Illusion is Reality
Chapter 107
-Existence is upside down-
I found myself wanting to have a game of Maids. I hadn't been able to get into it the last time we tried playing, but I think Pyronica was feeling better, and so was I. We weren't… fine. But we were better. Well, she didn't play Maids anyway but I felt better about starting a game night properly when the idea of playing Maids wasn't equated to that time when arguing happened.
"So… I was thinking… could we play Maids today?" I asked once everyone was gathered in the kitchen for breakfast. Ammy waved a tendril. "I would like to start a new character." Keyhole goraned. "Again? Your maid isn't even dead yet!"
"She's dead to me." Ammy explained. "That's dead enough."
"Fiiine~" I sighed. "Here's another character sheet." I had a whole stack now, just in case. He took the sheet and pulled out a pen from one of his blocks. "Can I borrow some dice?"
"After you eat your breakfast." I replied instantly. He picked up his plate and scraped it into one of his blocks with his fork. "And put your plate in the sink." I reminded him. Ammy put the plate in another block and I saw it rise up from the block beside the sink. He placed it gently in the sink with a tink sound. He never stopped staring right at me. "Ok, here you go." I handed him some dice so he could start rolling for his character. "Also. Good job." I patted his top block.
Breakfast was filled with the clattering of dice as Ammy rolled for his new character. He proceeded to get the max roll of 6 for his Athletic's Stat and low rolls for the rest of his stats. Huh. Guess he was going to have to play a powerhouse this time around.
Stats Types Qualities
Athletics: 6 Pure Roots: Admired Maids and became one
Affection: 2+1 Boyish Stress: Crying
Skill: 2-1 Color: Beige Power: Giant Weapon +1 to Athletics when attacking
Cunning: 2-1 Devil Stats (cont.)
Luck: 2 Monster: Succubus Favor: 6
Will: 1 Spirit: 10
Oh no. He got Succubus again. The last time Ammy got a Succubus character he tried to flirt with the Master. Like, yeah, that's fine, role play as you like. But… Ammy's flirting was… well, hilarious to say the least.
"Ahh Master, would you like dinner? A bath? Or me~?"
Ammy was able to say that line with no hesitation or embarrassment.
But he also said it in a monotone deadpan, and I just died laughing. I don't think I could handle anymore role-play flirting with Ammy's characters. They were just so bad at it! Kryptos saw his character sheet and groaned as well. "Succubus again?" Then in a quieter tone "At least he doesn't have tentacles this time…"
With his new character all set, we finished off breakfast and cleared the table for a round of Maids. Pyronica noped out of there quickly. "Still don't know what's so great about maids…"
So Ammy, Teeth, Hectorgon and Kryptos sat down around the table and I got my divider out to set up the board. I had a whole set built to represent the mansion they worked in. The miniatures of their characters would be moved around as needed. This was the 5th mansion already, these idiots kept getting fired or getting their Master killed and it was frustrating to work around them.
"So, I can't have your new Maid hired into the mansion until your other Maid gets fired or killed." I told Ammy. He considered it, thinking and squinting at his old character sheet. "I'm going to set off the fireworks I've been saving up over the last three sessions."
"Gonna go out with a bang?" I asked. He didn't respond immediately. "I'm going to set them around the Master's favorite hedge animal."
Teeth gasped. "Nooo! I worked so hard on cutting those!" He grit his teeth and moved his miniature. "I'm going to stop you." He declared as his miniature pulled out her weapon, a large kitchen knife. "I will resist." Ammy nodded, his own character pulling out a hand grenade. (I really shouldn't be letting them have half the items they have…)
"Alright, roll opposing athletic checks." I told them. Pretty simple to do. Roll 1D6 and then multiply it with their corresponding Stat. Good thing this was still on Ammy's old character, his new one had a [6] for Athletics. His old character only had [2] and Teeth's character has an [8] for Athletics. Unless he rolled really bad, Teeth was going to win this.
Ammy rolled a [5] and everyone around the table "Ooooh~"ed. That was 5x2 for a score of 10. Teeth wasn't worried though, the only way he'd lose was if he rolled a 1. He rolled a [4] and grinned in triumph. Seriously. A x8 multiplier was OP as fuck. On the board, Teeth's maid knocked the grenade and fireworks out of the other maid's hands. "I'm tellin' on you to the Master, you sack a shit!" Teeth drawled out in his character voice. (Getting the Delinquent Type with the Trash Talking sub-type gave Teeth all the excuses he wanted to roleplay a gangster girl.)
"Curses. I have been caught." Ammy deadpanned. He tended to play his characters as the deadpan stoic (mainly because he wasn't very good at anything else. But that's fine. He was learning!)
Teeth stared at him. "...did you only do this to get yourself in trouble?"
Slow blink. "Yes."
"Well Slash (Teeth's character) drags Ezzie (Ammy's character) to the Master's office." The miniatures moved as needed. "He isn't very happy about the attempted destruction of property."
"Success!" Ammy lifted his tendrils into the air. I had to shake my head. "Sorry. He's not happy, but he isn't mad enough to fire you. He's mainly confused as to why you're trying to do this."
"Success retracted."
I rolled my eye fondly. Teeth was muffling a laugh. Kryptos spoke up, "I'm going to set the hedges on fire and frame Ezzie for it."
"Nooooo!" Teeth wailed. Hectorgon added, in the tone of someone who was watching multiple people walk past a very obvious problem, "I'll be preparing breakfast for the master. Since SOMEONE needs to actually do their job."
"Roll Skill for making breakfast." I told Hectorgon. "And you-" I turned to Kryptos, "-roll Skill for your Fire magic. Unless you're doing something else to set the place on fire?"
"If I use magic everyone would know it was me." Kryptos scoffed. "Besides, such a thing would be incredibly rude and awful of me!" He added quickly. I narrowed my eye at him. "Are you attempting to make this a Luck roll?"
"...yes." His character had [6] Luck, so he was always trying to shift his rolls into using that instead of whatever other corresponding stat instead. To be fair, his stats were pretty low aside from the max Luck he rolled during character creation. He had a [-1] to Cunning, which he hated so much he saved up all his Favor points to level it up. It cost [10xStat#] to level up a Stat. For example, if you had [1] in Skill and wanted it to be [3], you would have to spend [30] Favor points. So Kryptos began with a [1] for Cunning and had a [-2] modifier due to his Maid Type [Pure] which gave a [+1] to Affection while giving [-1] to Cunning. He got double [Pure] so it became a [-2] and that put his Cunning at [-1]. It cost him [20] Favor points just to get his Cunning modifier up to [1]. He was really frustrated with that, since if your Stat was a [0] or below, you automatically failed any roll with that Stat, no matter what you rolled. It was a rather unfair rule, but it made Players have to roleplay harder and get creative with their actions.
In Kryptos's case, he turned every roll into some sort of Luck based thing. Throw the item without looking, blindfold himself and press the buttons, pick a bottle at random….
I hummed as he stared at me, like a puppy who was holding a leash and pacing in front of the door. "Alright fine. Where are you when this is happening?"
Kryptos licked his teeth and moved his miniature to the upstairs dining room. "I'm going to be setting the table for breakfast." He declared. "And opening the window to let the fresh air in." He added.
"The window facing the hedge garden?" I clarified. "Yes. Very picturesque and all that." Kryptos said in a voice much too calm.
"Bitch!" Teeth hissed. Hectorgon was quietly making his roll. "Five." He announced. It was a high roll, but Hectorgon's Skill stat was a [1] so it was JUST a [5] for the roll. So he hit the minimum roll necessary for a success. "You don't mess up anything. But the food is kinda bland." I told him.
"It's fine, I'm gonna level up my Skill at the end of the session." He mumbled. "I'm gonna have to suck up to the Master if I want to get more Favor points."
Favor was given out by the master if a Maid did something to please them. This could be anything from being affectionate to doing something cute and making the Master smile. Favor was essentially EXP. But it was more than just points to be spent for levelling up the stats. You could spend Favor points for things like allowing rerolls for combat or Stat rolls for trying to accomplish an action. There were a few other applications as well, but right now, most of them were saving up points for level up.
Kryptos was rolling now. The die landed on a [1] and Teeth started laughing like a madman. "Hah! Serves you right!"
Kryptos groaned and buried his face in his hands. "Fuck."
"A [1] times [6] is still only a six." I shook my head, mirth around my eye. "You do manage to throw the firework out the window, but it doesn't land in the hedges." I turned the model of the mansion around and pointed at the floor below. "But it does land and explode around the window of the… laundry room."
"Fuck." Kryptos groaned. Ammy tilted his top block. "What's the state of the laundry?"
"Why do you even care? You're trying to get fired." Teeth pointed out. His character was moving out of the Master's office now, heading down to check out the explosion downstairs. "Oh no. Nothing's on fire, is it?"
I rolled some dice behind my divider. And then consulted the various Event tables. Then I giggled. "Yeah, that's not good." Teeth deadpanned.
"Well… good news, no fire." I began. Hectorgon leaned back in his chair. "Bad news?"
"The explosion made the window explode, and aside from the broken glass all around the room, the Dryer is also malfunctioning now."
Teeth clenched his jaw. "What do you mean by… Malfunction?"
"You head into the laundry room, see the glass everywhere. The window is destroyed, there's the smell of smoke. The Dryer is on and churning even though you know that laundry day isn't today and no one should have been using it." I described the scene.
Teeth took a deep breath. "I'm not going near it. But I will poke it with a broom." I checked on Teeth's inventory to make sure he had a broom, otherwise I'd have to send him to find one first. He did. "I'm guessing you're pointing the bristle side toward the dryer?" I asked, to which he nodded.
"You take out your broom and attempt to poke the washing machine. But when the bristles come within a foot of it, they ignite and burn away." I told him. Teeth hissed in a breath. "And… How hot is the laundry room right now?" He questioned.
I heard Hectorgon mutter, "Please don't blow up THIS mansion too!"
"It DOES feel quite warm in there." I held back a cackle. "And getting warmer by the second as the dryer rumbles harder and faster."
"I run for the front door." Hectorgon said quickly.
"Your character doesn't know what's happening in that room." I shot him down.
"I run for the door." Teeth added as his character booked it to the door. "HEY ALL YA'LL SHITHEADS! THE DRYER'S GONNA BLOW!" He screamed as he ran.
"Aaaaaand I'm OUT of there!" Hectorgon made his Maid run.
"I'm heading to the other side of the mansion." Kryptos couldn't make it to the front door fast enough and he knew it, so he went with the next best thing. Ammy moved his Maid closer to the laundry room. "I wholeheartedly enter the sweet embrace of death."
The dryer exploded.
Everyone stared as one side of the mansion collapsed in on itself. Teeth looked up at me. "Am I alive?"
"Yeah you're fine." I looked at the board to see where everyone else was. "Kryptos is fine. Hectorgon's fine. You didn't even kill the Master this time. Ammy's dead though."
"Success!" Ammy repeated. I made his miniature burn up. "And by sheer luck," I snorted, stretching my arm out to elbow Kryptos, "-no one knows you caused this."
"Joy." Kryptos rolled his eye, but I saw the grin he was trying to hide. I turned to face the rest of the table. "So there's gonna be a bit of a timeskip as the Master hires people to repair the mansion. In that time, a new maid is hired. Introduce yourself."
Ammy picked up his sheet and, with more emotion than I usually heard from him, role played the best he could. "Hello fellow maids. My name is Toom and I have been dreaming of this day for years." He even attempted to do a character voice, by shifting the multiple voices he spoke with to suppress some of the deeper sounding ones and letting the high, young voices sound through. Huh. I didn't know he could do that. "I give them all a curtsey." Ammy added in his normal 'voice'.
(I say 'voice' but Ammy, like me, doesn't have a mouth, lungs or vocal chords. So he projects telepathically like I do.)
"Eh, whatever. Just don't get in my way, kid. I'm Slash, and you don't mess wi' me, I won't mess wi' you." Teeth grumbled as his Maid crossed her arms and her kitty ears twitched.
"A-ah… It's nice to meet you. My name's Winnie." Hectorgon said in a high falsetto, playing into his Lolita typing. As they were standing outside, in front of a mansion surrounded by construction workers, he had an umbrella. The downside of being a [Vampire]. He needed some coverage or else he'd take [Stress] damage from sun exposure when outside.
And since Hectorgon only had 10 Spirit, it'd only take 10 Stress to tip him over into his Stress Explosion. I wondered why no one bothered increasing their Will stat yet. Your Spirit (which was kinda like your Health Points, in this case, mental health) was 10xWill. So Hectorgon's Will Stat was [1] and that meant his Spirit was 10. To be fair, the lot of them had pretty low Will. They were constantly triggering Stress Explosions. I guess it was part of the fun.
Kryptos licked his teeth. "I'm Megumin. Here's hoping you don't end up like our last coworker." Teeth and Hectorgon sent him glares over the table. I clapped. "The Master is very annoyed. He is in the worst mood. What do you do?"
"I hide in the kitchen." Kryptos moved his character. "I'm stressed and I do NOT want to deal with this right now." Hectorgon moved his character to the kitchen as well. "I'm not leaving you alone with the food and silverware."
"Whaaaat? Why not?" Kryptos placed a hand on his plane and batted his eye. "I'm just gonna prepare a snack for the Master, he's feeling down right now, isn't he?"
"Well, you keep having 'accidents' when preparing food. So I'm just looking out for you." Hectorgon's tone was sweet, ernest and placating in a way that could only be insincere. Teeth muffled a snort. "Well, while you bitches have it out in the kitchen, I'm gonna give the Master a head massage to make him feel better."
"I would also like to massage the master." Ammy added. I looked between the two. "Well, the two of you go to his office. There are a lot of stacks all over his desk. He's swamped with paperwork. He glares at the two of you when you come in. What do you do?"
"Hello master. I am Toom." Ammy's character gave a cute curtsy. "I'm here to greet you and ask if there's anything you need of me." Teeth grumbled. "Well I'm going to check if there's anything that needs tidying in the office."
"Roll Affection for the massage. Roll Skill for cleaning."
"I rolled a 2, times 3 is 6." Ammy blinked down at his character sheet. "Eh… it's an okay massage. Nothing special. Gain 1 Favor point."
Teeth rolled. "5! Sweet! That'll be a 10 in total!" He turned and high foured Hectorgon. "Okay, you tidy up really well. The master is impressed. Gain 3 Favor."
I faked clearing my throat and shifted my tones deeper. "That's enough. Leave. I wish to be alone right now." The master grumbled, shifting his paperwork and waving a hand at the two of them. They got out of there fast. I refocused on the kitchen. "Whoever is cooking, roll Skill."
"I'm rather upset that Winnie doesn't trust me." Kryptos folded his arms. Hectorgon slapped a hand on the table. "We found cleaning chemicals in your cooking on multiple occasions. Why… if we didn't know better, we'd think you were trying to kill the Master."
"Oh that would just be silly! Oh hohohoho!"
"I'm watching hi-her closely." Hectorgon rolled his dice. "Also, I'm making breakfast. 2 times 2. 4. Fuck."
"You're so distracted with watching Megumin that you burn breakfast." I leaned back in my chair, absently petting Xanthar when I ended up pressed against him. "...can I scrap this and try again?" Hectorgon begged. That was a no, unfortunately. "Kryptos can make the Skill roll for cooking, but you already failed yours."
Kryptos proceeded to roll a [6] and cackled like a smug bastard. "12 in total! Suck it!"
"Anything special in the meal?"
"Oh, there might be a hint of dishwasher soap…" The polytool smirked as Hectorgon and Teeth complained, "Goddammit! I don't wanna have 'ta find a new boss again!"
"You bring the meal upstairs-"
"I wrestle the food away from him." Hectorgon pointed right at Kryptos. "Prepare yourself for battle!"
Ooh~! A fight huh? "Alright, combat has started. Bring out your weapons." Kryptos's maid pulled out a kitchen knife while Hectorgon's unsheathed her rapier. "Straight rolls to see who gets the first attack."
The dice clattered along the table. Kryptos [3] and Hectorgon [5]. Hec got the first move. "You know how this works by now." I turned to pet Xanthar while the two made their competing Athletic checks. Kryptos [2] and Hectorgon [6]. Wow. Hec's really crushing it with his rolls right now. "I activate Karma to dodge." Kryptos declared. He rolled Luck for a [1] and cursed, "Shitty fuck fuck!" Hectorgon's opposing Luck roll of [3] was just the icing on the cake.
Hectorgon's Athletics roll for attacking was a [5x2=10] while Kryptos was [3x1=3] which meant Hectorgon won the combat round. Stress damage dealt to Kryptos was Hectorgon's attack divided by Kryptos's [Athletics] stat which was 1 so… a full [10] Stress damage.
...which got Kryptos's Stress up to 20, and that was his limit. "Stress explosion time." I grinned, I loved this part. Kryptos groaned. "I hate this part!"
""Do it! Do it! Do it!"" Hectorgon and Teeth chanted with matching grins (give or take a few differences in their anatomy.) Ammy joined in the chanting, and after a few seconds, I did too. Kryptos slumped in his seat, "I hate yooooou~!" He whined, which was very in character. His Stress Explosion was [Spoiled Child] so for the next… 20 minutes (since that was his Stress level) he had to roleplay acting like a spoiled child. Stress went down 1 point per real life minute. So, 20 minutes of Kryptos whining and being a brat. The lot of us were stifling laughter at his high, nasally whine.
"I take the plate of food away from him." Hectorgon's mustache twitched. "I'm gonna dump it out in the trash with my own failed cooking."
"Noooo~! I worked so haaaard on that! You meeeeanie~!" Kryptos made Megumin lightly hit Winnie with her little fists, not actually attacking him so much as being annoying. "Why are you always such a jeeeeeerk?!"
"I'm going to [Seduce] Slash." Ammy spoke up. Teeth's jaw dropped. "Already?! We've only just met!"
"Roll play it and make an Affection roll, you know how it works by now."
Ammy turned to Teeth and reached out his tendrils to take Teeth's hand. "Miss Slash, I couldn't help but notice how impressively toned your muscles are. They're very lovely." Teeth leaned away. "I pull my hands away."
"Alright, Affection vs Athletics."
Ammy rolled a [4] times [3] for his Affection for a [12]. Teeth also rolled a [4] but his Athletics was still an awe inspiring [8] for [32] which was a seriously high roll. "Teeth wins the encounter, role play the result."
"I toss a bitch out the window." Teeth pulled his hands out of Ammy's grasp. "Defenestrate away. Also, Ammy is gonna be taking… 32 divided by 3 rounded down is 10, stress damage."
"Which puts me over." Ammy noted down. "Alright, 10 minutes of your Stress Explosion."
In a truly impressive display, Ammy burst into tears. To be fair, he just got thrown out a window. Luckily, Toom landed in a very convenient pile of soft insulation from the construction work. Still, I didn't know Ammy could cry on command. Wow. I'm learning many new things this session.
"Damn succo-bitch." Teeth complained. His character was a Delinquent, so he had waaaay too much fun with the tough talk. "Welp, I'm going to clean the mansion." He went off to do so. "If I clean well, can I get some Favor?"
"Well… the place IS kind of a mess because of the construction…" I considered it, peering around the mansion. "Alright, Skill for cleaning. But you realize..." I had to address it. "There's still no breakfast."
"...shit. Right. I guess I'll go check on the kitchen to see if anyone else made breakfast." the mouth moved his character, no meta gaming after all. Slash saw Megumin and Winnie scuffling in the hallway. "Yo, what's happening here?"
"Nothing, just… making sure Master doesn't eat anything deadly."
"This lack of faith in my cooking abilities really hurts my feelings, ya know?"
"It's not your cooking I'm worried about."
Teeth shrugged. "Well, whatever you two, I'm gonna go make breakfast." He rolled his die. "4 times 2 is 8. Eh… I think that's good enough?" I gave him the affirmative so he sent his character off to set up the dining room for Master's breakfast. He got 1 Favor for it.
"I would like to spend today watching the construction workers." Ammy chimed in. We all looked over at him. "Okaaaaay?" I refocused on Teeth. "So while you're in the Master's room, make a Cunning check." If this was DD&MD, I'd be asking for a Perception check. But here in Maids, we only had Cunning. Teeth rolled a [6] and I was actually very glad he did. "That's a 12 in total." The mouth looked up at me, "I'm kinda worried you made me roll that."
"Well, with a 12, you notice the little red dot moving across the Master's desk and travelling up to his head. Right between the eyes."
"Shit." Teeth deadpanned. "SHIT!" he said much louder as it fully dawned on him what was about to happen. "I grab him out of the way!"
"Athletics." I wasn't too worried, even if he rolled a 1 on the die, it'd still be an 8, which was enough to be at least a partial success even if I was setting the difficulty higher.
"3 times 8-"
"You dive forward and pull the Master down just in time. You hear the glass shatter and his desk crack from the bullet."
"I head up to the office at the sound!" Hectorgon moved his character up. Kryptos was leaning close to the mansion and examining it. "I wanna see where that shot came from."
"How do you plan to do that?"
"I'm gonna check the office and look at the bullet hole to calculate the trajectory."
"Can your character do that?"
"I can do that!" Kryptos insisted. "Sure, try it." I'm reminded of Warhammer now...
Everyone else groaned as Kryptos pulled out a ruler ("Do you really carry that everywhere?!") and bent over the table to use the straight edge to connect between the holes and squinted down the line to the tree house. "Always hated that tree house…" he glanced over at me. "Can my character realize what I just did?"
"I'll need you to make a Cunning roll for it."
"Ok. I really wanna take down that stupid assassin." Kryptos blew on his dice and rolled them.
"Why do you even care? You've been trying to kill the master since day one." Hectorgon sounded legitimately confused. Kryptos tossed his dice. "If anyone's gonna kill that man, it'll be ME."
"Fair." We all agreed. He looked down at the die. A [2]. He sighed. "I spend a Favor point to reroll." I allowed it. A [4] this time. Still not good, like I said, his character didn't have very good Cunning after all. He groaned, face planting on the table. "Stupid negative two modifier."
I felt bad, and I also wanted them to find the assassin. "Anyone else wanna roll Cunning to find the shooter?"
"I will." Hectorgon raised his hand before rolling a die. "Max 6." I cheered, as did Kryptos. "Alright. With a 12, you noticed the trajectory of where the bullet came from." Hectorgon pointed dramatically out the window. "To the treehouse!"
I played a sound effect of the old Batman cartoon scene transition.
"You all make it to the tree house in record time, except Ammy, since you're still hanging out with the construction workers." He waved a tendril, "It's calming~"
"The treehouse is isolated, with no nearby structures. And you haven't seen anyone come down, so you're pretty sure the sniper is still in there." I moved the map around to show the tree and all their miniatures at the base. "What do you do?"
"Do we have anything we can use as shields?" Kryptos peered around the garden. "Can I roll Luck to find something that can be used as protection?" I nodded, he rolled a [1] and cursed loudly.
"Yeah no. You've got nothing to work with." Kryptos swore under his breath. "I'm gonna go and get Ammy."
"Why?"
"I'm gonna use him as a shield."
"I am okay with this."
I slumped over onto the table. Of course. Why had I ever thought they'd do anything different?!
(With BlueBill)
Aaaaaaaah, Bill was so frustrated! He'd just got done with reading through and responding to all of his little sister's Tumblr posts, this after having written to-and-with her (first via Stanley's phone, and next via that 'chat room' he'd picked up on the communications from via that time-distorted hyperdimensional whatsit - and yes, that had taken some time to first check and fully-assess and then decode-it, all three). He'd FINALLY been in a good mood again. And right after he'd finished all that and ended up going downstairs, for lunch, because Stanley-
AAAAAAAAH! That 'Ford was just SO FRUSTRATING! He missed talking to his sister more, he missed getting to talk to her whenever HE wanted-
So Bill stomped back upstairs, irate in the extreme, because what he wanted, he got. For himself. Because he could.
Bill went back upstairs to his attic-room, fully and completely insulated from the rest of the dimension - the rest of his dimensional set, really - and he opened a Door inside it.
He (temporarily) locked Stanley out of his attic-room, and the rest of them from even being able to come up to the landing-area to see inside his own little penthouse attic room-space at all, and he opened a Door.
He opened a Door while still in his body, using the traction that gave him to make it much easier, and then he sat down, then laid down, on the floor of that attic-room of his - now forever and always his - and slipped right out of his body.
It wasn't as though he didn't know how to do it himself at this point, both the Door and the leaving his body without outside help for the maneuvering of it. And it wasn't as though he couldn't have done this earlier, when Miz had left. He'd known he could do it up here, and done it outside with her deliberately. -Misdirection!
Maybe that Stanford and Glasses might be able to pick up some sort of signal or wavelength from the Mindscape outside to have realized this, and definitely the two of them going outside and then doing what they had done at a physical level should have been picked up by those cameras of either Stanley's or that Stanford's that were facing outside, out into the yard…
...but there was no way in Chaos that any of them could have possibly been able to tell what he'd done from inside every last protection that he'd thrown up, put up, carved into the floor, and otherwise created up there, everything else that he'd done upstairs in this attic room of his, to both protect, reinforce, and isolate it. No, not at all, not a chance, none - there was no way, nothing at all, that could be done.
Not by Glasses, or that Stanford, not that 'Ford either - not ANY of them. Bill had tried his damndest to make it the next best thing close to lizard-proof up there, there was no way that any of the others, those stupid humans, could have POSSIBLY picked anything up.
So Bill knew that he was in the free and clear, here. He didn't have to worry about 'Ford finding out and trying to get out, trying to follow him out there, trying to set anything up to get any good decent readings to be able to sense it properly, let alone reproduce it. -As it was, that Stanford was still largely convinced that Miz (and Seb) were really just demons or 'demons' of one sort another, hailing from another dimension.
Bill knew what his other Zodiac didn't know yet. Sixer hadn't talked to Glasses about all of this yet - not the 'multiple Bills', or the 'dimensional set' things - and Shooting Star and Pine Tree didn't know enough to be useful in that respect, even if they had to do a degree that he'd need to worry about. Glasses didn't know, and 'Ford had no basis for even beginning to know with no data on it, or Miz. And Bill knew exactly what Stanley had and hadn't said to any and everyone else at this point. Bill had been watching him closely, right from the start, assessing him. Not just the situation. Not just the evolving situation that they were in. Him.
None of them would be able to sense what was going on up here, none of them had access anymore for the interim, and Bill didn't have to stay.
So Bill wasn't worried. So Bill left.
He set up a hard-hold on everything at all that was and could be coming through that time-distorted hyperdimensional whatsit - because he could now, because, really, he'd been regulating the incoming traffic from that right from when the connection had reconnected again, finally been reinstated again after having transited over from being so connected to that pair of Sensitive Dreamers in the dimension his 'Tumblr' blog was in - really, the two of them now...
... and with a hard 'hold-don't-let-it-through-yet' on everything that was incoming (not outgoing - because he didn't need to check any of that, though he was passively logging it now - because that dimension was almost-completely isolated from any demonic influence other than his, of course!, so he didn't need to, there was no danger there), Bill didn't need to worry about the passage of time between his 'set and any other that Miz might be tossing communications from and through to here, in the meantime.
With that accomplished in short order, before he even slipped out of his body, Bill floated up to, and through, the Door that he'd made-slash-opened-slash-connected to his little sister's own Void of Doors.
Of course, Bill checked it himself before opening it first. Of course he did. He wasn't stupid. He was smart, and he was smart about it.
He didn't bother to wait, no, not really. any floating and waiting that he did was largely incidental. What he did do was float right up to the door, and close his 'eyes'. And raised up his 'hands' on his 'arms'. And waited. And listened.
He listened and he 'saw', but not by 'seeing', or even all that much by 'hearing' as most atupid humans would call it. He felt it. He felt it, the same way that he'd always felt things, back when he'd been a triangle. You couldn't really be a Shape or a Line and get away with not knowing how to feel things farther out than just the sides of your edges, could you? -Not without risking getting yourself broken, the first time you pushed yourself out past a bend. Past a corner. Trying to move past someplace that you couldn't see. Because really, how else could you see around a corner, if you were a shape that was almost-blind to begin with? To Bill's experience, and to his way of thinking, it was essential.
Bill reached out his 'hands', and he felt for the vibrations that he'd still-and-always felt. It was almost like music, except not. Almost like a beat, but not really that either; it was never that consistent. What it was, was new information, just like everything else that he wanted to know, and understand, and collect inside his Mind for later use.
So Bill listened by not-hearing, right at the Door, feeling vibrations directly, right as it impacted his outer layers, and he started to get a mental picture of what was and wasn't on the other side of that Door.
And he knew it was 'safe'. Well... for various values of 'safe', anyway, HAHA!
And Bill was already feeling a little better internally as he dropped his 'hands' again - his own mental projection of them, really - and reached out to turn the knob on the door. Being outside of his body had disconnected his mental Mindscape self largely from his stupid human-ish physical body, and having to listen to such an extent had required that he 'calm' and better regulate his own internal energy flow.
He was a bit more tired now (not that he hadn't been tired, frustrated, and angry before all of this), but he was already feeling better.
He was also already-and-still-again feeling quite driven to visit his sister, or at least get the hell out of his set before he had to burn the whole place down out of a barely suppressed and strongly stoked RAGE.
And even if he wasn't able to visit his sister for whatever reason, he should still be able to float in her void of doors for a while until he'd calmed the fuck down again, enough said the burning wasn't something that he wanted on the outside so much anymore that he just couldn't resist doing it, over and over again. Because that wasn't the plan, that wasn't HIS plan, and he was sticking to his plan, Chaos take it! He was!
And no two-bit little 'Ford Pines, twin-brother of Stanley, was going to ever trick him into swaying from that, no matter how many fingers he had!
"-o Ammy. You got shot. You can't try making a seduction roll on the assassin." I rolled my eye while trying to get the game back on track. Seriously, there was a time and place for everything! Amorphous Shape didn't back down. "Can I lie on the ground and try to do a seduction via dramatic swooning over my injury?"
"Well, while he's doing that, I'm gonna just hit the assassin with a chair." Teeth deadpanned.
I hummed. "Ammy, roll cunning for distraction… fine, seduction," I amended when Ammy attempted to give me puppersnup eyes. "Teeth, you roll athletics."
The dice clattered across the table.
"Three times eight!" Teeth cheered. Everyone else rolled their eyes (if they had any). "Why even make him roll? He's got a x8 multiplier!" Kryptos groaned. Ammy looked up. "I got a 1."
"It's fine. Teeth rolled high enough to knock out the assassin." I waved him off. "Okay. What now?"
"I tie up the assassin. We need to interrogate him." Hectorgon suggested.
"I wanna secretly slit his throat while the others aren't looking." Kryptos cackled. Everyone groaned. "Seriously man?!"
"You know the drill. Roll luck to see if anyone catches you."
"I wanna keep focus on him!" Teeth did his equivalent of glaring with no eyes.
I sighed. Maybe I should make team PK no longer allowed so they'd stop fighting amongst themselves all the time.
"I will take this time to inform you all that the assassin has woken up…"
Bill sighed a bit as he floated in his little sister's Void of Doors, and took another look around. Maybe he shouldn't have been so hasty. Without Stanley's full "permission" this fine, and with no threats to their own 'set in sight, his own Weirdness-powered abilities were all still largely on lockdown. He couldn't even use his Eye properly here and now.
Bill sighed again. It wasn't even something of a scream of frustration or anything, just something of a tired sigh. It was very quiet here, which Bill just wasn't used to - in his 'Nightmare Realm', there was always a background of screaming. But here? Here, the only screaming was him. Him and his own made-musical 'humming', up and up and up the Shepard's-tone scales, always and forever screaming as a 'humming' of forever-rising tones...
Bill floated back, onto his back a bit, relative to the rest of the Doors surrounding him. Miz had done a pretty good job on everything, really. The whole thing really was surrounded very well - not just from the sides, but the top and bottom too - and his little sister had done it in such a way with the overlaps that none of the surrounding Doors themselves could open into the space except the three in the middle here, one of which had its back facing the other. It wasn't quite spacious within the smaller 'protected' space that she'd created, but it did still feel a little roomy.
He'd started out by looking around again with his limited senses, and then almost but not quite testing how contained it actually was, how close all the gaps actually were. And there weren't really any gaps; Bill didn't think that he'd be able to easily squeeze through himself, let alone any other 'broken' version of him.
He didn't quite touch anything; Miz had explained to him about how touching the Doors had had them opening almost automatically and sucking herself and Seb in - even bumping into them had apparently had them swinging open and doing so. Bill had frowned a little at this, but said nothing at the time about this, but it seemed a little contradictory to him almost. Miz or Seb touching them had pulled them in almost without a choice, but a 'broken Bill' could apparently ram themself at the Doors, and they would all stay completely locked-closed?
The only working theory that Bill had for this at the moment was that Miz had said that this place was her own real-and-'true' Dreamscape. Dreamscapes had defenses. Her own Dreamscape had apparently been subconsciously sorted by her own Mind at some point. This meant that there was probably some subconscious mechanism of hers deciding whether Doors were allowed to open or close, and for-whom, and who-with.
Well, his little sister's subconscious didn't seem to hate him being here without Miz consciously being here, so that was a plus. A good (plus) sign. Positive in all respects, really!
Bill floated around closer to and around the two Doors. Back to back.
And then he backed away for a short moment and moved to the back side of his own Door.
He reached out his 'hands' again, and he tried to feel the other side of it, in the same way that he had from his own 'set. But this time, he could feel almost nothing.
So he reached out and tried tapping the backside of the Door, just as an experiment. And nothing happened.
"Hm," said Bill to himself, before floating around to the front of his Door again and reaching out his 'hands' to feel without touching it.
The Door didn't move, and he was able to slowly resolve a few things about the other side from just floating there.
...as long as he was almost-but-not-quite touching it. He had trouble trying to resolve anything if he pulled his hands more than an inch or so away from the door, relative-size speaking.
Bill pulled away from it, then tried reaching out and tapping on the Door's frame.
It twitched. The door didn't open, per say. But the door handle rattled a little.
"Hmmmm…" Bill said.
He tried tapping lightly on the front of the Door itself next, and was promptly sucked right on back through as it SLAMMED open and pulled-
I looked up. Thought I Felt something?
"I can't believe you killed him!"
"What? He was trying to-"
"Bitch I know what you're after! You just don't want any of us to learn anything important!"
"I'm still bleeding out here."
"Just seduce yourself until you feel better."
""That's not how that works.""
"Can someone please get Ammy some medical attention? His last character JUST died! I don't want to have to deal with him making another new one!" I rubbed my face.
"If I roll high enough in athletics, can I yeet him into a hospital?" Teeth seemed way too enthusiastic about that idea. "Can I roll luck to help him get the trajectory right?" Kryptos added. Hectorgon was hitting his head against the table in sheer frustration at the lot of them.
Ammy raised a tendril. "I wholeheartedly embrace this plan. I have always wanted to fly."
Bill didn't quite grumble to himself at any point throughout the process of: falling back through his own Door into the attic, floating back up, metaphysically brushing himself off so-to-speak, slipping back into his body again to get the most amount of leverage for reopening it again, slipping out of his body again, and floating back and up to it, to be opening and going back through it.
(Though he did turn back around and glare at it a bit, as it vanished away on him right after he'd gone through it.)
So. Experiment accomplished and lesson-learned. If he didn't want to be falling through some random Door at any point, he was going to have to be VERY careful what to touch and not-to-touch around here.
It was still a little weird to him, though. The way that these Doors had an almost-physical presence, where they all were stationed presently, in the Mindscape in his 'set, and in the Dreamscape in this-whole-place-hers.
The times that Bill had run into anything 'solid' in the general Mindscape were few and far-between. He could count all of them on one hand. And none of them had been anything but less than benign.
Doors that acted like gaping mouths, that sucked you in like they were gobbling and eating you up greedily. Was that something that had to do with Miz's subconscious, or was it to do with those local stupid-lazy lizards?
Trying to keep them all in-and-contained? Maybe. Or maybe Miz wanted them all sorted into a place, even if it wasn't the place that they all really should go.
Or maybe his little sister's subconscious just wanted them out, except for the broken ones? Though that hardly made any sense to him at all. Unless it was a sort of containment… but then flushing them out into some other 'set would be more-and-safer than keeping them all in, wouldn't it? So the lizards probably had something to do with it, too. A sort of positive-negative pressure, maybe? Like some kind of osmosis-barrier but for Bill Cipher(s)?
Well… Bill had stalled in his next self-tasking long enough. (No, he wasn't nervous at all now - so shut up!)
He floated over to the two back-to-back Doors and hummed a bit more loudly to himself. He tried lifting his 'hands' up close to the surface, within that 'one inch', and tried to feel what he could feel...
"...I can't FUCKING believe that worked." I laid face down on the table, utterly done with these players.
"I can't believe Ammy's not dead." Hectorgon breathed in deeply before turning back to his character sheet. "So, can we just… do something about the dead assassin in the tree house now?"
"Well I'm in the hospital. So I can't help with that." Ammy laid down on the table. "I want to seduce my doctor."
"For the last time, just because your character's a succubus doesn't mean you need to seduce everything that moves!" Teeth was grinding his… teeth.
"I vote, the incinerator." Kryptos made his character nudge the body. "Also clean up all this blood."
"How do all our sessions of Maids always end up with you all killing someone?!" I wailed.
...well, that was… s̝̥̓̊͊̉̈́ͨ͜o̸̪̰͓̪͎͉̦͖̿̔͟͞m̵̡̗̺͙͌ͣ̈́ͪ͂͞e̢̯̗̠̮̺̣̖̔̀̔͘ẗ͉͍̟̳̯̹̪͛ͩ͒̓ͪ̒͟h̢͋͌̅̏҉͏̝̠͕̰̮i͙͈̠ͬ̅͆͐̒ͬ̚n̶̟ͭ͂̎ͯ̌̓̌ͣͩ͟͞g̣͓̥͖̬͖͗̉̈̍ͥ͌̕. Bill frowned to himself as he floated in place. (He hadn't run into something this new in quite awhile… at least not before Miz and Seb had turned up. Maybe he was a little rusty… WELL, if he was, then it was certainly as good a time as any to go off shaking all those old cobwebs off!)
He hadn't had a good way to explain it before, when he'd been trying it in front of his own Door, but after the comparison with the other two, he could say this… What he was feeling on the other side of these Doors wasn't the actual physical or metaphysical space - not exactly. What he was picking up was more of… the structure of how the places actually Worked... or didn't work, as the case-against-these-stupid-and-lazy-lizards may be.
The structure of the setup of the 'set behind the one Door felt largely like his own. Except not - it was disturbing. It was completely disturbing on a level that made Bill almost want to shudder in place, because while it was far far closer to the 'set that he'd come from and lived in… it was terribly, horribly WRONG in a not-so-subtle way.
It wasn't a game. Life there was very similar to his own, but it was in no way, shape or form a game.
It wasn't a Game being played writ large across the entire multiverse by the lizard that wrote it, created solely to host a host of other Demons, all those Demons that wanted to escape from their own personal too-Perfect hell.
And the other 'set behind the other Door that he was almost certain was no different, in at least that respect. But that was overshadowed by the fact that it was far different in many other respects to his own. It was far closer to the 'set and setup of that other 'set to which he and Miz had gone, the 'set behind the Door that he had tossed a full handful of Dreamscape-bled onto.
...and he was reminded of all the times Miz had insisted to him that things in her dimensional set were different. That it worked differently than his own. He… hadn't fully understood what she'd meant until this point; even after being in that 'Reverse Flatland' set, he hadn't quite understood, too busy in Fixing the very most-basic of things to really take a good Look around and truly assess the implications of what-all he Saw. And in being so very busy with everything since then… it hadn't really occurred to him until now. It hadn't really hit him until now, now that he finally understood, was beginning to understand the whole situation a little bit better.
Their sets were not Games. Not one bit, not even a little.
Nothing at all was in any way meant and set up to be FUN there, and that absolutely horrified him.
...He got over it quickly, though. He had to. (Classified it quickly enough as HILARIOUS instead, more-specifically in his need for wanted specificity.) And besides, well...
WELL WELL WELL. ...Well, that just meant that there was that much more work for him to do, didn't it? It was fine! He'd just have to go around fixing up their 'sets c̷͔͓̠̙̣̩̟ͪ̉̍̍ͅo̮̺͂́̽ͣͬͯ̌̏̿ͅm͍̱͚̱̞͍̳̹̞͆͒̇̽̿͗ͦ͂ͪp̢̡̣̫̘̣̙͉̬̜̹ͥ̔͂̆̈̾͊͆̂ļ̙͎ͤ͗̐̄̃͌͗͛ͨë̹̯̆ͨ͆̽̀͟ţ̼̠̼̗̉̈́͢e͖̹̝̘͇ͥ̃̇̒̈͆̌ͨ̕l̤͚̍́ͭ̋̏̅̕̕y̧̤͚̗̱̦ͨ for them, too! It wasn't like he hadn't been planning on doing that anyway, right from the start almost. It was just that, and doing this, he'd met and known the Bills themselves first, before seeing what of anything was wrong in their sets, that needed to be fixed. That needed fixing, oh so desperately.
Now, the only question was, which Door's frame was he going to reach out and knock one of his 'hands' on first?
Bill frowned a bit at the lack of response to his knocking against the frame of what he was almost completely sure was Seb's Door. He'd wanted to try that first for a number of reasons, primary among them that he absolutely did not want to go into Miz own set without her being there with him.
Secondary among them, his many and various reasons, was that he was incredibly curious as to exactly what all Seb's 'set was really like over there.
Tertiary was that he'd thought not much time had passed since the 'hold' that he had set up, and he'd be then hoping a bit that he'd still be able to 'catch' (up to) Miz in the same 'set as Seb was currently living in.
Fourth in the sequence of Bill's thinking was that he really didn't like the idea of going into Miz own 'set in general, almost as a matter of principle, right at this given point in time as a stand-and-test point. It felt very different from his own, to begin with, and he didn't have his full complement of powers fully open to him right-here-and-now in the current -meantime. (Not without straining and possibly BREAKING something horribly in the process of his doing-so.)
...Not that he didn't have a handful of backup plans for that, held discreetly and carefully tucked away in reserve, if the lizard in his sister's 'set WAS stupid enough to decide to do something stupid in outright attacking him. It was mostly the principle of the thing; he didn't like the idea of showing himself to any lizard with any less than his full power open, ready, and at hand for him to be able to use. The last thing he wanted to do in front of one of those stupid things was to look weak, let alone BE weak in some way.
And he didn't trust that lizard-'dad' of his sister's, not one little measly bit.
Bill did trust his little sister, though. And he knew for a while that if she responded to his knock, then he could ask her directly, using her own knowledge (though not her opinion) to inform his own.
And the overriding thing above this all? Was that Bill wanted to see his little sister. And he didn't trust that lizard-dad that she'd claimed as and to be hers. He did not trust it with her, not one measely little bit.
So, in keeping all of this well inside his cryptic and fully-encrypted Mind, Bill let out a sigh with a grimace, floated forward, reached out, and used his 'hand' to knock on and against the side of Miz's Door, on the Door's frame that was holding it, (al)most gingerly.
I sat up. Definitely Felt something that time. The guys were still bickering, Kryptos was trying to dismember the body and stick it in with the burnable trash, Hectorgon was shooting down his idea on account of bodies having a very distinct smell and they'd get found out immediately-
"Hang on. Be right back…" I told them before I slipped out of consciousness and into my Mindscape, and then to the Exit Door.
There was a knocking. A knocking upon my chamber door. But who had come a knocking? Knocking on my chamber door?
I shook that off. I didn't hear buzzing when I floated closer to press lightly, without opening it, against the door. I Felt, the most I could, beyond the false wooden surface. My eye went wide. I flung the Door open and yelped as a body came hurtling against me, knocking the two of us out of my Dreamscape entirely and back into the overworld.
"Brother!" I squealed.
MizBill quickly got back inside his body and told his friends, "Hang on. Pause for a bit. My big brother came to visit!"
"Did… you pull… me in...?" (Blue)Bill asked almost dizzily, as he bobbed more than floated in place, trying to regain his bearings. Then he shook himself. Right. The Door had flung open, the surface had slammed up against him, and… because he touched it, the stupid thing had pulled him right in. Ugh… poor planning. Poor planning... (...and poor judgement, of the judging of speeds, and his own reaction time to things going on in his sister's own Dreamscape Void of Doors. -He'd thought he'd have better reaction time to things in her Dreamscape than that, in a place that was the next thing to being very similar to the place where he'd almost constantly been living in for the past one trillion years - the Mindscape - but now he was starting to think that Stanley really truly might actually be on to something, and that it wasn't just him being in his physical body that had been slowed down a bit ever since he had finally come back.)
"Ehehe… sorry 'bout that. Didn't think it'd be that quick. Hang on while I make you a vessel…" MizBill said sheepishly.
"...Should I try to do it myself?" (Blue)Bill (not-quite-)asked his sister, still feeling a little dizzy, before shaking himself again and truly starting to really get back his own bearings. (He'd almost felt drowned in-)
(When he looked down at the few and motley crew of demons in front of him, who at first he both did and did not recognize, he nearly drew back to attack them, before shaking himself again as he remembered that demons weren't from-the-outside here, and realized upon a few more split-second pieces of moments looking at them that they were nothing like his own set of Henchmaniacs in his own 'set. ...Right.)
"Sure, if you want." MizBill grinned. His friends were looking at the empty space. "Your brother? Seb? Not Seb?" MizBill glanced over at them. "My big brother Blue. You haven't met him yet."
Blue(Bill) blinked again, then fought the urge to attempt slapping himself in the face in the Mindscape (not that he could impact any part of his mental self there). He should call himself Blue in other 'sets and places that were not his own 'set, for courtesy. His sister had given him the name before in that other 'set (and he liked it for this), but he still hadn't gotten quite in the habit of referring to his own Self that way, consistently, inside his own Mind, as well.
"Well, I'm going to be meeting them now?" Blue said, as he started to reach out and get an even better feel for himself of his sister's 'set surrounding him (a rather good idea, in his opinion, before trying to do anything like creating his own vessel in this 'set, with the way that things felt like they all worked differently around here). At least, he would be if he was going to be creating a vessel here, like his sister had almost just done for him (- a process he would have had severe case of mixed-feelings about, which he most certainly did not like to do).
"Unless you don't want me to," Blue continued, "Or if you think that lizard-'dad' of yours is going to be some sort of trouble, if I stay here, with you, while that pink frilly thing is around," he noted with a slight frown as he continued on looking and feeling around at the very-wrong and not-fun structure of the place, almost carefully. (VERY carefully. Because he hadn't quite understood his little sister before, when she'd said- really, he had thought his sister had been talking figuratively more than anything, Miz having started out as human - but the whole place really did feel like-)
His sister blinked up at him. "If you want. I'm sure you'd like them. They're funny." This dimension's Teeth let out a bark of laughter. "I try my best~" he said proudly. "And I'm sure dad wouldn't mind as long as you don't try and collapse any dimensions. That's like, the only thing he really tells me I'm not supposed to do."
"Hm," Blue hummed out. "Well, I wasn't planning on collapsing any dimensions, unless you want me to," he told his sister, giving her a bit of an almost-unreadable side eye, though MizBill did get a bit of an impression from this that he might be offering in case there was some place that she wanted collapsed, that he could get in trouble for her (while keeping her out of said trouble) by doing that collapsing that she wanted for her himself, instead.
"Which one is Kryptos?" Blue asked, as he was almost done feeling out what he thought he needed to know about this horrible place to do in order to be able to pull off what he was about to pull off. (Without doing it that way. He was going to have to expend a bit more energy than he'd thought he might need to, but... it would be better this way, because...) He didn't want to assume right now and potentially get this wrong… that would be a TERRIBLE first impression!
"No collapsing dimensions. And this guy here is Kryptos. Isn't he adorable?" MizBill squealed as he floated over to hug the suddenly tense Polytool. "B-Bill!" He stuttered.
...who had a very good reason to be tense, really, as Blue all but seemed to appear out of thin air with a 'CRACK!' of noise, towering over him, eyes narrowed, GLARING, in all of his female human-ish looking glory.
Kryptos 'meep'ed.
"DON'T THINK I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON HERE," Blue thundered out at Kryptos lowly, two-toned voice in almost a growl. "YOU-" Blue pointed a perfectly-straight finger right up to the tip of the poor polytool's nose "ARE NOT GOING TO SUCCEED IN KILLING MY SISTER." At which point Blue GLARED at him with a look that almost killed despite his being in a fully human-ish vessel-body at-present. And then Blue leaned in and said, "Ĩ̉͂ͥ͢͏͇̗̗̳̰'̢͌̂̅͏͎̬̬̯M̨̮̻̰̩ͤͫͫͮ̚ W̸̮̫̜̘̦̦̲̘̮͇̳͍̦̥̜̯͔̫̹̑̓ͣ̍̃̄̋̉͝Å̵̵̗͓̻͔̞͓̳͕̂̊ͥ̓̎̋͑̈̓̐̍͟͞T̴̴ͮ́̀̑̓ͨ҉̟̮̻̝̭̫̞̣̤̞̰̺͇̪̻̩̠͍̘C̴̷̜̤̥̞̬̖̗̼̯͇̻̤͓͍̱̣̱͒̇̆̽ͭ̂̄ͫ̍̅ͩ͛̄̋͑̿̚͟ͅH̺͖̳̬̠͎̼̠͔̭͚̲̪̲ͯ̇ͮ͂͊̅̃́ͫ̀͘͘I̧͇͎̦̥͔̩̺̦̞̳ͪ͋̆ͨ͡N̡̥̮͚͚̜̥̣͚̜̥͈̲̖̉͂̊ͪ̊ͮ͆͋̿ͩ͆͑̿ͯ̐ͪ̄̕͜͢Ģͯ̿̅̐͐͐͐ͬͪ̔́́ͧ͏͎̥͕̗̱̜̞̣ Y̯̣̦ͩͥͩ̚O̸̝̥̯̱̻̜̦͕̓̈́͢U̢͊̑ͬ͂͗ͣͦ͏̣̮..."
Everyone in the room Henchmaniac was leaning back, away from the terrifying as fuck 'big brother'. Then Amorphous Shape turned to Kryptos. "Wait. So you're trying to kill mother? I thought you just wanted to fuc-"
"Shhhh." Hectorgon pushed Ammy's 'head' down, as Blue's eyes flicked over towards them. "This is all a misunderstanding."
Ammy didn't skip a beat. "Is it a funny one?"
"...maybe…" Hectorgon responded at the same time Kryptos squeaked, "No it's not!"
Blue's eyes narrowed again, this time at all three of them. "Only if you're STUPID enough to think that taking advantage of my sister in ANY way-" - and ah, Hectorgon suddenly realized that this brother of Bill's had no problem with picking up on the meaning of sexual things, even with almost nothing to work off of at all, a bit unlike his own long-time friend - "Is somehow a good idea," this Blue of Bill's all but sneered out at the three of them. "Though I SUSPECT that it's more likely that he's just fooled you all…" Blue paused and frowned a bit furiously around at them all gathered there, "...some? Some of you all," he continued, "Into thinking that is what he wants instead," Blue not quite ended. "Is it your misunderstanding, not mine. I know-and-recognise a grouping of several botched and called-off murder attpts when I hear tell of it," and now Bill's brother was off glower-glaring at Kryptos, as he towered over the poor unfortunate polytool again.
Ammy stared unblinkingly, fearlessly, up at the demon. "Well, all those dates must have been a real waste of his time then, if murder was really his intention." Kryptos gasped. "Guys!"
"Yes," Blue agreed quite promptly. "He is terrible at planning ways to keep you all from disrupting his plans, dates and times, and it is to your credit that my sister has assured me that you would all murder him for it, if you ever caught him at it. But his repeated stubborn and numerous attempts to try and pull it off anyway do NOT speak well for him," Blue told his sister's first offspring, before leaning in further over Kryptos again.
"LEARN TO BE DECIDEDLY LESS TENACIOUS," Blue told him, "IN YOUR ILL-FATED TAKEOVER ATTEMPTS." Blue held his pose for a moment, before straightening up in place and clapping his hands together, suddenly all-smiles and seemingly cheerful.
"-So!" Blue said next, quite cheerfully, "Introductions are in order, yes? -You are my little sister's good 'friends'-of-the-human-variety of friendship, and you may call me Blue!" he told them all, looking around at them all (except for Kryptos, who he gave a hard-eyed glare of a stare as his gaze passed over him once again).
Kryptos stared at him, slack jawed. "I'm NOT trying to kill Bill-"
"Hah! Reference!" MizBill laughed in the background.
"-LYING will only get you into even MORE trouble, little 'tool," Blue told him almost sweetly without looking at him, but with a very hard edge to the bottom of his dual-tone. "I know that you're trying to kill SOMEONE, and by chaos it is NOT going to be one of my own who is MINE."
Kryptos stared before he sighed. "You know what? I don't have to explain myself to you." He growled. "And the one I'm trying to kill is Time Baby, not Bill."
(Blue barely spared him a flick of a low-lidded and still thoroughly unamused glance for that last one. -Anything that was strong enough to kill one of the three 'pillar's that was here was likely enough to kill any of all of the others. A 'likely story' indeed. And to Blue, it made next to no difference to him, in the long-run. If Kryptos really was trying to build a couple of weapons that could kill a Pillar that existed in this 'set here, and the polytool seemed in no way smart, competent, or intelligent enough to create - let alone use it properly - not least of which because he had not been asking Miz, his own sister for pointers - then it was just as likely that he was not storing the actual physical device or spell-components in such a way as to keep it all out of the reach of others let alone 'safing' the information for how to do it safely. At which point, the little polytool might as well have been pulling the trigger directly himself, all on his own, for whatever future device-and-killer would be after MizBill using said weapons.)
"I'm Amorphous Shape." Ammy said blandly, ignoring all the drama. "It's very nice to meet you. I suppose you… Are Uncle Blue?" He thought it was nice to have more family. And this Blue looked a lot like a human. Did mother really enjoy human-looking creatures?
"Miz...hmmm, Bill?" Blue self-corrected, glancing over at said MizBill (and double-checking her-his current gender presentation in the process), "Is my little sister. Other family relationships do not necessarily transfer," Blue informed him. "Decisions must be made mutually, after mutual-understanding. I do not know you; you do not know me. Yet. ...I decided; she decided. We," Blue gestured between himself and Amorphous Shape, "Have not decided. Potentially-yet. Yes? We should also be deciding this ourselves," Blue told him. "What if you wanted me to be a brother instead?" Blue noted, as the rest of the Hemchmaniacs blinked at the two of them upon hearing this.
"That is very fair." Ammy agreed. "I would like to get to know you first, see if you would be better as an uncle or otherwise. I decided Bill was my mother the same way." MizBill cooed and flew over to cuddle the disjointed creature. "I wuv you toooo~!"
Blue nodded once, and did not seem bothered by this display of affection, at least. (Poor Kryptos.) "You should know, that for me to decide this will take much longer than it took me to decide with your mother," Blue told him. "Bill is a me-who-is-also-me. Even if," Blue paused for a moment, glancing over at MizBill, "He is different in some respects," Blue looked back to Ammy, "He is well within what I consider to be my own standard deviations for my own definition of myself. You are another person entirely," Blue noted. "I do not, as a self-guideline though not a strict rule, generally 'make friends' with anyone who has not existed for at least one million years, which usually means no-people, just-demons. And I usually look through several million years of existence of a demon's own history, before I even consider whether I might want to be friends with them," Blue told him, seemingly without any pride or prejudice of any sort, simply and only being informative. "There is added-time for my own self-interactions with them as well. And I have higher standards for family than that," Blue told him. "It may take awhile."
"That's fine. I've got time." Ammy didn't sound like this phased him at all, which it didn't, and Blue nodded, not expecting any less from anyone who might be seriously considering such a family-relationship role with him. (Meanwhile, Hectorgon buried his face in his hands. "They really are related…" while Teeth hissed a laugh through his 'teeth', chortling out, "This is hilarious.")
"I can't believe this." Kryptos turned and floated away. "Fuck all this, I'm going to my room." He disappeared down the hall and there was a loud SLAM. MizBill called out, "Stop slamming your door! I don't wanna have to fix it again!"
"Just make them unbreakable!" was the muffled reply.
"RUDE!" Blue called out after him. "Why don't you make it unbreakable yourself!" Then he let out a 'tsk'ing sound and sent a (slightly dark and highly) questioning look his sister's way. He clearly did not understand why his sister was letting the little polytool get away with such blatant disrespect towards MizBill himself.
MizBill turned back to her brother. "Sorry about him. He's been kinda weird lately. He's normally really sweet." He sighed. "I wonder if he's going through a rebellious stage…"
"...I don't think that's the right word for this." Hectorgon didn't know if he wanted to laugh or not. Poor Kryptos.
"Have you seen him working on something that could kill this local Time Baby?" Blue queried him (and the rest of them). "Or is this the first time that he has brought this up."
"Temporal destabilizer." Ammy shrugged (and Blue frowned immediately at this). "He asked Bill about it a while ago and then started trying to build one." Teeth was motioning for Ammy to shut up, which he didn't pick up on at all. "He hasn't been able to get a working prototype since he's missing the parts he needs to power the weapon."
"How'd you know that?" MizBill blinked. Huh. So Kryptos was actually serious about that? He always thought the kid was joking. Ammy shrugged. "I watch him work."
"You're interested in temporal engineering?" MizBill asked, hoping this meant Ammy got a new hobby.
"Not the problem you should be focusing on here, little sis," Blue noted, glancing over at Bill almost worriedly. (Didn't his sister know how easy it was to turn a temporal destabilizer into a quantum-based one? Miz had to know this if he was giving out pointers on how exactly to do it, right? Both of those packed a fairly significant punch, and neither of those did what Blue would exactly call 'a really good day' to him, let alone his sister, he strongly suspected. ...Not unless the terminology and definitions for things here were incredibly off…)
"I like watching him sleep." Was the being's bland response. "But he tends to stay up late into the night now."
"Awww… the poor baby. I should set an alarm to tell him to go to bed." MizBill nodded to himself. Hectorgon was nearly sobbing into his hands, "Does no one see how creepy that is?" while Teeth patted his back.
MizBill turned back to doing introductions. "Tall, soft and quiet here is Xanthar! He's really nice to hug!" He flew over to the large purple alien, who'd been half dozing off this whole time. Xanthar snuffled when MizBill landed on his back and hugged him.
Blue opened his mouth and raised a hand to object - was his little sister really ignoring this problem within his own ranks with the polytool? Really?!
But then Blue stopped for a moment. And thought about it.
And it occurred to him that his little sister might be deliberately avoiding talking about the issue in front of his other Henchmaniacs right now for some reason. ...Possibly because more than one of them might be a traitor, or thinking about doing so.
...Also possibly because, if his sister had been the one to tell the polytool about it, and Miz had given him all the wrong instructions for doing so, potentially on purpose for whatever reason…
...then talking about it any further might expose that fact to the rest of them. Fine. He would talk to his sister about it later, then. When they weren't being overseen, listened in on, or watched...
"Your Xanthar seems to... like hugs?" Blue noted with a bit of a curious tilt to his head - shelving his objection for now, instead of pressing the point in the right there-and-then - while making (quick but not seemingly-so) "casual" long strides over towards the big purple alien, who his sister was now hugging, strolling up to his side although not coming quite within hugging (or reaching) range of said Xanthar-being-hugged.
"Yeah. He's so soooooft~" MizBill hummed, burying his face right up in the fur. Teeth carefully came over and waved. "Um. Hi. I'm Teeth. And that's Hectorgon. It's nice to meet you." (Blue nodded to them both in formal-response.) Teeth hesitated before speaking up again, "Um… I'm pretty sure Kryptos isn't trying to kill Bill, even if he is being super weird."
"If I thought Kryptos was ever going to actually hurt me, I would have atomized him ages ago." MizBill chirped, cheerful as can be (though Blue looked on at this pronouncement with significant levels of skepticism, given how he knew his sister generally defined 'friends' and 'friendship' by this point). "And I know he won't. He loves me!"
"Yeah that's kinda the problem." Hectorgon sighed.
"Love can be dangerous," Blue noted to Hectorgon, and the shape nearly jumped at the sound of his voice that seemed to go off right inside his auditory-receptors. "It depends on what kind of love. The form of the expression of it is important." ...And when he looked up, Blue was looking right at him...
Hectorgon nodded, faintly. "Yeah, I'm worried too. I know Kryptos. He's a little… obsessed. He… his affection for Bill isn't fake, he truly does care, but he wants something that I don't know if Bill can give. So far, Bill hasn't noticed, and probably won't be able to, but I am keeping a close observation on them. I don't want Bill hurt or killed or anything like that." He focused on thinking these thoughts at Blue and only Blue, if he was telepathic like Bill was, that was the best method to keep their conversation hidden from Bill.
He saw Blue staring at him as he tried to communicate telepathically at him, then Blue looked away.
He didn't see Blue's mouth move, when he next heard that voice inside his ears again, saying, "I don't read mustaches all that well. And I'm not in the Mindscape to read thoughts directly. Subvocalize on whatever you were trying to project at me just then, that my little sister likely heard anyway, or talk later." And really, he wasn't sure if that was creepier than hearing him inside his head telepathically instead, or not.
Hectorgon repeated himself in a low whisper, while Bill was bouncing on Xanthar, distracted as can be.
"My sister hasn't noticed that Kryptos is obsessed with him-her-them?" Blue asked him, as if trying to confirm something he wasn't entirely sure about.
small"...well, Bill is rather possessive on her own. So I doubt she sees any problem with it."
Hectorgon sighed.
There was a long pause.
"Why do you think my sister 'won't be able' to notice?" was what Blue asked of him next, in somewhat odd tones, while he was laughing and then talking with Bill about something else completely different, as Bill kept continuing to 'show off' Xanthar to him happily. Odd tones that Hectorgon, as a parent himself, had a protective tonal quality to them that gave him a feeling that Bill not being able to tell seemed like a very real problem to Blue.
"Well, everytime Kryptos confesses his love to Bill, in a way that expresses what it is that he wants from her, she… forgets."
Hectorgon saw him frown in a way that had no context with what Blue was saying out loud, but that fit rather perfectly with his rather furious, "What do you mean 'SHE FORGETS'." Hectorgon wasn't too sure about facial expressions from humanoids of his type, but when Blue's face smoothed over… if it had been Pyronica, it would seem a little strained. "When does she forget this; how long. Define: 'FORGETS'."
"Ah… well, I think it has to do with the wording of her Deal with Kryptos for him to be her friend. Bill only sees Kryptos as a Friend-"
But Hectorgon had to stop, because he realized Blue was twitching in place, hands clenched into fists. He also didn't look quite the same color as he had before? Though Hectorgon wasn't quite sure about that...
Blue took in a deep breath, and folded his arms and hands behind his back. "Miz? Little sis?" he said slowly.
MizBill slid down Xanthar's arm, raised perfectly at an angle to be a good slide, he knew what she liked, and floated over. "What's up brother?"
Hectorgon stared as he watched Blue seem to take control of himself, with an odd sort of poise, as he said next, "Do you remember when we talked about your friends possibly dying under certain circumstances, which you could not necessarily control if you were not… here at the time, for a thousand years or so?"
MizBill's eye curved into a small frown. "Yeah." He fiddled with his bowtie.
Blue took in another breath. "I think," the older demon began with a bit of a ponderous tone, "That it might be a good idea if you and I sit down and review the wording of that Deal, that you did not do in the Mindscape with them, so that we can come up with a much better one that covers all of those very-new concerns that you have, that will have no problems at all when it comes to that or free will either, in ANY way, shape, form, or substance or the glitter of it," Blue was smiling, and it should not come across as so scary to Hectorgon; frankly he didn't know why it did, it wasn't like the humanoid-looking creature's teeth were in any way pointed, "And you can replace your current Deals with each and every last one of them with something much better. Does that sound amenable to you, dear sister?"
MizBill blinked slowly, thinking about it. Well, if his big brother said so, and big brother was so much smarter and knew so much better about this sort of thing… but there was a bit of a hesitation. "But… what if they don't want to be my Friend anymore when I break the Deal?"
"Then that was a Free Will issue, which we will then handle," Blue told him easily. "But you are very sure that they do not have any Free Will issues with the Deal right now, as it stands, correct?"
And suddenly, Hectorgon knew the reason for that slight thrum of terror running through him.
"So they should not want to stop being your friend anymore, in the nonexistently-short period of time in which the new and better Deal that they will be deciding on and agreeing to beforehand is being replaced by that not-good-enough old Deal they currently have with you, yes?" Blue told his little sister next. "And you can make it a not-nonexistent period of time also, if you really want to, if you are even a little bit not sure about their wanting to be friends or not with you, here. But you don't have to do that, and they don't have to do that either. Yes?"
MizBill nodded at that. "I… I guess you're right…" He flicked his bowtie, making it spin. "I'll call everyone here and get this… settled?" He turned and floated off down a hallway.
Blue smiled.
"I think that would be a good idea, yes," Blue murmured under his breath, though he still looked quite a bit tense from where he stood, as far as Hectorgon could tell.
The red alien breathed slowly before saying aloud, "If it means anything, Kryptos has been trying to get Bill to break the Deal for this very reason. He was worried about it affecting Bill as well."
"-We aren't breaking it," Blue said immediately, turning towards him just as fast. "He is not breaking it. -You are not breaking it!" Blue called out directly in the direction that Bill had left in. "We are REPLACING it with something better, because right now it is not good enough! That is what we are doing, haha!" Blue turned back to Hectorgon. "-Understand?" Blue said, his eyes boring into him.
Hectorgon wanted to flinch back, he really did, but he was the adult of the household, it was his responsibility to take care of everyone, if he went around getting intimidated by people, then what good was he? So instead, he nodded firmly.
"-And if that polytool was that worried about it for any benign reason," Blue said next, turning away from Hectorgon slightly, "Or had the least bit of working intelligence operating in the right-wrong direction, then he would have figured out what the problem was, and suggested changing things in the way that I have, just now. Instead, he builds weaponry that can potentially kill the one he's obsessed with, with a handful of changes," he all but sneered out, making a toss-away gesture with his hand. "What a solution that is."
Hectorgon winced. "I don't know much about magic or Deals," he admitted, "But I do want Bill to be free to think and be whoever she wants to be. Without anything messing with that."
"Then we are in alignment in this," Blue told him simply, staring in the direction Bill had gone off floating after. "We are aligned."
MizBill came back, the rest of the Maniacs in tow. Kryptos was grumbling as he was carried by PaciFire, since he'd been busy sulking in his room. "So, this is my big brother Blue. He came to visit! And… um… he knows more about Deal-type stuff than me, so he wanted to review the one I had with you guys and fix any issue it might have."
"Is he anything like Seb?" Pyronica asked, trying to picture what another sibling of Bill's would look like. Sebastian was nice, very cute. She stopped short when she spotted the human 'looking' person in the room. "Oh… oh my…" She looked him up and down. "Rather skinny. But quite cute as well." She declared.
"You should see me when I'm not dressing down in 'don't stand out from the other humans' wear," Blue said almost-absently of his currently-seen and -worn clothing. But at the thought of what Pyronica brought up, he did take a moment to stop, run a hand through his hair, and keep going, growing it out to the longer length that he rather enjoyed and preferred for it, when he was in a female human(ish) body - because Shooting Star wasn't around to bother him about wanting to mess with it right now, HA! (He 'appeared' a small length of black string and tied it up in a ponytail at the back of his stupid human-ish body's skull shortly thereafter.)
"And no, I'm not like Seb," Blue told her next, as he wrapped the string around his gathered up hair, and tied it off rather easily. "My memory actually WORKS." He'd heard a few odd bits and pieces from his sister about that during (at the time) her second (longer) visit to his own 'set before this. "So there's that." Blue frowned as he dropped his hands back down to his sides. "Also: I do not have any children - human, 'demigod' spawn, or otherwise-adopted." (He barely kept himself from making a small face at this.)
"Ooh I like you." The pink cyclopian grinned.
"No biting," Blue said just as easily as before, though maybe a bit more teasingly this time, with the way he was wagging his finger at her? And the look of his eyes. "I am not food."
At that, Pyronica barked with laughter. "Oh I love him! Biiiill~ why haven't you brought your brother over to visit before?"
MizBill shrugged. "He had stuff to deal with back in his own set. Which…" He paused, turning to Blue. "Is that dealt with? Or did you come over because 'Ford was being an annoying asshat and you needed a break?" That made Kryptos look up. "Ford? Like Stanford?"
"Not Seb's Ford, a different Ford. Parallel dimensions and such. Alternative universe versions of people aren't always the same," MizBill told him.
Blue let out a huff a breath that was close-cousins to a sigh, if not an outright sibling to one. "The second one, and not handled all the way to completion yet," he told his sister. "It was take a trip to the Void, or stick around and start setting everything on fire, because he is so-" Blue cut himself off, but the grabby-hands clawing gesture he then began making didn't look too good to the rest of them. Or the way he was almost vibrating in place as he did it. …Or the grin of glee that he got on his humanoid face while he was clearly visualizing himself actually doing the whole 'setting everything on fire' things.
"Sucks," MizBill said, after waiting a moment for her brother to finish calming himself down, dropping his hands to his sides again after managing to get full control of himself once again. "I'm glad Seb's Ford got over himself. He's actually real nice to hang out with nowadays." MizBill nodded to himself. Kryptos scowled at that.
"...Are you wearing your glasses around this- Seb's Ford," Blue immediately asked of him suspiciously, now completely distracted from any previous burning thoughts that he'd had before then.
"...no?" MizBill admitted.
"Bad Miz, no squirmy feelings at Stanfords!" Blue declared out at him with another huff (not even getting to the being-skeptical part of any Ford having 'gotten over themselves' yet, because priorities). "Why do you always do the thing?!" Blue asked of MizBill in exasperation. "Those glasses are for wearing," he told her, "Not not-wearing! So wear them!"
MizBill whined. "But I like looking at his handsome face!" Pyronica nodded. "He IS very handsome." Kryptos gave her a dull look, "That's the problem!" the polytool complained.
Blue blinked. ...Well, now he had mixed feelings about it, if it was going to have him seemingly-agreeing with the polytool attempted-sister-murderer here...
Blue shook himself. This was distracting from the even-more-important things that shouldn't be distracted from! "-We can talk about this more later," Blue stressed. "Right now, we can-and-should talk about Deal revision and upgrading, now and post-haste. Yes?" He looked at his sister to continue. "What was the exact wording of each of all of your Deals to, with, at, and-or ever about them all, all before now?"
"Right. That." MizBill moved the couches around in the room and made everyone sit down. "Well, it was 'you'll be my friend from now until the end of time'."
Blue immediately looked like he wanted to strangle everyone, always, forever.
"Thaaaaat is not very well-worded, oh sister of mine," he then told him. "You… we all can do much better than that for you, yes? And everyone will always be that much more safe," he added in to the end there next, eyeing them all with an almost dangerous glont to his eye(s). "No more potential problems with unforeseen and unwanted stay-dead-forever death or free will anymore, yes?" he stressed out rather strongly, taking the time to look around at each and every one of the in the eye(s) or equivalent feature(s).
MizBill looked chastised, sitting on the couch beside Pyronica. The Maniacs all looked at each other and then back at Blue. "So, ah… do we need to introduce ourselves or?" 8-Ball asked.
"You can call me Blue," Blue said promptly. "And you can be not-rude and introduce yourselves as Miz writes down the original Deals on actual physical things that we can all pass around easily and look at, and we all look over each one, and also look down and over a written out list of things that we talked about before with the thousand-years issue?" He was perfectly matter-of-fact about all of it.
8-Ball shrank back into the couch. "Okie…"
Blue waited as MizBill materialized some paper product of some sort, and started writing a few things down using his finger, trailing an inky substance as he went. Hectorgon frowned. "Is that your blood?" (To which Blue's own follow-up was a confused, "You have blood in that form, little sis?")
"You call it blood, I call it condensed carbon water." MizBill shrugged. "It works pretty good as ink."
"Do YOU have carbon-water for blood?" was Blue's inside-his-ear posed question to Hectorgon.
"...no I don't." Hectorgon admitted. "I have a mixed liquid of many types of proteins and water."
There was a slight pause, then… "One of these days, I'm going to take a very good Look at all of you three-dimensional shapes that think you're two-dimensional, living in a thought-to-be but-not-actually-flat world instead," was what Hectorgon heard directly muttered inside his ear next, and it confused him a bit. What did that mean? While he mused over this, everyone else introduced themselves.
"Annnd done! I've got all their Deals written down here. One page for each of them." MizBill laid the papers down on the ground in front of their respective people.
"And what you were thinking of at the time that you made each of those Deals?" Blue added next, verbally prodding her as he stood up to look them over himself, flicking his eyes between and memorizing each of all of them as he went. "And what the definitions of 'my friend' and 'until the end of time' mean for all of you and them, each, conceptually and within your and their own separate Minds here?" Because, with Miz not having done his Deals in the Mindscape with them, those didn't necessarily have to mean the same thing. (Which was largely the problem in Blue's mind, in this instance. -It would have been one thing if it had been fair and equal, with both parties in each instance required to have a balance mutual capacity, in what they both considered to be the same definition of 'friendship', but because they hadn't and clearly really-and-truly had NOT...)
"Well, for Pyronica, I was thinking about how happy I was that she wanted to be with me. That she wanted to be my friend, and hang out with me when she wants to, and…"
"...Go on," Blue said, as he waved his hand about casually, and there was a slight breeze that moved towards him as a pile of paper suddenly appeared in his hand.
"...and that I didn't want her to stop being my friend. So I wanted to take care of her always and make sure she was safe, and alive and happy…" MizBill turned orange as he said this.
"That's fine. You don't have to be embarrassed, this is data we are gathering, all of it," Blue told her, noting his sister's color-change. "Write down your definition of friendship with her?" he asked MizBill next, handing him one of the sheets of paper. (He also not-so-casually set down another piece of paper right next to Pyronica where she was sitting on the comfy old couch, before putting down for the cycloptian a pen out of his other hand that also seemed to appear out of nowhere.)
Hectorgon blinked, then had to stifle a frown as Bill's brother seemed to shift from heel to heel a little… oddly, as he straightened away from Pyronica's couch cushion next to her, looking pretty darn tired for a moment there before it seemed to go away… or before the humanoid simply masked it. Meanwhile, MizBill was writing down all the things he loved about hanging out with Pyronica, the things he had loved about her and wanted to continue to do with her, forever.
"Also, who said that wording of the Deal - you, Pyronica, or both? -Both at the same time? One of you singly? Both in succession?" Blue asked him next, after Miz was done writing and handed it over to him, letting him look it all over. "I said it." MizBill said absently, finishing up the long list of what friendship with Pyronica meant to him. Pyronica was reading over his side, feeling rather touched by how much Bill cared.
Blue closed his eyes, seeming to need a moment to compose himself (or keep himself from exploding…). But after that long moment had passed...
"Write yours out also, on your own piece of paper," Blue told Pyronica, tapping her gently on the shoulder, so gently that she almost didn't feel it. Pyronica looked down at the paper and flushed. "I… don't know how to write," she admitted. MizBill stretched out a hand to pat her head. "It's ok. You tried."
Blue sighed in vague annoyance at (the longer delay that would be caused by) this, but otherwise seemed to take this completely in stride. "Tell Hectorgon and have him write it down for you. -Miz, curse him to only and completely write down what she whispers for him to write for the next five minutes, yes?"
The red alien nodded. "I don't need a Curse for that."
"Pyronica can't read it to know that you don't need a curse for that," Blue said, assuming not being able to write met that she also couldn't read since her hands and arms seemed to be perfectly functional. "And I don't feel like listening in on the both of you as you both do it right now," Blue told them both succinctly. "And Bill should not listen in on either of you while you do it, either. -It will be a surprise," Blue turned to Bill to tell him, said sister of his own similar and very-loving type here. And as he told his sister to keep it a surprise for himself, he did it with a gentle but somewhat-reserved smile.
"Am I next?" 8-Ball asked, raising his hand in the air like he thought he had to, to be asking the question as if sitting in a school classroom of some sort, and Blue nodded to him, "Yes. If you want to be, yes. -Miz, curse him unless he says no; otherwise, pick someone else to write for Pyronica and be cursed in his stead here for her, instead?" he said, with a gesture towards said not yet cursed Shape.
"Oh, okay." MizBill turned to the others and they all shrugged and agreed to it. A few Curses later and Hectorgon, Keyhole and Kryptos were seated around the papers, scribbling away for everyone else. "So here's 8-Ball's list…" MizBill held up another filled out sheet of paper. He handed it to Blue to read, and to his embarrassment Blue read every last word of it all off of the page out loud to the rest of them, too.
This happened several more times, with Blue reading aloud what Bill had just written, and Bill not yet getting to read anything off of her friends' own pages. And trying not to listen in on them as they were doing it - it was hard!
And then they got to Kryptos, who Blue eyed rather quellingly as Bill read off himself what he had written down about Kryptos this time - because Bill had gotten a little tired of feeling embarrassed by proxy, having to hear it spoken out loud from someone else, instead of just saying it to all of his friends here himself.
"He's always eager to learn, quick to pick up on stuff, likes to talk through all sorts of theories about why the world works the way it works, scientifically speaking…" MizBill read out, bricks burning a bright orange as he did so. "And the way he always checks to make sure nothing is nearby to get hurt whenever he takes off his gloves is a very sweet sort of care he has, that I admire a lot…"
Kryptos was blushing himself now. Teeth hummed and nudged him. "That's damn cute." Pyronica was gagging. "I think I'm gonna hurl…"
"I, too, have the urge to hurl something, at someone, somewhere," Blue said almost absently (thinking of large heavy objects rather than projectile vomit), speaking with a casualness that completely belied his actual thoughts on the situation with his sister currently. "It's too bad that he isn't as careful not to hurt anyone surrounding him with all of his weaponry, both at-hand-and-finished, and not." Blue picked up the sheets of paper that Kryptos had finished writing, out from in front of him, and paged through all of them, glancing at and memorizing them all quickly. He picked up and went through what Hectorgon and Keyhole had written down next, once they'd finished.
"I keep them stored away safely." Kryptos replied to Blue, rolling his eye.
"And all the knowledge that was, has, and is being used in order to create it?" Blue noted.
"Um… in my head?" Kryptos blinked. "I have some notes on my computer, and Hec's got everything here encrypted against hacking."
"And Hectorgon is the best at all of the security forever and everywhere, is he," Blue said dryly next. "And you never got any of the information that you needed from anywhere else outside of this place. And you never could have possibly been followed, or had anyone else paying attention too what you've been learning. Or ordering. Or buying, for your own use."
Hectorgon coughed. "There IS a bit of a security risk with all your Doogle searches," he told Kryptos. "And don't you get your classmates to be test subjects to your stuff?" Ammy added.
"Or know of anyone who might be able to Look in on you all here, from the outside of things at this location, when and while things are showing up on your computer screen, wholly unencrypted, in their whole-notes form of things on top of that?" Blue also then added for good measure, because he wasn't the only one with an All-Seeing Eye where he was from, and he doubted that that would be too different here. (Not least of which because he was almost absolutely certain that, as a start, that lizard-dad of his sister's was fully capable of looking in on anything and everything it wanted to here, at any point in time. And he didn't trust that thing at all not to share the information around, since it was apparently so talkative to at least some beings here - Blue didn't trust it, not one bit.)
"How very safe you are being, with all of this dangerous knowledge you are working on here. How completely considerate you are acting to all those concerned, in the here-and-now. How concerned you are, for their health and their well-being and safety." And the absolute sarcasm with which Blue had spoken this totally saturated his voice, nearly dripping into puddles on the floor of the Fearamid as it was transmitted to them all as waves of sound moving through the air.
Kryptos winced. "Ok, fair. I hadn't thought about that." MizBill patted his back. "I too, don't always think about operational security."
"I have noticed that, yes," Blue told his sister. "It's a work-in-progress for you, yes? You are working on it and you are progressing, little sis. ...And I am happy to go anywhere that you need me to, to help you with it." The implication being that here was one of those places that Blue thought was needing it (among other things).
"I'm gonna need to hide all my research…" Kryptos grumbled. "And maybe kill a few of my classmates if I can't be sure they won't blab…" MizBill poked his teeth. "No killing. If I'm not allowed to do it, neither are you." He paused. "I mean, I guess you ARE trying to kill Time Baby…"
"If their minds can be read by others, or yours, then you'd have to kill a lot more people than that," Blue told Kryptos, eyeing him sidelong, then Blue grimaced at the look that his sister gave to him over that next. Then Blue asked: "Little sis, you never made a Deal with Time Baby that was about having him as a brother or friend of any sort, did you? Or anything at all about getting along with him at all, ever?" he continued almost lightly, as all of Bill's Henchmaniac turned in place to stare over at him, horrified, as they realized exactly what this newcomer was saying.
"No. I haven't." MizBill shook her head. "He would never agree to it anyway. So I never bothered."
"Good," Blue said, as all of Bill's friends visibly heaved a huge sigh of relief. "Don't say yes to ever doing that with him anyway. ...Not without giving me a chance to go over the entire deal with you, first," Blue added at the end of his sharp pronouncement, at his sister's pout.
"So… what's your verdict?" Hectorgon asked as everyone finished writing.
And at this, Blue gave him a thin smile.
"A question for my sister first," Blue said. "Purely hypothetical, of course!" he added, as he lifted his own pen and started writing down something rather quickly.
It took him about a half-minute or so for him to finish, and then...
...Blue ripped the piece of paper apart into several long strips horizontally, and handed them all over to MizBill.
"A thought experiment," Blue told him. "Before we get into any of all-that that all of you have wrote, written those by proxy and also not. And nothing to do with this really, at all! Just to get the creative juices flowing, HA! -Some of these may match, and some of these may not! -Playing words-lawyering here," Blue told him with a far too wide grin, as he presented the written-on strips to his sister with a flair. "Which of these exactly match any or all of the other-ones, and of those that do NOT match, what is the absolute WORST way that a words-lawyer could make a Deal go bad with these, by pairing any of these the most-wrongly, with the way that all these written-down wants just may not match each other at all?" he asked Miz almost too-innocently.
MizBill looked through the slips of paper. Then he began to lay them down on the ground, building some sort of scrabble board looking pile of papers all laid down on top, the simple phrases written there overlapping and across each other. Everyone else crouched down to read.
And as MizBill did so, those of them who could read started to silently, thought something was a little bit wrong. And they began to realize this, as they each started reading through all those little slips of paper, and started to pick out notice that some of those phrases that they were all reading were far, far too familiar to them for this to be some sort of coincidence in some of the word choices there - rewritten a bit, yes, but...
"What order are these in, from stuff you like to stuff you dislike?" PaciFire asked, squatting to see the paper. "-Left to right. Good to bad. Roughly," MizBill told them all.
"Ha. Forget 'like'," Blue said next, once he saw MizBill was done with humoring one of his oldest friends here. "Play the words-lawyering game this time? -Which of these is going to cause the most conflicting-trouble with each other as part of a 'friendship', that you'd like to laugh at because the misunderstanding is so amusing to you... and which ones are not considered laughable, those misunderstandings that are not amusing to you at all," Blue ended on less than a sour note, almost teasingly. "Talk it out with us, please?"
"Well, I like playing video games together, and talking about philosophy and gardening…" MizBill pointed at those papers. "Not so much the 'taking advantage of financial riches' but I don't blame people for wanting such a thing either. The world is a harsh place, and having somewhere that you'll be taken care of, financially speaking, isn't something to be ashamed of."
MizBill pointed at another section. "I also like honesty. But I don't expect people to tell me the truth all the time. Sometimes things are personal and they don't wanna talk about it. And I get that. I… haven't told anyone many things about myself. I… haven't told you all so many things about myself… things… that I've told other people. And-" MizBill stuttered. "It's not because I don't trust you all to know about that part of me, or- well… but I just… don't…"
"-You have six-hundred-and-fifty-plus billion years of experience along your own personal timeline, and dumping that all into someone else's Mind is not only not-necessary, it is also not useful or feasible," Blue restated for her, picking up the common thread. "And even if it was, how much of them would be them, then, after all that, instead of being just another you?" Blue shrugged, sitting down next to his sister. "The problem is when there is a mismatch in what is considered important, what is considered important to know, what is considered important to share, and all of these similar and differing priorities, spaced out with someone, together with them in space time."
"...I'm also afraid… that they would see me differently if they knew certain things about me…" MizBill admitted. "I like how we are, I didn't… want that to change…"
"Everything changes," Blue told him quite soberly, looking down at the pieces of paper sorted across the floor. "Everyone may also, or also-not. More often, it's 'not'," Blue told him, poking at one of the closest pieces to him, without looking at his sister. "Most beings become more of what they really are over time, until they die. And the longer you wait, and watch, and listen, the more likely that they're less likely to lie. Eventually," he told Miz, "Everyone stops lying. Eventually." Blue paused for a moment. "And sometimes, the lying only stops when they're dead!" Blue told him quite cheerfully, looking up at her as he did it.
"I guess… I don't know what I want to do." MizBill's bricks glimmered. "I've spent so long… trying to be who I thought I was supposed to be. And I don't know what is or isn't me anymore. And, what if my friends only liked me for the person that I had been pretending to be? Or… I don't know…"
"Well, yes, I know you don't know what it is isn't you, yet," Blue told him. "Did you not tell them about the layering and the headband being necessary? ...That wasn't you pretending, though," Blue frowned. "That was unknown amounts and unmeasured levels of passive influence by external other-people, on your mentality."
"I mentioned that I was going to be sealing off some of my powers and stuff. And that I was going to teach dad to do the same," Bill admitted. Keyhole spoke up, "You have been a lot… calmer lately." He shrank back when both Bills looked over at him. "And you're not talking to empty air like you think it's us as much…"
MizBill blinked. "Wait, I do that?" The maniacs nodded. "Wow, I didn't know I was that kind of insane…" MizBill muttered.
"Psychic echoes are a thing," Blue told her with something of a shrug (though he was carefully eyeing her somewhat right then). "You could have heard them from elsewhere, or elsewhen. Not necessarily a sensory problem of unsourced hallucinations," Blue noted. "Necessarily."
"That explains why I sometimes have the same conversations with people that I've already had before… and didn't realize it until afterwards…" MizBill thought about that. Well, no one had really called him out on it before! Why didn't they? Eh….
"...Or is it like talking to…" Blue trailed off, unsure if his sister had talked about any of his as-a-human younger human siblings with the rest of them all before now. If there were things that he hadn't talked to them about, did he have his own sort of operational security that he called some other thing instead? "Like the 'asking a questions' first thing? That my Stanley talked about you, in my attic-room?" Blue asked of him, pointing towards his sister's own front-face 'head'.
"That's different. Zyun-Kei's only there when I want to ask her something. Though I did try manifesting her once, to see if I could get one of those shoulder angel-types of thing. But she ended up in the form of Kermit the frog in a Sith robe, for some reason…" He still didn't know how that happened...
"Did she like frogs and-or robes back then?" Blue asked, perking up.
"I think it was more for the meme potential. She was kinda a troll like that." MizBill said fondly.
"Would it be 'troll-like' for her to show up that way to you, if she could and had any control at all over it? Her manifestation to you?" Blue asked his sister next, sitting up straight and looking thoroughly intrigued.
"Oh my spud, yes. She was all about stupidly funny things like that." MizBill giggled at the memories.
Blue grinned widely at him.
Everyone else was thoroughly confused.
"And what does this tell you about her 'shoulder-angel-frog' manifestation in front of you when you wanted her there?" Blue asked him almost leadingly next.
"That she's a lot more like my sister than I thought?" MizBill tilted in thought. "And that I really needed the laugh, whenever I had those moments when I needed her."
"Hm," Blue said. He paused for a moment, and then he said, as he waved his hand around, gesturing at all and sundry gathered in front of them dramatically, in an all-encompassing motion:
"Can you manifest any of all of them in the exact same way, too?"
MizBill looked around at all his friends. "I have physical copies of their biological bodies up in my workshop. I use them for testing new foods to check for allergic reactions or toxicity."
"No Minds or Souls I hope," Blue said far more cautiously than he sounded, making a point (to make the effort) to breeze over it quickly like that was no big issue or potential problem.
"Nope. Empty. I made sure of it."
"-Good," Blue said quickly. "But not what I was trying to ask. Could the talking to them when they are not physically or mentally-Mind there at that particular point in the timeline be a 'manifestation' like Zyun-Kei, where you Know exactly how they're going to respond and you think and-or feel you are having conversations with them, too? Do they usually respond to your talking to them, and when do they not, how often? Can you tell?" he asked MizBill, trying to help his sister track it down - because to him, possible sensory problems and not knowing where one's own information was coming from, inside or out, was no joke at all. (And this would need to be handled first, even before this Deal issue was resolved, if it might be impacting his sister's mentality to the point where Miz was not actually seeing or hearing what was going on around him properly, to be making Decisions with accurate information from the raw data that Miz thought he was receiving...)
"...maybe. I guess that could be it." It was at that point that Pyronica coughed. "I mean, you're a master of the mind, you probably can do that."
"Can you think of a way that you could tell for-certain, for yourself, that you can trust?" Blue asked of MizBill next, after glancing over at Pyronica, sending the slightest of nods her way quickly. MizBill frowned and then raised a hand. A second Pyronica appeared. She blinked and then looked around. Everyone else stared.
"Holy shit! That's so fucking weird!" The 'Pyronica' cried. "Dude Bill, you never told me you could do this! That's wild!" She cackled and turned around, looking at herself.
"Headband on or layering at all right now?" Blue asked of his sister with a seeming casualness.
"My hat's been modified to be my new headband at the moment," was the response. MizBill sounded a little defensive, not wanting to be called out on being so haphazard with his health, as Blue raised his gaze above Miz's top point to give a significant look at his top hat, long enough that he might have been double-checking its modifications for himself.
"And I assume that nothing is tied to her right now for this to be occurring this way, as well," Blue added to confirm it, gesturing between the two Pyronicas quickly.
"Nope. This is all me. The false Pyronica is actually just being puppeted around. She says what I make her say and does what I make her do." MizBill clarified. Pyronica gasped. "Wait, so this isn't some kinda AI bullshit thing?"
"I know right? It sure doesn't feel like it." 'Pyronica' laughed. "But like, what if personality isn't actually a thing? Or some other mamby pamby shit you and Hec like to talk about." 'Pyronica' said to MizBill. Pyronica frowned. "Yeah, this is kinda creepy. No offense or anything."
"None taken." MizBill waved a hand and the false Pyronica dispersed into mist.
"Is this how you'd see yourself talking?" Blue turned and asked Pyronica next. "Is that how you can and have or would talk about things now, before or now-since?"
"Um, yeah. That thing had all my inflections and everything." The cyclopian huffed. "I'm impressed actually. Not many things can properly capture my sheer AWESOMENESS!" Keyhole coughed. "And humility."
Blue tried not to grimace as he looked back over at his sister. "How long have you known them all, each?"
"Xanthar… over 200 billion years. Pyronica, 110 billion? Ammy's like 90 billion…" He listed off.
Blue looked over to the rest of them next. He didn't like asking things like this of beings he didn't know very well, not without verifying for himself either the events in question or the beings themselves first, but… "Who have each of you not heard my sister talking to who you thought wasn't there, at one time or another." He glanced back over at MizBill. "I will share my hypothesis in a moment," Blue said, picking up a piece of blank paper and writing something down.
"Well… He doesn't talk to imaginary 8-Balls as much as the rest of us." Keyhole realized. "And 8-Ball is one of the last to join the family. Not counting some of the other new members of the family, who didn't make Deals to be Bill's friends."
"He hasn't ever talked to an imaginary Facey before, that I've noticed." PaciFire added.
"And Toobie can't even talk." 8-Ball held up the gelatinous creature.
Blue waited, listening to all of this without making any more changes to what he'd just written. And when they were done, he handed over the piece of paper to MizBill for him to read. On it was written:
If all of the oldest of your friends up to a point are the only ones you have talked to without them seeming to be there, then your direct exposure to them for so long has probably burned mental-copy Echoes of them into your Mind, from long-term exposure. If not, then it is potentially far more likely that you are sensing external Echoes of them from other places and times sometimes when you are thinking about and concentrating on them, when you are letting your powers 'run wild' on you, instead.
Blue was watching his little sister carefully as he read it. MizBill thought about it. "Probably number 1. Number 2 would have my mental projections of them be twisted into something… terrible. Like they'd be mean to me instead."
Blue pulled in a breath, and let it out slowly.
"Do you want me to help you undo number one?" Blue asked him.
"I…" MizBill felt cold for some reason. "I don't know…" He winced. "I mean…"
"...Is it the same as them being here with you, always? Even if they themselves were eventually gone, if that ever was something that happened?" Blue asked her next, carefully, his hands steepled in front of him, holding his chin up, watching Miz.
"...I guess… kinda… I'm… I'm afraid of losing them. And if I really do have copies that could still be them, I… I mean, not that I want to replace them, but if the worst happened-"
"-Do you want the accurate truth, or do you want the kind lie?" Blue asked him next.
"...Just lay it on me. I'll handle it." MizBill had his eye closed, squeezing his hands into little fists.
Blue nodded once, then continued on quite seriously. "If they decide to leave you, then if you use a copy of them to try to replace them, it will not be them. And you will know that, eventually, they will leave you all over again. Because forever is infinity is forever. It will either never-ever happen at all under no circumstances ever, or it will always eventually and forever happen again. And you will know this. And you will know that it is coming. And it will hurt worse, every. Single. Time. That it happens. Again. And again. And again. Over, and over again."
Blue took in a deep breath, and he let it out slowly. "And, eventually, if you do it too many times, you'll know them so well that you will be able to predict them in any case and every event finally, completely and utterly; you'll know, exactly what they will do - wind them up and let them go, let them loose and you will predict their each and every thought, act, action, and move before they do it. They will be pull-string puppets, for you to command. Is that what you call a 'friend', to you?" Blue then asked her. "Is that what you would call fun?"
"No. I don't want a friend who just does whatever I want. That's not the point of being friends. A friend is someone who likes me, and wants to hang out with me and do things I like, because they like to be around me to do those things. But they also have things that they like and want to share with me too."
Blue nodded to him again. "If they grow and change, those 'echoes' of yours, then they will by definition change to be something and someone who is not the same. Who is, eventually, different - someone who is not them anymore, as you remember them, and expect them to be. That is creating life that is not a wind-up doll, or a pull-string puppet," Blue told him. "A different person, a being that is not them. Not anymore. Understand?" He looked over at her. "These Echoes are not them; they are here," he gestured outwards, "Not here," he said, tapping MizBill gently right above his eye on his front-face. "You do not fully-encompass them, and they do not fully-encompass you. And that is just fine for you-and-us all, here and now as we look together forwards in dead-time into an infinity of forevers, towards an unending future that we will live within and See ourselves forward-and-into together, forever, here and now and then-in-the-future as we are always and forever moving forward. Yes?"
"...yeah." MizBill glanced over at his friends. "I like my real friends better anyway," he decided.
"Good," Blue told her with a smile, as he fully-noted his sister's Decision. "Then we will discuss your internalized echoes later." (And, for now, Blue left out completely the thought which he had, which went something like, 'that lizard wasn't doing you any favors at all, even if it might have thought that it was, the stupid thing.' And then, a little more sideways, Blue wondered… '...can that lizard even comprehend getting lonely as a problem that can happen forever?') "As for the here-and-now…" Blue trailed off.
Blue clapped his hands together suddenly, startling all and sundry of the Henchmaniacs who had been sitting there largely quietly - some of them following the discussion, and some of them not following any of it at all.
"-Well," Blue brightly said next. "Time to start working on a better set of Deals with you all! -Between you all, in a VERY fair manner, of course," he added almost ominously next. "Because, let's face it, there are really only two ways that this can really go - and I think you all know which one you want to be going with, if you all truly believe in Free Will, and free thought that includes freely-thinking! HAHAHA!" Blue grinned out at them all in that far-too-wide grin of his almost-aggressively next.
"-And then games!" Blue added quickly. "Because we interrupted you all in your playing here with my arrival just a short while ago, here, yes?" His grin shifted then, growing a little brighter and both less aggressive and angry.
Ammy pointed at the table where the mini-mansion was set up with all their miniatures were. "Yes. We were playing Maids. Mother likes it because it's less combat and killing focused than the Dungeons game. But we end up killing each other anyway." MizBill grumbled. "I really need to ban you all from getting weapons…"
"Oh, do you?" Blue said far far too innocently to MizBill. "Do you really?" Blue said next, and his sister looked over at him, at the grin on his face and the very Bill Cipher twinkle he had there in his eyes.
And then MizBill remembered what little his brother had said about how to handle murderhobo players at the kitchen table, at Melody's own prompting. How very easy it had been for Blue, to come up with a few overarching suggestions at solutions almost immediately, right on the spot.
"Deal-work session to process and complete it all effectively now; stealing your DM status away from you for a game or two with your absolutely fun and enjoyable troop of not-yet-weapons-banned little murderous murderhobo players later?" his big brother asked of him brightly, not quite bouncing in place.
And somehow, MizBill got the feeling that, if nothing else, his friends would probably be very much appreciating his own stylings of gameplay, for a very long time after that, if he let his big brother go through with what he was suggesting with a very big helping of not really well suppressed glee.
"Sure beans. I bet they'd love to play a game with you!" MizBill's grin didn't reassure any of them.
They were almost hoping the Deal reworking would take much longer so they didn't have to go through that.
"HMMM… how long do these games usually last?" Blue asked of them, before almost immediately laughing out, "HAHA! -Doesn't matter! We've got all the dead-time in now and forever for it! Yes?" Blue grinned out at them all next. ...Yeah, they were really worried now.
"But first!" MizBill clapped his hands. "Reworking Deals. Never tried this before, so this'll be a fun new experience~"
The Maniacs let out a collective 'Meep' (aside from Ammy who lifted his tendrils into the air with a monotone "Yaaaaay!")
WELL. The Deal replacement had… largely gone according to plan, as far as BlueBill had been able to tell? Things should surely be better on the 'Free Will and free thought for his sister' part from here on out, at least.
There was the little issue of his sister apparently getting all his 'lost' (well, really 'just' purposefully and forcefully internally misplaced)/small memories back all at once and bursting out into tears on them all, claiming he was a terrible person who took advantage of Kryptos, though.
...Which didn't make any sense at all to Blue, since to him it had really seemed to go the other way around, to his line of thinking, given the fact that Kryptos hadn't been the one of the two of them who had been suffering from the lack of memory-access (and associated ability to respond properly to ongoing events and actions made in their life) because of their unintentional loss of Free Will. Unfortunately, his sister had refused to talk about it with him or anyone else, so Blue was still pretty in the dark on this one - and not in the 'there's not enough light, and I can just spell up a light or a decent-sized burst of fire to fix this!' sense, either. This felt like more of a 'Dark Ages' lack of enlightenment sort of thing, only for him instead of others this time, which made it even less funny and far far more annoying than the loss of that knowledge had made him back then the first time around.
And Blue might have gone a little too far in terrorizing Kryptos into telling him what that crazy tool had done to his sister to try and figure that one out, in lieu of his sister not telling him anything…
...except that he didn't. Yet. (And really ended up not needing to do so at all in order to get the information.) Because Pyronica was doing a really great job of already taking care of all of that for him, glowering at the buck-toothed alien and holding him up by his top while lowering him slowly towards her open maw. Needless to say, Kryptos cracked around the time when his shoulders were engulfed. And once he did tell them what had happened? Well.
Now Blue was thinking that he really needed to have more of a discussion with his little sister about how, in most cases, getting ANGRY was really the better-worse way to respond to certain sorts of things. Like THIS one, especially.
(Blue was strongly considering frying this Kryptos on the spot, despite how he knew his sister felt about the little polytool in general. But that really wasn't the deciding factor here; it was that Blue also knew that it wasn't necessarily his place to step in and handle this for Miz unless his sister explicitly asked him to. Blue was highly aware of the fact that he himself was a guest here, and he was already disrupting his little sister's social hierarchy here quite a bit, just by having done what he'd already just done in helping him fix all of his longstanding 'friend' Deals here. -It had absolutely needed doing, yes, but still. If he zapped this Kryptos for having taken advantage of his Deal with her in the way that he had, and these Henchmaniacs only ended up fearing him more than Miz himself… Blue knew he wouldn't be doing his sister any favors here, if he did that.)
(It was still fairly difficult for Blue to hold himself back, though.)
"Idiot. Idiot. Idiot." The Maniacs were in a circle, Kryptos in the middle. Everyone was flicking him with their fingers. Enough to make him sting uncomfortably, but not actually hurt him in a way that would endanger his health. Kryptos was taking the punishment admirably. "I know. Ow. I'm sorry. Ow. I will accept whatever punishment you guys see fit." He pointed at Blue, "Not you though, just them. They get to decide."
Blue pinned him with a glare. "If I don't think it's enough," Blue declared rather self-righteously, "Then you will get a learning-lesson ON TOP of your punishment for what you did to my little sister, so that you never go doing any of that ever all-over-again." He was still twitching slightly after what he'd heard the polytool say he had done, thus not about to go along with this polytool-idiot's declaration. (That was not up for Kryptos to decide.) "No getting away with just a penalty, either." Blue paused. "Maybe both, instead, a penalty AND a learning-lesson," Blue mused to himself, tilting his head back, "If they REALLY underdo it." (And as much as Blue wanted to burn him down to ash right now, he also realized that these were all beings, not demons-from-the-outside, any of them. So, instead of burning him to ash like he really wanted to, Stanley's way of doing things with learning-lessons and penalties instead of punishments and killing was probably, supposedly, supposed to work better as a better action-to-take, on these who were not-demon beings, moving forwards. According to Stanley. ...So this was probably a good place to be able to try out and then show how Stanley's way of doing things worked not at all. -And then handle things PROPERLY next time, VERY shortly after that, in exactly the way Blue normally handled things like this - the way that they should be!)
"No going anywhere within a meter of Bill for at least a century." Keyhole started.
"No touching Bill, whether or not you are within a meter of him, for two centuries." PaciFire added.
"No being alone in a room with Bill without one of us being there with you, for three centuries." Hectorgon tacked on.
"Guys, I think this is a little much…" MizBill said quietly. "It's not." Pyronica told him firmly. "He overstepped a boundary, accident or not, and we won't let him just pretend it didn't happen." (Blue gave Pyronica a look at that; to him, that had sounded like the exact OPPOSITE of what Stanley defined as an 'accident' to him.)
"No taking Bill out on playdates without one of us being there with you, for four centuries." Teeth was trying hard not to laugh, even as he continued the trend of adding another century onto the punishment for his part of it.
"Pull out his teeth." Ammy suggested. Every Maniac turned to him. """No.""" Ammy sighed. "No one ever likes my ideas…"
"I like your idea!" BlueBill chimed in, grinning, to another series of groans. "Please don't encourage him," Hectorgon sighed, to a grinning "Why not?" from Blue.
And so it went, each of them adding on their own part of the punishment, and a longer time period to go with it. They shot down three more of Ammy's suggestions, to his and Blue's disappointment. And by the end, Kryptos was sulking in a corner.
...and Blue was left mulling over this all, thinking about the consequences of all this, trying to make sure-and-certain that this would all be enough for his little sister to come out of this in a better state than he had been before (besides just the fixed-replaced Deal ongoing), and he came to a startling (to him) conclusion.
"...All of these punishments of yours are just delays," Blue said slowly. "Once the delay is done, what is his reasoning going to be for not doing this again? You will all no longer be threatening his physical person with... nonspecified torture of some sort that you have not yet specified to him, if he does not meet these restrictions and instead decides to break them with inpugnity," and potentially try to trick, manipulate, or otherwise push his sister into doing this thing again, even without the bad Deal in place for him to exploit and leverage, the idea of which left Blue twitching all over again. -Not to mention that these Henchmanics of his sister's would have to be actively following the polytool around at all times and physically there with him in order to stop him, which he did NOT see them having the patience or attention span or ability to actually be able to pull off - which would lead to this polytool potentially getting away with this unwanted behavior AGAIN! Unless…
Blue turned to MizBill. "Little sis, do any of them know curses, to put on him that he cannot break, and you will also promise not to break, to make sure that he is not-doing all of these things that he is not supposed to be doing?" Because anything other than the automatic enforcement of this long list of things was suddenly looking a lot less tenable to him, the more that Blue looked around at all of them, and thought even more about all of it.
...see, THIS was why Blue usually went with killing his enemies, instead of mildly torturing them over time like this in some way. Doing this stupid long-term torturing thing took a lot more work, and he always got a lot less out of it in general! And, once it was done… Blue wouldn't have a 'ready-made excuse' that these Henchmaniacs would agree with to stop the polytool anymore, not until the next time Kryptos tried to pull his stupid shit on his sister, all over again. So annoying! Killing was so much easier, and more permanent besides! (With beings, they would stay dead once he killed them, and he could always bring them back later, if he really wanted to, and they wouldn't have had any time to plot or plan against him in the meantime! And even the demons who wouldn't stay dead got the message after a while, sooner or later, once he killed them enough times. Once they started racking up enough setbacks and penalties and 'time-outs' that they began to realize how much less fun everything was for all of them, as long as they continued to try to fuck with him when they really really shouldn't... they always and finally realized that he was NOT one to mess with.)
"They can't do Curses. Well… I guess PaciFire knows a bit of magic." MizBill said slowly. He knew Paci knew much MORE than just a bit, but PaciFire didn't want to admit to going to magic school, so he wasn't gonna out him in front of everyone.
"If you do the Curses…" Blue paused. "Are you going to keep them on him?" he asked, while he was also thinking 'will you forgive him far too soon for this offense?' as well as 'will that stupid Polytool just get mad at you for being the one who put them on him, and try to kill you harder, if he isn't trying to do that already, after getting away with this before?'
"I'm not trying to kill Bill." Kryptos protested, almost instinctively by this point. He knew he'd fucked up a lot, but that was one thing he was sure he wasn't trying to go for! Killing Bill was like the exact opposite of what he wanted!
Blue looked over at him.
"And I should trust you when you are telling this to me why?" Blue said to him, looking down on the little polytool in far more ways than one. "You are already doing things that could be seen as useful to anyone at a distance who wants to hurt my sister, who could view what you are doing, to steal that knowledge and use it for themselves." Blue's eyes narrowed. "With pure knowledge, supposed ignorance and a claim of no-responsibility if someone else uses what you know in a way that you supposedly do not agree with, is no excuse!" (And to Blue, this referred to the knowledge needed to create a working version of the gun Kryptos had been trying to make, and the polytool's knowledge of what was wrong with the Deal in order to exploit it horribly as he had, both.)
Kryptos sighed, ignoring Blue now.
Blue turned away from him himself, and asked his sister directly, "Do you want me to do it, this 'cursing'?" He eyed Kryptos sidelong. "Do you think that these punishments will in some way be enough that he will not do any of the things that made you cry ever again, at all, anymore?" Blue crossed his arms, staring.
"I… could Curse him, if you all think it's for the best." MizBill looked around. Kryptos called out, "Actually, yes. That would be for the best." The Polytool was glaring down at his feet. "I don't want to do anything to make you cry again."
"...Resentment grows," BlueBill warned Miz, giving more weight and attention to Kryptos's action of glaring than the polytool's (still to his Mind, largely untrustworthy) words. "These sentences are several lifetimes of a Polytool long," Blue noted. "They are not built for this, physically. Physical bodies, physical connections to their Minds," Blue reminded his sister. "It influences how they grow, learn, and think." As a being of pure energy, he'd had to pay very close attention to these sorts of things over the years, especially with his possessions, puppets, and (eventually, his very few and far-between) avatars. "If you do this, he will grow to associate this series of punishments with you. -Will this cause the change in behavior that you and your other friends all want to see out of him as a permanent change, or will it cause just and only his resentment, to a worsening effect?" Because it didn't make sense to Blue to enact things this way, not if it would only make the situation for his sister that much worse. And as much as he liked the idea of this polytool getting tortured in some way for the next several centuries, if it wasn't going to be actually effective, with an end result of being a gigantic waste of time or even worse...
"I don't want him to hate me," was MizBill's only reply. Kryptos sighed. "I don't want to hate you either." He closed his eye. "Maybe… it'd be better if I left," he said softly. That got an immediate, "Please don't…" from MizBill.
"-We aren't talking 'leaving' where you can go off and be plotting and planning on your own without anyone else to see what you're doing," Blue snapped out at him, with a rather large helping of irritation. He didn't like that Miz still considered this manipulator to be his friend, or that he had to act at all accordingly (not wanting to see his little sister cry all over again). "Keep your friends watched-close, and your enemies watched even-closer so that they can all be watched that much better, as is appropriate and needed," Blue noted. He flipped his blue-and-black ponytail of head-hair back over his shoulder absently as he moved back to his original line of thought. "We're talking 'stop conditions' here," Blue told him, "For when things can and should stop once the appropriate necessary and needed change has been seen to have been fully-internalized within you. Conditions and evaluatory measures that you have no control of influence over whatsoever." He'd hardly let a little manipulator get away with something as simple as that, to get himself out of all the consequences of things here.
"If there's any resentment here, it's for you." Kryptos narrowed his eye at Blue. "Seriously, what's with you? You've been on my case ever since we met!"
"BECAUSE YOU HAVE BEEN DOING THINGS THAT ARE GOING TO GET MY SISTER KILLED, YOU STUPID FOOL!" Blue bellowed back at him in pure rage, leaving the rest of the Maniacs almost jumping in place in reflexive and instinctive fear. "If you CARED about him AT ALL, you WOULDN'T be ARGUING with ME about it, you'd be DOING SOMETHING about it already YOURSELF!" Blue shot back at him just as angrily next. "None of them NEEDED you here while they were deciding your punishments!" Blue yelled out at him, gesturing downright furiously at the rest of the Maniacs (who hadn't really been helping at all with any of this at any point, to Blue's way of thinking). "You STILL don't need to be sitting here, growling at ME for what YOU YOURSELF did, and KEEP ON REFUSING to fix! -YOU want ME to stop getting on your case?!" Blue yelled out at him, before strikingly whipping his arm up to point his attached hand out in the exact direction of Kryptos' own room. "GO off and GET RID OF what YOU know and I KNOW is something that will HURT him, and do FAR WORSE of a hurt TO him than to just 'make him cry'. DO IT, before I have to GO OFF and DO it FOR you!" Blue thundered out at him still, angrily. "Or do I have to do ALL of your thinking FOR you?!"
Kryptos shook in the face of this rage. But he did stand up and walk back to his room. "Years of research… dammit. If I'd known someone would fix the Deal I wouldn't have bothered-"
"-if YOU'D bothered or cared about him at all, you would have been WORKING on FIXING THE DEAL in the first place!" Blue shot back at him, eyes narrowing, because that in his mind was the most egregious thing of it all - the polytool had known he'd done something wrong with the thing, and he'd kept on not even trying to fix the thing that was there and so broken, even though he said that he'd cared whether or not it would ever even be fixed! "And if you couldn't think of that, of how to go about solving your problems directly, then MAYBE you should work on being able to think through things like that properly and correctly FIRST." ...And though Blue was still yelling after the polytool just then, this time he actually sounded a great deal less ready to rip Kryptos to shreds for all of his thought-of offenses this time, now that the polytool was actually on the move and seemingly ready to be finally doing something about it.
"You think I didn't try?!" Kryptos leaned out from behind the doorframe. "I asked Bill about changing it up, or breaking it temporarily to remake the Deal with a better wording that DIDN'T fuck her over! But she went into a panic everytime I so much as suggested it!" Kryptos pointed at Blue. "But she listened to YOU. She-" He growled. "She wouldn't listen to me! She was too scared to even think about what I suggested."
"-Because you went at it in the wrong order, with the wrong priority, with no reason to have my sister be able to want to put through the change on his own, at his own discretion, and you 'eventually' gave up after trying to explain it all out differently... HMMM, tell me, how many times did you try this, exactly?" Blue scoffed at him. "After knowing him and knowing about the basic problem he was having, for how long a time with him, now?" Blue turned away from him. "He trusted you as 'a friend' at least as much as he does me, when it comes to all of that 'listening'; because he can think of losing me, while he couldn't even think of losing you. -You didn't even try properly," Blue groused out at the polytool. "Did you even look into how he does Deals, or do any research at all?" Blue muttered out next, crossing his arms.
"I tried! I just-" Kryptos made a frustrated sound. "I just wasn't good enough, smart enough… I couldn't even…"
"Then you should have found a way to either make yourself smarter, or find someone else here who is smarter than you to work with, to get what you wanted," Blue told him without sympathy. "It's not like I haven't done both of those things before myself, when I needed to before. It's not impossible. It's not even that hard to do," Blue groused out all over again.
MizBill reached out to nudged Blue lightly. "Brother, please stop. I… I don't like Kryptos sad."
"-You cried, he should get to cry too, now that he is finally starting to realize everything of all that he did that was wrong," Blue told him, not quite going so far as to wave it all off. "Be fair."
"It makes me sad, to see him sad." MizBill explained.
At that, Blue bopped Bill lightly on the top of his front-face lightly with the side of his palm. "No unstable feedback loops," Blue told him. "Also, he should get to be able to be made-sad, to see you sad enough to be crying, too. That is fair, if you both really absolutely want to insist on being sad sometimes together." Blue bopped him on the front-face again. "Yes?" Blue asked of him.
"Uwu…" MizBill whined in lieu of a response.
"Ahhh?" Blue said. "What's that? Are you not done with doing enough of the saddening yet?" He ran his hand oddly up over the top of MizBill's top-point, not quite and just his front-face, back and forth and back and forth again, not quite a 'mussing up' of 'hair' that was not there, and not quite a tickle either, but-
MizBill still found himself having to stifle a giggle. The sensation was just so barely there and- it was almost not even there and so weird...
"Is it not time for yet more of the saddening reflective-emotions yet?" Blue continued on, not stopping or letting up his almost-ticklish hand motions yet, though Blue was starting to grin. "Are we not insisting on all of the forever-negativity, boo hoo, all is lost, we shall now give up and do all of the forever-crying because we are now stuck in an infinite-crying-loop of all of the never-ending sadness in existence for everyone in all places forever?" Blue both started and ended his bout of chattering at him almost sing-song. "How greedy!" Blue told him, letting up on it a little bit. "Save some for the rest of the beings all left on their own in their own painful and currently crying-needing existence, yes?" Blue said brightly next, as he finally pulled his hand away from MizBill, now looking all kinds of smug at his younger and very-loved little sister.
MizBill giggled. "Fine. I guess I can allow others to have their own sad time. Then they can get their own hugs too."
"No hugs from you, if the 'meter-distance from you' thing is actually going to be a thing for him," Blue reminded his sister. MizBill looked over at Kryptos and got an almost mischievous look. "He can hug this." And MizBill held out a little Bill Plushie. The words 'No bad touching' was stitched onto its back. MizBill tossed it over and Kryptos reached up to catched it, missed, and yelped as it smacked him in the face. At least it was soft. "...thanks?" Kryptos awkwardly held the doll. He knew well that MizBill could see through it, and that this was just another way to keep an Eye on him. Which was fair, he wouldn't hold that against Bill.
Kryptos did look rather put out when Bill flew over to cuddle with Pyronica, who rolled her eye at her friend. "I'm sure Xanthar likes hugs more." Pyronica drawled. "Yeah, but I need to share hugs with all of you as well. Except Kryptos, sorry 'bout this," he added (to an eyeroll from Blue). "'S fine. I know I'm being punished right now." Kryptos sighed, ticking the Bill plushie under his arm. "I'm… I'm going back to my room."
"Wait." The compass paused when Bill called out. "There's something we need to… talk about… isn't there?" MizBill looked very much like he didn't want to talk about this, but he was doing it anyway. Kryptos bit his bottom mouth-part.
"The enacting of the rest of the life extension and-or pause parts for the thousand-year span piece, just in case? Or the I'm going to curse him for you thing, even if it might not work the way you want it to?" Blue asked him.
MizBill gave Blue an almost annoyed look, to his surprise. ("...Or something else?" Blue tried.) "I meant, the fact that Kryptos thinks he's in love with me."
"Which kind of love," Blue said blandly, though he had a feeling that it was probably going to be the eros one (ew).
"That's kinda what I needed to have clarified." MizBill looked really embarrassed about this topic, if the deep orange shade of his bricks was any indicator. "But I need to know what this… is all about…"
"...Put up a filter around you two that filters only sound between you two outwards-from-inside, not visuals or physical hits from the outside-of-it inwards as necessary, while I take a look at the rules-book for this game of yours that I am thinking I will be taking over in short order, once you are done with this talk?" Blue offered, only barely keeping a lid on his wanted-suggestion to add something to it that would force the one-meter distance from the polytool's end.
Kryptos was clenching his fists, the rubber material creaking. MizBill handed Blue a copy of Maid RPG. "We're going with the multiplication rule, as opposed to the multiple dice rule. It's kinda broken, but it makes for more wild gameplay." Blue nodded once, "Noted!" taking the book from her and plopping down on the couch next to Pyronica, paging it open.
MizBill turned back to Kryptos, almost hesitant, and a shimmering appeared around the two of them, Bill's powers being purposefully showy to let the others know he had cast something. Kryptos took in a deep breath, hands trembling with a barely suppressed outpouring of emotion. Specifically, rage.
"I don't think I'm in love with you." Kryptos's tone was deceptively calm. "I know I'm in love with you."
"That's not possible." MizBill responded near instantly. "I can't be loved. Not like that. I'm not worth it."
"Yes you ARE!" Kryptos clenched his eye shut, shaking all over. "Why won't you understand that?!" It was something that always frustrated him. The fact that Bill was so sure, so convinced that he wasn't worth loving in such a way. To the point that he never took Kryptos's feelings seriously, with or (now) without their Deal. "You're… amazing! You're powerful and kind and capable of giving so much to everyone- and they don't appreciate it! But I do! I know the worth of what you're offering us, all of us."
"Being grateful isn't love," was Bill's (incredibly stupid) reply. Kryptos hissed through his teeth. "If I was just grateful for everything you've given me, I wouldn't be feeling like this! You do things to me, Bill! You make me feel all twisted up inside!"
"...that sounds awful. I'm sorry." Bill shrank in on himself. Kryptos facepalmed. "...this is part of the problem. I'm not saying that as a criticism. I like feeling for you, about you. You make me so happy. And even when you're being a damn idiot and disregarding the fact that I can love you all on my own-" He paused, took a step back, breathed to calm down. "Look, I love you. I want to be with you. I want t-to be your partner. I want to be the one who gets to stay beside you."
At this, Bill only looked even more confused and flustered. "But why? Do you even know what you're saying?" He waved his arms around. "I'm awful!" Kryptos was about to take a step forward, but remembered his punishment and stayed put. "You're not as awful as you think you are, and more than that, what if I liked you this way?"
"You don't even know everything about me." Bill whispered. "How can you really love me when you know so little about me?" But to that, Kryptos just groaned. "Because I don't care about all that!" He was shaking again. "Sure, I don't know everything about your past, who you were, where you came from, how you became what you are now- but none of that matters!" He was vehement in this. "You're here now. And I'm here now. And we've got all the time in the world to get to know everything about each other."
At this, Bill looked away. "What if I don't want you to know everything about me?"
"We have time. I don't mind waiting until you're comfortable with sharing."
"What if I'm never comfortable sharing?"
"Then I'll wait forever."
"What if you don't like the real me?" Bill wasn't quite pressing the boundaries, testing. Kryptos actually laughed. "Please Bill. I've seen you in all your moods. I've seen you drunk. I've seen you cry, and laugh and get angry. I've seen sides of yourself you've never shown anyone else in the multiverse, out there-" Kryptos guestured, "-those people know nothing about you. You're crazy, and scary as fuck, yes. But you're nice. You care. About me, about the others, and even about some of those unworthy mortals who understand nothing about you."
Kryptos scowled. "You still care enough to have limits to what you do or don't do with them, even when they're all strangers. Even when none of them give a single shit about you, your feelings or how hard you're working for them." Kryptos growled under his breath about idiots who didn't even understand how good they had it. "You asked about whether my feelings for you were from some sort of gratefulness for what you've done for me-" He shook his head. "Any gratitude I feel is born from being able to understand what it is that you do for us."
Bill shook his head. "Kryptos, I don't want you loving me just for that."
"It's not just what you've done for me!" Kryptos repeated, stressed actually. "I think you're amazing and beautiful and powerful and-" He flushed indigo, "-it's really attractive. Ok? I think you're attractive, and I find myself wanting to etch into you. Make you- I want you Bill! Why can't you understand that?"
For the longest time, Bill didn't respond. Finally, when Kryptos was beginning to regret what he'd admitted, his friend spoke up, "What if I don't love you back the same way?" and Kryptos had known this was coming, he knew, but it still stung worse than anything else that the other Maniacs did to him. "It won't stop me from loving you."
"But that's too sad." Bill glanced up at him, briefly meeting his eye before looking away again. "That's not fair…"
"Bill, I don't want you thinking that you have to love me back the same way." Kryptos sighed. "Sure, I'd really like it if you did, but not if that's not what you want." He waved his arms, looking like he was about to try and hug Bill again, but stopped just in time. MizBill noted that this was BEFORE any Curses were placed on to enforce his punishment.
"...I'm sorry I don't like you back." MizBill finally said.
"Don't apologize for that. You feel what you feel, and it's only fair for you to be able to choose this yourself." Kryptos nodded, looking rather pained, but he was keeping a strong front, he didn't want to make Bill feel any worse about this. "I guess, I'm actually kinda glad." The polytool admitted. "I mean, it sucks, but it's nice to finally get an honest reply."
"I'm so-" MizBill stopped himself in time. "I… you're my friend, Kryptos. And I love you a lot."
"I know." Kryptos managed to smile, a genuine one. "I love you too, Bill."
And then he turned and went back to his room, to destroy all of his research into building a temporal destabilizer. He was going to have to find another way to kill Time Baby now, a method that wouldn't put Bill in danger. Yes, he still wanted to kill Time Baby. But this time, it was simply because he hated that infant for treating Bill like he did. Heck, no one liked Time Baby anyway.
MizBill sighed, feeling strange as he took down the silence barrier. Like… relieved, but also a little sad. "I hope things don't get weird between us…" he mumbled. "How do you deal with this?" he asked Keyhole. The Lockin rolled his eyes. "Easy. Me and Py are still friends."
"Heck yeah! I appreciate you, little dude. Not gonna let something like this stop me from being able to throw you like a pillow," she cackled, tossing Keyhole up in the air as she grinned. Keyhole giggled as he was bouncing up into the air, caught and then thrown again. "Yeah, who else is gonna manhandle me?"
MizBill squinted into a smile. "So, does that mean things are gonna be okay?" Hectorgon came over to pat his side. "Well, as long as you two talk it out and work out how you both want to handle all this, yeah."
Blue himself remained silent on the topic for now. He could read lips and mouths, and while he hadn't been able to decipher so easily what his sister had been saying (and hadn't tried), it had been dead-simple to tell what the polytool had been saying. And now, Blue knew that the polytool was in the throes of that sick raw biological urge called 'love', if 'etching' meant here anything like what Blue thought it did.
"Well, I… what should I do now?" MizBill sighed. "Just give him some space. You're supposed to keep apart anyway."
"He should give you all the space," Blue noted with a mutter. "ALL of it. Isn't that what your friends decided for you." He tilted his head back and bumped his elbow against the book on the couch at his side, while Pyronica gave him a bit of a grin - which Blue noted, but that didn't quite make things better for him, exactly. This cycloptian wasn't really anything like his own, not nearly as smart or as driven as 'Ronnie was herself, but… WELL. He supposed that was just fine with him, but… it had already made for one partially-weird conversation between them before, just a little while earlier.
Blue snapped the rules-book for the Maid RPG game shut, after finishing paging through it and memorizing the sighted-look of every page therein. (He'd held the book in a manner in which he could see both Kryptos and his sister in the periphery of his vision the whole time, and they currently still were not done with their talking of 'love'. Whatever that polytool thought of it, anyway.) WELL. -Time for an only partially-distracting diversion! And - HAHA - he had several beings here whom he could choose from, for such potential diverting conversation with him!
"So," Blue said, turning to Pyronica first, "Can you only not-write because you have not practiced the proper arm-and-hand implement movements or typing?" he asked her, "Or can you really not read things on a written-page or a billboard or sign."
"Eh… Bill tried to teach me, but I got frustrated. There's just too many squigglies and different languages and all sorts of stuff. I mean, there's Standard Galactic Common but even that's hard."
"Really," Blue said, eyeing the cyclopian. "That's why you think you can't write or read. Because 'squigglies are hard' and there is more than one language that you could learn to be reading and writing in. You really can't read or write in even one language that you are fluent in; yes or no," Blue prodded her.
"I… never learned when I was a kid. Never cared to." Pyronica shrugged.
"So, you are sure that you don't know how to read or write, because you never 'learned how'. Are you sure of that? That you don't know how to read or write in any language in existence that you know how to speak in?" Blue asked Pyronica next, and it left her blinking at him, and then laughing.
"I mean, I never cared enough to really try. It wasn't the sort of thing I cared too much about. I always just asked Bill what something said or not."
And at this, Blue let out a tired sigh. He turned in place, setting the RPG rulebook aside, and then twisted around, kicking his feet up over the back of the sofa; his back now laying flat on the cushion he'd been sitting on before. He glanced up at her, giving her a very long look.
Pyronica paused. "I mean, I can read SOME words here and there. I can see prices and stuff pretty easily. And there are some words I know just 'cause I've seen them so much. I'm pretty good at guessing stuff. But like, reading a whole book? Or that programming stuff that Hec is always doing?"
"Then your 'problem' is just the 'squigglies', and things being boring to you," Blue told her, like this wasn't a terrible surprise to him at this point. He raised a hand. "I bet you a… piece of fruit," he told her, "That you already know how to write, and read, and just don't know it, yet."
"Whoa? Really?" Pyronica blinked at him, looking like that idea was hilarious. "I mean, I'm not all that smart. Though Bill always says that I'm actually brilliant. Dunno if that's what he means. Or what you mean. I mean, how can I know how to read without knowin' it?"
Blue smiled a bit. It was a slightly thin smile, with no teeth. "I will show you," he told the cycloptian matter-of-factly, as he raised a hand into the air. He gestured, and a wavering picture of a cycloptian floated in the air, like a framed picture in front of her. "What is this a representation of? One word," Blue said.
"Cyclopian." Pyronica answered easily.
Blue threw up another image next to it. "And this?"
"Plumbus."
"And this?" Blue asked her next. And so it continued, for several more images.
"Now," Blue told her, after a bit of this, and then rearranging some of the images that were floating there already. "What is the first syllable of this one?" he said, pointing to one closest to his left hand.
"Fler." She pronounced with a flick of her tongue.
"This one?" Blue said next, to the one just to the right of that. "Pith." And so on and so forth they went.
"Good," Blue said. "Now." He moved three forward and greyed out the others. "Pronounce the first syllable of these three, in sequence."
"Ba. Nan. Ah."
"Good. Have an Earth-type piece of fruit; banana," Blue said, twisting his hand to seemingly materialize a yellow fruit out of nowhere, before tossing it into Pyronica's lap. "Now tell me again how you can't read or write, 'because squigglies'," Blue said to her next.
"I mean… when you put it like this, I guess I do know some things?" Pyronica grinned. She opened her mouth and tossed the banana in. "Hm, sweet."
"Pictograms are a perfectly acceptable form of writing for the purposes of communication," Blue told her. "Call it 'Pyronica-ese', if you want. Miz could make up a keyboard with pictures for the start of every symbol for you," he told her, "Or some other electronic-visual plus gestural interface that you might like."
"Ooh, like that soundboard with words that puppersnups can press buttons on?"
"Sure," Blue told her, with a slightly wider smile. "And, once you have one system for writing, as long as you have representations for every phonetic sound in your own 'native' base-language, you just need to get someone to set up a program to translate it back and forth to any other language in existence for you, really," Blue told her. "So long as the concepts exist in some form in both of them, it should work out just fine. No 'learning how to read and write in every other language' necessary! Otherwise, it can take a lot of explaining, to build up a common vocabulary," he didn't quite shrug off, as he slid his arms back behind his head to pillow it a bit. "And that doesn't even take into account the different modalities you can use. Not every species has a 'visual' equivalent, so sound or touch or taste or… tasting the air," no, he wasn't going to bring up noses (double-ew), "With a transfer of hydrocarbons or other chemical compounds, are all viable methods of communication, too."
"I know what words for food are, in standard galactic common. Since Bill takes us to restaurants a lot." Pyronica realized. "Never thought about that before. But this would probably help a lot."
"Communication is important," Blue said, stretching his arms out and away from his head.
And then he rotated them upwards, away from his chest, knitted his fingers together, stretched again, and...
Pyronica tilted her head at him, as she caught a whiff of... something burning? The other Maniacs were staring, very confused about all of this. ("Wait, Ronica can't read? I never even noticed, she's pretty good at telling what stuff is." "I thought she could read? Everything I know is a liiiiiie!")
After Blue had finished laying out (read: burning in) the foundations that he needed along his arms and legs, and up his torso, all the way up his chin to his neck (and that little ring around the very top of his forehead, almost like a thin circlet-crown…), Blue took a moment to blow out a breath at the significantly-lesser sensation, and then pulled himself together for the final piece of it. He unknitted his fingers, and moved them into a triangle shape, then brought them back down towards his chest, breathing in.
The black almost-charred 'skin' on him that was visible shifted immediately to a dark black melanin color instead, as his modified self-recovery spell kicked in and healed up the 'damage' that he'd made to his exoskeleton as a template for everything to follow. (Easier to do that from an 'outside' external vantage point, than to try and direct all that from the inside for him, even with how things currently stood with this thing he was currently sitting in right now.)
""""Oooooh~"""" The Maniacs chorused.
Blue blinked open his eyes and looked up and around at all of them. And then blinked at them again, a bit nonplussed at this apparent (and seemingly universal) reaction from all of them, as he slowly let his arms come to a rest half on his chest, elbows touching the cushions of the couch below him.
His hands, all the way up his arms to his shoulders, and his legs, from the toes of his feet up to the bottom of his torso, were now almost a very-dark black (not that most of this was visible at-present). He'd added his usual bracing structural 'brick' pattern all across and wrapping around his torso, right up to the underside of his chin, cradling up to the base of the back of his head. And there was a dark thin line high up on and circling his forehead that, if one took a very close look at it, was not actually a line, but a series of open 'cipher-eyes' touching each other at the corners.
"...Problem?" Blue put out there, wondering what, exactly, was going on. (He'd thought he'd managed to largely keep the 'slightly charred burning flesh' smell held in and cleared up rather quickly, for the most part. Were they planning on eating him, now?)
Teeth broke the silence, "That's wicked cool! Is that like a demon thing?" PaciFire chuckled. "You really like demons, huh?" Teeth continued to squeal, "They're so COOL!"
"It's... " Blue felt a bit off-put by this. He'd never actually been asked this, before. "More of a security measure, here, because boundaries," he admitted to them. "I… didn't end up going with a body-like vessel," he told them, looking over at Miz and the polytool again. "I ended up making something like my usual exoskeleton, except with a very few vessel-like extras," he told them. Primarily, and not least of which, because he had realized upon entering Miz's dimensional set that he was literally standing, floating, breathing, and otherwise swimming in and around inside his little sister's dead corpse.
...and he'd nearly used a good portion of the material that was here to make his exoskeleton-not-quite-a-vessel when he'd first come in, there. It hadn't been comfortable in the interim, either; he'd been trying to hold his own boundaries while creating… well, if he hadn't been welcome and welcomed here according to Miz, he wasn't entirely sure how much energy it would have taken him to do it, if he could have done it at all. (He still wasn't happy about what he'd needed to do for a base in order to get started...) But given that he hadn't gotten Stanley to let up on anything again for this trip, before he'd come calling elsewhere to this other 'set, and because there hadn't been any danger that would've given him much further leeway in the use of his 'weirdness powers' for any of the things that he'd already worked out with Stanley... Blue had a bit of a limit on how much energy he could pull out of himself to use immediately currently, especially given his current internal energy configuration. (And also his want to not strangle himself on, or otherwise instigate a breakage of, the anchor he had on him, currently.)
Blue had made most of his exoskeleton at the start, but he'd been slowly spooling out more and more of his energy over time to complete doing so. He'd had to practically pull himself down into it, and hold himself there in the meantime (otherwise, he'd have come loose of it and 'fallen' back into the general Mindscape here quickly, collapsing said exoskeleton into a significant mess across his sister's floor), hence his not trying to look at things in or from the Mindscape in any significant way thus far.
But now, Blue had finally finished up the basic structure of the exoskeleton completely, filled it in completely, and had the normal protections and holding-structure he liked to let his energy-form Self settle into… and a few more little boundary protections and quirks here beyond that.
Because he was currently lying in the middle of his sister's dead corpse, of which everything in this dimensional set was made (barring that stupid, lying, misleading lizard-dad of hers and that Time Baby - both of which he now categorized as parasitic interlopers, for what they were doing with all of it; they shouldn't even be here, should they...).
It had taken awhile, because he'd had to 'back-burner' it, needing to spend the greater part of his concentration on other things - like his sister's Deal issues - instead of completing this, and being able to speed up or otherwise make more efficient the process in the meantime. But, now that he had it…
"...though not in my usual Shape-form that I usually take," Blue admitted a bit more neutrally. And in this respect, he was glad that this Pyronica (and the other 'Henchmaniacs') here were NOTHING like their counterparts in his own dimensional set. (Because he'd never hear the freaking end of it for-)
"Man, wish I could look that cool." Teeth sighed. (Blue blinked at this.) "You know Bill's offered to shapeshift you." Keyhole pointed out. "Yeah, but Bill keeps wanting to give me kitty ears!"
Ah. They thought he looked 'cool', not edible. Well, THAT was fine! But… "There is something wrong with kitty ears?" Blue said, wondering why handing him such appendages would be an issue. Now, deer teeth could take up a lot of space, if you didn't know what you were doing, and they ended up rolling all over the place, but 'kitty ears' would be a lot easier to stack, and... "Do you not have enough shelf-space for holding them?" he asked Teeth.
"They're too cute." Teeth sighed. "I kinda want to be intimidating, I guess." He shrugged. "I don't really need it, and I'm handsome enough as is, so there's no real point… I guess… it'd just be cool if I could do even a fraction of all the cool stuff Bill could."
"What 'cool stuff' does my sister do, that you want to be able to do also?" Blue asked him inquisitively, kicking his feet back, and turning in place to right himself on the couch there where he was.
And then Miz and Kryptos finished their 'love' talk and walked over...
"..." MizBill trailed off, blinking at his big brother. Then he grinned. "You're so COOL!" He squealed. ("That's what I said!" Teeth laughed.)
Blue got a small smile (without really realizing it), and laughed. "Yes, I AM!" he said, now-grinning (and not quite preening under his little sister's praise), "But what thing do you think is the new cool thing that I did just now?"
"You repurposed the free floating atoms to build your vessel! And it's super cool looking!"
Blue's smile wavered a bit, and almost froze outright. "Well, I was trying to create them out of my own energy and inject them into the… surrounding environment here instead, actually," Blue noted. "I did use a bit of the free-floating atoms that are here before for a starting-to-build-off-of structure - and then ejected them from this form for myself here later," he said with a not-quite grimace. There had been a small layer of them that he'd needed to put in place here, to build off of, to start with. He'd tried not to lean on any of it at all, but… he'd had to settle for that, and then shoving it away later, instead of keeping it incorporated-fully and -further.
"It's fine to use the stuff here. I don't want you using up your energy when you don't have an easy way to refill like I do." MizBill blinked at him.
"I have plenty of energy in reserve," Blue told Bill simply, blinking up at him. "I just… am not and have not been trying to pull out too much energy from myself at one time, for reasons," Blue explained about as vaguely as he could, given who-all was listening in at the moment. He did not exactly trust anyone and everyone that might be listening in on him in this dimensional set other than his sister with any more detailed information on that particular subject, given how that might be able to be taken advantage of if he wasn't careful (not that he wasn't still in the process of continuously pulling out more into an 'external' reserve inside his new exoskeleton at-present, for a 'emergency'; he was).
"We can… mmm..." Blue hummed to himself and frowned slightly, before straightening in place a bit and restarting again with what he thought a better way to put this would be. "If you want to know why I used and am-using as little of the stuff here as possible, and then pushed out the rest once I was done, I can explain later. In… your personal Dreamscape? Or elsewhere similarly locked down to anyone else's external viewing?" Blue added slowly.
"Sure, you guys good here? I mean, like, the new Deal isn't making you feel weird or anything?" MizBill asked everyone. They all shook their heads. "We're fine. But I'm going to program Pyronica a portable soundboard," Hectorgon laughed, "Should be a fun project."
"But, Game?" Blue said, his shoulders drooping as he looked over at the Shape, who he knew had been sitting around that gameboard before when he'd first arrived.
Ammy poked at the board. "Well, I'm going to continue seducing the doctors while I'm waiting. I'm sure if I roll enough times, I could have the entire hospital at my command."
Blue looked over at Ammy, and then looked over at his sister and saw his reaction to this news.
And then Blue shot to his feet from the couch rather quickly.
"Master of Games conference!" he said brightly, pointing a finger in the air. "Game Masters only, for the correct and proper transfer of the Game, post-haste. One minute! Yes?" And Blue took off at a brisk walk towards his little sister, holding out an arm to his side and not-quite wrapping it around him, to corral Bill a bit farther away from the rest of his Maniacs for a moment.
"Alright. Have fun stopping Ammy from making things burn up and explode while I'm having game talk." As Bill said so, Teeth turned to see Ammy tossing dice after dice onto the table. (So did Blue.)
"No no no," Blue told them all, "Game is on pause for 53 seconds currently, OR ELSE." Then, after tossing up a full-filter, Blue repeated to his sister and his sister alone, "No no no, I am fine with all of the murderhobo things, and also the not-murderhobo things," Blue told him. "What I want to know is: what is the current situation and overarching scenario of the Game that they know about, and what do you not want them doing anymore that you want me to teach them not to do anymore."
And when MizBill looked over at his brother, he realized that Blue was perfectly serious about this. "Ah, well, mainly I'm just tired of them making me have to build a new mansion and design a new master every time they end up killing them."
Blue blinked at this.
"Why not just put them in a time loop scenario?" Blue asked him. "They do not 'escape' it and will always die horribly, unless and until they complete a 'saving' objective that does not include both of those two things remaining intact by the end of their campaign?"
"I mean… there IS that hidden section under the mansion that I haven't put anything into yet. I could put a time-loop machine down there or something."
Blue nodded a few times absently, more to himself than to his sister. "Tell me what they have seen while playing to-date, and know of the current scenario-setup, so I know what I have to work with as 'new' 'within the rules' of the Game, yes?" Blue quickly asked of him next. That should tell him enough to know what he could add in that wouldn't contradict what existed there previously in the same scenario.
MizBill explained the basic setup, who the characters were (NPC and not) amongst other things. "-ere was that one time Teeth had to dress, I mean, his character had to dress as a man to sneak into that boys only gym to get the master's missing wallet-"
Blue paid very close attention during all of this, and then he smiled.
"Is there anything else that you don't want them to do, ever again?" Blue asked Bill. "Or anything that you would like to see them doing, from now on?"
"I mean, I guess I'd like if they didn't keep trying to sabotage each other?"
Blue downright grinned for a moment, then nodded once again. "Anything else?"
"Having to roleplay any flirtation with Ammy is super weird because he's my son." MizBill deadpanned.
Blue nodded, then took down the filter - they were at 'time'.
"WELL!" Blue said, clapping his hands together, as he strolled over to the tabletop RPG board. "WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL." He grinned at all and sundry. "Are you all ready to PLAY?" he asked Hectorgon, Ammy, and Teeth, with an almost feral unholy (dare I say, demonic?) light in his eyes. ("How unfortunate," that Kryptos wasn't here right now, so they were going to put his character on hold for the moment. MizBill would record what everyone else did in the meantime so he could get caught up when he came back.)
"I feel a little afraid. But, yes." Teeth sat down. Ammy stared at Blue unblinkingly. "I hold no fear within me. Let the game commence."
"HA! -It is a Game," Blue told them. "Fear would be counterproductive in most cases, for most playing," he told them, "And not FUN!"
Hectorgon looked at the board. "Well, we were trying to hide a body."
"You hear footsteps in the hallway. The double doors to the room open, and the head butler walks in on you," Blue said promptly, as he sat down in front of the GM's board.
"Uuugh, I hate that guy." Teeth groaned. Ammy tilted his head. "I thought he died after we Cast of Amantiado'd him…"
"'What are you doing?' the head butler demands of you," Blue said. "The double doors open again, and the Master is standing there."
"Ah, we found the assassin who tried to kill the master. So, we sort of… killed them?"
Blue cuts him off. "-'WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY SON!?' the Master roars out at you. The head butler turns to him and says, 'Master, please, let's not be hasty-' and you are now dead," Blue concluded, reaching forward to pick up all of the pieces for the player characters.
"..." Everyone stared at him. Ammy shrugged. "Ok. I'll roll a new character."
Blue set the pieces for Ammy, Hectorgon, Teeth, and Kryptos in the front hall of the mansion.
"You blink, and you are standing in the central foyer of the mansion," Blue continued, seemingly unconcerned with anything in general that Ammy had just said. "The head butler is in front of you. He says, 'Does everyone understand their tasks for the day?'"
"Are we… still the same character?" Hectorgon clarified.
"Yes," said Blue, unblinkingly. Hectorgon nodded, pulling everything together already. "Are we back to the first day we joined?"
"Are you?" Blue asked him, folding his hands in his lap.
"We wouldn't be. This is Ammy's new character, who only joined the staff after his last character died in the laundry room explosion." The red alien considered it. "Feels more like this is some sort of… Undo-effect, possibly a time reversal?"
Blue looked at him. "Roll for perception, and roll for intelligence."
"So, Cunning…" Hectorgon tossed his die. "4 times 2 is 8." He paused. "Unless we're going by D&D rules for Perception?"
"This Game is Maid RPG," Blue noted. "The rules-book is over there, if you need it." He pointed at the couch.
"Cunning it is."
"No," Blue said. "Perception is a special skill that is under the basic battle maid 'espionage' tree, and also the 'assassin' subspecialty," Blue reminded him. He fixed Hectorgon with a long look. "Do you have that skill for your character?"
"Ah. I see." Hectorgon nodded. "I'm a vampire, I have a few basic Skills from that, but Kryptos is the assassin. He's been secretly gunning for the master this whole time. He's probably got some espionage skills."
"Do you want to wait for him, or do you want to continue on without him?" Blue asked them.
Hectorgon glanced back, toward the hallway that Kryptos went down. "He's being punished, so we can play without him."
Blue gave Hectorgon a long look (not playing Games had not been part of the list that had been given by the rest of them before...), then Blue removed Kryptos' piece from the board.
"Well, I'm going to do my chores for the day, like I'm supposed to." Hectorgon moved his character up to the kitchen. He made a quick check on the pantry for what supplies he had to work with.
"Noted," Blue said. "The head butler does not attempt to stop you. He does, however, give the other two of you a very hard look, as you are not moving quickly enough or asking any questions," he told Teeth and Ammy.
"I'm… going to set the dining room." Teeth hurriedly made his character go do that. Ammy stared at Blue. "I'm going to seduce the head butler."
"Roll for seduction," Blue said.
A clatter of the die. "5 times 3. 15 in total."
Blue nodded once. "The head butler promptly fires you for inappropriate behavior in the mansion, with cause: no fraternization between the working staff. You are told that you have ten minutes to clear out your things and leave, with no references."
"Aww. That sucks." Ammy didn't sound all that upset. Teeth and Hectorgon groaned.
Blue watched him without saying anything for a few long moments, that slowly turned into a few tens of moments, and finally one minute.
"The head butler grabs you by the arm and forcibly drags you towards the maid quarters," Blue said next, eyeing Ammy.
"I struggle." The disjointed shape responded.
"Roll for strength, agility, skill? Choose one of these three," was Blue's response.
More clattering. "A max roll of 6, times 6 for 36."
"Invalid roll, your choice must be selected and given first. Choose, and reroll," Blue told him.
"Strength, in this case, Athletics." Ammy rolled the die again. "4 this time. So that's 24."
"Athletics skill selected, check your multiplier; this is not stacked. Choose one of the three: strength OR agility OR one skill," Blue restated for him.
"Strength." Ammy rolled his many eyes.
"Strength selected. Reroll," Blue told him.
"...3 times 6 is 18." Ammy looked down at his die. Teeth was sniggering in the background.
Blue picked up his own dice and rolled it behind the GM board.
"Strength check failed; you are towed down the hallway and all but tossed into the maid quarters," Blue informed him. "The head butler is standing in the doorway, watching you with a frown."
"You didn't have to manhandle me." Ammy told the butler.
"'You have eight minutes to leave the premises,' says the butler," Blue told him.
"Good thing I don't have a lot of belongings." Ammy still didn't sound all that upset about being fired. MizBill was whining, "But your background is that you've been dreaming of being a Maid! This is your life's dream! Uuuuugh…"
Blue glanced over Bill's way. "Who wrote that background?" he asked his sister.
"He rolled for it. It's randomized so players have to be creative with their roleplay, since they don't know what they're gonna be until after." MizBill sighed.
Yes, Blue had read that from the rules-book, but that was a short-phrase background statement; that didn't quite answer his question, for a character in a role-playing game… unless it did. Blue looked back at Ammy. "Did you want that for your character's background?" Ammy shrugged again. "I don't particularly care. I just do what I feel like." ("Which is fine in other settings, but this is so annoying!")
"Do you feel like playing this character as dreaming of being a Maid?" Blue asked Ammy next.
"...not really. I just wanna do what I want."
Blue didn't quite sigh at this.
"Game pause," Blue said. "-Then you do 'particularly care' what your character's background is," Blue informed him, "Since you don't feel like playing this Game with this character to this character's current background. Next time, when you roll a character with a background you don't like," Blue told him, "I suggest that you roll the background roll first, and if you don't like the role you get from the roll, then you speed through the rest of the creation process, immediately kill the character, and reroll again. Repeat as necessary, until you get something you want."
"Is that how that works?"
"According to the current rules-set from the rules-book for how to create characters for this Game, yes," Blue told him.
"Is that why Ammy keeps killing his characters?" Teeth mumbled. "I mean, I know he got bored of them after a few sessions… but… still…"
"Now. This time," Blue continued, "I recommend that, if you don't like this generic background, that you come up with a 'why' that would have this current scenario negating or otherwise reversing it, if you want to play it that way instead."
"I guess..." Ammy looked down at his character sheet. "I don't really have any want to do what I'm supposed to do for the roleplay stuff. I don't understand my background, or what I'm meant to do with it."
"HM," Blue said. "The background is the motivation," Blue proceeded to explain. "It is what drives the character to actually do things. -For example," Blue told him. "Is this character life dream to be a maid… because their sister is one in a particular household? Then perhaps they want to be working in the same household alongside them. Or perhaps they want to show up their sister in a different household, and would not want to work in the same house and always be compared to them, instead. Or their life dream is to be a maid to a particular person. Or they were wanting to be a maid, trained from birth, the whole family was such, but now their whole family is dead and the entire mansion they were working at went up in flames, in an assassination of the Master of that house. And they just received word of this a few days ago; rumors are that the rest of the family was all killed horribly by the master of this household that they are now currently working in. -Why are they here, what do they want; this is what the background is meant to define and help provide an explanation for the character's motivating push forward, towards some goal that you also find interesting and want to pursue within the context of this Game. Otherwise, why would they be working as a Maid, or even working or moving around at all? A 'need' to eat, sleep, and perform basic bodily functions over time will only push a character so far," Blue told him. "Yes?"
Hectorgon nodded. "Like my background is that I'm a distant relative to the master, it's interesting, because it means that somehow, I ended up in a servant position, despite being part of his family. It's also vague enough that I can build on it to make up my own reason for why I'm here as I am." He twirled his mustache. "In my case, I'm playing with the idea in mind that I was of wealth when I was younger but my parents made some bad financial decisions and we were forced to find work elsewhere. I asked to work at my distant uncle's house, because it would mean I still got to live in a mansion, with access to nice food and clothes. And I work hard to be a good maid and get everything done right, because I'm hoping that if I do well enough, I could earn my way back into the upper echelons of the family."
Teeth added, "And I'm an Infiltrator. I guess I could have rolled for Perception earlier, heh." He rubbed the back of his 'head'. "But anyway, my character's actually here to try and steal the master's business secrets. I was hired to do so, but in order to gain the master's trust, I have to do a good job as a Maid until I can complete my objective." He patted Ammy's blocks. "So the background thing might be limiting your character a little bit, but otherwise, you're free to interpret as you see fit."
"No no no, it isn't limiting," Blue said, "It's a start. Add to it, and it can be anything you want, if you know enough about the situation at hand and are creative enough about it. And in this Game, with not nearly as much defined, you only need approval from the Game Master for your convoluted background motivating story, that it does not and will not contradict the basic scenario of the Game currently being played."
Ammy listened to all this, and he thought about it. He thought long and hard. "...what if my character wants to be a maid, because they grew up watching romantic comedies with that setting. And they're attempting to seduce everyone because they want to act out the same scenarios from the shows she used to watch?"
"That is internally-consistent and does not contradict any of the historical aspects of the scenario at-hand," Blue informed him. The many jointed shape perked up, almost smiling in his own way. "I like this better. I think." He looked down at the board. "So… now what should I do? Am I going to be fired regardless?"
"Your character was just fired in the central foyer of the mansion," Blue informed him. "Game resumes from pause."
"...so what should I do?" Ammy asked again.
"The butler reminds you that you have seven minutes now to pack and leave the premises," Blue informed him, then rolled behind the screen. "And pauses briefly, then informs you neutrally that you will receive no references, but will also not be blacklisted from Maid service or your behavior reported to the other butlers of the Houses at-large. He is still watching you."
Ammy frowned down at the board. "I'm sorry sir. I didn't think you would get so mad. I just..." Ammy paused, trying to find the right words. "I thought it would be fun. Please don't fire me."
"'The rules of this House require that there be no fraternization between working servants or other members of the household,' the butler restates. 'This was part of your contract. There are no exceptions.'" Blue told him in neutral tones.
"I won't do it again. Please sir," Ammy blinked his many eyes.
"'No exceptions,' the butler tells you. 'You have five minutes remaining.'" Blue tells him.
"..." Ammy looked to the other people at the table. "Help?" he asked at last. Teeth sighed. "Well, I'm up in the dining room. Sorry." Hectorgon gave Ammy an apologetic look. "And I'm still in the kitchen. None of us know this is happening."
"Seeing that you are not packing yourself," Blue said, then rolled behind the screen again, "The butler efficiently packs your things for you, takes your arm, and starts walking you towards the side door, past the kitchens."
"I'm going to come out and see what's happening." Hectorgon moved his character into the hallway. "Mister Welleby? What's going on?"
"'Routine staffing matters, unfortunately; go back to your work,' the butler informs you dryly, continuing to tow Ammy's character along," Blue told him, moving the figurines farther through the kitchen.
"Sir. What is happening?" Hectorgon positioned himself in front of the butler, sort of in his way. Ammy gave him a hopeful look, "I was flirting with him as a joke, but he got really mad."
"Intimidation check," Blue announced, rolling his dice behind the screen. "Hectorgon, roll to save. Ammy, roll to save."
"I got a 1." Hectorgon winced. Ammy rolled his die. "I got 4."
Blue moved Hectorgon's piece back to the pantry, and moved the head butler and Ammy out the side door.
"The head butler's status is higher than yours," Blue told Hectorgon. "You realize in a cold sweat, as you stare into his eyes, that he is perfectly prepared to fire you if you proceed to interfere any further, and you do not think you can survive out on the streets." Blue rolled again. "You are unsure whether the Master would listen to his head butler over yourself, but you can't risk it; not right here and now. Directly contradicting him further right now would be grounds for termination, and you know it. You vanish back into the pantry."
"I will go talk to the Master about this, about giving Toom another chance. I have to at least try. And see if we can just keep a closer eye on her and let her try to prove she can actually do this." Hectorgon rushed his character down the hall. "Also, the food's pretty much set, it just needs to simmer on low heat, so it should be fine to leave it alone for a few minutes."
Blue looked up and over and asked Teeth, "Your base task time has elapsed. Roll for task-completion quality."
Teeth winced. "I got a 1… but it'll be a 2 in total with my modifier… can I spend a Favor point to reroll?"
"Yes, you can," Blue told him. "Do you want to do that?"
"Yes I do." Teeth hovered his hand over the dice, waiting for the okay.
"Favor point is being spent on this task's quality. Reroll."
"...I got a 5 this time, which makes it 10." Teeth cheered.
"Yes," Blue nodded, seeming to note this. "Next action?" Blue asked him.
"I'm… going to do my other chores, since I have no idea what's happening with Ammy." Teeth pointed out.
"Which chore do you choose to have your character do next, and where?" Blue asked him.
"Well, in this situation, my character would head up to the Master's room to make his bed. If he's already awake, and if he's still asleep, I'll wake him up."
Blue nodded, and gestured at the board and piece. "Start your movement, then."
Teeth did so, and Blue turned back to Ammy.
"The head butler pushes your character out of the doorway," Blue informed him. "He shoves your packed suitcase into your arms, and pushes you forwards, a few steps down the lane." Blue moved the pieces forward. "You start walking," Blue informed Ammy.
And then Blue flicked Ammy's character piece over.
"You are dead," Blue informed him, then he turned towards Hectorgon and Teeth.
"Roll for perception, and roll for intelligence," Blue said simply, then waited.
Hectorgon got a 10 in total on intelligence, not having a perception roll. Teeth got a 4 on both.
Blue nodded once.
"You walk down the hallway," Blue told Hectorgon, reaching out and moving his piece forwards for him. And three-quarters of the way down the hallway, Blue added, "After awhile, you notice something strange. Looking around, something seems different about this hallway."
"Hm… I inspect the carpet and walls, look out the window as well." Hectorgon frowned.
"Roll for perception, and roll for intelligence," Blue repeated.
"...6 and 12." He smiled, "Better than usual…"
"You have no perception skill, your first roll is multiplied by 0," Blue noted.
"Right, sorry. I just made both rolls on instinct."
"It's fine," Blue said. "That is perfectly legal by the rules-book." Blue straightened a bit in place, then said, "It takes you a minute or so, but suddenly you realize that the color seems to be slowly leeching out of your surroundings, out of absolutely everything that you can see." Blue pauses. "Everything in your vision is now grey."
"I am very worried now." Hectorgon said dryly.
Blue reached out and moved Teeth's piece for him down the hallway towards his next task, and partway into the room. Then he told Teeth, "You notice as you enter the room that everything seems very dark to you, all of a sudden, in the hallway and the room both."
"Yeah, I'm worried now too." Teeth glanced at the board nervously. "Wait, is there some kinda time reset thing happening again?"
"What are each of your characters' next actions?" Blue asked them. "Your vision is getting darker..."
"I'm going to brace myself." Hectorgon sighed. "Me too." Teeth added. Ammy blinked at them. "I guess I'll do the same, 'cept I'm technically dead."
Blue nodded once. About one minute of time passed, and then Blue said, "Your vision goes completely black."
There was a pause.
Blue picked up the pieces for Ammy, Hectorgon, and Teeth, and set them in the front hall of the mansion.
"You blink, and you are standing in the central foyer of the mansion," Blue said again, the same as he had before. "The head butler is in front of you. He says, 'Does everyone understand their tasks for the day?'"
"Yes. I'm going to the kitchen to begin breakfast." Hectorgon, already realizing what this was all about, moved his character easily.
Blue turned to Teeth. "Set the dining room." Blue turned to Ammy...
...and said, "Wisdom check. Roll for wisdom."
"...5…"
"Game pause," said Blue. He met eyes with Ammy. And then Blue said, "Do you have any questions about the Game mechanics, as they relate to this scenario?"
"...I'm assuming there's a reset in place until we hit some sort of path forward. Or whenever some sort of 'bad' condition is hit to trigger said reset."
Blue nodded once, without actually nodding. He then reached out and seemed to produce three unique-looking triangular tokens out of thin air. He set them down in sequence, one-two-three, in front of Ammy. He then did the same for both Teeth, and Hectorgon.
"Help points," Blue said. "Game Master's privilege. You start out with three," Blue told them, straightening back into his original casual seated posture. "But first, a quick tutorial on how to use them may be in order!"
Then Blue looked at Ammy again. "Would you like some free advice, without using a help point of yours that you have in reserve for this particular Game, yet?"
"...that might help."
Blue smiled. "The head butler told you that the rules of this House require that there be no fraternization between working servants or other members of the household, that this was part of your contract, and that there are no exceptions." Blue reminded him.
"Alright. No flirting with the butler." Ammy made a note.
"Yes, that is not recommended, if you want your character to not be fired immediately," Blue told him, "Because his loyalty score is so high, and because of his background. He could potentially get caught; your character telling on him with evidence to back that up will with high probability get him fired. Neither of these things would be something he would stand for or risk happening with his background," Blue told him. "There are usually hidden mechanics like this in play," Blue explained to him. "Also, note. The rule is: no fraternization between anyone in these two sets of people because it is in their contracts. Nothing is said in these contracts about outside people, people who have been fired, people who are not working 'servants'…" Blue explained to him. "Are you with me so far?"
They all nodded.
"Also," Blue continued, "Note that the main factors here for succeeding or failing a check for the seduction itself and the actions that take place in its aftermath are: loyalty score, motivation due to background, anti-motivation due to background, current state of all interpersonal relationships, and potential outcome of said fraternization. This can be influenced by 'intrigue', such as an attempt to get you fired for said fraternization attempt, or by 'socioeconomic needs', such as how badly that character needs to keep a job in order to survive, versus this specific job."
Blue looked around at all of them. "All of these factors culminate in a few simple questions I like to call: 'Do I want to do this at all?' and 'Do I think I will get caught?', with an intermediate roll of 'What will be the outcome of this if I do get caught?' and a terminating roll of 'Is doing this going to be worth it, given everything else that I want?' And there can be other rolls and questions later, depending on Cunning and other attributes." Blue looked at Ammy. "It does not say all this explicitly in the rules-book, but if you read it carefully, you will see that the 'seduction' roll generally maps to this when playing by all the rules in the rules-book explicitly, when reading about all of those attributes. -This requires at least four rolls, against character-background parameters that may be higher than any roll with a modifier can give you in the Game, depending on how all of these features stack for any particular character. I suspect," Blue noted, glancing up at Bill, "That my sister has been simplifying this process for you, up until now. It is not technically required to roll for seduction multiple times this way," Blue told them, "But if the character backgrounds are set 'low' enough on this front, or with enough conflicting motivations, and one single roll is used to give the number for every hidden check… you can get highly unrealistic responses between the characters within this Role-Playing Game with a very high multiplier and roll," Blue told them with a grimace.
The group nodded. "Ok, so… treat this… like we're actually there, doing this." Hectorgon said slowly. "But, like, just as our characters."
"This is a Role-Playing Game, and if you want to roleplay, then you should!" Blue told them with a grin. "There is also meta-gaming the system," Blue noted next. "But in either choice, for either case, this is why it is important to have a character that you like, and would enjoy playing the role of, for at least some period of time," Blue told them, smiling again.
"Bill does like it better when we roleplay properly," Teeth noted.
"And the first step to role-playing properly in a role-playing Game is having a character that you enjoy playing in the role of in the first place," Blue told them succinctly, with a nod. "Otherwise, you are failing right away. Also: not all characters are fun to play in all scenarios, which is fine. Trying to play a character at a severe disadvantage can be worse than annoying. Variety is also good to keep things from getting stale," he said, with a nod to Ammy next.
"Ok, so…" Ammy looked at his character sheet and considered his options. "I guess… I can start cleaning the windows?" He blinked. "I don't think there's laundry yet."
"Help points quick tutorial ends, Game resumes from pause," Blue noted, with a smile.
"You could have one of your other Maniacs do the 'roleplay' for the seduction roles, instead," Blue told his sister later, after the Maniacs had finished a good section of the "new"(-ish) Game scenario thus far, and gotten to what Blue had considered from the onset to be the second 'save point' in the time-loop 'resets' going on in said scenario being Game'd. "Maybe Pyronica? Your Amorphous Shape seems very interested in the concept; he was listening to my advice tutorial and background motivation explanation at all times, not ignoring it or bored during any of it," Blue noted, trying to find a middle ground for both his sister and Miz's son also, here. Because Miz cared about Ammy…
"...This would be an easier and safer way for your son to learn about these concepts, if you want to help him use the Game in that way?" Blue asked Miz. (And admittedly, thinking in this way for his sister was stretching far beyond Blue's own personal experiences, and well into 'really out there' predictive territory. The idea of how to give good advice about the best learning processes for a son of a sister was… definitely a way of thinking that he hadn't ever had to do before, not even close to it.)
"I guess." MizBill sighed. "I wonder if he's getting into his… equivalent of his teenage years, being more interested in things like seduction or what? Ah… I guess it's safer for him to learn flirting here than going out there in public and getting punched for it or something…"
"In a Game that no-one cares about outside of the scenario, the people 'playing' with their characters and trying things out for fun do not actually get or feel hurt, if and when things do go all wrong!" Blue noted, in full agreement with his sister. "Not while they're having fun doing it. And not when all of any of the meta-gaming that is happening is being kept to a minimum," Bill couldn't help but add for completeness.
"Oh. What do I do when Ammy starts wanting to date?!" MizBill sounded horrified. "I mean, Pyronia and Pynelope kinda learned that on their own. But they had much better social skills than Ammy does!"
"Do?" That was confusing to Blue. "To him? Or yourself?" to prepare and plan for all of such various outcomes, Blue assumed.
"What if he brings someone home?" MizBill didn't seem like he was listening to Blue anymore, lost in his own horrible fantasies. "If they're not good for him I will have to tell him 'no' but Ammy's never even liked anyone before-"
"If he brings someone home who is not good for him, then show him how sick they are making him, and then destroy them?" Blue said. "And then help Ammy become un-sick again." Seemed simple enough to him. Blue tilted his head at Bill. "Were you thinking this sick would be from contact poison on purpose, or the common cold by accident? Or something else? You could protect against most of the sickening things long before he starts 'dating' outside his species," Blue pointed out to him.
"I could do that." MizBill nodded. He paused. "Oh I hope he doesn't get all weird…"
Blue eyed his little sister sidelong. "You are weird, and he is your son on all sides?" he reminded Miz. "He should have started out at least all-weird."
"Yes. But not that kinda weird. Like, I dunno how to say it. I suppose, I don't know what to expect. I mean… Ammy's my son, but he's not a Flatlander, he's something new. I don't have any reference I can look up for what he is, how he's supposed to develop- anything! What if he wants to mate? He doesn't have anything for such a thing!"
"Pull his Mind out into the Mindscape, put him in a compatible body for the mating that he wants to do, if he wants to do it," Blue told him quite simply, though Blue made a face at the very idea of this. "Why would he want to mate with any other being; making children when everything is not broken enough to be fixed yet is…" Blue struggled with a good word in Galactic Standard for the concept, and unfortunately had to settle on the closest thing instead: "Irresponsible."
"I dunno. But Pyrone had kids. Pynelope luckily didn't, and Quackers didn't either. But I'm told that most beings want to create spawn, to pass on their genetics to the next generation or some shit like that."
"That's a body issue," Blue told him, "Biology. Those sick biological urges that make people think they're 'in love', when it's all just a bunch of stupid chemicals! Trying to fool them into a bunch of stupid things instead. Yeesh," Blue waved off. "Are you sure that's for him?" Blue asked Bill.
"I dunno. He doesn't have that sort of thing."
"It could just be a new mechanic that he's trying out in different settings, because it isn't in any other Game he's played before?" Blue tried. He wasn't entirely sure whether that might be true or not, though - it was more of a question.
"I suppose." MizBill shuddered. "Well, if he is going through the whatever-he-is equivalent of puberty…"
"...You could ask him directly if he is," Blue put out there.
"True. But then I'd have to talk about that with him and it's gonna be so embarassing…"
"Make Pyronica do it?" Blue said. "You co-parented for her. Make her do it for you! She has more experience on both the flirting and the mating side of things anyway, yes?"
"She did teach the twins… and while I liked teasing them about their budding sexuality, I don't like actually talking about the nitty gritty of stuff… yeah I could ask Ammy. And if he is going through… whatever it is he's going through, I'll patch him over to Ronica for the questions."
"Talk to Pyronica first, Ammy second," Blue advised him. "That way, she knows what is going on and can actually help and will do it instead of blowing it off. Communication is important."
"Yeah, got it." MizBill wrote down a note for himself. "Well, now that that's sort of got plans for how to deal…" He grinned at Blue. "Are you hungry? I can make dinner?"
Blue looked uncomfortable for a long moment at this. Bill's smile slowly evened out. "Is there something wrong?"
Blue glanced around - the Maniacs were elsewhere, they were in Bill's room now, in the 'hidden' upstairs part of it - and he still didn't feel completely comfortable talking about it, but if he was careful with what he shared that the local lizard could hear...
"Little sis," Blue told him, "The only reason I am not drowning in your corpse right now," he spread his hands out to his sides, "Is because of this," he gestured with his arms and his legs, "That is keeping me contained away from the rest of you, and you from me. Because right now, I am wearing an exoskeleton, not a vessel-body of any-sort, and I also do not have to breathe."
"...oh. I didn't realize it was that bad, I mean, I know I created the universe and all that… but…" He was so used to it, he didn't realize his brother could tell.
"I don't eat sentient or sapient beings," Blue reminded him, "And all this used to be you." Normally, he didn't do it because of the bits of soul he had to clean away from it, but the thing he usually didn't tell people or beings was that it was also partly a matter of principle on his part; he also didn't want to do it, if he didn't have to.
"Right, that's gonna be hard since all matter is made of me. Kinda… makes it difficult for the whole… eating thing." MizBill winced at that. Okay, acknowledging that everything in the multiverse was made of his dead body was kinda gross, but it wasn't incorrect. "I guess… no food here, huh?" He sighed. "I'm sorry…" This meant that his brother couldn't live here with him full-time.
"Don't be sorry," Blue said in exasperation. "I… just don't like the idea of it," he told his sister. "I literally got turned upside-down when I got pulled in through your Door, because I couldn't tell what was you, and what is you-now. -Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?" Blue asked him, "Because I don't!"
"Um… I don't know either. But… everything here…" Bill gestured around them. "The plants, animals, planets… people. They're all… made of me."
"I know," Blue told him. He hadn't really understood it before, but now? "And those two interloping Pillars coming in here and… doing what they are doing is another problem entirely, that you haven't expelled them yet. Or been able to." Blue shook his head roughly.
"What would I even do? I need Dad to give unique Souls to these bits of matter arranged into living bodies. If it weren't for those Souls, they'd all just be… me." And wouldn't that just be an awful place to live in.
"If you want life to continue sprouting here in that form, from dimensions that that lizard-'dad' of yours creates along with that stupid baby... I don't know if anything would have stabilized here or moved forward in time without them," Blue groused out at him next, really not liking the idea of that, as he held his head in his hands and rubbed them back and forth across the sides of his face, at the temples. He looked like he had some kind of ongoing headache. "I have to think about this." He then looked up at Bill. "But what I do know is that, while I don't know this, the last thing I want to do here is ingest and try to incorporate a part of you and then find out later that doing that was the worst kind of mistake, and not in the good kind of worst-way!"
"I just… go with it, mainly. I mean, it's sort of creepy to think that they're all me, and it was very creepy at first, but I've had eons to get used to it. If you don't wanna use up or consume bits of me, that's fine. Better safe than sorry? I guess. I don't think this causes anyone else any problems, like…" He tried to think of how to say it.
"Yes, 'better safe than sorry', and it's not about 'creepy', it's about boundaries," Blue told him. "I don't want to 'guess'; I don't know if this is still 'you' yet, or if you might need all of 'you', later."
"I brought Seb and my human family over here before. But as they came through my Dreamscape, their physical bodies have no connection to what they do here, and since they're not Beings of Pure Energy, nothing that happens to them here sticks when they head back home. So they didn't have a problem." MizBill pointed out.
"But I am a Being of Pure Energy, and the way that I layer these days involves… sampling things at my boundaries, to an extent," Blue told him, and now he was getting real close to one of his own 'operational security' lines. "I had to add extra protections to this, and concentrate while I was here the entire time before I put those protections in place, to not accidentally start to incorporate or circulate some parts of 'you' through me," he told Bill.
"I guess… if you're really worried, the Space Between Spaces isn't 'me' or made of 'me' so you could grab some of Ax's clouds if you really need to?"
"I don't need them," Blue told his sister, not that he trusted anything from that stupid lying lizard anyway, "And I used a minimal amount of the atoms here as a base for building the rest of my exoskeleton off of using only my own energy. I kept track of them, and pushed them out and away, right after. I did not eat or incorporate any part of you," he assured Miz (though it was more for his own assurance at this point, admittedly).
"...if it makes you feel any better, I don't mind you using parts of me. At least you notice, and ask."
"I know, and I… 'appreciate' that," Blue said to him, more than a little awkwardly, "But I'm not going to do that still. Not until I know if you might need it later, or not," Blue told him stubbornly, "And not until I know what effect that will have on the rest of things that are 'you' and also-you here."
"Well at least, now you can see why things here are so much easier for me to change, than using my powers in your Set." MizBill chuckled, almost sheepish. "Things are too easy to change here, for me. Since it's all 'me' and… yeah. Kinda dangerous when I'm not trying to mess with other people."
Blue nodded a few times in agreement with that, here. "It's a little like how I was able to change and create and mold and also completely destroy things in my 'Nightmare Realm', once I knew how, except that was not 'all me' in the same way that everything here is all you; it was a bit different," Blue told him.
"So… is it uncomfortable for you here?" MizBill looked worried about that. "I don't want you getting all drained out since you can't replenish here."
"I have deep reserves," Blue told him. "The problem for me isn't capacity, it's that I don't want to try to pull out too much at once; it's my own current easiest-to-follow restrictions on both bandwidth, and rate of flow." He icould do it, but it would risk a lot of things back in his own 'set, none of which he was ABOUT to discuss outside of his own Mind here, right now! The very-last thing he was going to do in front of any potential enemy here who might be listening in, would be to tell them what he would and would not risk, let alone how far and why!
"I still worry. I got starved a lot when I was mortal, I don't like something like that happening to anyone else." It was why he was always pushing food onto people, even when they might not need it. He couldn't help himself.
"If I think it will be a problem, I will let you know," Blue told him, with a bit of a twist to his smile, "But that would be VERY poor planning on my part, if I did that."
"Alright." MizBill spread his arms, checking for Blue's response to his invitation to hug.
"Hugs?" Blue said, to Miz's nod. That local protocol confirmed as not being any different here from there, Blue got up from his seat, and made his way over to his sister's own chair.
He plopped down right next to him, and relaxed right up against his side. MizBill nuzzled against him.
"How much squeezing and arm-wrapping is too much, when you are like this here?" Blue asked his sister next.
"This vessel is much stronger than a real Flatlander. So, same force as what you'd use to handle a human body in your dimension."
"I wasn't worried about breaking your physical form," even though Blue generally didn't feel comfortable with extra pressure beyond a certain point himself, let alone like it, but... "I thought you still…" Blue trailed off, not sure how much the lizard here might already know.
"Hugs aren't the same as being held down. And I'm working to get less scared of that. Seb's Ford has been helping. He holds me in a way I can break out of and I try to see how much I can take. It's a little scary, but it helps."
"...that from a Stanford is helping?" Blue muttered.
"It lets me experience it and practice not panicking or losing control."
"...from a Stanford," Blue repeated almost incredulously, and with a mighty dose there of outright skepticism.
"A nice one. Now. He had therapy." MizBill shrugged. "And I'm going to be starting therapy too. Seb introduced me. She's his old therapist."
"Define: nice," Blue muttered. On the therapist, all he had to say (again) was, "Ugh." Also: "I want to meet this 'therapist' first." And terrorize the hell out of them. ...And put up every protection known to him for wherever Miz was thinking about talking about any of the things that could be used to exploit said little sister's Self. Including peoples' brains.
"He wasn't nice at first. But he realized he was wrong, and he wanted to change and be better."
"...I notice you are not defining 'nice' to me," Blue pointed out (read: complained) to his little sister, as he turned on his side and wrapped his arms around Bill. -Not quickly, not slowly, but he did it.
MizBill rolled his eye. "Well, he's patient with me. When I mess up or do something he considers 'wrong' or 'bad' he doesn't get mad and write me off. He explains his point of view and what it was that he didn't like about what I did, so I could change my behavior if I choose to. That's pretty nice. Giving me a chance to fix what I might have done wrong. Not getting mad at me and hating me for it."
"...Up until he finds out everything else that you did everyplace else, and decides to murder you before you consider doing any of that there, where he is," Blue noted under his breath. "Whether you were planning on doing it, or whether he could actually talk you out of it, or not."
"What I do out in space, where it's dangerous and I need to defend myself is excusable to a point. He's done all sorts of awful stuff when he was behind the portal. So it'd be hypocritical to say I was 'evil' for doing the same."
"Yes," Blue said, wrapping his arms around his sister just a little bit tighter. "It would be hypocritical if he thought you were evil for doing the same. -What's your point?" Blue asked her. And without even a pause, he then added, "Also: how likely is it that he thinks it's not the same in the first place."
"He doesn't want to be a hypocrite, so he doesn't blame me. Though he does think I shouldn't kill people if I could avoid it." MizBill thought about the 2nd part. "I mean, he doesn't know all that I've done. But he's free to ask if he wanted to know. I wouldn't lie if he asked."
"Yes," Blue said. "He's free to ask, and he won't. Even though he'll say later that he wanted to know, and you didn't tell him, because you didn't think it was IMPORTANT, and oh, what a monster you are for not realizing that," he ended with a boatload of sarcasm, "Not a failure on his part of imagination or respect or anything at all, oh no."
"He hasn't asked." MizBill looked down. "I have told him that I'm a Bill Cipher, just not the one he knew. And he knows vaguely what that entails, in how he understands it. But his brother was a Bill Cipher. And he loves Seb."
"'Vaguely'," Blue scoffed. "-Give me five minutes with him, alone in a room together, telling and talking to him about nothing but all the things my Sixer complained about with me, and I'll have him trying to murder me without needing the last four," Blue told him, letting out a huff. He was perfectly… well, happy wasn't quite the right word for it, but he'd be absolutely thrilled to spring that little trap for his little sister, to keep her from ever getting hurt. ...Chaos, he might even find a way to do it to make it even a little bit fun.
"Are you thinking of making him mad at you so he wouldn't be mad at me?" Bill narrowed his eye at Blue.
"No," Blue told him, "Because that's not possible. -I'm planning on making him mad at me, about several of the same things that I know that we have in common or similar, so that you can see what he'd do to you too, if he ever found out any of all of those things," Blue told Bill quite simply. "Save you a lot of time and wasted effort on him, when you don't need him for anything," Blue huffed out.
"..." Yeah, the thought of Fordsie not wanting to be his friend anymore because of things like that was sad.
"Nnnnnnn…" Blue complained next, butting his forehead up against Bill's side. "That's a mental attack, though. Probably. ...Don't really want to talk about doing or not-doing it with Stanley even a little at all right now, though," Blue muttered. He shifted in place. "Can't you just give up on him, so I don't have to do the thing?" Miz's big brother almost but not quite whined out at him.
MizBill groaned. "I'm not gonna stop being friends with him."
"..." Blue wasn't too happy with this, and it was obvious. But then again, so was, "I knew you were going to say that," Blue huffed out in tired and frustrated annoyance. Because after how mini-'Ford had treated his sister, and then kept on treating his sister, and how she'd both responded and not responded to that… Blue really hadn't expected any different from Miz.
"I like hanging out with him." MizBill protested. "It's… fun." He sighed. "I dunno. I feel happy when I'm with him. I'm happy when I'm with Seb and mommy and Zach and Zoe too. I like my human family. They like me too. And, I can actually think of Zach as a little brother without having a meltdown." Saying that aloud made Bill pause. Zach… was his little brother. That thought didn't send him into a spiral of anxiety like he was used to feeling with anyone else. Bill hoped it was a sign that maybe he was getting better? Then he thought about Kryptos, if he were a little brother instead of a sister… and froze at the feelings of wrongwrongwrongwrong that thought invoked. Nope. Still couldn't do it. Zach was special, apparently.
"If you want, we could go meet my human family. Seb's world isn't made of dead bodies, so it might be more comfortable for you." And MizBill tried not to think about how the fact that everything here being made of himself made People's bodies so easily manipulated. He could feel his connection to them, all of them. Everything and everyone was HIS. They belonged to him, they were made of him, to do with as he saw fit. No, that was wrong. It had to be. Even if he had every right to do whatever he wanted with his own god damn dead body, he still… Shouldn't. This lack of say in his own bodily autonomy was… Also wrong. But it just didn't work- and this train of thought was giving him a headache with all the back and forth of what he was and wasn't allowed to do with his own body, and taking into account Free Will of those many souls who were unknowingly using his body...
"Dead body, just one and yours..." Blue noted, and he actually hesitated as he started to seriously consider Bill's question on his potentially visiting Bill's new newly-chosen family and tried to think through all of this. Not least of which because Blue realized exactly how very convoluted and very-complex a question that his little sister had just posed to him. It took him a while. But then Blue asked, first and foremost, "Has Seb said that he is fine or," (Blue grimaced) "'Okay' with me-visiting?" And, secondly, something else that had occurred to him after his own little sister's push-back, and in remembering the new family relations' she had going on over there… "...Does Seb consider that Ford Pines over there…" Blue was having trouble getting the next few words out.
"That Ford Pines over there is Seb's Brother. And they love each other a lot."
"...a brother? Really?" Blue got that out finally, but he darn near strangled himself on those word-concepts in doing so - which was no mean feat when said triangle demon was currently sitting inside an exoskeleton that didn't need to breathe!
"Different Set, different people." Bill reminded his brother. "And Ford is finally choosing to actually be a Brother. He wasn't at first. His Filbrick went out of his way to break any sense of Brotherhood Ford had, purposely tried to set Ford against Seb." (Blue himself was almost twitching by this point.) "And it worked for many years, but Ford has moved past that. He worked to move past that, to fix himself, teach himself, so that he could be a real Brother to Sebastian." MizBill hummed, a faint orange, "It's part of why I like Fordsie. He chose to be Seb's brother, and worked really hard to be a proper one. He realized he was wrong and grew past it. That's more than I can say for most people I know." MizBill's color went back to yellow. He'd even been prodding at it, testing it, making Ford uncomfortable and guilty as he did. But Bill had to be sure Ford was sincere, so he pushed at Ford's boundaries and comfort to confirm he really did love Sebastian now.
It… hurt a little, that Blue thought that he hadn't been doing that for Seb. Checking and making sure. He wasn't stupid, he knew how to get tests and checks. Bill wondered if it just hadn't occured to him, or if Blue actually thought that he just couldn't do it right from what his big brother had been saying before, and… Bill wasn't sure which one of those was actually worse.
"...does Seb consider this Ford to be a brother," was what was Blue barely managed to drag out of himself next, after a VERY long several minutes of silence (and more almost-hug not-quite-cuddle/snuggling with his sister - not that Blue would EVER call it that).
"Yes. He's considered Ford a Brother for a long time, which used to be unrequited. So he's very happy now that Ford wants to be his brother too."
Blue let go of Miz and rolled back over onto his back(side). He raised his hands up, and started scrubbing them through the top of his exoskeleton's 'head' and 'hair' in some sort of frustration.
"Attacking Seb's Ford would be attacking a me-who-is-also-me's… trying-to-be-re-forming... 'brother'," Blue grumbled out at the last, letting his hands drop to the sides of his head again. And oh, how that thought-process had been painful to try and walk (read: drag) himself through...
"AAAAAAAH!" Blue yelled out in complaint, kicking his arms and legs out at his sides. "This stupid thing is all so stupidly WRONG!" He went back to scrubbing his hands through his 'hair' again in sheer frustration and self-sympathetic outrage.
"I feel like that was the point." MizBill pointed out blandly. "Since Seb's AXOLOTL reincarnated him as a human, and as part of the Pines family."
Blue dropped his hands to his sides again. "Can I at least kill that stupid lazy deranged lizard that is there, for him," Blue muttered out, glaring in the general possible direction of the stupid thing (maybe). And maybe torture it a little before that, despite how dangerous it might be to not just kill it outright-immediately there, post-haste. "He said that he was fine with me doing that, yes?"
"...you'll have to ask Seb on that. If he's changed his mind on that or not."
Blue turned his head and gave Bill a stare. "While that lizard is listening in on us? That's horrible operational security!" he told Bill. "Horrible!" He didn't want to give it any sort of heads-up at all! No!
"We could wait until he falls asleep…" Bill put out there, "Or ask Seb while he's here."
"We'd have to talk about it and then also and immediately DO it, all before it 'wakes up' again, if we do it that first way," Blue noted almost absently, already well in the midst of his planning. "Pretty sure the things can Look Back in time, just as easily as anything." Blue frowned. "Probably better to ask Seb while Seb is here. Or in your Void with us." Blue paused. "We are very sure that your lizard-'dad' cannot sense anything that is going on in here, yes?" Blue asked, starting to get a little paranoid. (He'd thought that it felt like his sister had incorporated some of that 'headband'-like stuff into things, but he hadn't checked everything thoroughly. ….Mostly because he wasn't all that used to having to wonder or worry about whether or not a stupid lazy pink frilly lizard in question knew whether or not he was going to try and kill it, because the one in his 'set absolutely DID, he'd YELLED it at it years ago, and said it over and over and over again many times since…)
"Eh, he's really lazy though. And yeah, I told dad I wanted my privacy up here in my workshop. And placed protections on top of that. But there are several places where dad refuses to look at. Like the Penis Planet ™, where he sends souls to, but doesn't actually look at. His Soul system is automatic so he doesn't have to look anywhere at it. I don't think he wants to. So anything I do there goes entirely unseen by him."
Blue blinked at his little sister. "You are sure of all this?" he questioned. "You tested this?"
"Yeah, anytime I talk about the Penis Planet™ he shuts it out, looks away, sometimes swims away. Dad wants NOTHING to do with it."
Blue blinked at him. "There are things that your lizard does not want to do, and then does not do them," he said slowly and oddly, like it was a new concept for him completely.
"Dad is a person with his own wants, desires and levels of comfort." Bill clarified.
Blue blinked again. And then Blue turned his head away and looked up at the ceiling.
"This lizard here came here to your corpse," Blue said just as slowly again, processing all of these new thoughts heavily. "It did not create everything here, right from the start."
"He might have made the 2nd dimension. 'Cause I didn't make it. But the 2nd dimension was destroyed by me and I created the 3rd dimension and everything else."
Blue frowned slightly and closed his eyes, as he thought on this further.
"...What about your human dimension before that?"
"I don't know who created that. I didn't meet any God or Gods ever while I was human. And my old human dimension doesn't exist here.
"...and if you ask the lizard here now, it may lie to you, and you won't be able to tell if it is or isn't, because you still have no sense of its thoughts or emotions, or do not know whether they sound the same as your own or not, if it is masking them," Blue muttered out. Not that he had a problem in principle with the lizard not leaving all that out there and potentially overwhelming his little sister with all of itself, but… it did make it very hard to verify things, as a dual-outcome of the balance of this 'trade'.
"Dad just said my soul wasn't created by him. I wasn't the Bill Cipher he was expecting."
"So it was created by some other 'god-lizard'," Blue muttered. "Which one…"
"If my old dimension even had a lizard." Bill clarified.
Blue snapped his eyes open at this, and turned his head to stare over at him.
"...What else would it have," Blue said in something very much like a bout of sheer existential horror.
"From what I could understand, there were a few theories that the humans in my old dimension had. One, there was a God or Gods who created everything. Two, there was no God and we were all the result of a natural freak accident with physics and chemistry acting on its own with no outside input or creator. Three, nothing was real and the world we all saw and lived in was nothing more than our minds floating in a void and imagining it all." Bill laughed. "There were more but I think those were the main ones."
"Yeesh, those 'big bang' theories that those humans get, with all the 'gods' and the 'no gods'," Blue recognized almost immediately, after an initial bout of confusion. He just about waved that off, with a, "Dimensions don't just create themselves, and neither do Minds or Souls or ny Voids; they have to be made, they come from somewhere, and even 'gods' come from somewhere-else first. You know that. And dimensions don't just stabilize themselves, either," Blue said at the last, but then grew quiet as the thought hit him… why not? Why didn't dimensions stabilize themselves was one question that he knew the answer to… for the 'set that he himself was from, but... if there were ways of creating dimensions that were completely-unstable to begin with, or robust-but-then-failed once pushed past their somewhat-flexible limits… was there possibly a type of dimension that was the OPPOSITE of that? Was there a way to create a dimension that would always and forever try to restabilize itself, from any force external or internal? He had never Seen such before, but that didn't NECESSARILY mean that...
"So who made the AXOLOTL?" Bill questioned. "In my old dimension, the prevailing thought was that the universe existed on its own, without any input or direction. I used to believe that more than the idea of any Gods. 'Cause life was weird and horrible things happened all the time, so there couldn't possibly be any Gods, and if there were, they were all fucking assholes."
Blue shook his head physically (and his energy Self mentally), and then said, "Any of the human theories for that that I've ever seen fall apart when they get too close back to the 'big bang' point, when physics doesn't exist yet," Blue noted. "None of them explain what everything was like that came before, and they all depend on something coming before. Which means that there was a something before." Lizards and more-lizards all the way down.
"So what did come before? Or is it just lizards all the way UP as well?" Bill asked, already hitting the same mental thought Blue was on without knowing it.
Blue shrugged. "In my 'set, it's the Outside?" he told Bill. "But I don't know enough about the Outside yet to tell you how that came to be," Blue told him with a frown. "Infinities running around and feeding into each other in circular-spheres of existence are hard," he said purely philosophically.
"What if it's circular?" Bill realized suddenly. "The outside is the outside is the outside is the inside… like replacing carbon atoms with fish and all the fish's carbon being part of the other fish. What if all existence is connected in such a way with beginnings being the end of another being the beginning being the end?"
"That is the 'simple' solution to the problem as-posed," Blue noted. "But…" he grimaced. "Spheres look like circles in two dimensions. -What if we are missing something else?" Blue put out there. "Unable to comprehend a 'height'-like direction, that we have Seen no evidence of its existence before, at all?" It wasn't as though that wasn't largely what had happened to Blue(Bill) himself, when it had come to his own personal experiences before that Sphere...
"Or maybe there was nothing. And it really was just completely random that something came from nothing. A Denial of Nothingness as it were."
"But 'nothing' is something," Blue noted. "The concept itself is a thing. And what would be doing the Denial? Some thing would have to be there, to be doing the thing."
"That's the part that I don't get. What started it all, at the beginning. If it was the AXOLOTL, where did he come from?"
Blue huffed out a breath at himself.
"Maybe this is a failing of me, and my own internalized workings and functioning at-present," Blue noted, stretching a little in place, before relaxing again. (For some reason, it was almost comforting to him to know he wasn't alone in trying to tackle this problem. He wasn't the only one who thought about these things, in this way, and wasn't about to brush it all off, at-worst just save it for later all over again...) "I can't actually comprehend pure Chaos, without using a structure to define it against - made-up for that specific particular purpose or otherwise. I've never been able to comprehend it directly, completely. Not now. Not yet..."
"Even chaos will eventually form a pattern, given enough time." Bill pointed out. "But I don't always think about this myself since it just ends up being circular. But if reality worked the same way time travel did in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, then it always has existed as it did because the people there wanted it to be."
"Patterns are arbitrary made-up sets of rules for the grouping of concepts to call them alike," Blue noted, "You could technically use Chaos as a pattern for Chaos." And while Blue was not quite getting Miz's reference, the explanation was... "WELL. Causality is a thing. But it doesn't always go in just the one direction. Humans" - and other beings - "do get confused sometimes about that. Time didn't exist before the 'big bang', either? Maybe we beings and demons all move in the half-dimension of time forwards in the one-direction, while the rest of everything moves backwards through it in the other-direction instead. ...when it isn't pooling itself in odd spirals and convoluted-knotted eddies?" And while what had come before this had largely been old hat to him (once past the initial crisis-idea of someplace with no lizards), this series of thoughts felt almost passing-familiar to Blue, now. -almost. (Not nearly as familiar as all the rest, which he'd ruminated on at-length before now, but... Had he thought something like this before, when he'd been all ascended further up? If he was beginning to be able to unpack more things from that section of him again, in a way that some lower thought-processes could comprehend, while he was so far down like this, then that meant...)
"It's more like, in the movie, spoiler warning by the way, they got captured by bad guys, they mention that 'if we escape, we'll go back in time and help ourselves escape.' And then their future selves show up to help them escape, so they could go back in time and save themselves. It was a circular series of events that couldn't have happened since they would have needed to escape first before going back to save themselves, but themselves showed up to save themselves."
"Oh, that," Blue waved off. "I do that all the time with my decision-making!" He grinned. "That's not hard. -But that's a thing inside an already-stable set, with beings that already exist, and a way to do that thing that they would know how to do that would make it all work if they came back in time all over again."
"But what if Reality came to be the same way? Like someone wanted it to exist and so it did in order for that person to exist to want it in the first place?"
"...yes?" Blue said. "That would be the 'everything moves backwards through it in the other-direction instead'?" he said, repeating himself. "If the Causality that was needed for that to happen could begin to exist in the first place. ...And that's where the equations get WEIRD," he told Bill. "In that whole 'flux state' at the beginning there. You know about this, yes? You've actually created dimensions here before."
"Yeah, the moment between Nothing and Something."
"...except that it's not a lack-of-even-a-Nothing here," Blue realized, before slapping his palm to his forehead and sitting up quickly, "Because YOU have your dead body-corpse here, making up absolutely EVERYTHING, and all the Nothing-ness of all the spaces between, too." Yeesh.
"With Ax's space between those spaces and Time Baby's stream flowing between those." Bill noted.
"Right." Blue flopped back in the chair they were both sharing. "And your Void of Doors is more like a bridge you grew out from here, connecting between all those spaces-and-'sets. -You're not starting from a lack of even a 'zero' from here. That makes things difficult to use as a proper comparison-basis here for trying to go about defining this problem, since everything-here is all 'enclosed' and 'connected' in some way," Blue noted, frowning. But then he added, almost ponderously slowly, as he stared up at her ceiling, "...I wonder how that lizard of yours got itself here." He just as slowly looked over at her after saying this.
"...he swam?" Bill shrugged.
"Swam through what? From where?" though, Blue noted. "Your Void of Doors didn't exist before that lizard came to here, did it? So what did it use as a connection?" Blue frowned further. "Do all of the lizards of its type take over dead-body corpses? And bring over Time Babies with?" Blue's frowned deepened. "How are the Pillars set up in the first place, if the stupid thing is having trouble automating the thing now, and you're having to do that for it yourself?"
"I don't know. Never asked." Bill blinked. "Should I ask Dad?"
Blue hummed for a bit, with a very low vibration. "Might be a dangerous question. Could be better to try and sneak up on the concept, instead of trying to jump on it outright. Operational security is NOT just a 'me thing', you know," Blue noted.
"Alright. Just casually dropping questions about existence itself over a cup of tea, got it." Bill joked.
Blue laughed.
"So, putting that aside for now, the whole existentially horrifying contemplation of life and reality and the nature of existence, what do you want to do now? Dinner is out, but I still need to make dinner for my friends, we kinda missed lunch with everything that happened."
"I could help with the making of dinner for them, if you trust me with that," Blue noted. "I think that what I want to do after that is... " he tried not to grimace, "Things that do not have me taking over your house and being all… 'overbearing' any further?" He was used to taking over things; it was something of a (always 'good' in his opinion! ...up until now...) reflexive habit of his to IMMEDIATELY (a) try and take over a situation and (b) put himself at the top of any power structure that did or did not already exist in any place that he was in (and if one was not well-defined there, then he'd make a worse one). Blue had been trying to be a good guest for his sister and not do the latter of those two usual things, but with what he'd heard-before about the polytool and the problems his sister had been having with those murder-hobo players in her Games, and then what he'd learned about his little sister's Deals right then and there on the spot...
...he wouldn't have been a good big brother if he'd NOT done something about that, to fix that Free Will problem for his little sister there. Right?
"Sure. I've never seen you cook before." Bill agreed easily enough. He floated out. "Do you want me to make you a guest room? Are you staying for a while?"
"I…" Blue honestly hadn't considered a length of stay. "...wasn't trying to get hit by your Door when you opened it?" he said, with an almost-chagrined looking grin. Things had been so busy already since he'd fallen in here, that he hadn't even thought to ask himself - or Bill - the question, yet. But, now that his sister had asked it... "How long do you want me to stay?"
"As long as you'd want? Unless that would impact your comfort or health and safety to stay too long."
Blue let out a sigh as he pushed himself up, out of the chair. "I did a thing before I left that should make the relative-time be at a standstill in my own 'set, relative to this one," he told Bill. "But if we want to be sure-and-certain… then I probably shouldn't stay here any longer than we both stayed out there in that 'Reverse Flatland' dimension," yeesh, that place STILL gave him the shudders, he'd put bled on that Door for a reason, "...yet. Until I have done a little more of the testing, to be more sure-and-certain about this," Blue then told him.
"Ok. I don't know what I can do to make this place more accommodating, since you don't want to breathe in or eat my body and all that."
"It's fine," Blue told him, following him out of the upper 'safed' personal room area and into the lower one. "I set my boundaries and yours for these very strictly," he gestured at his arms and legs, "And you- let me? Move and lean on those atoms of yours earlier, so that I could make this exoskeleton here from just-and-solely my own energy. Not sure I could've moved anything around too much at all, if you hadn't told it all to let me do it."
"I don't mind."
"I am Mind," Blue teased out. "And you have already been VERY accommodating," he noted further, "I have never been able to make my own exoskeleton anywhere else before, besides my 'Nightmare Realm' and that 46'\ dimension."
"Oh, I'm glad. I hope you like living here, even if it's just for a bit." Bill smiled.
"WELL. It is very… you?" Blue told him, and Bill laughed.
"Didn't get to say this earlier. I love you big brother. I'm happy you came to visit, even if it was sort of an accident."
"Coming inside was an accident, the visiting wasn't," Blue noted. "And I love you too, little sister." He sounded a touch pleased at this. "I… missed seeing you," was the almost tentative thing that came next. "And talking with you directly. That also. Both." Thought Blue still sounded almost tentative as he said this. (Because sometimes, with Liam…)
"Missed you too. Now come on, I'll show you my kitchen and pantry." Bill giggled with pure delight.
Blue grinned widely at this. "Sounds like you have a plan!" he said, not quite bouncing along down the hallway after Bill.
