porch.

Then he recognized who it was - that damn demon, standing there with the widest grin on his face, along with somebody else there behind him - and Robbie immediately slammed the door closed before he even got as far as looking at whoever else was out there with him. -Nope. Not today. Maybe he could pretend he hadn't seen him...

...yeah, right. Like ignoring the demon had worked out well for him the last time. His parents had let him in, and then the demon had played loudly enough on the piano down in the funeral service room that Robbie practically hadn't been able to hear himself think up in his own room above there, let alone play anything, and the demon had kept going on and on until Robbie had finally given up and-

Robbie winced as he heard the demon's voice call out through the closed door, "Stitched-Heart! It's stage-breaking-in time! We need to borrow some of your equipment to do it right!" (Ugh, he didn't really want to hand over any of his stuff to the demon - it was expensive! The stupid demon might break it! ...Maybe he could sneak out the front door instead.)

Another voice, some guy he'd never heard before, came through the door next. "May we please borrow some equipment? We wanna perform during Woodstick."

...Great. The demon was roping more people into his crazy-demon things, even out-of-towners now. Which meant the front door was probably covered too, or would be in a second if he tried.

Robbie groaned under his breath and rubbed a hand across his face as he tried to think this through. Because, what was the worst thing that could happen, if he actually managed to pull off running away from the demon and whoever else was out there and in on this thing with him? ...If he didn't let them in, and managed to skip out the front door, could he count on his parents not loaning out his equipment to the demon and his friends? He wasn't so sure about that…

"Get your own stuff! I'm not letting you borrow mine," Robbie called out through the closed door at them, turning and slumping his back up against it, hoping that the crazy demon didn't try calling his bluff.

Then Robbie heard the screen door go and... then he heard Mabel's voice come through. "Ummm… Robbie? We just want to sing and play some music together. And Bill said you had the equipment that we need to do it. I don't think he'll do anything weird to it. You can come along if you want, to make sure he doesn't do anything wrong with it?"

Robbie groaned and dropped his head back to thunk against the door behind him softly. Really? The demon had roped the girl twin into this, too?

"Look, I told him, I'm not joining whatever band he wants to do!" Robbie complained. "I've already got a band!" He was pretty sure that this was going to turn out to be some kind of trap - they'd get him to loan them the stuff and then come along with them, and once he was there...

"You can be in more than one band at a time," Robbie heard from the demon, closer-in this time. Ugh, the demon had to be leaning up against the side back door now.

"I was going out to practice," Robbie complained. Alone.

"You can practice with us! You're not playing with them right now today," he heard the demon say next.

"You don't know that," Robbie grumbled out, but it was true; he'd been planning on going out and-

There was a sigh and then that voice Robbie didn't recognize spoke up again, saying, "It's fine. I guess Robbie's too shy to come and perform at Woodstick with us. I'm sure we can get the instruments and speakers somewhere else."

...What? Robbie twitched, then shook his head. "Yeah, you better go get them somewhere else. I'm already gonna be playing at Woodstick this year." Not that Robbie knew that for sure, yet, because they hadn't sent out the emails yet on who had been selected to perform-

"Don't want to get it somewhere else," he heard the demon say next. "You can play with both bands this year, you know."

"No, I can't!" Because- "You can only sign up for one band at a time, or you get your app for the festival tossed out." It was how they made sure they got enough variety in the acts to make it an actual independent music festival, not just a bunch of look-alike sound-alike posers. Then something occurred to him like a bolt out of the blue, and Robbie felt himself go pale. "Hey. -Hey!" He straightened away from the door, starting to get angry, because-

Robbie turned towards the back door and yanked it open, glaring. "-You better not have signed me up for your band this year, or we'll both not end up getting in!" He glared at the demon - he didn't want to not make it this time because of a stupid disqualification like that!

-and Robbie stopped short as he caught sight of the demon and that unknown person… who had four arms- and- (the heck?!)

"I don't think we need to register if we're planning to just crash the festival?" the four-armed… person? Demon? (Was it another demon!? -How?! Didn't the old man say he wasn't going to let Bill bring any of his freaky friends here?!) -Whoever-it-was said it, as they turned and looked directly at Bill. And once Robbie tore his gaze away from staring at all the arms and looked up at the guy's face, the teenager had to do yet another double-take. This guy… Robbie shook his head. What the heck? He… looked human… mostly. Aside from the arms… Robbie frowned. No, this was definitely some kind of demon or something, those freaky arms had swirling black markings on them that moved.

"I'm not gonna play with you," Robbie repeated again instead, backing away a little from the freaky (if admittedly kind of attractive, the jerk) four-armed man.

"It would be more fun if you did." The stranger pouted at him. "Brother said music is your thing, and I really liked when we played together last time."

Played together the last- what? Robbie frowned. He didn't remember ever playing together with this demon. But then the first part of that sentence really registered with him, and his eyes widened. "Wait, brother-?!" Robbie's eyes shot over to Bill and things began to come together for him. He opened his mouth in shock, a million different things going through his head as he tried to figure out what to say here, but when he finally did say something it was, "Weren't you a little girl?!"

Bill's sister (brother?!) shrugged at him and said, "I got bored. Thought I'd change it up."

...and Robbie could only lament his life and wish he didn't have to deal with this… (It was just like when the stupid triangle had suddenly decided to be a cool-looking girl and come over to the graveyard every other day, bothering him all over again! But even worse this time, since at least Bill was still freaking recognizable, and definitely a guy once you saw him doing more than just lying there breathing! And Bill's sister was way too hot as a guy- nope! Not gonna go down that particular thought. He was totally not jealous of him at all. Freaky four-arms and everything that could probably hold at least two guitars-)

"C'mon, Robbie," was what he heard next, and that was enough to get him poking his head out the door and looking out to the side to see… both Mabel and Dipper standing there. And it sounded like the boy twin was taking no shit today. "If we've gotta go along with this, so do you. Where's the equipment," he said, as he pushed his way into the house past Robbie and the doorway.

("Hey!" Robbie complained as he got past him.)

But Dipper just kept right on going. Because there was no way Dipper was going to suffer through this alone. Misery loved company and Robbie was literally the worst company that he could think of for this. So, why not?

"Just, freaking hold on a second, all right?" Robbie grumbled, shoving past Dipper as he moved back into the back entrance way of his own house. "My equipment, my rules," he said, almost before he realized it, and Robbie was already kicking himself as he heard the far-too-close behind him "HA!" from the crazy triangle demon, who must've followed him already into the house next.

"Yay!" Jan cheered, throwing all his hands in the air (in a bit of a chorus with Mabel there, who had cheered the same thing). "You said it! So we're doing it! No take backs!"

Robbie groaned the way that Dipper kind of wanted to just then. (They looked at each other and shared a common glare.)

"...Right," said Dipper. They might as well get on down to it. "So, where is all this stuff that Bill wants to bring?" he asked him.

(The demons and kids had a wild and wonderful music-filled adventure that day - well, at least some of them thought it was wonderful, anyway. Ford ended up yelling at them all later that night for it, too. But that's a story for another time.)

To Ford's (eventual) relief, it seemed the man-eater had gotten bored of being a male-gendered object of pure worship after less than twelve hours of going at it, with no noticeable short-term impact on the town (though Ford would have to be vigilant in looking for the usual medium- and longer-term effects that might rear its ugly head later). The man-eater had changed back into their little girl form after a whole wild day of shenanigans around town. (It was a series of events Ford was still frustrated to have missed out on, not least of which had to do with the fact that Stan had simply let the children spend their time with the demons for the entire day after ordering Bill to spend the entire rest of the day around them - which was dangerous no matter what Stan said about Bill 'being about to babysit them both properly now' - and Ford still couldn't believe that his brother had taken that risk!)

...Not that this other 'little girl' form of theirs was much better, since the man-eater had obviously made their 'Miz' form small and helpless-looking on purpose in order to lower the defenses of any person who saw it, as some form of 'easy victim here!' trap.

In fact the man-eater was clearly trying to invoke some sort of strong empathy-response in him now, looking up at him with those wide eyes, pretending to be nervous, and timid, and-

-and it wasn't going to work! He refused!

"Um… mister Ford, can I talk to you? Like, actually have a conversation where we both try to not lose our tempers with each other?" Miz asked him quietly. "Stan can be there too, to tell us to stop if he thinks things are going for a bad turn."

Ford twitched, and he looked up from his book at the kitchen table to glare over at her. "I don't want to talk to you," he ground out at her firmly. Frankly, he didn't want this man-eater talking to anyone in his family at all. He felt wary enough at the idea of her continuing to have discussions with Bill Cipher that ended in the demon hugging her. That could not possibly be good for-

-But he especially did not want her talking to him. Certainly not after the last several times that this demon who was trying to be a 'Bill Cipher' had done so, and- -He wasn't stupid. He wasn't about to give the demon an open invitation to openly be horribly rude to him, or to try and 'break' his mind with Bill as a 'helpful' assist all over again.

Stan, on the other hand, gave Miz a level stare over his crossword puzzle book from where he was sitting at the same table. "What did you want to talk to him about?" Stan asked her, running interference for Ford.

Miz sighed and ran a hand through her hair. "I've been doing a lot of thinking," to which Bill raised his head and looked approving (thinking was always good), "-And I think that… my definitions and Ford's definitions for things aren't the same for pretty much everything, and I think that might be what's causing most of the problems we have with each other. So, I thought that maybe we should talk and clarify things?"

Stan raised his eyebrows at this. He wasn't so sure about that one; hell, he'd had a talk with her and the kid over why Ford kept getting so touchy with her days ago, and that one hadn't even made the list…

...then again, a lot of what Stan did with the kid was vocabulary concepts and defining terms, and he'd already figured out pretty quick that the kid meant different things than he necessarily sounded most times, and that Ford had never even seemed to realize this. So…

...Yeah, okay. Stan could see how that might be a good idea. If his brother would agree to do it. But even if Ford did, there were a lot of ways this could go wrong, still. One was just the fact that Stan knew how his conversations with the kid usually went on stuff like this, and just trying to talk about this stuff itself could lead to a lot of easy misunderstandings. And that was even if you weren't trying to look for the worst possible way to take every last thing that somebody said while you were doing it, the way that Ford probably would. And if either of them started fighting over the 'proper' definitions for things, like Bill still did with him sometimes...

Stan sighed, flipped his crossword puzzle book closed (with the pencil stuck in it, marking his place), and tossed it onto the table. (He figured he was gonna need his full attention for this. "Okay, I hear ya. But what are you intending to do with this conversation? Just clarifying your definitions? What are you wanting to get out of it?" Because he figured he'd better work that one out properly first, so he'd have a good place to stand to tell them both when they needed to stop because they weren't getting anywhere where they were trying to go, if they even ended up doing this thing in the first place.

"I just want to understand." Miz had a strained expression on her face as she said this. "I don't like misunderstandings that aren't funny," she insisted. "And I'm misunderstanding Ford a lot." ...Well, Stan couldn't disagree with her there, the demon-dragon-lady really didn't understand Ford one bit.

Stan looked over at his brother. Ford hadn't spoken up again yet, but he was listening - he sure as hell wasn't that engaged in that book he was reading; Stan could tell.

Stan turned back to the dragon-lady. "Look, if you two want to talk to figure out vocabulary, or somethin', we're gonna need some ground rules - and one of 'em is that I'm going to be sitting right here listening, and if I say stop, you're gonna stop when I tell you to, 'cause I don't want this thing escalating again like every other time you two have ended up going off at each other, every time you've tried talking at each other before this." Stan moved his eyes over to look at Bill. "You want your brother here with you for this kinda conversation as well?"

"Only if he wants to be," was Miz's reply, to which the older demon made a chittering sound and immediately said, "Of course I want to be. -I DON'T want you alone with Stanley," the kid said almost grumpily, eyeing said Stanley again side-long over this.

"Guess we've got our two referee-interpreters, then." Stan let out a breath and turned to his brother. "Well? Do you wanna try to get your 'definitions' straightened out with this one?" Stan asked him, tossing a thumb Miz's way.

But to this, Ford simply set down his book on the table and scoffed. "I don't see how that's important in any way. We don't need to 'understand' each other." Ford felt he knew far more than he needed to know about demons already, thank you. He didn't particularly care to know what this one thought of him any better, in any sense of the word. And he looked off-put - and felt rather horrified - at the very idea of Miz 'understanding him' better, in any way. Because that would likely just mean that her verbal attacks would be that much more accurate and damaging against him - which was, he felt, the very last thing that he needed from her or anyone else at the moment, thank you. "And quite frankly, I don't want to."

Ford folded his arms, leaning back in his chair, and Stan held back a sigh. (Damnit, Ford. He knew what his brother really meant there, but did he have any idea what that would have just sounded like to anyone else, let alone some crazy not-understanding-him demon?)

Miz was frowning at the scientist. "So… you… want me to keep misunderstanding you?" She sounded both frustrated and confused. "You… want me to keep getting mad at you when we both say things that don't match up and get offended?"

Ford glared at her, while Stan straightened up in his chair a bit and groaned. "-No, that's not what he wants," Stan cut in for him quickly, while shooting his brother another (annoyed) look. Clumsy as it was, Miz was trying here; Stan could tell. Ford trying to shoot down her attempt right outta the gate wasn't gonna help anyone now or later - like the kids, when some other misunderstanding might happen later with them - least of all Ford himself right now. "He ain't explaining himself real well right now. -Ford, elaborate," Stan told him next.

Ford let out a huff of breath. "Stanley, this is pointless!" he told him. Because yes, he'd realized what his brother had been getting at when he'd more or less pointed out to him days ago that he hadn't truly been treating the man-eater like the demon she (probably… no, almost certainly) was. But- "I don't need to 'understand' a demon any better than I already do - I understand them well-enough as it is! -They're all heartless monsters that-"

Miz pointed at Ford. "-That. Right there. What exactly is your definition for demon? Because 'heartless monster' isn't what mine is."

Ford glared at her. "Whether you use a different word for it is hardly much more than a distraction! -It's what you are." Ford shot back at her, already more than done with this new 'game' of hers, and mad for Stanley playing along with it to begin with. "You are a monster who thinks that the entirety of our living existence is all just some sort of game for you to play at, and take great fun and delight at messing around with other peoples' lives and their very existence and livelihoods and families-" Ford was gripping at the table now, almost panting for breath in his rage, "-destroying every last thing that you can get your hands on, after you're all done toying with it, and with them! Because that includes people to you!" Ford was nearly shaking in place now, as he said, "None of you care about anything or anyone else in the least, and-!"

Ford cut himself off at the last, because Stan's hand came down on his shoulder - to just sit there, even as Ford flinched and tried to stop shaking in place in his rage. (He'd barely even noticed when Stan had gotten up from his chair and started to make his way over, he'd been so engrossed in the past, in trying to ignore the flashes of horribleness that had flickered across his vision, as he'd almost against his will remembered bit and pieces of-)

Stan stood there and held his hand there on his brother' shoulder, rubbing it back and forth just a bit, as Ford slowly calmed down, panting for breath. (And yeah, the kid had a hand on top of his sister's head at the moment. ...Some kinda signal to let Ford speak his piece first for now? Well, whatever it was, Stan was kinda appreciating the help at the moment, whether the kid realized it was the right thing to be doing right now or not. He raised his eyes to the kid's own, and the kid gave him the shortest of nods as he did it. ...Huh.)

After Ford had calmed down again a bit, and pulled his hands back into his lap (really, more wrapped them around his chest while disguising it as just crossing them in front of him; hell, Ford…), Stan tried to decide whether or not to continue… then thought 'the hell with it' (his brother should be able to say 'stop' on his own, too, if he needed it) and Stan nodded to Miz. It was her turn.

Miz bit her lip, then took a deep breath and said, "I don't think life is a game. I thought it was a cartoon show, but aside from that, I do SO care about others! I just don't care about every single person that I meet. And just because I don't care for them doesn't mean I immediately kill them, or whatever the heck your definition of a demon will do to people!" And now Miz was shaking a little herself. Because when Ford had called her a monster before… she'd maybe thought he'd meant the kind of monster under the bed that she could laugh at and scare away herself as a triangle. But some of the stuff he'd said just now, about destroying existence and livelihoods and families?! That was- That was just- It spoke to something a heck of a lot worse than that, something much darker, and-

It left Miz shivering and shaking in place. Because he'd called her that. He thought she was that. He'd called her and her brother- her- her brother- had her brother ever-?!

Her brother, who was standing there right next to her, began to pet her slowly, and gently, on top of her head, never looking away from either of his Zodiac as he did it.

Stan stared at Miz for a moment. "...Wait, back up." He cut off both Ford and Miz before they could escalate this whole conversation-fight-thing any further. Because... "You think life… is a cartoon show?" Stan asked Miz incredulously, and… oh, and now he was remembering how Miz had mentioned 'plot' a few times before. How she was supposed to move 'the plot' along in her own dimension… (hell, she hadn't been talking about moving around land now, had she…)

Miz grimaced down at the ground and shuffled her feet. "Thought. I know it's my reality now, but back when I was human," she stated, "There was a children's cartoon show that I really liked." She looked a little embarrassed (the heck?) as she said... "It was called Gravity Falls, and it was about a pair of children spending a summer with their great uncle, discovering supernatural mysteries and eventually defeating a triangle demon…" Miz was blushing now. "It was one of my favorite shows."

Stan stared at her. So did Ford.

Bill let out one of his 'so annoying' chitters and literally tossed his free hand up in the air, as if he was discarding the idea out of hand, almost. "It's fine," the demon told them both. "That happens sometimes."

"That-" Ford looked like he was trying to wrap his head around that one, and gearing up to very much not like the idea of that one bit. "What-"

"-It happens more often than you might think," Bill emphasized, giving Ford a long look.

"Kid, what the hell?" Stan said next, completing Ford's sentence, because… what the hell?

Ford, for his part, seemed to get unstuck once Stan got the thought out there for him, and now he looked absolutely irate. "Just because the multiverse is infinite, doesn't mean that-"

"-our dimensional set, taken on its own, isn't actually infinite," Bill drawled out, both interrupting and contradicting him. "The stupid lizard is lazy, yes - the stupid thing just got done spinning up a dimension for Pine Tree and Shooting Star to land in that we just got done visiting THAT DIDN'T EXIST HERE BEFORE," the demon-kid thundered out at them next, cutting Ford off before looking up at Stan. "-But that doesn't mean anything," Bill continued, gearing up to apparently what was supposed to be his main point.

"Ford, give the kid a minute, here," Stan said slowly almost under his breath, not looking away from the kid. "Pretty sure this might be important." He heard an agitated huff from his brother, but Ford stayed silent next to him, annd Stan counted his small blessings.

"Look," Bill began again, glancing between them. "The multiverse may not be infinite, but the Mindscape is EVERYWHERE. Thoughts travel. The 'collective unconscious' - the way you humans think of it - isn't a thing," Bill put out there, "But! Everyone's so-called 'Dreamscapes'," the kid shot an annoyed look Ford's way, "Do connect out to the general Mindscape - not just their own internal one - and sometimes, when that happens, thoughts and events that cause a big enough 'ripple' in the general Mindscape can travel. And then people in other dimensions can get 'glimpses' of those events that happen in other dimensions inside of their dreams without anyone else actually trying to put it there. And sometimes, the people who get those 'glimpses' even decide to WRITE IT ALL DOWN in a book, or into a screenplay, and make it all into a SHOW. -It happens sometimes. That's all. -You don't need an infinity to get a bunch of so-called 'repetitions'; things just need to impact each other. Like that." The kid shrugged.

Stan stared at the kid, because, really? This was a thing?

"And sometimes some of the higher-level beings and demons with some form of Sight or spying capability are lazy and just go looking for things that they can steal and pass off as their own on purpose. Multidimensional 'reality TV', woop-dee-do - so what," Bill said next, almost in disgust, waving that one off, too. "It isn't necessarily accurate most of the time." After all, not everybody had 20/∞ vision like he did! "And spending time chasing every 'echo' of something down the ostrich hole, trying to figure that one out, just isn't worth it, most of the time," Bill told them all next. "I've even been communicating with two 'blogs' that are linked to a dimension that I haven't really Looked into... much from the outside-here yet, and..." he didn't really want to talk about it, because he'd only just realized what he'd done wrong and only just recently fixed, last time he'd make assumptions on anything there… -Though admittedly that was mostly only because he hadn't been able to use his All-Seeing Eye, to See into it properly, before, so the blame for that could largely be laid at Stanley's own feet, he was certain.

(And even if he could have done it at the time, that much earlier, Bill also wouldn't have wanted to try it at a time when he'd known that other Bill Cipher from that other dimensional set might have potentially been watching - watching that dimension while the connection was still present - and potentially noticed his own 'Eye-spying' somehow(?!). Bill hadn't wanted to risk… well, Stanley getting angry at him if he ran into a problem with that, with that other Bill Cipher who he didn't understand at all yet, later. Ha. -Anyway...)

"...that dimension does seem to have a cartoon show like that. -I've been reading your blogposts there," he told Miz, not wanting to go into too much detail on her own role in the ongoing connections (let alone why and how that dimension existed in his dimensional set because of her in the first place…) "And it's half the reason why I'm not worried about any of those idiots - or anyone else - 'finding out' who I am when I write things to any of the blogs over there," he told Stan next somewhat absently, waving it off. "They won't ever think any of us could possibly be real there, because of that show." After all, why would any of the locals there think he was actually 'the real Bill Cipher' even if he said who he was, when there was a perfectly good explanation for why someone - or several someones - might want to pretend to be him over there, because of that apparently somewhat-popular show...

"There were a lot of role-playing blogs where people pretended to be characters from the show," Miz shrugged, explaining the concept a bit better to the two older men in front of her. "It happened a lot."

"I could see how the energy signals from the communication lines connected to that time-distorted hyperdimensional whatsit were flowing into and out of that dimension, and I was able to decipher the datastreams as part of that, then access it myself - no weirdness necessary." Bill carefully left out how he'd been sending communications to that dimension there, though, really not wanting to get into that whole mess with either of his Zodiac right then. "The 'Gravity Falls' cartoon show they have there isn't of any concern to ME; from what I could access from their own networked world-wide-internet, it seems FAR too general in the whole," and far too skimpy on any specifics, "-to be of any use or detriment to anyone else." Meaning: other demons who might try and take advantage of any information therein. "I didn't bother to check how much of it was accurate. That's generally a waste of time."

After all, even if someone was necessarily accurate on the generalities, being more attuned to the finer happenings of one specific dimension that they were somehow seeing glimpses of in their dreams… most of the devilish-details just didn't make it through the Mindscape to 'Dreamscape' to awakening process intact, and the final product of any of the forms of entertainment that Bill ever saw come out of something like that were always dodgy at-best. And even though Bill could track down the Dreamer connected to those sorts of things properly - if there even was one to begin with, coincidences did happen - it wasn't as though anyone could necessarily mine any of those dreams for more useful information than one would get just by viewing that singular dimension oneself directly, not even himself. And trying to do things that way, rather than just going with direct-viewing, usually disrupted or broke the Dreamer's connection to that dimension, if he tried! -It just wasn't worth it. Dreamers were all well and good, but Bill had found out over the years that only Sensitives could do that sort of thing with any consistency at all, and...

"But the portal specifications-" Ford said urgently, suddenly looking alarmed, and Stan turned to look down at him, blinking in shock, because he hadn't thought of that at all-

"-Relax, Sixer. The 'portal blueprints' they dreamed up there were a load of garbage that will never get them anywhere," the kid told them both, to the tune of Ford letting out something of a breath of relief, which honestly left Stan feeling a little bit odd. "And so is the 'math'. -That, I checked," the kid told them next. (Bill hadn't checked much else besides that for anything to do with the show, though, other than the general-basics of having noted that 'he' was known there in the form of a character from some cartoon show that was there and apparently also 'a thing' for some people there, too.) "Even when it's a thing, the details usually get lost, or rewritten entirely. So even when it is, it isn't. -Don't worry about it," the kid repeated. "It's just your normal weird fluke," the kid shrugged off, completely unconcerned with all of it.

"...Right," Stan said slowly, feeling a little off-balance at this for a moment. "So, uh…... should I be claiming royalties or somethin' outta these people?" he asked next, to a "HA!" outta the kid, and the usual sort of not-so-happy with him for 'not takin' things seriously' kind of annoyed exclamation out of Ford. (Welp, at least that lightened the mood a bit.) Stan shook his head and asked Miz next, "Right. So, you think you saw some kinda cartoon show that maybe was a little like all of us, way back when, when you were a human." Talk about weird, hell. "What does that have to do with anything?"

Miz continued, "Well, the show had a yellow triangle demon named Bill Cipher in it. So when I died and woke up as a yellow triangle, I kinda thought… well…" She shrugged helplessly. "I don't go around killing people for fun or anything, though, and ah… well…" Here, she looked a little guilty. "Even when I tried to go against the 'plot' I remember from the show, certain events still happened, like fixed points…" She looked solemn. "Like the destruction of the 2nd dimension. I didn't mean for it to happen, but it still did."

Bill, who had placed a hand on her head earlier, started petting her on the head again gently.

("Not your fault," Bill reminded her under his breath. Because it wasn't. Her. Fault.)

"So I figured, if the same things are going to happen, regardless of what I do, then I should plan out how to make them happen, but in my own way. If I could hit all the points I need with the least amount of pain and suffering for the people around me somehow…"

(Bill visibly twitched at this.)

Ford… looked irate. "Are you honestly telling me that you're going to continue to destroy dimensions, and kill hundreds of trillions of people, all because you saw a TV show where something like that happened once?!" Ford grated out at her, slamming his hands into the table again and shoving himself to his feet. (And Stan didn't even try to stop him that time.)

Miz managed to keep her cool, but only barely. "That ISN'T what I do at all! -I think this is another definition problem. I don't go around killing and enslaving people. I have jobs from Time Baby sometimes, but for the most part I just travel and learn things. Make Deals, create planets and hang out with my friends." Miz groaned. "And aside from what happened to the 2nd dimension, I've never destroyed any other dimension. Ever," she told him firmly. "Dad would get upset if I did that on purpose - or even by accident or something," she added quickly, trying to cut off what she realized would probably be Ford's next argument there. "And I don't want to make him upset. And I literally have no reason or desire to do so, so I don't. Less dimensions would mean less places for me to hang out! That'd be boring!" she added, giving a selfish reason for why she'd want that something she was talking about, just like Stan had told her to do.

But Ford was still shaking his head and looking just as angry. "You say that now, but even if you're telling the truth," and it was clear that Ford did not think that was the case, "You yourself have stated before that you want to be like Bill Cipher!" Ford said, pointing at Bill roughly.

Bill narrowed his eyes at Ford.

"Our definition of Bill Cipher is different too." Miz sighed, rubbing a hand across her face.

And Bill went a little bit still at that, blinking as he looked down at her.

"...He does always get me wrong whenever he thinks of me inside his head," Bill said, in an odd, almost uneasy tone of voice.

"This isn't about definitions!" Ford insisted, slamming a fist into the table beside him. "It's about basic facts-!"

"-Look, I don't know what idea you have of Bill Cipher inside of your head," Miz told him, "But clearly it's wrong and not me!" Miz looked frustrated. "I don't want to do those kinds of things to people, ever! But if the same thing's going to happen, regardless of how I try to stop it from happening, and generally end up worse because I tried to stop it, then why shouldn't I do it on purpose in a way that I can control and mitigate the damage?"

"You said you want to be like him!" Ford repeated angrily. "To be more like him! -Who do you think that he is?!" he yelled out at her, feeling almost a sense of disconnect at the very idea that she was trying to somehow make some case for being- being less bad than he actually was!?

Miz flinched back a little at the yelling. "...a triangle…" she mumbled. "...with magical powers…" She looked almost embarrassed.

Ford let out a strangled sound, and stared at her in absolute and pure disbelief at what he was hearing just then.

"-there wasn't all that much to go on from the show, aside from some fan-theories and stuff-" Miz whined. "-but from what little we got from the show-writer-"

And as Miz continued talking and talking, Ford stared down at her with a growing sense of absolute horror. Because… he'd completely misread the situation here. Miz… somehow... had absolutely no idea who Bill Cipher actually was. What he was. What he was like. This man-eater - demon - whatever she was - had absolutely no idea, and- and she was here now and- and looking for guidance from him?! From Bill Cipher!? On how to be a "better" demon? -Just like him, when she didn't know who he even really was?!

Oh no. Oh, no no no. No, that couldn't be true. She was already too- No. No. That just couldn't be-

"-but there was clearly something I was supposed to go with, people treated me as if I was like that, even when I didn't do anything remotely close to it, so they must have some idea of what I'm supposed to be like-"

Ford began shaking his head in pure disbelief. A 'magical triangle' with 'powers'. This couldn't be right. No. She had to- had to be lying to him- nobody was this stupid and wrong, or just plain blind, about anything-

-he himself had thought Bill was a true and dear friend to him, once-

-She had a sense of empathy she hadn't been able to shut off herself, for Axolotl's sake! She must have been able to sense such things from him directly. -She had to know better!

"-yeah he was a villain in the show, but that's because it was from the human's point of view so-"

"-Stop talking," Ford choked out, too many emotions swirling through his heart and chest and brain to try and catalogue or deal with at the moment. "Stop talking, now." He could barely think, over the noise and the confusion running through him just then. But what Ford did know was that this just wasn't right, wasn't anything like right, none of it, and-

Stan glanced over at his brother, who kept shifting between looking red and looking a little bit pale, over and over again, and (thankfully) Miz closed her mouth when he told her to and stopped talking. She didn't look all that happy though.

...Largely, because Miz wasn't stupid. She knew this wasn't going well, and she was having trouble figuring out how to deal properly with Ford. He was rejecting her off the bat without even attempting to understand her. Reminded her a lot of the debates she'd had with some racists to try and get them to stop being mean and rude to people, never worked.

"...Bill," Stan said slowly, wondering if he was making a really big mistake here in asking him... "You got any idea how the hell to get these two seeing eye to eye here?" Because Stan didn't know a hell of a lot about 'Bill Cipher, the crazy triangle demon', but he sure as hell knew some things about the kid who'd been talking his ear off the past few weeks, here and there, on the regular. But that didn't mean that he knew all the crazy demon stuff the kid had gotten up to before he'd punched the demon into pieces inside his head. And that sure as hell didn't mean that he knew what to say about the kid in front of both Ford and the kid's new sister, that wouldn't maybe cause some even bigger problems pretty damn quickly… like an even bigger shouting match between Ford, who didn't want to talk about other dimensions and all the shit he'd lived through that the demon had probably pulled, and Miz, who didn't seem to want to think much of anything she thought was 'bad' about her brother...

But what the kid said next wasn't what Stan had been expecting at all. The kid didn't try and 'define' himself better to any of them. Bill just looked down at Miz, his eyebrows slightly raised, with a slight frown on his face, and he didn't do anything like what Stan had been expecting him to do, at all.

Instead, what he did was say...

"...Your idea of…" Bill paused, as he looked down at his sister. "Your 'morality' is…" and Bill trailed off, his eyes jittering slightly from side-to-side for a moment. "...flat," Bill said next, then seemed to shake himself mentally, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment before correcting himself slightly, saying, "-Ish. It's… flat-ish. Not… flat-flat, or flatter-than-flat, but..." Bill pulled in a breath as he thought. "-It's mostly the same as that Stanford's," Bill said finally, sounding a little odd again, and…

...Bill felt a little bit odd, just left of weird, as it finally occurred to him that this was, in fact, the case. Because after what had happened in that dimension with the human-looking, always-been-human Bill… and in thinking about some of the things that Miz had said to him before in this new context that she'd all just given them now...

Bill's hand twitched upwards slightly on top of her head reflexively, without anything that resembled in any way conscious thought.

Ford stared at Bill, absolutely aghast at Bill's belief that the man-eater's morality was- "Her morality isn't like mine!" Ford protested. "I don't think that it's funny or a joke to run around killing people!" he yelled out at them.

"...And neither does she," Bill murmured out, frowning ever so slightly. "She doesn't like it when 'innocents' get hurt," he added, tilting his head as he looked at her, slightly.

Miz nodded. She'd said that very thing when she'd created that Toybox back in that other dimension where demons could do all sorts of awful things to 'not-real' people instead of 'real' people. (Not that Bill had quite gotten into the finer details of philosophy with her on the issues posed by that particular way of thinking back then, or just yet, that 'having a soul' meant it wasn't okay to torture someone and kill them, and 'not having a soul' made anything and everything you did to them just fine... a way of thinking that very closely resembled the way that all demons-from-the-outside thought about the people-playthings here that clearly weren't demonic individuals that were anything like they were at all… but then again, his sister had created all those constructs so perhaps in that way...)

"What?" Ford said, taken aback. Because that clearly wasn't true. If it was, she wouldn't have ever treated him the way that she did! If she did believe that, she never would have ever hurt him! Or the niblings! Or-!

(Stan was watching the kid carefully, because something didn't feel right about this… He'd felt this kind of confusion in the air like this before - and a missing tension, like it should've been hanging in the air, but wasn't yet - and when he had...)

Ford shook his head roughly. -Better not to even bother with attacking the most obvious of surface lies, here. He knew Stan would have been able to see through that one easily without any help. "She clearly doesn't know how to act around other people, and doesn't care when she gets it all wrong," Ford told Bill, as if the dream demon didn't know. "-You don't know right from wrong, and don't care about it," Ford insisted, addressing Miz directly, trying to avoid all the flash and noise at the surface of things, to dig down straight to the main issue here instead.

"Yes?" Miz shrugged, agreeing with him without issue. "I don't know anymore what counts as right or wrong. But I do care about it," she told him. "I just… I know that there are some things that make me feel bad when I do them, and it's generally on a case by case basis, okay? That's pretty much all I have to go by," she told him with a huff. "Like, I don't like to harm people who haven't done anything to me, but there are some people who haven't done anything to me that I DO want to harm. Like pedophilic rapists. I like to hunt them down and make them suffer." She let out another huff of breath again. "And from all the things I've seen, I don't think there's a way to even really define a real universal right or wrong, so I just go by how I feel about stuff. Is that really so wrong?" she ended up asking him. Because it wasn't like her dad or Time Baby had really complained all that much about it! (Well, maybe Time Baby did, but her dad certainly hadn't! And he was really good! He would've told her if that was really wrong for her to do... right? He had told her sometimes when she did certain things that she should -Calm down- so clearly he DID have an opinion on what she did!)

Ford was feeling faint as he stood there, and left utterly speechless, as he listened to this. Because hearing this man-eater talk about how she always did what she felt was right, at any given moment, was just...

...wrong. It was wrong, and wrong, and there were universal evils, just as there were universal truths, and if she didn't realize that, then-!

Meanwhile, Bill was thinking heavy, and hard, just then. And something had occurred - and was occurring - to him, in waves and wavefronts, though trying to express the information in some sort of easily-relatable-to-humans manner, let alone in causal relationships to each other, was taking him a bit of work, as well.

"You… have been feeling other peoples' emotions, and hearing their thoughts, for a very long time," Bill said slowly to Miz. "That is… likely on average the 'norm' within the standard deviation of the 'good' side of 'good versus evil' morality. Yes? -But is that what YOU want?" he asked her, slowly building up steam. "Is that what you do and still think and feel now, for your own self, after blocking all the rest of everyone else out from your own thoughts and emotions and being? And- want to keep on feeling, without changing it all again later?" Bill asked her directly, trying to confirm something with her before he went any further.

Miz blinked up at him. "I don't know," she admitted. "I haven't really had…" she frowned. "I don't know yet," she decided. "I'm still learning. And, I don't know what I want to feel or think yet." She'd never really thought about that. She'd just… always gone with whatever it was she was feeling at the moment. The idea of choosing who she wanted to be… that… she'd never really gotten to do that before. Other people had always told her how she was supposed to be. That was 'normal', wasn't it?

Stan glanced over at his brother, who'd been pretty quiet there now for awhile. Ford was standing there, staring at Miz, as she said this. He looked like he was breathing only shallowly, and he was looking a little wide-eyed and pale. Stan slowly put his hand on his brother's shoulder again, but he didn't react to it this time; he didn't even seem to feel it.

"I…" Bill's expression went through several, continually-changing flashes of emotion, and Ford seemed to bristle again and again under Stan's touch. "-thiiiink…"

"-Don't you dare, Bill," Ford ground out almost breathily, with a terrible anger in his eyes as he suddenly realized that, "You're going to ruin her."

And Bill visibly flinched and took a step back away from her in an instant, lifting his hand away from her head completely. (And whatever expression the kid had had slowly-growing on his face just before that? Left his face just as quickly as that, too. Stan frowned a bit, because that had been almost a grin there, but… it hadn't looked like any of the ones Stan had seen out of the kid before, and it worried him that-)

Stan straightened slightly in alarm as he watched this happen, and he felt the immediate increase in tension in his brother's shoulder under where he was holding his hand - his brother had been surprised by Bill's reaction, too. Moving away from her like that at what Ford had just said to him.

(Hell, so was Stan. That had sounded like a challenge or a command, coming outta Ford like that - but the kid had reacted instantly to it, almost reflexively, in a really bad way.)

-But then the kid whipped his head around towards Ford after a beat, to glare at him, and if looks could kill- "I'm NOT going to DO THAT!" Bill shouted out at him, in that dual-toned high-and-low-pitched voice Stan had only really heard the kid do when he was a triangle before, that now the kid only did when getting that stressed. "She's MY SISTER!" And… holy shit, the kid really did look seriously freaked out right now, under all the raging anger on top and out on display, because from the look in his eyes and his posture- "I-" Bill snapped his mouth shut again, then turned away from Ford and opened it again, and before Stan or anyone else could stop him, the kid blurted out, rattled off at her quickly-

"-You're still stuck in that stupid flat karmic cycle, and if your stupid lizard is 'good' and you are registered as its opposite, then you are registered as 'evil', and if you have not been wanting to have those certain things happen, but they still happen anyway, no matter what you do or don't do to try and not-do them-" Bill looked up at her directly, looking irate (but not with her), "-then it's PROBABLY BECAUSE you are 'evil' and what you want is the direct opposite of what karma wants to give you, because of that," Bill told her, while still looking tense. "'Evil' doesn't get what it really wants, EVER, when it comes to that stupid Karma system," Bill told her. "Whether you want that or not, you NEED to disconnect from it NOW, before it turns all of reality against you again, or 'self'-sabotages you even further! -I WANT you to be ABLE to make YOUR OWN decisions here, and SEE them THROUGH! Even if-" Bill cut himself off rather abruptly, looking strained, with his hands curled into slight fists at his sides.

Miz curled in on herself. "How do I do that?" she asked quietly. "I don't want to have to break my bond with dad…"

"You shouldn't HAVE to be his opposite!" Bill told her - almost yelled out at her, shit; Stan winced. "You shouldn't have to be ANYTHING that you DON'T WANT to be, or DO anything you DON'T WANT to DO!" Bill's voice was getting higher and higher, and those vibrating weird odd undertones the kid's voice sometimes got were sneaking in there again. "That's NOT right, that's NOT 'fair play', that's- that's-" (Ford was staring at the kid now, like something was slowly dawning on him, and Stan pressed his hand down on Ford's shoulder a little bit - not now Ford, not now, c'mon, geez…)

"-But he took me in after the 2nd dimension was destroyed." Miz weakly protested. "And all he's really asked of me is to uphold my pillar and be his opposite. And I still don't really know what that means." Miz shook her head, looking frustrated. "But beyond all that, I didn't actually know for sure if I really was the Bill Cipher of my dimensional set until I met my AXOLOTL. And he… well…" she grimaced. "He said that I wasn't what he was expecting… I was the Bill of my dimensional set, but I wasn't the Bill he'd meant to get." Miz seemed saddened to admit that. "And I don't know, I guess, part of me wanted to be the Bill that maybe he'd wanted. Because I thought that was what he meant when he told me that I was Bill Cipher, but not the right Bill Cipher…"

"-no no NO!" Bill protested. "I've TOLD you BEFORE! You don't have to be anything that someone else WANTS!" Bill told her, reaching out to take her by the shoulders (and for a moment, Stan almost thought Bill was about to start shaking her, he looked so angry and tense and insane about something). "What other people want isn't IMPORTANT! -YOU SHOULD BE YOU!" Bill told her. "The stupid lizard is- stupid! And yours is, TOO! And the only reason ANYONE EVER tries to tell someone else that they WANT them to be SOMEONE ELSE is-" Bill gritted his teeth. "It's NOT fair to play things that way. It's NOT-"

(It was about this point that Ford was left absolutely speechless again at the sheer hypocrisy he was seeing out on display here, right in front of him…)

"-The only reason that ANYONE, that that stupid lizard would want you to do something like THAT, would be if- if-" and here, Bill cut himself off with a look of dawning horrified realization. "Would be if- if- if-" Bill went completely upright and rigid, as he sounded out and climbed over the logical barrier, and realized - and then said - "If it got something out of it, too," Bill breathed out, before looking absolutely livid all over again. Because it was USING her for something, making her DO things that she really DIDN'T WANT TO do, and-

(...And it was about this point that Stan grimly confirmed something that he'd been suspecting for awhile now. The kid always, always down-talked the 'stupid lizard', every damn chance that he got. But when push came to shove? The kid always seemed to also have some sort of a blind spot, when it came to that god-lizard thing of his. Because the kid never seemed to actually think - all that easily, mind you, and certainly not on his own when the dragon-lady wasn't involved - that the lizard would actually, actively do anything really, really wrong...)

(...because every single time the dragon-lady told him something seriously messed-up sounding about her lizard, it seemed to bowl the kid over every. Single. Damn. Time.)

(It left Stan feeling almost sorry for the kid. Almost.)

"Dad wouldn't do that." Miz's breath hitched as she trembled. Sure, she might have thought about it as a possibility- but never seriously. "H-he wouldn't-" her eyes were tearing up and she was trying in vain to keep her voice steady. "-j-just- he can't just be using me-and even if he was I-" It would hurt… but she'd still accept it. So long as she could be wanted. And… didn't that just make her a fucked up person?

"Everybody wants something," Bill told her, "As long as they keep wanting to be alive. -I want you to BE HAPPY and HAVE FUN," Bill told her, "And-" then he paused, and seemed to realize something as he stared down at her face, and her expression, and he seemed to tense up all over again. "Iiiiiii…(?!)" he said, then seemed to mentally pull himself out and away from whatever hole he'd just about dug himself down into, "-want, that's, -you needed to know this, I- I- you weren't being happy before, when these things were happening, they keep on happening, it's- I'm not making this badly-any-worse, not that kind of worse!- not!- I'm NOT just trying to shift around the feeling-bad either- I'm trying to make things better for YOU-! I am! -I-I -If you know this NOW then all the things can be better- the better kind of worse- sooner- better- more- it's- it's just a little bad now, for-for EVERYTHING being better than just-bad almost-right-away not-too-much-later-!" and his voice was starting to rise all over again as Bill verbally (and physically) flailed (his arms and hands) about, trying to backtrack without backtracking what he was trying to do here for her, that he'd just realized was obviously upsetting and hurting her, because he was the one telling her this...

And Stan wanted to interrupt, to get Bill to back down for now. Because Ford was upset as hell already, and Miz was crying now, and Bill looked like he didn't know how to handle this in any way, shape, or form, at all with her...

...so Stan did. He let go of his brother's shoulder to take the three steps forward that he needed to, to put his own hand down on top of Bill's head.

"I- I… I…..." Bill wound down, looking three kinds of miserable as he looked down at his sister and his shoulders slumped a little bit in place. His hands dropped down to hang at his sides, and...

...Stan took over for him, before things got any worse here. "You're wanting to tell your sister the truth, because a little hurt now means a lot less hurt overall later, before things maybe get any worse, even worse later," Stan said for the kid, trying to translate into normal-people-speak what he was pretty sure that the kid was actually trying to tell his little sister, here. "You aren't trying to hurt her-" Stan winced, as Bill literally shoved himself back against Stan's chest, physically trying to back himself away from and not touch the dragon-lady again. Those two hands he'd been flailing about with, and had hovering on top of one of her shoulders, barely even touching her at the end of everything there? He'd just ripped himself away from her in an instant, like she'd been on fire and he'd been the one causing the fire.

"-Nope, wrong thing, kid. -You two, hug it out. No talking for awhile. C'mon," Stan said, moving the hand on the kid's head down to the demon-kid's back and pushing - then shoving him forward, telling him, "You're not gonna freaking break her by touching her, kid," -until the kid actually did it. "Yup. Good job, there, kid," Stan told him after the kid had finally, and with almost-glacial slowness finished wrapping his arms around his little sister again, and his little sister had buried her head in the kid's chest and wrapped her arms around him almost-immediately right back... and then, and only then, Stan moved the hand at the kid's back, back up to the top of the kid's head, to let it stay on top of him there. (And Stan glanced back over his shoulder at Ford, who was staring at this, looking a little grey almost, and… he saw his brother lower his head slightly and raise a hand, to pass it over his face.)

Stan sighed. (...Yeah, he'd called it. This whole thing had been headed for all kinds of screwed-up, there. Hell.)

Miz clung to Bill and muffled her sobs into his chest. "D-daddy w-wo-wouldn't- he can't- why-" she didn't want to believe it. But what reason would Ax even have for- why?!

(Of course no one would want her without wanting to use her somehow.)

Stan was watching his brother and Ford seemed to have a lot on his mind, none of it good.

And then Ford slowly raised his head, and lowered his hand away from his face, and said to Bill, in a very quiet but horribly angry tone, "You did it to me."

('Oh, shit,' thought Stan, as he turned his head to stare at his brother. Not now. He didn't have a handle on the demons right now, not really-)

Bill turned his head towards him slowly, and Ford clenched his jaw. "You never treated me like myself." His fists were clenched at his sides and his chest felt like he was being stabbed in it, all over again. "You were always waiting and waiting for something - watching, and waiting, and- did you really think that I didn't notice?!" Ford said, his voice rising. "That I didn't try?" To try to be what you wanted? "And then, after- after the portal- I-" Ford was shaking in place at this point. "You never stopped trying to make me into-" what you wanted! "You-"

-It hurt. It hurt so much. To see that Bill was actually capable of this, of- of trying to care for another full-blown and fully-independent individual- capable of actually caring about another different and completely-separate person than the demon himself- to see that Bill was- it was- this was- so wrong- no- no- why her and not him- why wasn't he the one to deserve- why- wasn't he good enough to be the one to deserve-?! no- he couldn't- this wasn't- that man-eater was horrible- this wasn't fair-

-why hadn't Bill cared about him?! Why- why had he refused to- why couldn't he just- what was the difference here?! Why her and not him?! -What was so wrong with him, that Bill didn't want him-?! But the demon liked and wanted her-

But Ford stopped talking at the look on Bill's face. The confused look on Bill's face.

-And that just made Ford even angrier.

"-Your brother has collapsed nine different dimensions to-date!" Ford snapped out at Miz next. (Trying to go for the throat. Trying to hurt Bill back. Because if he couldn't take Bill away from her, then he would simply do the opposite-) (Trying to get her away from Bill Cipher before-) "And destabilized and then taken over thousands of others!" Because if she really had any sense of decency in her at all, then she should be horrified by the fact that- "He's not a good-"

"-Fifteen," Bill interrupted him, glaring. (Though it wasn't his usual burning-hot glare. This one looked a hell of a lot tired and older to Stan, and...)

"-What?" Ford said, halting in the middle of his tirade.

"I've destabilized and collapsed fifteen dimensions," Bill corrected him, in a tired, yet 'factual' tone of voice. "And five of the ones you've heard about, I took credit for, after killing everyone who did it, everyone who was involved, everyone who knew anyone who was involved, and everyone who knew any of them. And then burned down anything and everything that any of all of them had ever touched," Bill stated almost emotionlessly.

"...Why?" Miz asked him, looking up at him with a strained expression on her face. Though it seemed more from her crying than any sort of negative judgment towards his actions.

Bill looked down at his little sister, and he said:

"Because it's too dangerous for anyone else to know. I can't trust anyone else with it."

"You-" Ford stared at him, almost blue-screened for a moment at what Bill had just admitted there, at the utter evil and depravity of it…

...and then Ford let out a dark chuckle, as he realized the real reason why Bill had done it.

"-You didn't want to risk anyone else learning how to finish collapsing that space you were hiding in!" Ford grated out, irate that this was Bill's reason for so much death. This greed of and for unshared knowledge, only for him to have and to hold-

"-I was keeping the rest of those demons from finding it out!" Bill snapped out at him, just as mad, if not moreso. "Once they learn something, it spreads like wildfire between them - if any of the EVER learn how to do it, it would NEVER STOP!" Bill told him, looking downright furious, "They'd take down EVERYTHING!" Bill yelled out at him, and it brought Stanford up short.

"I haven't collapsed any dimensions, that I know of… just destroyed the 2nd by accident and created the 3rd…" Miz muttered out, as she wiped at her eyes. "But you wouldn't have done such a thing unless you had a reason for it." She didn't let go of Bill though. "It would be a waste of time and energy if you didn't have a reason." She understood her brother well enough by this point to know this.

"Yes, but he doesn't care about that," Bill said, with a 'tch', "To him, his too-flat 'morality' doesn't ever let him 'justify' that sort of thing, ever, for any reason-"

And then Bill realized what he'd just said (and, further, what might actually really be happening now, given the line of reasoning he'd just followed, continued on from before, about how Miz's 'morality' was flat-ish in almost exactly the same way as that Stanford's) and Bill immediately stopped talking, stopped short, almost freezing in place.

Miz sniffled. "Everyone has some reason for doing what they do. There are things that can be justified or forgiven. And there are also things that can't…" She rubbed her face against Bill's chest and asked quietly, "What was your reason?"

And Bill suddenly got the most pained and painful look that Stan had ever seen on anybody in his life-

And Stan felt an odd sort of muted almost-panic, as he watched the kid tilt his head back all the way back on his neck, and slowly snap his eyes shut. And hold them like that.

The kid wasn't looking. He was refusing to look. That was completely the opposite of anything and everything that Stan had ever seen or heard out of the kid to-date; the kid always looked at everything, no matter what. He didn't freaking avoid-

But the kid was. That was exactly what the kid was doing; Stan wasn't seeing things. The kid looked very pained. -And scared, Stan realized, more scared than Stan remembered seeing him, even when everything had been burning down around them both, inside his own brain.

And the kid just stopped still and didn't seem to (barely) manage to do anything more than breathing, just then.

"...Brother?" Miz tried again, slowly tilting her head to look up at him.

"...Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…" Stan finally heard the kid let out, almost softly.

"What, nothing to say, Bill?" Ford slowly gritted out, fists still clenched at his sides. (Stan shot him a look, because really?!)

Bill slowly pulled in a breath at this. He still had his head tilted back. He still had his eyes closed.

And then... he didn't. His head slowly came down; he slowly, ever so slowly opened his eyes. He looked down at Miz, and his expression was...

-"Thank you for what? For destroying our dimension? For killing… how many people have died, Bill?"-

...how many people have died, Bill?

"I'd have preferred to die without seeing any of this! I'd have preferred to go without knowing what kind of monster you'd become!"-

I'd have preferred to die without seeing any of this!

Bill still forced himself to meet her gaze.

That wasn't him.

That wasn't him.

He wasn't him.

He wasn't him.

-He wasn't that MORON who had screwed up and killed his own brother!

No. HE was the one who Looked before he leapt, and that Liam had NOT been HIS brother!

HIS brother would listen to him! His sibling would listen to him! Because-

Miz blinked, worried now. "Brother?"

"-Cause does NOT always come before effect," Bill told his little sister. "I WILL fix everything, and then it will NEVER have needed to ever have been fixed in the first place." Bill took in another slow breath. "I haven't fixed those dimensions yet. By the time I'm done, none of them will have ever crashed again in the first place. I will BREAK causality, too," Bill told her. He straightened up a bit, looking down at her a little more fully. "The math will take a LONG time to explain. I promise I will make it all work," he told her.

He told her everything that he could, in such a terribly short moving span of time. He told her what he could, in this stupid thoroughly-too-limited dumb human language that they were speaking, and he explained it to her like he would have tried to explain it to his brother, if he'd ever planned on trying to bring him back before everything had all and forever been fixed in a way that it had never needed fixing in the first place before, first.

His brother, who he trusted. His brother, who was so very much smarter than him.

His brother, who would get it. His brother, who would understand.

"You're going to 'fix' it," Ford practically breathed out, in absolute incredulity and shock. "You…" Was this some kind of joke? Did Bill truly believe that-?! "-You can't fix what you did!" Ford yelled out at him.

"I can fix it, and I WILL!" Bill turned in place and yelled out at his damn Zodiac. Because he NEVER-

"Like hell!" Ford yelled back in pure disbelief.

"Ford-" Stan began, unconsciously dropping his hand away from the kid's head, as he stared at his brother.

But Ford shook his head and kept going. "Even if you could somehow 'fix' all of that, somehow," Ford snarled out at Bill, as if Bill could just wave a magic wand and make everything somehow all better?! "-'Fixing it' - even if anyone was ever stupid enough to believe that somehow your idea of fixing anything would somehow be a good idea - won't make what you did any less wrong!" Ford spat out at the demon. "It won't make you any less of a heartless, horrible, dimension-destroying MONSTER!"

"You aren't LISTENING TO ME!" Bill yelled back at him, irate. "You NEVER LISTEN!" (And Stan winced hard at the mix of emotion in the kid's voice now, because that was anything but-) "It WON'T HAVE HAPPENED in the FIRST PL-!"

"Kid-" Stan tried to cut in. (But it was too late. Far, far too late. It was until later that Stan would realize when everything had gone completely off the rails - and that had been when he'd asked the kid to help him try and get Miz and Ford to see eye to eye. ...Well, the kid had sure done almost that. ...in the very worst way imaginable...)

"You can't just roll back everything and make it all never happen!" Ford yelled back at him again, really starting to lose it this time. "People didn't just lose their lives, they lost their families!" Ford yelled back at him. "They ended up refugees in other dimensions!" Ford gritted out, calling him out on the truth of the matter. "You wouldn't just have to rewind time in all of those dimensions, once you magically made them all whole again - you'd have to rewind everything, everywhere, across every dimension that's ever existed!" Ford told him.

And the last thing Ford had been expecting Bill Cipher to say to that was an exasperated, "YES!"

Ford stared at the insane dream demon in absolute shock.

And he wasn't certain whether he felt more terrified or angry or just out-and-out scared, as he told Bill, "I will remember it. -Are you going to roll me back into nonexistence, too!?" really, demanded it out of him, shaking in place as he said it.

"NO!" was Bill response back to him, even more angry than before.

"Then YOU CAN'T DO IT!" Ford yelled back at him, while feeling like everything was finally falling apart around him. Worse than Weirdmageddon, worse than anything else he'd ever felt and had to live through before. Because he'd known, he'd known that Bill was insane, but this, this was-! "It's impossible for anyone to-!"

"YOU-" Bill began, but he shook his head roughly, and then turned away from Ford "-AREN'T IMPORTANT HERE," Bill said, as he looked back down at his own sister (and leaving Ford going absolutely white with shock for a moment). "YOU understand me, right?!" he asked her, cupping the bottom of her jaw oh-so-gently with his hands. Because it wasn't that Stanford that mattered, here, to him - that Stanford wasn't the one he was trying to convince, to explain to, to-

"No, she doesn't!" Ford yelled out at him. "Because she actually knows that killing other people is WRONG!" Ford was breathing heavily now, as he turned to Miz. "If you have any ounce of decency in you at all-" he began.

"SHUT! UP!" Bill yelled back at him, dropping his hands away from Miz's face. (And Stan's eyes went a little wide as he saw a glow start up, under Bill's skin. A blue glow.)

(And it was about this point that Stan realized that the kid's hair was completely black now- all of it was black, no blue in sight- no, fuck, it wasn't just black and staying black, the part that had been blue before was starting to turn red on the kid, somehow.)

Stan was tense, so much so that his neck ached. "Ford-! For fuck's sake, shut up and just let the kid talk to his sister!"

"She's NOT his sister! He doesn't even HAVE-"

But then Ford shut up on his own. Stan didn't know why he did, but he did it.

(Ford stopped talking because he finally saw how Bill's coloring had changed. His hair was red; his eyes were red in their irises, and glowing blue in the sclera. And he saw how Bill himself was starting to glow under the barrier under his skin with a vast amount of suppressed energy despite this. Which shouldn't have been possible, not if-)

(-unless-)

Ford just stopped talking and stared, as he realized that Bill was-

"...brother?" Came Miz's voice. Small and… afraid? Stan snapped his eyes back over to her, looking down at her over the kid's shoulder, at how she was worriedly frowning at all the kid's glowing and the red and-

(Mis knew the signs of an explosion when she saw one. Brother's might be different from hers, but the basics were the same.)

And the three of them watched as Bill seemed to stop for a moment, and take stock of himself…

...and then Bill closed his eyes and seemed to hold himself in place and just concentrate. He pulled in a deep breath, in through his mouth...

...and the glow under his skin slowly faded on the outbreath. On the next deep breath in, his hair shifted back down through black to blue again, before he even finished blowing his breath out, like watching a sunset reverse itself in high-speed motion in reverse.

Stan realized he'd been holding his own breath only when he stopped holding it. When he realized that he'd started holding it when he'd started hearing that angry humming-buzzing noise that had been emanating not from the kid's mouth or throat, but coming out as some kind of vibration through his skin. One that the kid was no longer doing.

Stan waited for the kid to take in and out a third breath, just for kicks and for safety, and then he said, "You got things under control there, kiddo?"

"I'm fine," was Bill's terse response, as he slowly opened his eyes back up again. "I'm not going to ever hurt my sister, vessel or not. Not even her vessel," he repeated flatly, before looking back down at her.

And then Bill said, a little more haltingly. "I… should not have to collapse any more dimensions again anymore. Now that I am out. -It will take time to explain everything else to you in enough detail for you to understand why I did what I had to do, more fully. But I promise that I can explain it all to you, to make it make sense. I didn't do it for no reason. And I wouldn't have done it if not-doing it hadn't meant I was never getting out. I had to get out. -I needed to get out first, before I could fix everything. Now I can fix it, but it's going to take time until it's never-happened again like it all will be," he told her. And then Bill took the plunge. "Can you trust me, to wait to 'reserve judgement' on me and all of what I did, until I have explained? Everything?"

(Stan stared a bit, and glanced over and back at his brother. The kid didn't talk about trust often, and when he did… it was a clusterfuck, let's be honest here. But the kid was sounding almost like a grown-up adult, and almost actually some kind of sane, as he said it, the way he'd just said it here.)

(Ford took one small step away from him, backwards. One odd, almost spasmodic step away from what he was seeing and hearing here, right in front of him… because why wasn't she… why wasn't she really, already ready to… why wasn't she already…)

And Miz thought about that. Thought about how many people had been sacrificed for this. For Bill's plans. For his goals. Everyone he killed. Everyone he hurt. She thought about all that and...

"I'm not happy." She glared up at him before her expression softened. "But I will trust you." She sounded a little resigned, and a touch annoyed, but she hadn't stepped away from Bill, hadn't rejected him.

(Ford looked like he'd just been punched in the gut as he realized that... Bill had just...)

Bill pulled in a shaky breath, and he let it out slowly.

"I'm… not happy either," Bill told her with brutal honesty, and a shaking voice, dropping his head a little bit towards her. "But I will trust you, too."

(And now, Ford was clutching one hand at his chest, fisted above and at his heart... though he didn't seem aware he was doing it, as he stared…)

Miz sighed, not looking happy at all.

Despite that, Miz reached up and patted the side of Bill's head, now that it was lower and she could reach, and had her other arm wrapped around his back. "I'm willing to listen. When you're ready, and able to explain. I won't hate you. I love you and I'll always love you. Even if I might be mad at you for a while," she promised.

"Love you, too," Bill said somewhat stiltedly, almost as stiltely and strangely as he'd had trouble hugging her before this tonight, and even though Stan saw him flinch at the 'being mad at you' mention, his breathing began evening out slowly; his body slowly relaxed. "Love you," Stan heard Bill repeat, like he was trying it out all over again. "Love you, love you, always. Always my sister, forever." He breathed out softly, "...no take-backs, forever…"

Ford turned away from them, expressionless now, and walked right out of the room. Stan watched him go and grimaced.

The kid was breathing easy again - relieved, almost - though definitely tired as hell, and Stan took a minute to say, "Yeah, we're gonna stop here. ...Pick this one up again a hell of a lot later," Stan said, taking a step back and away to the side, completely disengaging from the kid. "Pretty sure you're right about the definitions thing there, Miz," Stan added as he turned away from the two demon-kids, "You two had better pick that one back up upstairs yourselves in the attic with each other first, and then talk to me all about it, before you even think about talkin' to Ford again, you hear me?" he said, as hurried off to leave the room after Ford.

"Yes. Yes. Yes," Bill murmured out, in answer to each of Stanley's question-command-queries, as he breathing slowed down and evened out further.

Miz nodded at Stan. "Okay." She almost told him, 'You should go talk to Ford. He doesn't look alright.' But Stan was already out of sight.

Stan didn't have a hell of a lot of brainpower to spare for anyone other than his brother right now, but he did hope that the dragon-lady would get the kid upstairs without too much trouble. The kids were already in bed and damn well had better have stayed there, so they shouldn't be coming downstairs and walkin' in on any of that anytime soon, but...

...Hell, Stan could only handle one, maybe two things at a time, damnit. There was only one of him here, y'know. (And sure, Dipper had told him about how his messed up photocopy machine worked, but Stan wasn't going to go off fixing that stupid thing up, to try that one all over again.)

It'd be fine. (It'd have to be.) Kids knew better than to come down at night after some yelling.. They weren't going to set the kid off that badly again, anyway, even if they did. (And it wasn't like he couldn't come running if-)

No, damnit. Focus. One thing at a time. First things first, no distractions.

Stan came to a stop in front of Ford's bedroom door, and knocked on it only briefly before turning the doorknob and shoving his way in.

He found Ford immediately, his back turned towards the door, curled up on his bed, with his knees pulled up and in to his chest.

"...Ford," Stan said slowly. He closed the door behind him, and as he approached, he realized...

Ford had that hand still clutched to his chest. He was curled in around himself like… like that hurt. Like something there hurt.

Ford had his eyes closed, and he was breathing almost careful-like. Like it almost hurt to breathe. ...or like he was worried something would start to hurt, if he breathed the wrong way.

Stan carefully sat down on the side of the bed, and placed his hand on Ford's shoulder.

Ford didn't respond.

"...Ford," Stan said slowly. "I don't know what's going on with you, but the kid's a damn sun's worth of energy, minimum. I can't have him going supernova on us, right in the middle of the damn house," Stan told his brother, just as slowly. "...Okay?"

"He's..."

"Huh?" Stan said. His brother had breathed out something, but it had been too damn low for his hearing aid to pick up.

He saw his brother pull in another breath, and...

"He's more than a star's worth of energy. And Bill is physically here," Ford said quietly, eyes still closed, still curled in on himself on his bed, with that fist - his right hand - pressed up against his chest.

"Yeah," Stan said. "He is." Stan pulled in a breath. "And I'm pretty sure he could burn through that damn anchor like nothin' doing that, but it'd kill all the rest of us…"

"...in the process," Ford finished for him, shifting slightly in place.

"Yeah," said Stan, feeling a little uncomfortable.

There was a long silence of about a minute or so. And then Ford said:

"...How long have you known."

Stan blinked. "About the 'going supernova' thing? -Kid threatened it on the morning of the second day, right before I told him I wasn't jailing him or nothin'. Don't think he was kidding around about that." Stan scratched the side of his cheek. "All I really got outta that was that he didn't want to do it if he didn't have to, for some reason, 'cause if he did, he already would have done it instead of just tellin' me about it. ...Hell, kid didn't even know about the anchor at the time," Stan muttered out at the last, with a bit of a wince.

Ford curled in on himself a bit more, and he let out a soft, almost breathy laugh.

"This is why you're not worried about him," Ford said, and Stan wasn't sure if that was just pure hysteria, or the hysterical laughter under that talking, or something else completely different. "This. Because he didn't 'blow us all up' on day one."

"Day two," Stan said. "Wasn't that late in the afternoon when you first grabbed him, that time. That day counts as a day, too."

Ford let out another wheezing sort of laugh, and raised his other hand up to his face, to cover it.

He shook a little in place, and Stan rubbed his hand over Ford's shoulder for awhile, waiting while his brother rode whatever the hell this was out on his own.

...except Stan really hated doin' it like this, and he was fed up enough with everything that he just shoved himself up and over-

"-W-what are you doing?" Ford blurted out, flustered, as Stan climbed into - okay, yeah, on top of the covers of - the bed with him, and wrapped an arm over his brother's shoulder and chest.

"It's a hug. Prescribed by me," Stan told him as belligerently as he could, hugging him a little closer. "Don't like it? Deal with it."

(He'd hated having to tell his brother to stop and shut up out there; 'I'm sorry' didn't fucking cut it. He hadn't handled that one for him at all, and he'd seen Ford getting hurt just listening to the two of them; he'd let Ford go through the wringer, not having any idea how to stop it, and… Words just didn't fucking cut it. Stan did actions, and he was damn well hugging his brother over this. And if he got punched for it, then, well, so be it.)

He felt and heard his brother let out another shaky, more hysterical sounding laugh at 'his antics' this time - yeah, well, what else was new.

...except his brother didn't turn around and punch him, or try to shove him up off of the bed.

Instead, his brother grabbed him by the arm he had over his shoulder-

-and pulled him in even harder. Closer in. It, uh… kind of surprised him. A lot.

"Uh, yeah," Stan said, feeling a little off-center all over again - though this one felt a lot different than the off-center he'd been feeling before. "Right." He tried shoving his other arm under Ford's side, and his brother actually shifted around a little bit and let him do it. "Great. ...Good talk there. Glad you're with me on this one," Stan said, just to have something to say.

He felt his brother give out a huff, so he decided to go for broke and wrapped himself around his brother in a real damn hug for once, and… and his brother slowly relaxed into it. (Holy shit.)

...Stan let out a breath and knocked his forehead lightly into the back of his brother head, while he was at it.

"You're a crazy, dangerous lunatic, you know that?" Stan muttered out. (He couldn't friggin help it. His brother had damn near made the dumb demon go supernova on them just by talking at him too much.)

"So I've been told," Ford murmured out in reply, and Stan let out a huff of breath at that, because he was pretty sure that he was the only one who'd ever called him that, lately. Mostly over all of that dangerous 'weirdness' stuff of his. But...

Stan felt his brother relax in his arms, and start to breathe a little easier, and he decided...

...to just let things lie. Talking right now wasn't gonna help. Ford was exhausted. Emotionally, or whatever, sure, but exhausted was exhausted.

(And Stan wasn't really feeling up for getting in yet another fight with his brother again, either. Or any misunderstandings. Or any more yelling. Or arguing. Or...)

So Stan just lay there, and held onto his brother, and...

...he tried to feel like everything was just fine and… 'at peace', he guessed. Like his brother had used to say to him on the boat a few times.

'At peace.' Somethin' like that would be really great right about now, Stan thought to himself, as he lie there and hugged him and breathed, just like his brother was doing, and trying to do.

And Ford lay there himself, with his brother in his arms, and he tried not to think too hard about forgiveness and anger. Because if a demon-like man-eater could love Bill Cipher, and Bill Cipher might actually be capable of loving someone else in return…

(Was it possible that he could still end up having this, too? Even after everything that he had already done… that no-one could ever begin to be forgiven for…

(...was it really at all possible to just be forgiven? Just like that? To still be able to be loved by someone, even if they were also awful? Even, and despite everything he had done… and had done to him-)

Miz got Bill back up to the attic without incident. She was relieved for that, at least. Bill was still clinging to her a bit (arms wrapped around her shoulders from behind as they walked) nervously all the while, and Miz let him. She'd been pretty much the same with Xanthar sometimes, and for a few weeks after Ammy got shot...

"Are you okay?" Miz asked when they both finally settled down on some pillows.

Bill breathed for a bit, and then he finally let out a small laugh and said, "...are you still mad at me?"

Miz was quiet for awhile, waiting. And Bill sighed out a bit, knowing it wasn't going to be that easy. He shifted a bit in place uncomfortably, and breathed a bit more, and then finally said next, "It's going to take a long time to explain everything to you."

"I know," Miz said. And she couldn't see how it would ever be fully explained. Even if he'd been desperate to get out, why had the only solution he saw been the death of billions? There could have- must have been another way...

"One trillion years is a long time," Bill told her next.

"I know," Miz told him, with a nod. Somehow, she doubted this was going to be easy for him, no matter how it all turned out. If he really didn't have a good answer for everything, and she pointed that out to him, what would he do? And if he didn't listen to her when she knew he was wrong… she didn't like to think that she might not be able to forgive him, but that was looking like a real possibility, and...

"...I want to see your show, right here and now," Bill told her next, startling her a bit. "The show you saw. I want to see it."

Miz regarded him for a bit, worrying a little. "Will you be… alright with watching it?" she asked, not wanting to upset him (more than he'd already been).

Bill nodded, then shook his head. "I-" He paused. Would the show show anything at all about what had happened during any of all of those collapses? Miz had implied that the show that she'd seen hadn't actually shown all that much about that cartoon demon at all, but... "I can say 'stop' if I need to stop for… awhile. I..." He swallowed. He had no idea how far back it went, in whatever it went into for the 'Bill Cipher, triangle demon' character she'd seen in that show, or how much any of it might talk about Liam, but…

"This is important," Bill told her. "I can't… fix everything-else yet, but if I know this, then I can help you with…" he trailed off. But he didn't give up. His little sister might be angry with him, but he couldn't let that stop him from doing what he could; he had to focus on what she still needed, right now. And earlier, she'd said that she'd felt 'trapped' by all those 'fixed points'. She didn't want to do those things, at least some of them, whatever they were, so he had to know what they were to try and help her out. Because that was what a good big brother did; they helped their littler sibling(s) out.

Miz leaned against his side, interlocking their hands together. "Okay." she said. "Though, the show doesn't tell us much about Bill's past at all, I got more of that kind of thing from the writer's social media or panels where he answered questions…" and Liam was from a fanfic, of all things!

Bill blinked at this. "He put on the show?" Bill asked her of "That... other Bill?..." he asked her, still blinking, and now a bit (thoroughly) lost.

Miz looked at Bill, and then giggled slightly - she couldn't help it. "He, the writer, Alex. He's the human who wrote the story down and made it into a cartoon. He also voiced multiple characters in the show, including Bill, Stan and Glasses." she told him (to which Bill replied with a "Hm..."). "But he mentioned the book Flatland in a roundabout way in one of his Q&A sessions, and had stated that Bill didn't have the best relationship with his family…"

"-Brothers and sisters aren't family," Bill told her quickly, then frowned. "Unless we're going by Stanley's definition there."

"Not sure what definition he meant during that Q&A." Miz shrugged. "But the show itself only followed the Pines during last summer. Anything else was information I got from extra content made surrounding the show. Not a lot has happened yet since my timeline is still pretty far back, but the UFO crashed and created the valley, so that's one thing to check off the list." Miz shrugged.

Bill looked at her, and then he said to her, almost suspiciously, "...You said that 'the 2'nd dimension burning down' was a fixed point." He frowned. "That happened before last summer…" so… "That wasn't part of the show. Was it?"

"There was a point in the show where Bill talked about the 2nd dimension, and an image of it on-screen burned. It could have been literal or a metaphor, but either way, my dimension burned."

Bill thought about this with a slight frown on his face.

"Start with that, then show me everything that you remember seeing in the order that you saw it in," Bill told her. Because if he was going to help her get around the Karmic system in her dimensional set… "This is a worst-case scenario. The worst kind of worst-case. I want to know what will maybe happen - or TRY to happen, that you think will happen - if we can't disconnect you from things properly, over there." He needed to know what he was going to be helping her to fight.

"...I can play the whole series, maybe fast-forward some parts…" Miz turned to face the wall and held out her free hand, the other was still holding Bill's, and projecting a screen. Well, movie marathon, here we go.

"-No," Bill told her. "Don't fast-forward anything. I want to see it the way that you saw it," Bill told her carefully. He didn't want to miss any small detail out that she herself had seen. He was in a human-ish body right now, and... "I can… try to be even lower in this stupid human-ish body for this?" he offered. He didn't really like the idea of doing that, not one bit, let alone actually doing it all that much, but if he actually tried taking full advantage of that...

"Well, we might have to stop and take a food break. But I can show you exactly what I saw." Miz told him, moving her fingers and getting the screen up and running, paused for now as she waited for the go ahead.

"That's fine," Bill said to her, "We have food up here." And with that, he let himself sink into the pillow-nest a bit more.

"Okay." Miz nodded.

And a nostalgic melody began to play as the theme song appeared on the screen.

Illusion is Reality

Chapter 99.1

-Just because you aren't seeing me doesn't mean I can't see you-

They watched the whole show, stopping only for Miz to remind Bill to get himself some snacks from the 'emergency rations' on the shelves that he'd stocked up nearby. They went long into the night, with Miz having to make Bill take yet another break to get some sleep, but they woke up again fairly early the next morning and continued watching all through the afternoon and well into the evening again, only stopping to dip into more of those 'shelved' rations a few times, before running out of those and having to dip into a few more things that came directly out of Bill's own (and the 'original') top hat that he still had.

And once they were done… well...

"Are you alright, brother?" Miz asked, nuzzling into his side. Bill chittered quietly under his breath as he kept on staring at the now-blank screen, eyes still intently focused on the very spot where the short after-credits sequence had been showing a live-action recording of the statue of 'Bill Cipher'.

Miz wanted to ask Bill if he liked it, if he hated it, how accurate it was, whether it was even relevant to his own experiences, all sorts of things. But she could tell Bill was thinking hard just then, so she kept quiet for a few moments and let him collect himself.

She was pretty sure the show wasn't entirely accurate to real events, or that they were probably otherwise too general to have captured all the important nuances of the situation. (Well, the fact that they didn't get internal monologues for all the characters might be part of that. There was definitely a level of understanding that was missing.) Still, from what she'd scanned on this world (though she was still a little confused because of the alternate dimensions within this set) the basics of what happened had looked… pretty much the same, at least on a surface level. ...Well, Shermie being female was an interesting deviation here, though that Stanford's Shermie was male. But she supposed there would be other dimensions where Shermie could be male or female or whatever else as well. It made her wonder which one her own Shermie would be. Which got her thinking about what differences her own Zodiac would have.

...and how her own story would unfold from this point out. If she… decided to fuck Canon and go off to do whatever she wanted… how different would everything be? Miz wouldn't lie and say that didn't scare her a little. The uncertainty of it. But… she'd figure that out later. No use stressing over this now. The younger demon rolled over and glanced at Bill. "Brother?"

Bill turned to look at her.

"We need to disconnect you from that Karmic cycle, now," Bill told her quite seriously. "If that," Bill gestured at the screen, "Is all 'fixed points' for what is going to happen in your own dimensional set... then the only way to save you would be to get someone else to do it, instead." He didn't think he had the patience anymore to do it himself, and he didn't like her chances, either, if she just tried to get away with… "Having a 'split copy' of yourself doing those things for you just won't work. Sympathetic frequencies will transfer the trouble." Sympathetic magic was a thing, some places, as well. "And even if you manage to separate it that far away from yourself while it's alive, you won't want to risk that other part of you 'coming back' to reintegrate back into you when it's dead, after all is said and done and it's been punched out into pieces and dies for you," Bill noted. "Especially not if you have to try and segregate it completely, in order for you to have it do what 'must' be done for yourself. Making a different 'you' that it will be forced into doing and being for you, if you are correct about your 'everything on TV is fixed points' hypothesis being true." It wasn't like he hadn't been paying attention to her own responses to several of the events that had taken place during said TV show.

Miz frowned. She didn't think she would end up punched to death inside Stan's mind. "Well I could try and go off script, as it were. I don't have to follow it, if I can get away with not doing so." She paused. "But I WOULD like to get out of the karma system regardless. It sounds like a pain."

Bill nodded. "That… is going to be a tricky one," he told her. "I don't know how your own system is set up in your own 'set," Bill told her. "But I can tell you how things are set up to 'work' here, and how I did it." He grimaced. "...which worked when I did it before," he admitted to her, "But that I may still need to do all over again. -May still need to do," he emphasized, trying not to worry her at all, the least little bit. "Still haven't COMPLETELY narrowed down exactly how I finally managed to make my own come-back," he grumbled out, almost to himself, as he crossed his arms again over his chest. "The devil's in the details," he muttered.

"Hm…" Miz felt around her Self for anything that might be going outside herself. "I can find my Bond with Ax, and the other feeling that is probably my Pillar..."

"Yes, well." Bill pulled a piece of paper out of his hat, and a odd-looking fountain pen. "That isn't Karma," he told her, as he quickly sketched out and labeled a three-by-three grid on the paper.

"I'm not sure what to go about looking for?" Miz admitted.

"It's not a bond," Bill told her, "It's an interaction. The Karma system and karmic cycle is something fully-external to you, that interacts on you and with you, and on everything-else around you that you have and will and are and eventually-will-be interacting with - and that also includes everyone. -It's annoying," he grumbled out at her, in pure dislike of the concept, at the very least.

"So it's not inside me." Miz frowned. That made this harder.

"Yes," he told her. "So if your 'bond' to... your 'dad'," he grimaced, "Is what it registering you as 'evil', because you are somehow registered in your local Karma system as its opposite and it it registered as "good" somehow…" Bill frowned, "Then you will need to find a way to find and break that external Rule that's been coded into that system. That is bad enough," he noted. "But what is worse," he told her, "Is that it all shifts over time," he warned her. "The majority-view changes how the interactions go. -On Sunday, eating meat is evil? Next Tuesday, it's just fine. -Fish are the new no-go from there on in! ...Up until something else changes it, all over again." His mouth curled up in a snarl. "If the majority has 'decided' that you are that lizard's opposite… you will have to break that Rule over, and over, and over again. Until you can find out what broken thing is making that keep happening and BREAK it all completely-even-further, so that it stops doing that. You may not gain any traction, otherwise." Even Bill himself wasn't coded that way to the Karma system here. That his sister had said that she was over there truly worried him.

"My dimension doesn't have an automated system like that." Miz pointed out. "No shifting morality like that. Every culture and even the individual people have their own sense of right and wrong. And often times the exact same situation is considered good by one culture and evil by another."

"And do those 'rights' and 'wrongs' change over time, for those 'culture'-al populations?" he asked her, without looking at her. "Do those people change in population? Do those civilizations rise, and then fall?"

"Yeah. Takes a long time though."

"Then the consensus DOES shift over time, and that is the same as it all is here," Bill told her. "If it shifts, then it shifts. And you need to look out for it, one way or the other. Karma is a bitch, and the system is VERY hard to find, even if you know what you're looking for. Either you work with and within it, staying stuck and sticking by it, or you find another way." He looked up at her. "This is the other way," he told her.

He slapped the piece of paper down in front of them. It… looked like a standard D&D alignment chart to her, complete with all the same naming schemes: Good, Neutral, Evil; Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic.

It also had Bill's symbols on it, sort of. -Really, it had a sort of color-coded key on the side of it corresponding to each of Bill's Zodiac, and a bunch of almost random-looking squiggles across it in places.

"Well, I'm a Chaotic Neutral." Miz pointed out.

"And I am in the center of it all," Bill told her. "True Neutral."

Miz blinked at him in disbelief - the dream demon who thought 'Fun' was just another name for 'Chaos' thought that he was neutral? ...or was that just the canon Bill? - but Miz didn't comment. Not on that, anyway. "...Dad is a True Neutral. 'Least, he's supposed to be." She wasn't sure how to feel about that.

"The stupid lizards aren't," Bill told her. "Neutral-Neutral, maybe. At best." If we're lucky, he didn't quite voice.

Miz frowned down at the chart that Bill was showing her. "Like I said, supposed to be."

"These are the current trajectories of my Zodiac," Bill told her, pointing down at the squiggles. "You may notice something here."

Miz frowned at it for a moment. ...Well, the one thing that stood out the most was that, "The whole thing looks a little like Stan's symbol, almost?" The color attributed to Stan even made a sort of outlined trajectory that looked like his own symbol on the paper, minus the little circle-pellet piece.

Bill nodded, and drew the outline, emphasizing further the 'normal' fish-outline that was there around almost the entire periphery of the squiggles, with few extrusions. "That's where I'm trying to get it to go," Bill told her, "Before I have them all follow me up."

"...okay. Follow you up? You're taking them with you up to the AXOLOTL'S space?"

Bill nodded again, and smiled. "Eventually," he told her. "But for now… we're just talking Karmic alignment."

Miz frowned.

"This is what they all look like right now, in terms of where their actions actually fall and flow," he told her. "Regardless of what some of them think," he muttered out, looking down at that Stanford's symbol, which made up the majority of the 'tail' of the fish, cycling heavily between the very outmost corners of 'Chaotic Good' and 'Chaotic Evil', with almost no time spent in 'Chaotic Neutral' in-between. Then Bill raised his hand above the page. "This is where I'm trying to let Stanley lead them to go." He moved his hand, and all the squiggles shifted. -Notably, the whole 'fish' periphery (and every squiggle inside it) seemed to compress itself a little bit, to the point that every path that had a trajectory leading into in the 'lawful' side of the page shifted almost completely over to the neutral column, but in the process...

"So… no lawful, and almost no evil." Except for... "That's gonna be hard for Gideon." And that was sure a high density of squiggles around the chaotic neutral region where the 'tail' of the fish was, now.

Bill shrugged. "Too many of them are already starting out 'good'," he told her. "Easier to go the other way, get rid of the 'Lawful' orientation first, instead of trying to shift more of them 'Good' or 'Evil' instead. -Not that it matters," Bill said. "Not once I use the current mis-balance to over-balance everything like this," he told her, and suddenly the paper rose up to eye-level and the entire symbol of squiggly-marks twisted sideways and fell down out of the page.

...no, that wasn't quite right. It was like the 'Neutral-Neutral' center block was pinning the center of it in place, all those squiggles. The whole thing rotated and spun around the 'neutral' column that was sitting between 'Lawful' and 'Chaotic', until all the (few) parts of the squiggle in the 'Neutral' column that had still been the closest to the 'Lawful' column had rotated themselves upwards and out of the page, while all the 'Chaotic' parts of the 'tail' rotated themselves down below it.

It was like a really strange (and completely out-of-balance) mobile. That was Miz's impression at least. "And… what does this all mean?" she finally asked him.

"It means," Bill told her, as he raised his hand and pointed above the piece of paper, "That I," pointed to a little equilateral triangle hanging above it, spinning like a pinwheel in place and outlining a circle above it, completing the whole 'fish' symbol, "And my Zodiac," he told her, moving his hand upwards, and the triangle moved upwards, "Cast a very large shadow."

And as Bill moved his hand upwards, and that triangle move upwards as well, the 'fish' below slowly 'swam' itself upwards, as well - right up out of the page, seemingly almost chasing the pinwheeling triangle as it went. (...Trying to eat it? Capture it again? Or just follow it up?)

And as it moved higher and higher, the neutral lit-everywhere lighting of the room showed Miz two very odd things: a single small area on the page below - the 'True Neutral' square - being almost exclusively lit with an ever-shrinking small dot of very-strong shadow… and a more overall broad and lighter (but still fairly obviously there) shadow, slowly becoming increasingly larger, and larger, until it all filled the entire page below it.

"Karma does not define me," Bill said, letting go of the entire illusion, and letting the piece of paper flutter down to settle back where it first had started out, back down on the floor once again. "I need them all out of 'Lawful', so that we can all break the Rules we need to break here more fully. -'Chaotic' is well and good, but the new system we all will put in place needs to be better, in order to hold, manage, grow, and contain it. Tempests in teacups," he told her, "Not ones that grow to tear down the whole of a dimension, and then some." He shrugged. "Staying in 'Neutral', and cycling between 'Good'-'Neutral'-'Evil' back and forth all the time, it all cancels out," he told her. "No traction, not enough inertia to hold it to slow it down to stick there in place; it's got nothing to stick to, so nothing will stick. -It's the piling on that gets you," he told her. "If you stay in just one state forever, and never pass over to the other side, it just keeps piling on, and accumulating, and winding up, because you just aren't winding it down, all of that inertia keeping it all there in place just builds and builds and builds, and that's when all the worst things will happen," he told her, "At all the worst times. It's almost like everything just starts 'spontaneously' working against you."

Well, that was good? Miz didn't know what Bill was after specifically.

"But that's my entire Zodiac, to which I am… 'chained'," he told her, sitting back and easing back a bit. "I myself stay true neutral. -I'll make Deals with anything and anyone," he told her, them grimaced a bit. "Well…" he admitted, "No more Deals anymore, but I'm happy to do anything-else with anyone else!" he told her. "I like to take advantage for myself when I can," he told her, "But I'll do that with anybody. Doesn't matter to me, as long as it's fun." Bill shrugged again. "That's the 'height' by the way, along the third axis," he told her, "The 'up' that I'm going to have all of us moving along, together. 'Fun' and interesting and weird and colorful and forever-and-ever-getting-smarter," he told her, tracing a hand upwards towards the ceiling, "Versus 'dull' and drab and oh-so-predictable and chained-down and boring," Bill completed, moving his hand down to point towards the floor. "Karma just doesn't go there," he told her. "'Height' isn't part of this system! Karma is flat; it's all stuck down there," he pointed at the piece of paper in disgust, "Being two-dimensional. It only measures what falls on and intersects here," Bill said, making a flat gesture along the whole piece of paper, "And nothing else. -So once we're all unstuck from the whole range of concepts of anything to do with any of all-this at all ever," he made a gesture at the piece of paper again, "Once we're all on the same 'page' and then up and out of it, all of it, entirely... it doesn't really apply to any of us at all anymore, ever again! And anything else that anybody else is seeing, in terms of karma? Is just little bits of shadow here and there, cast down on the walls and the floor, where the rest of those flat-thought idiots think."

Bill glanced down at the piece of paper again. "But that's my Zodiac, with all their puppet-string connections to me that just won't ever hold me down. I cast myself as 'True Neutral'," Bill told her. "But the trick there is, you need to know where you're starting out first, to know how and when and where you are going to move. -Start out thinking you're a 'Lawful Good' and go one space right? -If you were actually seen by the system as 'Lawful Neutral', you've just gone Chaotic. And that's if you're even facing the right direction; south-by-southwest, and you just gone 'Lawful Evil' instead!" Bill warned her. "See what I mean? -You need to know where you are, and which way you're facing, and going to be facing, things - what direction you're going to strike out in - in order to know where you're going. That's the problem I'm sitting at now," he told her. "I don't know where I'm sitting at now, or which direction I'm even facing." Or how much 'Karmic debt' he might be in, if the stupid lizard had lied to him misleadingly, and hadn't cancelled all of it all out on him yet, after trying to shove him down flat into the flatness of the 'normal' system of thing, once again.

Miz frowned down at the page. She wasn't sure about this… and Bill noticed this.

"Let me give you another example-" the trillion year old demon began, reaching for another blank piece of paper.

Many, somewhat-varying explanations later, with the floor of Bill's room covered in papers and scribbles, Miz finally felt as if she was getting the hang on this, and a handle on the general concept. How it would apply to her, she wasn't sure. But she had adjusted and shifted around a few things in her Self that she was pretty sure might help her out. That would have to do for now until she went home to really experiment with it.

And by that time, it was late and Miz made Bill go to bed again. (not that he did a whole lot of complaining about falling asleep again; he was tired, just not tired enough to not complain until his sister reassured him that she was getting the concept, and that they didn't need to stay up any later, talking about any of it further.) She still couldn't believe they had spent the entire day up here without going down to see anyone else even once. ...Well, she thought that Stanford would be thrilled about not seeing her, though.

Still, she snuggled up with her brother and the two drifted off to sleep again.

There was something that Bill didn't want to think about. Something he really wanted to avoid.

But he HAD to think about it - because in order to avoid it ever needing to happen, he had to think about it. Because it was part of a completely different problem that he had to handle now - or at least, very soon. It was something he had been able to avoid doing for a while, as he kept working to help his sister deal with her other problems. But with her Karma situation more or less handled as best as they could for now, along with several of the other problems on her list (and a few that hadn't been on it at all, before or since), Bill found his thoughts going back to this thing he had to do, and also this thing he didn't want to think about.

Bill had to bring Stanley's twin back to life before he realized that that Stanford - Sixer - wasn't actually his twin, 'just' his brother. Because that was a thing that had happened. Bill hadn't thought that this was ever going to be a problem; he'd planned on bringing 'Ford back eventually, but he hadn't thought that Stanley had actually felt or thought that way about his twin. That he was 'family', the way that Stanley defined it. -That meant that 'Ford staying dead was 'crossing his line', and if Stanley knew about it... Bill not having realized it at the time just wouldn't cut it - Bill knew Stanley well enough now to know that much, at least. As things stood, the agreement was technically already defunct, broken before it even began. And unless Bill fixed it-

-So Bill couldn't wait as long as he liked to do it, whenever he wanted to do it; he would have to bring 'Ford back the next closest thing to NOW, if he wanted to fix and to keep the agreement. (And he wanted to keep the mutual non-aggression agreement he had with Stanley, for many, various reasons.) In a strict reading of the terms that he'd ended up working out with Stanley, if 'Ford already being dead didn't break the terms of the agreement outright from before the very-start, then it might almost be something close to a requirement that it be carried out as soon as Bill could end up doing it 'safely' (following the agreement without breaking the agreement in the process), once Bill had learned of the problem from him - helping Stanley 'save' and 'keep safe' his 'family' from harm.

Either way, it really did have to happen very soon now. With Stanley and that Stanford talking to each other more now, after coming back from that other dimension, and that Stanford starting to realize something was wrong-

That Stanford would never figure it out on his own consciously himself, but he was acting in ways that were enough to make Stanley suspicious. And Stanley wasn't stupid. He might not be able to even think of 'his brother' dying in the portal, but he definitely was capable of thinking about the existence of other Stanleys and other Stanfords. Bill doubted that he could keep Stanley from the conscious realization that the Stanford he was living with wasn't the twin who he'd grown up with - not for much longer. Not with the twitchy-touchy way that Sixer had been acting, especially lately. Which meant...

(And of course that Stanford had to mess all this up by continuing to behave in a way that would make Stanley start to be suspicious-)

-It was fine, overall. It wasn't like Bill hadn't planned to bring 'Ford (Stanley's twin) back from the start - right when he'd been having to make that split-second frozen decision on which Stanford to save, when they'd both fell into their respective portals in the same frozen moment in the Nightmare Realm, somehow at the VERY SAME TIME in the broken time of that place, and damn the Axolotl ALL OVER AGAIN FOR THAT!. -He'd had to make a decision, and between a choice of saving his Zodiac-Sixer so that he would finally get out of there and the other 'Ford that he actually liked... WELL, it had been no choice at all! If he saved Sixer, he'd eventually get out, and eventually be able to save that 'Ford to bring him back. Win-win. -Of course he'd gone with saving Sixer, stabilizing his portal and letting that other one's atoms just dissolve into the ether, not even properly fully-connected to the Nightmare Realm in the first place./p

Bill had already even figured out a few ways that should lead to tricking that Stanford into giving him the breathing room to do the whole thing without incident, just a bit before the unexpected 'dimensional rescue mission' had started! -But after that trip and being back, he'd still held back from actually doing it, for one person and one person only, and one very important reason to do with that person.

His little sister.

Bill refused to expose his little sister to Stanley's twin - he wouldn't, couldn't allow 'Ford near her. Because as bad as that younger Stanford had been in that other newly-created 'offshoot' of this dimension, the older 'Ford that had been here had been worse. Worse, and NOT in the good-way worse. Worse AND intelligent enough to know how to FAKE being a PERSON to manipulate people into getting what he wanted. (Case-in-point: Glasses.) 'Ford had been fun, fun to play with and fun to talk to and interact with, but in Bill's opinion? Most truly FUN things were not at-all safe. And his sister was not him; he DID NOT TRUST that other 'Ford around her or with her. (His sister was too trusting. Too 'nice'. And she forgave far, far too easily. She didn't ever WANT to stay mad. And she was too eager to please on top of all that, and THAT meant…)

-'Ford would EAT HER ALIVE and not even spit out the bones of her vessel or Self-

-And that was MORE than enough reason for Bill to refused to even consider the idea of letting that 'Ford be around his little sister, for even the smallest split-instant of time! Bill did not want anyone like that anywhere near his little sister. It would be like Gideon but worse. (The living ventriloquist dummy wasn't even comparable to-)

And with how… naive his little sister was at times… she wanted to see the best in most-people, even when she had reasons to WANT to stay away. And with the way she'd reacted - and kept on reacting to that Stanford… No. If Bill brought 'Ford back while she was here… she would want to see him, at least once. And Bill didn't lay high odds on whether he would be able to keep her away from him, if she wanted to meet him, even once.

And it would only take once. In some ways, 'Ford was like a black hole-

-But Bill HAD to bring 'Ford back to keep-and-fix-and-keep the agreement that he had going with Stanley. He had to. Because that was Stanley's line, messing with his family. And that 'Ford was Stanley's twin. His 'family', too, in the way that Stanley would define it.

But Bill couldn't bring 'Ford back without him being somewhere nearby the house. Where he was staying, because Stanley wanted him to stay here, here - because of the agreement. And where his sister was staying with him, with Stanley's 'that's fine, she should stay here with you'. -He didn't want 'Ford and that would put 'Ford somewhere near his sister, but he'd be stretching the agreement past the limits if he left the house once 'Ford was back. Because of course 'Ford would stay at the house, with Stanley and the rest of them. (Even with what Bill was planning at and beyond that, 'Ford would still be staying at Stanley's house for at least a long enough length of time that his sister-) And his sister's curiosity would have her going towards and seeking out 'Ford just because she wanted to-!

-Bill was not going to tell his sister that she had to leave. Not the house, to stay in town. Not the town, because it would require at least that distance, to keep her far enough away to stay out of 'Ford's general range of influence, out on her own - but even that probably wasn't enough. Which meant that to keep his sister truly safe, and far enough away and not only out of reach of 'Ford, but far enough that she wouldn't even think of coming over and potentially seeing 'Ford at the house, in the 'Falls, here-

...The only way that would happen would be if Bill asked-or-told her to leave his dimensional set entirely. (The other demons out there were too much of a risk; having her go to another dimension while still in this dimensional set and having her stay, visiting her there, was risky even in its own way. He might be able to ask her to go off-and-back to Lee's new dimension, but Bill doubted that she would actually stay there on her own. And he didn't want to expose her to any of the demons-from-the-Outside that were roaming around out there, out in the dimensions that she hadn't Seen for herself here, yet.) And that was the thing that Bill didn't even want to think about doing.

...But Bill had to bring 'Ford back NOW, because Stanley was going to figure it out any day now - Bill had been watching him carefully, and he was seeing it happen, seeing the signs as it slowly kept on progressing, the unconscious thought making its way forward into truly conscious thought, right up to that point - and once Stanley did realize it, Stanley would also realize that the agreement wasn't just broken, it had been null-and-void to begin with, right from the start-

Which left Bill with a dilemma.

Keep the agreement, or keep his sister.

...not that Bill was EVER going to give up his sister, not for ANYTHING! That would be stupid! But… telling-or-asking her to leave? He couldn't do THAT, either - he didn't WANT to do that, either! That WASN'T what big brothers did!

And so Bill thought hard about this now, lying on his back in his spelled-fully-safe attic room, while his sister - back in their triangle form for the first time in a while (since they weren't going off to see any of the humans, he'd thought it would be okay to be a triangle again around his brother) - was entertaining themselves with some sort of arts and crafts project, while staying quiet so Bill could think. And Bill thought, and he thought, and he thought, until his stupid human-ish body felt almost itchy with wanting to do something, but he didn't know what it was, what movement it was wanting to make on him now. ….Until he did. And when he finally realized exactly what it was that his stupid body wanted to do…

...Bill sat up and reached out to gently pick his sister up, carefully cradling their small form close to his stupid body's own.

MizBill tilted back to look up at him. "Brother? What's wrong?" Their bricks glowly faintly as they spoke.

And Bill just didn't know what to do. He was getting agitated, jittery and stressed as all hell about all of this, and-

-and-

...and MizBill reached up a small hand to place on his cheek. "Talk to me. What's bothering you? I can help with what you have a problem with."

And Bill chittered in a distressed way. "I'm the big brother. I'M the one who's supposed to help YOU with YOUR problems!"

MizBill almost rolled his eye. "Yes. But you're still new to the whole experience of being an older sibling. I've had little sisters and a brother; I know how to be an older sibling. Now tell me what's bothering you and I'll help."

Bill didn't like it, but he knew he was too agitated to figure this out on his own - and he needed to talk to him anyway, yes? Because staying up in the attic, or staying in town someplace else, or staying in another dimension - he could at least do his sister the uncommon-courtesy of explaining the problem, why he didn't want him around 'Ford, why it was such a bad idea for him to do that, and offer him a choice-!

Even if his sister didn't go anywhere, and promised Bill he'd stay up in the attic the entire time trapped while 'Ford did whatever he wanted to downstairs, he'd still need to tell him, and explain. He really couldn't get around explaining it all to his little sister before it all, no. One way or the other.

So Bill told him. He told him about the choices he was trapped between. The pros and cons, the things he would stand to gain or lose. The things he didn't want to lose.

MizBill listened, and then he nodded. "Ah, I see. -I understand," he clarified. "You're afraid that you'd have to choose between me or Stanley." MizBill sighed when he felt Bill shudder in reaction to that. "Well, here's the thing, you can have us both."

"Siblings come first," Bill told her angrily. He wasn't choosing between Stanley and his sister - he was choosing between Miz and the agreement - which (eventually) led to him getting Liam back. If it was just a choice between Miz and Stanley, he'd pick Miz every time. -And Stanley would understand that, or at the very least couldn't complain - he had 'family' as his line, and he'd kick Bill to the curb long before letting anyone break that.

Bill frowned and looked away, off to the side. "I won't force you to have to suffer through being around 'Ford. It's bad enough you have to handle Sixer being around-"

"-And I won't have to," MizBill assured him. "You just need to bring 'Ford back. I can leave- just for a little while!" MizBill assured his brother quickly when immediately Bill stiffened at his words (- because that wasn't what he'd wanted his sister to think! He'd been absolutely careful not to ask him that, or even bring it up that way, just stating the facts surrounding why he didn't want Miz and 'Ford anywhere near each other-).

"I will keep in touch through my blog," MizBill told him, then frowned as he thought. "And you can handle things here. Tell me when it's safe enough for me to come back."

"-I don't want you to leave," Bill told her quickly. "I want you not to leave! I never said that! I never said either of those things!"

MizBill gave his brother a reassuring eye-curved smile. "I won't be gone forever. My Door leads to you. And… well, that GlitchBill is gone. I… technically don't have an excuse to stay. And-" here, MizBill looked, and felt, quite guilty, "-I have to go home. I can't… leave my friends alone. I love you, and I love them too." He seemed to shrink in on himself. "And I miss them." He finally admitted. "But I'll miss you too. And, I'll come back and visit again once it's safe."

Bill grimaced and his whole upper half - head, torso, and arms - bobbed side to side, as he parsed this new information from her. He hadn't realized… that she might want to leave. Him. To go elsewhere. Right now. ...To go back home. …...To her friends, and no siblings left alive that she could see or even See there.

But Bill had known of the possibility of that far earlier than this, as more of an 'eventually' than a 'soon'. And he'd promised himself that he wouldn't stop his sister from leaving, if Miz wanted to leave, he wasn't going to trap her here… with him… if she really didn't want to stay here.

And his sister had also said that he would miss him. And come back- but they also wanted to leave-!

No. No, there was something much more wrong with what his sister had just said than leaving him. His sister going home to their original dimensional set would mean-

"-Don't go home," Bill finally told her, with authoritative urgency. "Go to Seb, instead. -It's not safe for you back in your home dimension, with your," Bill grimaced, "-'dad' lizard who's…" Bill looked irate all over again for a moment, before he pulled in a breath pushed most (but not all) of it back down. "Who probably-almost-DEFINITELY has some plans for using you. -You're safe staying away from him, now. Much safer, out and away where that stupid thing can't get at you, at all ever - only 'hear' about you, maybe, in some places other than this." Because they'd learned in that other 'set that the local stupid lizard here just didn't talk to any of the other ones that apparently also talked to the one from Miz's current 'home' dimensional set. (And, eventually, Bill wanted to make THIS set his sister's home 'set. But that was for later. For now…) "If you want to go elsewhere, stay with Seb at least until I can work out a way to keep you more safe around it," or anyone else.

MizBill winced, still not wanting to believe Ax could… could be merely using him. That couldn't be true, or at the very least, it couldn't be the full story. Dad cared about him. He did! He must! MizBill believed so, and he wouldn't just write him off without actually talking to Ax first, getting his side of the story. MizBill refused to let this be some horrible misunderstanding. And it wasn't like being used was all that bad, right? Because it still meant you were useful as opposed to useless- But he didn't say this aloud, because his big brother would be upset. Instead, he nodded. "I don't mind going to visit Seb. He's nice."

Bill nodded at this. (But he wasn't stupid; he noted that that WASN'T a 'yes, I will go see him and stay with him, and stay there until you call me, and not go back to my home 'set again', not even a little. Which might mean that...)

"That's good," Bill told his little sister (while keeping his own thoughts to himself, for now...). "You can go to Seb; we can keep in contact through your blog. I'll be able to tell you when it's safe to come back- we can talk at least some of this out over your blog. Operational security," he noted once again.

MizBill nodded. "So… will you be bringing Stan's twin back?" he asked, changing the subject casually.

Bill let out something of a chittering-tsk. "Yes. Soon." 'After you go,' remained unsaid.

MizBill bit his lip and thought. "Better do it sooner than later. They're beginning to suspect something's wrong."

"...I'm aware," Bill drawled out at his little sister, giving him a look.

MizBill winced. He felt a little guilty about that, having sort of dropped hints all over the place. -Well he wanted them to know! He didn't like this situation! (And now he would have to leave his brother for a bit because of it, because he hadn't completely thought these things out, is what Bill would complain about, if he knew his sister's own thoughts on the matter just then. But Bill wouldn't exactly have much ground to stand on there, either, given how he was the one who hadn't realized the problem in the first-place, before he'd made and agreed-to abide by that agreement with Stanley.)

"I should leave after dinner tonight," MizBill said simply. That way, brother would have the entire rest of this afternoon to think of a way to convince that Stanford to let him down into the lab, to be able to enact it that evening, right after Miz left. (If he didn't already have a plan; his big brother was so smart! Always thinking a few thousand steps ahead! Nothing at all like him, who could do that too… but was generally too lazy or non-invested in things to do so.)

...and also because MizBill wanted to spend the rest of the day with his brother. And when he told his brother that, the older demon had no issue at all with it. (The only issue he had was that his sister was leaving so soon. He wanted her to stay with him FOREVER.)

So the two demons spent the rest of the day together, quietly snuggled in each other's embrace. It was a little boring for MizBill, not having anything more exciting to do, but MizBill didn't mind.

"..." It was the evening now. The two had eaten dinner, brought upstairs by Melody and left at the base of the last flight of attic stairs for them, and now it was time. They were down in the grass, the lawn of the Shack, outside the barrier, and...

...Miz wasn't sure how to feel, now that she actually had to leave. She'd known that this was coming, and that it needed to be done. And she really did want to go home (even if brother said it wasn't a good idea). But...

"I'll come visit again some time," she promised her brother, back in her human Miz form. They still had their arms wrapped around each other in a very long hug.

"Yes," Bill said simply. He acknowledged what his sister-self was saying as best as he could, but he didn't want her to go, and didn't want to promise anything to her that he might not be able to keep. (Because that would be…)

"I'll try to keep connected on your blog. And see about other means of communication." Because if she could get Com-service to work between dimensions… like she'd used Mary's specialized Com to test with (which was going well, they'd texted back and forth a few times, Mary even updated her on the twin's situation, as she was capable of seeing it. And it appeared Young Ford really had gone back to school) to see about opening a direct chatroom with her brother as well.

Bill nodded. "I will put color on my Door once there is no longer an immediate problem," he told her. Because it wasn't as though killing 'Ford once he was back was going to be on the menu; not immediate was going to be the best that he was going to be able to go for here. But that would be more than good enough; he would make sure of it. "What color do you want it to be?"

"A ying-yang heart with blue and yellow!" Was Miz's quick reply.

Hm. He hadn't tried tossing shapes of color on any of those Doors yet, but he could probably do it. -He would find a way to make it work regardless. "And anytime it is possibly unsafe for you here?" Bill asked her next.

"Make the heart be broken into two halves and go gray." Miz nodded to herself, yeah. That would be a good indicator that something was wrong.

Bill nodded once as he held her. "Grey shades down to black. -Black meaning you should not open the Door under any circumstances. Too dangerous," he told her. "I will note where I am if that happens," he told her next, then paused. "There will be nothing on the Door until some of the immediate problems are handled here first. Yes?"

"Okay," Miz said. She didn't exactly like the idea that Bill was thinking of something that might have him needing to flee his own dimensional set? ...But maybe he was just planning ahead for everything, just in case. Her brother did seem to try and do that a lot. (And he was pretty paranoid. She deliberately did not mention that the paranoia reminded her of that Stanford, the two were actually kind of alike sometimes…)

Finally, Miz couldn't delay anymore. She turned away and dropped her vessel - not dispersing it, but changing it into a small doll (...one which Bill ended up catching up in his arms quite easily, because of the hug he hadn't stopped giving her). "Here," she told her brother, as she turned in place in the (general) Mindscape to face him. "Keep it. It'll save energy if I don't have to build a new one when I come back. And… if you feel lonely or need a hug, you can hug it." She wasn't sure if he would, but it was a nice thought.

Bill let out a soft "Ha." He watched her. "You know I bite dolls," he reminded her, but the small smile he had at his mouth didn't reach his eyes as he said it, and even the smile at his mouth fell slowly thereafter. He continued cradling the doll-vessel carefully in his arms. "I'll make sure your vessel remains unharmed," he told her more seriously.

Miz nodded. There was no more stalling. The Door materialized behind her. She floated back towards it, listening for any other broken Bills that might have been there and finding nothing. "Well… see you soon," she told him.

Because she wasn't going to say good bye.

Because this wasn't a good bye.

Not at all.

...and Bill apparently thought this wasn't one either. "I'm coming with you," Bill told her, and Miz startled a bit.

"You can't-" she began (because he couldn't come with her, he needed to stay behind and bring Fister back!), but Bill shook his head as he stomped his foot firmly into the ground once, then folded his legs under him to sit down just as fluidly, even as the mandala he'd just visualized was still finishing burning itself into the grass around him - a circle of protection for him and her vessel while he was 'away'.

"I want to know which Door is yours," he told her, "And which Door is Seb's." At her confused, startled look, he explained to her, "I want to be able to find you easily later. Just in case." He saw his sister's eye go wide at the implications of that thought just before he closed his eyes, her doll-vessel held in his lap, and he slipped out of his body with a bit of effort - all on his own this time; he remembered how he'd done it with her help before, all the correct paths and pathways that she'd been able to see externally and help him maneuver his way through without breaking anything.

...and the way she paused and bobbed guiltily in place in the general Mindscape for a moment, as Bill finished slipping his Self out of his body without disrupting the Anchor that still connected to (and held onto part of) him, had him suspecting already that she really had been planning on going back to her dimensional set first, instead of going to Seb like he'd hoped she'd meant to agree to be doing.

"I can tell you which ones they are, you don't have to come," Miz said slowly, looking slightly uncomfortable at having gotten caught out by him.

"I want to see them myself," Bill told her. Because he had an idea or two that he didn't want to say out-loud out and around here - not out here in the grass, not even under his attic-barrier - but… "I want to know where they are currently, before you go through them," he told her right then. He pulled in another 'breath'. "And I want to make sure that nothing catches you along the way. ...Let a big brother escort you back?" he tried next at her clear reticence at the idea, thinking as quickly as he could. "This is a thing that big brothers do, yes? I won't know you've made it back safely or not if I don't," he told her quite honestly.

MizBill couldn't help but giggle at that. "Yeah, you're right." Looks like she wasn't going to be able to get one past him. Wow. ...Was this what she was like when she was being overprotective? She had to apologize to the twins when she got back, if she remembered to. She nodded to him, and the Door opened behind her. Bill followed along; the Door sucked them both into the void.

Just like last time, the abrupt change from a world with life, to the absolute silence of the Void of Doors, was jarring to Miz.

The two floated in the void for a moment, reorienting themselves before MizBill glanced around and 'felt' for her door. "Mine's this way…" Miz pointed in one direction. "And Seb's is…" she was stalling, brother was stalling her, she wanted to go home. Even if it 'wasn't safe' according to brother.

And while Miz valued his input, she wasn't a child. She could take care of herself. And she could handle her dad! Sure, he was incredibly powerful and the ultimate god or whatever, but she wasn't a pushover either. But brother was watching, and he was stubborn. She knew this. "-Seb's is that way!"

"Show me?" Bill asked his sister, but it wasn't really a question. Miz didn't quite let out a huff at this. Her brother was being so stubborn.

-But Miz was MORE stubborn! Her stubbornness wouldn't lose out to anyone!

But she flew off to find Seb's Door anyway; she DID want to visit him. Would be good to know where his Door was.

As they traveled along - Miz taking the lead, Bill following while looking about and out for any potential problems while refusing to lose track of her - Bill asked her, "Can you move them? The Doors?" And with the way he said it, Bill somehow didn't make his question sound like a question at all. He made it sound more like a certainty than anything (he did so on purpose, and rather purposefully) - as if he was asking whether she knew how to do it, instead of whether it was actually a possibility at all.

Miz considered it before reaching for a random Door and pushed it. There was a faint resistance at first, before the Door drifted away. "Huh. Cool." Miz blinked. So they could move. Well, that would be useful. She got distracted nudging the Doors around and lining them up beside each other for a bit, before she got back on track. -Right. Find Seb's Door.

"Here. This one is Seb's. I think?" Miz squinted at the Door. It was part of the [Triplet AU] section, but there were several here with the same words on the Door. And they all kinda felt like Seb. Miz deduced that these were alternate versions of Seb. It made her wonder if there were alternate versions of herself as well. It was odd to think of. Nonetheless, she thought she found which Door was for her specific Seb.

"'You think' this is it?" Bill asked her. He hadn't thought she had any memory problems… the idea itself was VERY disturbing to him.

"...Yes?" Miz said.

"You 'think'? Or you know," Bill asked her again as he floated in place next to her, watching her.

Miz thought for a moment, watching the text change back and forth a few times, and remembering what she'd seen before. "It's his Door," she said more firmly.

"Check," was what Bill said next, and Miz blinked.

"...What?" Miz turned back to look at him.

"If you are sure that it is his, and that it is safe, then check," Bill told her next, as he crossed his arms slightly, floating in place.

MizBill couldn't help but narrow her eye at him a bit. "You're trying to trick me into not going home," she told him. "I want to go home. And I can be more stubborn than you are," she told him.

There was a bit of a pause for a moment.

"...Is that a challenge?" Bill asked her neutrally next, almost tonelessly.

MizBill looked at him, then looked away. "No…" she said.

There was another long pause, which left Miz feeling antsy before she looked up at her brother again. "But-" she began.

"-I will NOT stop you from going 'home' again, EVER," Bill told her, cutting her off, and Miz felt a little startled at this. He didn't exactly look happy about it, but… she didn't think he was lying? She felt like she might be missing something there, though. What little drifts of emotion she was getting from him now - which he seemed to be doing a really good job of not letting himself project at her at all (when... she didn't have her headband on? Oh…) - seemed a little tangled up, and really complex, a lot more complex than she remembered feeling from him before. (Even more complex than what little she'd been feeling from him, up in the attic, when they'd been talking about…)

"You won't?" she said slowly, and Bill shook his head.

"No, I won't stop you," Bill said. "I could for at least a LITTLE while, I'm sure," he told her with a slight smile, "But that would be a trap. And then you would escape and never want to come back to me again, because you would think I would trap you again. ...Which would mean that you wouldn't come to me when you're feeling alone. I'm not going to risk you not coming to me when you're feeling lonely," he told her, then grimaced. "I don't like not being your first choice for safety," he told her. "But I want you to have at least one place and person that you can always come to, no matter what. -Even if you don't know if I've handled 'Ford yet, if you want to come see me, I don't want you hesitating to do that," Bill told her. "I'll figure something out, even if 'Ford is there. Stanley may complain, but I WILL find a way to handle it properly, without risking Liam's return later not-happening at the end of things. ...And I will always find a way to let you know where I am," he added, at the last.

Miz startled a bit at Bill's mention of Liam. And Miz was reminded of the fact that Bill hadn't actually agreed to her leaving because of 'Ford, or even asked her to go. He had admitted that it would be easier to handle, and safer for her, if she left, when she asked him specifically about it, but… he hadn't asked her to go.

...He wasn't just balancing things with Stan and 'Ford and that Stanford and all the rest of them, was he. He was actually trying to balance Liam against… her. He was trying to prioritize between siblings, and if it was obvious to her before that he didn't really know how to be a big brother yet, it was crystal-clear to Miz now that he didn't know how to handle more than one sibling at a time.

Miz sighed. ...Brother really was trying, wasn't he? "It's going to be harder for you if I stay with you any longer," Miz reminded him. "And, you don't have to choose between me or Liam. You can have both," she told him, reiterating the words she'd told him before.

"I know," Bill said. "And I know. I can, and will, have you both. -And I don't want you to hesitate to come to me if you want to see me, for any reason," he repeated.

"And I want to go home," Miz told him next. To remind him of that too.

"I know," Bill said, and he both looked and sounded agitated at the reminder of that, as he looked away from her but...

...it was weird. Miz could see that he was acting a little differently, and his energy flow-

Miz blinked. His energy flow was moving a little differently. So were his (encrypted) thoughts, what little she could sense of those of them that vibrated little bits and pieces of 'I'm here'ness out into their surroundings. He sounded a little different right now, but it wasn't just that. Bill was… her brother was...

"You're planning something," Miz noted. It was super-complex, very dense, and she wasn't imagining things, there was definitely a lot more activity now than she'd sensed going on back when they'd been in his own 'set, even a short while ago. (It reminded her a bit more like what he'd been like in that ReverseBill's other dimension.) "Just… tell me?" she asked him. She didn't really like the idea of being led around on a string, which was what this was almost starting to feel like to her.

Bill looked back over at her.

And then he dropped his shoulders, and his arms loosened a bit, and he sighed.

And Bill told her everything he expected to have happen next.

That he expected her to not want to go in Seb's door, thinking it was a 'trap'.

That she would either protest and say she wanted to go home now, first, or that he expected her to stay there longer than just a few seconds to check everything out.

That he planned to tell her that she shouldn't go back in her own Door before checking to make sure that she had at least one other place that she felt completely comfortable 'escaping' to, if necessary, and that he realized that there was a double-digit probability that she wouldn't come back to his own 'set until he gave her the all-clear - which he thought was way too high.

He told her that he expected to have to argue with her about stubbornness and coming back right away, and promise to stay floating right there by Seb's Door until she came back out - as a sort of other-risk for him if she stayed any longer than those few seconds, giving her a reason to come back straightaway, just in case there were any more 'broken Bills' about, somewhere, farther away.

He told her that he expected a non-zero chance of her trying to tell him that she didn't need to check. He told her that he might have to push her into deciding how sure she was about that Door or not - to go in there alone, on her own, by herself. And he told her that he wouldn't let her go in any Door that she wasn't already absolutely sure was Seb's, but also wouldn't let her feel comfortable going back in her own Door without at least making sure that she knew exactly which Door was Seb's.

"But you won't come in with me when I check?" Miz asked him, frowning at him. He shook his head once. "Why?"

"Seb didn't invite me," Bill told her simply.

Miz eyed him. That sounded super-suspicious to her. "The ReverseBill didn't invite you, but you went in there…"

"That Bill didn't know me," Bill brushed off. "And you invited me to go exploring places with you."

Miz gave her big brother another look, because she was pretty sure that Bill still would've insisted on coming along even if she'd tried to tell him no.

"I care more about you, my sister, than some other Bill that I don't know," Bill told her succinctly. "And I do know Seb. Seb met me and didn't invite me over to come visit," Bill told her. "That isn't a 'yes, I want you in my dimensional set with me, please'; it's the opposite."

"...What else?" Miz asked him, because she doubted her very plan-ny big brother would've just stopped at that.

And then Miz blinked as Bill told her what he'd expected she'd need to know next - and began to demonstrate (via something of a few pantomimed motions, along with a rather thorough but brief accompanying explanation) what he'd thought of as an 'escape hatch' for her, even in the event that a 'broken Bill' might be on the other side of the Door of her home 'set, waiting. It basically involved moving Seb's Door over to be right behind hers, in a special but really very simple kind of way.

Bill had noticed, and then noted - from everything that he'd seen (and Seen) thus far with her Door and what she'd shown both him and Stanley - that the 'broken Bills' couldn't get through the Doors on their own - not just the locks, but the actual Doors themselves. He shared his theory with her that she could probably materialize the Door, then slam it open into the 'broken Bill' to shove it away from her - and then slip her way out quickly, closing it behind her, without getting touched, reach, or hurt (and then consumed) by it. With even a little breathing room, she could then dash - if not simply slide and rotate herself - right around the edge of the doorframe, and pull open Seb's Door immediately, slamming it shut it behind her.

All she would need to do, to do that, would be to move Seb's Door behind hers, turn it upside down so that both the doorknobs were at the same edge, and then 'stick' it in place so that it wouldn't go anywhere else in the meantime.

And the reason the whole thing would work was because Miz could move her own Doors around however she wanted, and the Doors only opened one way. Bill noted that aloud to her outright. The 'hinges' and 'doorframes' only let them open the one way, in the one direction. The 'backs' of the Doors might as well be completely immovable and useless, in terms of getting anyplace freely. They didn't even have any 'doorknobs' on them; the backs of the Doors were almost completely smooth surfaces.

It made her want to smack her forehead, with how stupidly simple it was. She didn't say that out loud to him though, just like she hadn't said anything about any of his younger-self's childlike-scribble 'hats' made of light.

She also had to fight down a laugh when Bill didn't stop there. He apparently had a plan for how she could capture 'broken Bills' in here, too. And the way he described it was not only cute, it was just as stupidly simple as the 'escape hatch' idea that he'd had.

He didn't pantimome anything this time, demonstrating it for her himself; he actually drew out the wireframes and 'animated' them for her, in pretty much the same way that he'd visually drawn those 'hats' of his out of light.

Miz looked on and watched as he drew six doors in the air, and an odd sort of 'tangle' to represent a 'broken Bill'. Bill then enclosed the 'broken Bill' in the middle of a box, using four 'Doors' to surround it on all sides in a square-shape, looking down on it from above… and then really finish enclosing it on all sides by adding a 'top' and 'bottom' to the box - covering them by using those last two odd-out 'Doors', too.

And then Miz blinked as Bill shifted the sides past each other, further and further, slowly shrinking the space in the middle, until it started to look more like an open-centered Brigid's cross than a box anymore. It was still just as tall as ever… but it seemed a little more contained now, with all the sides of every Door overlapping each other a bit.

(Miz was reminded of those matchstick puzzles. Also, if she did manage to capture a broken Bill with the Doors, she could technically move them around by moving said Doors while keeping the 'cage' functional.)

And apparently she and Bill were on the same wavelength on this one, because the very next thing Bill did after that was begin to explain his ideas for how and why such a trap would work. How having the doorknobs towards the 'broken Bill' would make it not want to escape, but rather probably go towards it. How shifting the edges in that way past the hinges, not making it a 'box' where all the outer edges were touching and fully-flush, would make it so the Doors couldn't be opened from inside that boxed-in area, even if the 'broken Bill' would otherwise somehow be able to manage it, if given enough time, because the Doors slammed open outwards into her Dreamscape, rather than opening into the 'set that they gave entry in upon - they wouldn't be able to open 'into' the inside 'trap' area, with the box arrangement blocking the hinges from moving...

...and then Bill moved straight on to what Miz had been thinking of: How he thought the backsides of the Doors - without 'doorknobs' on them, and the 'hinges' being the wrong way around to even allow that sort of motion - could be set up and used to 'face' and trap a 'broken Bill' for longer-term viewing and 'storage', if necessary, instead. (HAH!) How he thought Miz could set up a second 'box' without 'doorknobs' showing, or only one showing, and let the 'broken Bill' maneuver its way into that one instead. How he thought she could swap out one 'Door' with another along one single side at a time, without letting anything inside get free, with how she could potentially maneuver the Doors around there.

"You'll want to practice before you do it," Bill told her, as he finished visually showing her the examples of all the motions that he'd thought through, and Miz nodded, then blinked as he handed her the little lightshow of eight doors that he'd just shown her.

"You've been thinking a lot about this," Miz noted (it wasn't like she hadn't noticed how he had trouble figuring out - literally, figuring out - certain kinds of three-dimensional movements in his body sometimes), and Bill nodded once.

"Don't forget to look in EVERY direction for them, outside your outer-sides of yourself," Bill told her next, pointing a finger outwards and gesturing around them in a circle as he slowly rotated… and then started moving his arm to point both downwards and then upwards. "These Doors may mostly be in-a-line with each other, around here," he said, and they were - pretty much all facing the same way, in the same orientation, and at the same 'floor' level with each other - "But that doesn't mean that some of them might not think in all-other directions just as easily. That one Bill was… always human," Bill noted with a bit of a wince, if not a stifled shudder. "There may be other three-dimensional Bills, from higher-dimensional spaces, in other places that we haven't gone to and Seen yet." And he looked anything but happy at the idea.

Miz sighed at her brother's reaction to the very idea of that, and put away the little practice 'Door set' for now, rewinding and flattening it out in much the same way that she'd done with the hat that Bill had given her. She knew that he didn't think of her that way, and he didn't seem to… look down on her for being human a long time ago, or for wanting to be human again still? But...

Miz shook those (worrying) thoughts away from herself, and then she reached out to grip Seb's Door. And then stretched her other hand out in the direction she felt her own. This was her Dreamscape, she could do whatever. Instead of moving Seb's Door away from his cluster toward her own Door completely, she instead pulled his Door a little ways away from his section, and then pulled her own Door towards herself from where it had been. Then, after a quick glance at her brother, a third arm stretched out to get his door as well.

"Is this ok? Having all three of us close together?" she asked, feeling a little nervous for moving her brother's door without asking.

"This is your Dreamscape," he told her. "I'm not going to try moving anything unless you want me to." (Not least of which because Stanley hadn't given him full access to his powers for this impromptu trip, so he didn't have nearly as much leeway with his powers and abilities right now as he had when last they'd been in here together before.) "If you want to move something, you move it. Yes?"

Miz flickered orange for a second. "I like the idea of you being close by. So I can visit you easier."

Bill smiled slightly at that, but it faded again quickly.

"Check Seb's dimension first, now," he told her, crossing his arms again. "You can decide whether it will be easier to use his Door instead of mine for now, as an escape hatch." He paused for a moment. "I will stay right here and not-move while you do it."

"Okaaaay~" Miz huffed before giggling. Being doted on in this way was… interesting. She went toward Seb's Door and glanced back at her human-looking but not at all human and never had been brother before she eye-smiled. "Be back in a few secs."

Bill nodded once, with no expression on his face.

But when she reached out her hand for the doorknob to the Door, she had a flash of anxiety. Bill had pretty much refused to come into Seb's dimension with her, and… he'd talked about moving Doors and stuff, and how to keep them closed. He'd said he wasn't going to trap her, but what if-

-what if he moves another Door in front of this one and I can't get back out? What if he locks it on me somehow? What if-

No. She… was… going to trust him.

He was her brother, and he'd promised he wasn't going to trap her anywhere, ever.

And then Miz was gone, in and through the Door.

And Bill counted.

One second.

Two.

Three.

He floated slightly forward towards the Doorway, his hands 'clenching' in-place 'against' (but not against) his purely Mental form...

Miz was quick this time. Making sure to shrink down super-small the instant she was through, so as not to alert the Bill here if she was wrong and it wasn't Seb.

...but it WAS Seb! And he was… at… a fashion show? With a cheering crowd around the runway?! And cameras flashing everywhere?

...he got a fashion show?! That must be what this was! Seb became a fashion designer for real! That was amazing!

Reassured that this WAS her Seb, Miz turned and slipped back through and out the Door without the former demon even noticing she was there.

It was only a few seconds.

...and Miz was out and through the other side, back in her own true Dreamscape again.

...And Bill was a little bit closer to the Door than he had been when she'd gone inside of it.

"...Brother?" she asked him slowly. "You…"

"Yes," Bill said. "I… moved. A little," he said next. "I didn't touch it. Or anything."

He sounded a little guilty, though.

Miz felt frustrated. "Were you going to try and trap me in there?" she demanded of him.

"I didn't," Bill said.

"Brother..." Miz said, hands on her hip-equivalents.

And Bill looked away from her then, looking very frustrated.

"I wanted to, but I didn't do it!" he told her hotly. "I want you with me more. Trapping you isn't fine. I'm not going to do that. Not even to make sure that you're safe," he said, but Miz suddenly realized that it sounded a lot less like Bill was trying to convince Miz of this, and a lot more like he was almost trying to...

...It sounded like he was trying to convince himself that he wasn't going to do it. To trap her, and keep her forever with him, whether she wanted him to or not.

And Miz looked at him. Really, really looked at him, for a long few moments.

He'd always seemed really super in-control to her, ever since she'd met him. In control of himself, in control of almost every situation he was in. Maybe he still had trouble physically interacting with things sometimes, and he definitely didn't have his own Zodiac Ten figured out for how to get along with them all yet, but he always seemed to have a plan for absolutely everything, to make sure that it was all going to be going his way. -Maybe he really did love chaos, and throwing sanity out the window sometimes, but… to Miz, he'd always seemed really in control of himself. What he was going to do.

This was the first time she'd actually seen him struggle with anything like a choice, really. Struggle with making a choice and a decision, and then struggle even more with following through on it, on something he'd said that he'd do.

And, well… she could understand that, especially given the circumstances. Trying to balance the needs of two siblings could be really hard, sometimes. But… how could she reassure him? How could she help him understand that she didn't want to leave him either?

"-Even if I really want to," Bill told her, "I don't want to. -I'm trying," he told her, looking back at her. "I want you to stay with me. I want you to want to stay with me," he told her, "And I want you to stay." And he knew that they both knew that, really, all three of those things were different.

"And I want to stay with you too." Miz told him. "I don't want to leave either. But there are more things I want, too. I want to see my friends again. I want to see my children again." She sighed. "I want to do that. Just as much as I want to be with you."

"I know," Bill told her. "I know that! I don't want to stop you, I just- I want to stop you, but I don't, because stopping you is worse-" ('unless you die and don't come back' he thought - but he couldn't let himself think that there was any real possibility of that ever happening, he had to trust that she wouldn't let that happen to herself again and would call and come to him for help if she thought about doing it, or anyone tried to do it to her; if he couldn't believe that, then he'd NEVER be able to let himself let her go - and he tightened his arms around his Self, hands in to keep himself from even be able to try to even start to grab her)

"-but-" He looked even more agitated, actually looking almost human for once, in Miz's eyes, the way his shoulders came up, the way he was holding himself. "Liam-" He clamped down on his lips quickly, shuddering slightly, then shook him head and said, "He never went anywhere. It's hard," he told her, looking up at her again. "-It's hard." And it finally occurred to Miz that what her brother was doing right now? Was something her brother had never really had to think about before, let alone try to follow through on. This was something completely new for him, and… he really didn't know how to handle it, did he?

"You're just worried. And scared." Miz said to him, explained for him, trying to help him understand himself. "You're afraid I won't come back, that I wouldn't be able to. Or that something bad would happen to me once I Ieave your sight." And she thought of what she could do to make him feel better about this.

"-I'm 'afraid' that you're going to get lonely again and that lizard of yours is going to talk you into killing yourself forever instead of taking that escape hatch immediately to get away from it and coming to ME," Bill hissed out at her rather angrily, but Miz didn't have to be a trained psychologist to know that he was projecting at least a little, because it was definitely easier for him to be angry at somebody else about everything than for him to… think that he might not be there for her when she needed him.

"...Back when I was human," Miz admitted softly, "My sister moved out for college. And… she never moved back in. She left our parents house the first chance she got and never looked back." She fiddled with her hands. "And part of me felt really sad that she left. I understood why she did that, but it still hurt that she left me and our other sister behind. I… know she couldn't have taken us with her, but it was still hard to just… not have her there anymore." Miz wasn't exactly sure where she was going with this, but it was still...

"And I didn't get to see her very much anymore. But I still went to visit when I could. It was hard to find the time or the means." Miz sighed. "And that sucked. But, here and now," she gestured around them. "I can come and go as I want. And no one, not Dad, not Time Baby, not even my own fucking depression, is going to stop me from coming to see you again." Miz stared at Bill firmly. "I love you," she told him. "And so long as I do, I won't hurt you by leaving you alone. So I'm not going to die and leave you. And I won't ever stop loving you either." She paused to let that sink in. "That's what I've decided. On how I feel. How I WANT to feel."

And Bill paused, seeming to hang in the air for a very long frozen moment.

And in response to this declaration of love from his sister, Bill said to her: "Then you'd better headband that stupid lizard of yours immediately once you get back, so it can't mess around with your 'Soul' and make you do anything like that, even if it wanted to." His eyes bored into her own, and boy did he look grim. "Or headband yourself away from him straightaway, so that he can't get at you that way, instead." He straightened slightly in place. "I don't want it, or anyone else, pushing around your Mind or your Heart or your Soul, telling you what you should think or feel or be, anymore ever again. You know how to do that now, so use it," Bill told her firmly, but he himself seemed to be vibrating slightly in place.

...Ah. Well. -Her brother, practical and eye-on-the-prize as ever. ...Miz guessed this was his big brother super-overprotective-right-now way of saying, 'I don't want you to get hurt again' and 'I love you, too'.

"I'm not going to die and leave you, either," Bill told her next, to her slight surprise, because she'd thought he was done, that that was all he was going to say to her then. "No takebacks. I meant it, and I mean it, and you meant it, and you mean it. So."

Miz blinked as she remembered that, well, that was almost exactly how they'd decided to become brother and sister to begin with; they'd done that with almost the exact same phrasing. And if her brother really was offering what he just had... "So… I guess…" she rubbed her arm. "I guess, you should teach me how to break my bond with dad first. That… would probably help." She didn't want to break her bond, but… If it would help make her brother feel even just a little bit better about her 'homelife' situation...

Bill let out a slight huff. "'Breaking a 'bond' is about as useful as trying to lock you into, or out of, a dimensional set," he told her, looking away from her for a moment. "There are always ways around it, and you have to lock and block every way that something like that can be done." He glanced back at her. "I showed you my own way of getting back here, that was sort of like using the Doors, and it worked for you," he told her slowly, and she internally winced slightly - she had hoped he hadn't thought things through that quite that far…

...but if he had, then how early had he started thinking about forcing her to stay, and trying to tell himself not to do it? Had he actually wanted her to try out his own method of doing that, to give her a second way to do it and get her thinking about the possibilities of other ways of doing that, in order to actually make it harder on himself to lock her into any given 'set - maybe even impossible for him to think that he might actually be able to get away with pulling that off, once he'd told her that? -Had he actively and consciously self-sabotaged himself on purpose by doing that, to try and keep himself from being able to do that to her later, knowing full well exactly what he was doing - and what the later consequences for him would be - when he was doing it?

Uwu...

"'Bonds' can reform," he told her. "Breaking them is easy, not simple. Backlash is a thing, and can go either - or both - ways; you can influence the way in which the backlash hits, and who, and how hard." Oh man, from the way he was saying this, it sounded like these were just the basics; she was used to how Bill usually explained things to her, now. "Remember when I told you about Karma?" Miz didn't even get a chance to grimace, let alone nod, before he told her, "It's a little like that, except the person-or-thing you had those bonds with can and usually will keep trying to reform those bonds with you and drag you back in, in all sorts of different and very not-fun ways."

"Right. Got it." Miz nodded. So she'd have to be careful with that. And fortify her defenses.

"Sometimes," and Bill got a cautious look, "Sometimes, it is easier to let the bond stay in place, but tie it up in a knot even tighter, along the bonding-'string'. -Make it unable to change, and then block it with a blockage. Make it fluid and shift over all of your surfaces, but not actually get any traction; let it rise to the surface, never let it get any deeper. That way," he told her, "You always know where it is. You keep it, but on YOUR terms. -I DON'T recommend doing that, keeping it is usually worse," he told her, "Except when the reforming bond might dig in hooks EVEN DEEPER, to a place you can't reach, or one that would cause even-worse damage if you tried to rip it out directly. -Layering helps," Bill told her. "You can shift things around, slowly move them out and further-out. The idea of relationships works in the same way," he told her. "Some are grabby; some require maintenance; some will disengage on their own if you leave them alone and refuse to communicate with them long enough - your lizard doesn't sound like that one, though," Bill told her. "It sounds like the hooks-and-grabby type."

Miz tilted a little. "Ehh… Ax is too lazy to put that much effort into anything." But… would he?

"Miz," Bill said, about as patiently as he could on the subject (which admittedly, wasn't very). "Little sister. That lizard is holding on to your Zodiac prophecy. It has a point of leverage over you, for something that you want. It's a type of 'bond'," he told her. "And it is refusing to give that up."

"...oh." Hadn't thought of that.

"And, if what it ends up writing is anything like my prophesy," Bill continued, "Then it will add in that part near the end about 'calling on it' to 'shirk the blame'. -Which is another hook to bring you back in and back to it," he noted, quite clearly, while looking her straight in the eye.

"Okay, headband it is. Got it." Miz nodded. Though she would still talk to her dad about it. Despite brother's paranoia, she just… couldn't bring herself to believe Ax would have anything malicious planned for her.

"A general 'no-touch' layer, to prevent anyone or anything touching your Soul without a lot of effort and you noticing, is one good first line of defense," Bill told her. "Something to stall anything from sinking in, giving you enough time to do something about it. -Next defense would be something that would let you shift any 'bond' or 'connection' you have on or in you to the headband directly; let it take the first hit if it tries anything. Switch and shift-around and shunt - we've talked about sympathetic magic and stand-ins; the basic base-line concept is similar," he told her, giving her the best ideas he could think of at the moment. He'd only gotten so far before, and most things in his own 'set just didn't attack the 'Soul' directly - not the way that his sister had ever talked about it, that is. And he himself had only really started getting a real sense for what she'd meant when she had done what she'd done and explained with those 'Soulless' constructs in the Reverse!Flatland 'set. To Bill, this was all still very bleeding-edge new.

Miz was taking all the mental notes she could. Her power pulsed out, fortifying her mental self, taking her brother's words as pointers for setting the parameters. It left her Self feeling a little tingly before it settled in and down. "Kinda… like this?"

"Good," Bill told her, upon looking her over. "Not how I would do it, but good. -My way would not fit you well," he noted, "Our energy flows are different, and you don't do any encryption." He frowned a bit. "I didn't explain my own bricks and outer-structure, did I," he noted, realizing something as he looked her over again.

"Encrypting my Self would scramble my thoughts worse than they are already. I'd be even more scatterbrained." Miz grumbled.

"Try thinking in a different, made-up language that nobody else knows, then," Bill told her. "That can be a first step towards the idea of encryption. If they can read you, at least they can't understand what they're reading, then. Mostly. Patterns are a thing, still." It wasn't the same as what he did, but then, that probably wouldn't work well for her, either. "-You said that the layers feel constraining before, yes? Not comfortable? Because you have to hold them? The way that you have to hold them?"

"Yeah, like I didn't have room to just spread out when I want." Miz liked stretching, reaching out and shifting and changing as she liked.

"You are used to vessels, not exoskeletons that are bigger on the inside, with as many layers as you want and need to have to provide the necessary protection needed for and from all external threats," Bill noted. "And your bricks are also not the same as mine," he told her. He hadn't really realized it before, but seeing (and Seeing) her for this long outside of any constraining anything... "I use my bricks like a constraining structure to hold me in-and-up a bit, as well as build off of. -Not constraining," he grimaced, "More like… a chair? I sit almost all of myself inside it… but not fully," he noted. "Hats do not surround the whole head; human clothing has holes in it. A body can 'sit' in it, clothing and accessories, if they are made in a way that supports the body they were made for." He frowned for a moment. "Climbing harness, built-and-stitched into clothes?" he tried, casting about for ideas. "My bricks are an internal-external support structure. I can lean against parts of myself. Physical muscle and tendons rest on bones; I rest up-and-against my 'outer' bricks and brick-lines; they are solid. I don't usually change them," he told her. "See?" And he turned about in place.

Miz blinked. Because her brother most certainly did not look like a triangle just then, let alone have any 'brick pattern' on him, but...

...she could see the anchor standing out fully now, as he turned. It didn't look like a symbol on his back when he was like this; instead, it seemed to stay under the 'skin' and run through him, to curl down and into his center and seem to almost vanish there, to trace back to...

...but that wasn't the only thing that she saw. Some of the lines of energy of him seemed to pulse a little bit stronger against the others now, as if he was leaning against things, particular parts of his thoughts and thought- and energy-patterns inside him, as he 'showed off', trying to show her what he meant. She hadn't really caught it before, with the whole 'encryption' thing he had going on - especially since the bunches of strands she was Looking at now seemed to shift a bit over time as he went, too - but… there were always some of them there, and sort of acting as some internal something for him, even if she couldn't really read or See every part of him completely, to see exactly what they were actually doing for him. Every last part of him still seemed to be fuzzed out a bit (a lot), even when she still tried to See him. (She guessed it was because he was still pretty self-contained and still not letting much of his sense-able energy, thought, or emotion escape out to her past his own 'surface boundaries'. ...He was probably also still worried about influencing her too much, if she - or anyone else - got a really good look at him; he'd been worried before what that might do to her.) But...

"I'll work on it. I think I get what you mean." She also took this chance to search inside herself for her bond to Ax. It wasn't very hard to find once she actually tried looking for it. She was surprised to note that the bond originated from her. She had been the one to make it originally. Huh. Weird.

And when she glanced up at Bill right afterwards, still in somewhat the same mindset in order to see that kind of thing, a bond between someone and an Axolotl...

"Brother! You have a bond to your Axolotl, too!" Miz exclaimed. Because she could See it. Especially since she'd Seen his AXOLOTL in person. It was clear when one knew where to look.

And, oddly enough, Bill didn't deny it. He just sort-of grimaced at it being brought up and tried to wave it off to her, as he stopped 'showing off' and rotating in place.

"Brother…" Miz pressed him, because she really wanted an explanation for that one.

"It's fine," he told her as he reoriented himself again towards her, "I'm fine," but he was still grimacing over it.

Miz didn't have an eyebrow but she drew one along her top corner just so she could raise it, to make it clear she was being skeptical.

Bill sighed. "...The easiest way for me to take over everything later is probably to trace this connection back to it," he made an odd gesture, "And then trace every other connection it has to and from it going outwards even-further, in order to pick up anything and everything that it would otherwise DROP once I kill it," Bill told her, in almost muted tones, as he hovered there in front of her. "Had to keep something in place to lean on the prophecy, anyway." Though he left out the part where he hadn't had any real connection to the stupid thing in the first place before that, for whatever reason. (...probably to do with whatever utterly stupid kind of thing it was trying to use him as an experiment for; his hypothesis hadn't changed yet on that front.) He'd had to forge one himself to it, in order to even get that Prophecy, as a start. And what it had taken to do that-

"Well, as long as you're careful." Miz told him.

"HA!" Bill said, and that got a grin out of him. Miz couldn't understand why, suddenly, he looked so much more relaxed. "'Free will' has always been a joke, and a punchline," he told her. "So they keep on lining up the punches for it; so what. Doesn't mean I can't still make everything better until it's the broken-unbroken way it SHOULD BE and should-have-been from the start," he told her.

"Pretty sure Free Will in my dimension works differently too. It felt different, when I was up there with your AXOLOTL."

"Everything feels and actually-is different there, in existential actuality, all the way that high up," Bill told her. "That's why I have to be careful. That's why I don't change; why I refuse to." He shrugged. "Otherwise, what's the point? I go up there, change, and then don't want the same things at all anymore? -I'm not that stupid," he told her. "I'm not going to make that kind of mistake."

"It didn't feel like that with my Ax." Miz mused, more to herself than to Bill.

"Probably because you're a 'pillar'," Bill told her. "You're already up at the tip-of-the-top of any and every level that's ever existed there, from where you are over there, already. But the way moving up-in-and-through all the levels is-and-works-and-happens in my 'set, all goes very differently than the way it goes in yours, I think."

"Oh right. Sometimes I forget I'm actually kinda important in my world…"

Bill let out a soft short chitter, then nodded. "And the structure is completely different there, too. So the mappings all work out differently, also. -So why would anything feel the same, if nothing is in the same place, or made of any of all of the same things?" he asked her rhetorically.

"True. Well, let's see how this works…" and she unhooked her bond, let it unravel slowly. She shuddered. "Oh this feels weird. Like… being submerged in bubbly soda or something." She shuddered again.

"Grab onto the end of it; don't let go of it completely!" Bill warned her very quickly, almost reaching for it himself as it nearly started to slide away from her. It would be VERY bad, he suspected, if she let go of it completely, and gave that lizard of hers any warning, of what she was trying to do...

"Got it." She did. "So… do I stick this somewhere?" The end of the bond was very… fluid feeling. Like running her fingers through silky wet sand underwater.

"Make a patch for it, to stitch-and-stick it into-onto?" Bill said after a long moment, his mind going to Shooting Star because of his need for an analogy, and her 'craft'-iness of how she knew how to make clothing articles that were more physical than mental, for him to be able to continue on explaining things via his earlier analogy. "One you can rip off of yourself if you need to? Like a headband, like a piece-of-a-layer, like a..." Bill was clearly struggling for comparisons at this point.

"Stickers!" Miz cheered as she plastered the mental equivalent of a sticky image of a pork chop with googly eyes onto the end and stuck it to the wall inside herself.

Bill blinked. -Not what he would've gone with, but Miz was a bit different than he was in how she worked things, and how she made things work, and what worked best for her, and if it worked? Well, he'd have no complaints! And as for the idea that she'd come up with…

...Hm. Miz had seemed to get along with Shooting Star better than the rest. He'd have to remember at a higher priority level from now on, that both of them liked stickers...

Miz hummed. "Well I have my fortifications and my stickers. Should I get some bubble wrap too?" she teased, thinking of what he'd said about the 'no-touch layer'. "At what point would it be safe for me to go home?"

"If it works, then use it," Bill told her of the bubble wrap, very practically. As for his sister going home… "It isn't safe," he told her. "But you're going to go back to your home 'set anyway, and I'm not stopping you." He looked about as (un)happy as ever about that, but at least he looked a little (maybe slightly) less tense about it now than he had been before.

Miz shrugged and spread bubble wrap around her Mindscape anyway. They'd be fun to pop if she got bored. "So…" She looked up at Bill and huffed. "I'm going to be okay. I'm going to he careful."

"Don't tie yourself up in knots over anything," Bill told her. "If anything, just try for braids, instead." (He actually meant it partially in reference to her 'snarled' and 'tangled' energy, but he also meant it for some of her thought processes and stressful-decisions as well.) "You can always send me things through your blog," he reminded her.

"I know. I just don't want you to stress out worrying over me." She sighed.

"I will stress more later, when we finally talk again, once we talk again and I know that you did not talk to me when you could have, if you don't send me things when you could have. I promise," he told her primly, and it sounded almost like some kind of a threat. ...Where he was holding himself and his own stress levels hostage over it?

Miz giggled. "...well, there are some things that little sisters can't talk to brothers about~" most of which would be due to how embarrassing it would be.

Bill made a confused chittering sound. "What?! -What can't you talk about with me? I can talk about ANYTHING!" he proclaimed.

"Boys I might like?" Miz asked, just to test the waters.

"-I will analyze them for you and MAKE THEM PAY," Bill said to her promptly. "Maybe. If they deserve it and aren't 'good' enough for you. Or to you. -Which they won't be. Probably."

Wow. So this was how Pynelope felt. Miz couldn't help but laugh. "And maaaaybe~ I'd want to keep secrets so they'd be a pleasant surprise later~ who knows~" she couldn't help but tease him, he looked so serious right now.

"I don't like surprises," Bill told her, "They interrupt my plans and require replanning on-the-fly. Tell me anyway."

"I was a surprise." Miz reached her hand up to move her eyebrow again.

"You're not a surprise," Bill told her. "You are a me-that-is-also-a-me. -I would have to meet one of you eventually. How is meeting you a surprise?"

"Me being your new sister was a surprise. Wasn't it a pleasant one? I certainly liked it." Miz pointed out.

"That was a Stanley-idea; he's part of my Zodiac," Bill told her, then gave a slight grimace. "Pretty sure the stupid lizard made them so they're supposed to 'surprise' me with things - and new ideas, and sheer and utter lunacy - more often than I can count on them to count them out. -But yes," he told her, "I liked it. That wasn't because of Stanley, though," he told her. "That's because you are you, and my sister."

"I like pleasant surprises. Well, within reason." Miz shrugged.

"I don't like not-telling you things," Bill noted, getting back to his sister's 'threatened' 'secret-keeping', but with her apparently asking him for a 'pleasant surprise' he had to stop and rethink a few things a bit, then he hummed for a moment. "...'Pleasant surprises' are what I call gifts?" he tried after a moment, realizing that this might be some sort of definition issue again?

"That is one type." Miz considered it. "There are many types. For all situations." She was getting off topic though. "I… like telling you things, and I'm happy you like telling me things too. But sometimes there are things I don't want to tell anyone about."

"If it's not a secret, then it's just something we haven't talked about yet," Bill told her, going the route of an educated guess for that response. (Her morality was flat-ish - more like that Stanford - which meant he should talk with her now about how...) "Secrets have impact, they end-and-start through causality to bad-or-worse decisions by the people who don't know them; holding back knowledge can be dangerous," he told her, "But to your critical advantage. It depends on how you use it, or how and when you hold it back."

And it was at that point that Bill realized suddenly that he'd never actually had a conversation with his sister on how he usually did his own business in his 'set with anyone or anything, or anything at all to do with how he usually gained or acquired knowledge, or when or how he decided to and ever did dole it out, and to whom. She'd only seen so far how he did the things that he did with his Zodiac, primarily… but that was only a small group of people. That didn't even begin to touch upon the demons who he-

"There are things I've never told anyone. Not even to my sisters. And I'm pretty sure there're things you haven't told me, for your own reasons. And I just want to tell you that I'm okay with that."

"Well, yes," Bill said, noting her decision on the matter, and getting back to the point that he'd been trying to work up to with a bit less internal worry than before, as he shared how he felt about... "Calling 'lies of omission' a thing because you didn't talk about a thing yet is stupid, whether you're one or one trillion years old. It's just a lack of communication issue, really." And that Stanford really should just get over himself on the subject, already. "I will explain all about the dimensions and the fixing, though. When we are less rushed," he added, as he suddenly pattern-matched some of her phrasing with what she'd told him two nights ago.

"I know you will," Miz told him, trying not to get too angry about that with him again just then. Because collapsing all those dimensions was just... "But, well, what I'm saying is that sometimes, I won't be able to tell you stuff. Because I don't want you to stress out and get worried." Miz really didn't want to make him worry. It was the same reason why she hadn't told her friends about half the shit she'd been through.

"I wasn't able to tell you all the things we just talked about here, or in my own 'set, over the blog, only because of operational security; it was too dangerous," he told her, blinking as he worried that maybe she hadn't known why he'd left out so much of it. He'd sent her that one note, but… "If it's something that will 'stress me out' or 'worry me', I won't worry or stress," he told her, as he finally realized that he might have to try to directly explain how he knew he was slightly different from her in that way, in the form of giving her a different add-on layer to his earlier promise, as he explained to her that, "I'll just get mad and come over to help you break whatever you need to break, instead. ...Or meet you here, and we can talk things out," he amended next, frowning. "I don't know how much push, pull, or sway I might have in your dimension," he admitted, not really liking to admit it, but...

"Meeting and talking here would be nice." Miz blinked. "We'd be able to see each other, even when I can't go to your world for whatever reason." Then she laughed. "I'll see you in my dreams!"

Bill tilted his head at her, then smiled slightly.

"Your dreams are on the other side of that Door," he told her almost teasingly, while floating in the middle of her 'true' Dreamscape. "I can slide a 'polaroid picture' under the Door? Of me? So you can 'see' me in your dreams there?" he tried next.

Miz giggled, vibrating with a healthy glow. "I meant we can meet up here, after making plans to do so over my blog. So we can be together."

Bill let out a 'breath' again and nodded. He hadn't even considered that before, with the 'broken Bill' issue being such a problem (and her ability to move around the Doors still technically an open question until this visit). -He rather liked the idea, except… "I'll try to think of some ways to automate the capture-of-'broken Bills'-process," he told her. He also still needed to think of a way to do something to similar effect that would work for he himself to use. His sister moving her own Doors around was all well and good, but he wasn't even sure he could do that, even if he wanted to risk what that might do to her if he did it, instead of her. She had been the one to move all those dimensions around in the Reverse!Flatland dimensional set, and he hadn't really watched and gotten a good Look at what she'd been doing, let alone how she had done it; he didn't even know if he could do something like that yet. And if he started moving around Doors inside her Dreamscape like this, without knowing what he was doing, or whether he was forcing something to move that really shouldn't be forced, or moved… Well. -It was something for him to practice on and over using something else (very different than her Doors) in the meantime and in his own 'set, then, he calculated and figured.

"We'll figure it out as well go." Miz shrugged, not worrying over it. "We have time. I'm not gonna die. And neither are you."

Bill smiled. "Not again!" he told her almost chipperly. "Two times is more than enough for me, forever and forever-again."

"Same!" Miz laughed. Then she quieted. She couldn't keep stalling, and neither could he. His body was just lying there back in his own 'set right now, and somebody was going to notice if she let him keep on stalling her any longer, too.

"I'm gonna need to go now," she reminded him. "And part of me doesn't want to. Even as the other part of me does."

And with the way Bill looked frustrated all over again, she knew that he really had been stalling her on purpose, at least a little bit consciously.

"Well, the sooner you get Fister back, the sooner you can find a way to make him leave. And then I'll be able to come back," Miz added.

"I… yes," Bill said, and he stopped. He didn't say anything further.

Miz paused for a moment, then realized that she really couldn't think of anything else that she could say that was any better than what she'd already told him before. "See you soon," was the only thing she could go with.

...And now it was happening. It was really and with-finality happening. His sister was leaving him, and now Bill had to just… let her go and say… and just say...

Bill paused for a moment, thinking of what, exactly, he should say to her, about all of this, right here and now. Thinking of what Miz had said before, and now again. Thinking of how he didn't like or want to let her go; how he really didn't want her to go.

...And then something occurred to him. Something he'd seen - well, read - from that other dimension, something that he hadn't quite understood fully before…

...but from how his sister had said nearly the same thing as that particular person had decided to say, and the situation there, and… all of it, Bill suddenly realized that what that other person had wanted - what Miz, having once been human also, probably wanted - was-

"I will see you... soon, too," Bill told his sister. "I will see you again soon. I will. I will. -And you will see me again, too."

Miz gave him the slightest of eye-smiles as she listened to him and heard what he had told her, and then she turned away from him once again.

And then Miz was gone, out-and-in through her Door and it closed with a sense of locked-finality behind her.

Bill pulled in another 'deep breath' and floated there for almost a minute of timeless-time, staring, before he turned away himself to go back to his own Door.

He would go back there now. He would open that Door, and go back inside it.

Back inside his body.

Back inside the Shack.

He would send her a message on his phone to her blog, put her MizDoll up in his room, and then...

...and then he would bring 'Ford Pines back to life. He would trick that Stanford into it, letting him do it without breaking the agreement outright. And then...

And then.

And then he would see about Stanley.

And then…

...when all was said and done…

-He would finish with these things far sooner than that. And then he would have his sister back. He would. He would. He wanted his sister back, and he would have his own sister again, back. Safe and sound. Alive and well-again, and, well…

'See you later.' See you again soon.

-This wasn't 'goodbye'. This wasn't an 'I doubt I will ever see you again'. This would never be a goodbye, a giving up and accepting of fate and destiny and the 'real free will' that was such a joke here. No.

Just like that other Stanford from that other unknown dimensional set that he still hadn't traced back, separate from his one entirely, Bill knew. He knew what this was, and what it would be.

This wasn't a 'giving up' and it was not a goodbye.

-This was an 'I do not accept this, I will fix this, I will find a way to make this work, and I will defy and overcome and beat into the floor anything and everything and everyone that DARES to so much as think of attempting to stand in my way!'

Bill was going to fix this. He would bring that 'Ford back, without having to destroy or give up anything or anyone he'd been working towards over the course of his full one trillion years. He would find a way to handle things, to make things safe for his sister to be able to come stay with him again.

And then-