Illusion is Reality
Chapter 113
-Hey toots-
Stan didn't consider himself to be a cruel man. He really didn't. But even he could admit that it was… not very nice to bring Miz to an all you can eat buffet. Well, not nice for the people who owned the buffet at least.
But hey, this place cost over $100 per person to get in. Stan might have been a little salty about that, to sic Miz on their unsuspecting establishment. After all, he only wanted to come here to eat the desserts, but they charged the same amount and Stan sort of… wanted his money's worth. Miz would eat enough to make up for how much he was spending on his family here. Also, Stan had to admit, the looks of absolute growing horror on the faces of the workers here was funny as hell.
"I haven't tried the steak yet…" Miz drooled at the sight of the meat slicing area. The server there had a huge chunk of cooked meat and would slice off a piece for you. And Miz was there now, just asking for another slice, after another slice. The server frowned. "Excuse me, Miss? Are you sure you can eat all this? You… shouldn't waste food." But Sixer stepped in to make an excuse of, "Oh, we're a large group, she's just getting enough for everyone to share." And that made the server relax… up until Miz, who was hungry and impatient, stuck an entire piece of the sliced steak into her mouth and tore it apart with her fangs, moaning at the taste, before swallowing it all.
The server's eyes bugged out. Sixer pulled Miz and the plate of meat away. "Thankyouwe'regonnaheadbacknowbye~!" he called back as he hurried Miz away from there.
They got back to their table, where everyone else was just eating the little pastries and ice cream. Miz was the only one getting an actual meal. And what a meal it was. She'd piled her plates high with mashed potatoes, salmon, some green beans (because Wanda said she had to eat some vegetables too), an entire bowl of mushrooms, various meats and more fish- well. The other people nearby were watching in awe as Miz devoured everything. Some people even wondered if they were from some sort of Ker-Pranked skit.
"Are you enjoying yourself?" Seb asked as he licked his ice cream. Miz, mouth full and wiggling back and forth happily, nodded. "I might not need dinner tonight!" She said, once she swallowed.
Stan was nodding to himself. Yes, taking Miz to a buffet was a great idea. And saved him money in the long run.
(With Blue and Ford)
Blue had largely just been following Sixer around so far now, letting him do his own thing. ...Yes, Sixer. He was sort of acting like his 'Sixer', but also not. And people thought he was insane? -Well, he was, but so was Sixer. Just in a different way than him. Yeesh...
Blue stretched in place. He figured it would be a good idea to just keep on letting Sixer do his 'thing'. Wasn't like that Stanford was going to just up and accept anything from him, still. Not after he'd noticed the idiot paying attention to the various food stores they were passing, and where all the dumpsters were located.
And now they were holed up in a little electronics shop, with him sitting on the floor next to Sixer; and Sixer bent over a table, surrounded by ceiling-high piles of absolute better-as-raw-materials-than-anything-else junk, fixing a bunch of broken shit for 'cash'...
...SUPPOSEDLY...
...and Blue could just see it now, without even needing to open his eyes or try and See into his Mind from the Mindscape. He could practically feel the tension radiating off of him. Sixer had gotten VERY good at telling when somebody was going to try and rip him off over the years, and he damn well knew from the first few words in when he'd met him first that that asshole at the front register was going to try and stiff him his pay - already too low for the repair work he was doing to begin with, which Sixer damn well knew also. Blue knew that from the set of Sixer's shoulders.
So of course Sixer was going to make it look like he wasn't done until he was finished with everything-else he was working on back there, ganking small spare parts here and there within reach to squirrel away into pockets, and quickly soldering little things here and there as he could to get ready for the upcoming exodus. Wasn't like that little asshole human up front there didn't deserve it. -Should've just treated him right! Sixer liked doing favors for the ones who treated him nice: all the ones who didn't try to screw with him, rip him off, or outright murder him any. Blue had noticed that one, once he'd gotten Sixer out of his old dimension, real quick.
...HMMMMMM. That broken-looking soldering iron right there with the missing everything-but-the-actual-iron part there and most of the wire was something old Sixer here hadn't managed to grab up for himself just yet. -Probably because it was out of sight and out of reach, with where he was sitting practically right down on top of the stupid thing here. HA. -Might as well put his OWN fingers to good use!
Aaaaaaaaaand here comes the idiotic asshole rip-off store owner again, getting all loud and complaining. Like 'the punk girl' that the idiot thought he was, was doing any more than taking up air where he was sitting in this miserable dump? He was helping keep half of this stupid box pile behind him from falling down on top of this asshole by sitting up against it like this, the ungrateful little single-life'd, one-lifespanned moron. He should be bowing at his feet just for gracing him with his presence, and-
HA! -Take that, YES! SIXER! FINALLY. -Whoops! Guess it really was TIME to GO! -HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
When the roast chicken ran out, Miz headed to the seafood section. There was a display of sushi, just simple rolls and some nigiri with salmon or tuna. Not the high grade stuff, but they were fresh and good quality. Miz polished off that whole display within three trips. The servers at the cut meat sections shivered when she approached them, some let out relieved sighs when she passed them over. The steak and lamb were all gone. The roast pork was gone. Miraculously the ham was still untouched by the wicked beast. It appeared she didn't like ham.
The servers shivered as the little monster made her way down the aisle with her tray. She looked so innocent. But behind that sweet smile was a ravenous beast. This was something the servers had learned in their hearts. The sushi chef was staring at the empty display, his hopes just as barren as he realized they were only halfway through the day and he was going to have to dig into his dinner stock.
By some miracle, the beast didn't so much as glance at the lobster, but the tilapia fillets were gone. So was the breaded haddock. The salmon had all vanished long before this.
And once she'd finished with those sections, the beast worked her way through the pizza section, snatching up a slice from each type of pizza, eating each one to clear her plate right before she got to the next one, so that there was room to grab another. They all heaved a sigh of relief as she only took one slice from each pizza and didn't go back for seconds (or thirds, fourths and fifths like she'd done with the meat and seafood sections).
Then she moved onto the pasta section and the mountains of fettuccine and meatballs began to dwindle like their hopes. This was a nightmare, but they knew this was not one they could wake from. By this point, the manager had been called, but they weren't sure what to do. The desperate man turned to the beast's handlers and begged for mercy. And, like an angel from on high, the beautiful blonde goddess went to the beast, placed a hand on her head and said, "Miz, make sure you leave some for the rest of the customers."
And, to the rapturous joy of all the workers (and other patrons), the beast responded, "Okay mommy." And left the pasta section with her selection, to sit down. Some other guests at the restaurant rushed for the food, to fill their own plates while they had the chance.
Back at the table, Carla turned to her husband and sighed. "You're evil."
Stan gasped. "What?! What are you even talking about? I'm bringing our dear niece out to eat at a nice restaurant." Carla groaned. "You know what you did."
"...I think the manager's crying." Seb noted, looking over at the man. "We should probably leave before they decide to throw us out."
"We're paying customers, they can't do that." Stan shrugged.
Miz paid no attention to all this, slurping up her noodles and licking the sauce off her lips. So many things to scan and add to her extensive library of Recipes. She made a note to recreate some of these for her family later, for dinner, since none of them were eating any of the savory stuff right now. She also made a note to head to the salad bar to scan a few things for her brother. Minus the salad dressing, which was thankfully separate and self serve. Speaking of her brother, Miz allowed her eyes to flicker as she cut up a meatball with the side of her fork. Was he doing okay? Alone with that Stanford for so long? She might as well check up on them….
Ford was still feeling a bit off-put by Bill and his behavior, as he walked down the street next to the demon.
"Why are you presenting girl instead of guy?" Ford finally asked the demon (unconsciously slipping into Galactic Standard as he asked it, not knowing the words for expressing the concepts in English), as the scientist strode his way towards his next destination (with Bill walking beside him). It had seemed odd and off-putting to him - not that Bill had cut his hair short again, or burned the ponytail away like it was nothing; not even the flickers of flame along his fingers that he'd used as he'd then 'styled' the rest - it was the choice of the hairstyle itself. What he hadn't expected was how feminine the demon had been able to make that short-cut look, that 'spiky-haired punk look' that Stan had called it.
Bill had done it right before they'd entered the repair shop, after a short flicker of use of that 'Cipher Eye' spell of his, and… he'd shifted the way he was walking, the tone and cadence of his voice, his stance and the way he balanced on the balls of his feet, even in place...
He watched the triangle demon almost warily, as he continued to walk along, and Bill sped up a bit, to turn and start walking backwards as he addressed him, moving almost in front of him a bit. (The sea of people was parting around them as they did so, but Ford hardly noticed this, used to it by this point in his travels, really. He had no concept of how much presence he himself and Bill were both projecting at the moment, as they made their way down the crowded sidewalk.)
He blinked as he caught something tossed at his chest by the demon, and frowned slightly at the grin that followed. "What? You think I don't know how to do this, Sixer? -How UNOBSERVANT do you think I am?"
Ford frowned a little at Bill's words, and then his frown deepened as he looked at what he had grabbed out of the air, and recognized for what it was.
"You stole a soldering iron?!" he demanded out of the demon, to which said triangle demon let out a short "HA!" and said, "What- you didn't?"
"I left his tools for repair behind-" Ford protested, eyes narrowing, and Bill just cut in after with an, "-I NOTICED," and "In case YOU haven't noticed, THIS one is broken and would require some work. Along with the rest of the OTHER junk you stole to make useful to YOU." (Ford grimaced at this.)
"You shouldn't steal from other people," Ford began, to another "HA!" and before Bill could get on his case about hypocrisy, he added, "Stan doesn't want you stealing things, remember?"
"When New York City is trying to fall like Rome…" Bill shrugged next, turning in place again and falling back in his walking pace a bit to stay at his right shoulder beside him. "Where to next, Sixer?"
"The library," Ford said firmly, as he started up the steps towards the building guarded by stone lions, watchful pillars, and surely more than a few reigning librarians as well.
"What. We couldn't have done that first?" Blue complained, not quite muttering it out under his breath as he took the steps two at a time to keep up with him.
When the Pines left the buffet, there was a resounding cheer from the room. Stan looked quite satisfied with himself. Miz just looked satisfied. She was still cleaning her face, licking the back of her hand and rubbing it along her face in an almost animalistic manner. Sebastian pulled out a handkerchief and began wiping her down. "No self grooming like that. Humans have napkins."
"The napkin steals the sauce…" Miz mumbled as Seb cleaned her off. "You've eaten enough." Seb sighed. "Well, now I know how to cook all of that." Miz pointed out. "So if anyone wants to try any of those for dinner…"
Stan let out a, "Yes!" as he thought about taking Miz to 5-Star restaurants so she could learn those recipes and prepare him all the delicious food for less cost. Hey, if she was here, and willing, then why shouldn't he take advantage of that?! Getting amazing high class meals made anytime he wanted from his niece? It was brilliant!
"We should find Blue and Stanford." Sixer sighed. "I'm rather worried about what the two of them could be getting up to."
"Brother can keep that Stanford alive." Miz shrugged. She groaned a little, patted her belly. "I think I ate too much. But they were so yummy…" she whined. Wanda reached over and felt Miz's forehead. "You are heating up…"
"I… I think I need to head back to my side and store some of this away before I start burning…" Miz groaned. Wanda picked her up, almost tipping over. "Wow, you get heavy when you eat…"
"I think I ate like… 15 pounds of food…" Miz groaned. Her storage was pretty high, but being in a vessel did make it less efficient. "I'll be back…" and then Miz slipped out of her vessel and through a Door.
Gotta admit, being in the Mindscape again so I could stretch out as much as I needed felt nice. I tumbled back to my own dimension and sighed. I had a piece of me inside the Nightmare Realm, a vessel I was using to store excess energy in. And since energy WAS me, it was still technically me (though without my consciousness inside it). I essentially shoved a good chunk of myself into the vessel, safely in bed in the house I built in the Nightmare Realm, and sighed as the 'exploding' feeling died down.
...really shouldn't be eating that much. But they were right there and I was hungry-
Whatever. I was home now, and it felt like a waste to just head back to Seb's so soon when I was feeling so jittery and excited. Besides, I DID want to check out an arcade with my friends. Just… have to go in disguise.
I popped back into the Death Star and found Keyhole fiddling with the microwave, the machine was taken apart and the pieces all laid out around him. "...what happened? Is it broken?" I sighed, not feeling up to Looking quite yet. Keyhole jumped and tilted his head up at me. "Oh, it's not broken, I wanted to know how it worked. And Kryptos wanted to get a couple pieces from it for his newest experiment." Oh. Well, good to know he's moving on to something else. Must have been hard for him to lose his goals and stuff. Having no direction in life is scary. "What's he working on?"
Keyhole shrugged. "Some new kind of ray gun. He really likes those. Dunno what it's for. He just wanted the parts."
"Any reason it had to come from our microwave?"
Keyhole turned brown and rubbed his large head sheepishly. "Ah, well, I've always wanted to take one apart to see what it was made of." That's fair. "Well, does this mean we need to buy a new microwave?"
Keyhole glanced down, bit his lip and then sighed. "This IS an old model. We haven't updated in centuries."
"...its a microwave! It vibrates the atoms! Why would we need to get some fancy machine for that?" I huffed. Keyhole leaned back on his butt from where he was sitting. "I've seen the new models that have settings for which particular atoms you want to inject energy into. And others with built in sensors that check if you put something living inside, so people won't be able to microwave their pets by accident."
"Who the FUCK puts their pet into a damn microwave?!" I felt faint at the very idea. Keyhole shrugged. "I read on the internet that some old lady thought she could dry her felixus in a microwave…"
"There CANNOT be anyone stupid enough to microwave their fucking-" I sputtered, unable to really grasp the stupidity of people. "That- you can't do that!" Keyhole pushed himself up and to his feet, walking over to pat my front plane. "Bill, calm down, don't think about it too hard. You're gonna upset yourself."
"I bet that whole story is just some bullshit made up by those people making the newfangled microwaves just to make people buy them!" I wasn't being petulant, I swear-
Keyhole pet my bricks steadily. "It's ok… come on, its better if its a fake story, right? So that no pets were actually hurt…" I continued to huff, pissed at the whole thing. "Well, I can pay for the new microwave, since I'm taking apart the old one." Keyhole sat back down. "So you don't have to worry about appliance shopping."
"...but I like shopping." I floated down and plopped onto the stone floor beside him. "And you don't have to buy it, I can pay. I'm in charge of buying stuff for the household anyway."
"Did SOMEONE say SHOPPING~?!"
Pyronica danced into the room, trailing flames behind her. "We haven't had a shopping spree together in AGES!" She whined, stomping her foot. I had to dash her hopes. "We're just getting a new microwave."
"And then shopping spree for other stuff?" She batted her eyelashes at me. I gave her a long look. "You mean shopping as in you're gonna pay for them… right?" She placed her hands under her chin and gave me a wide smile. More batting of the eyelashes.
"No stealing from stores." I scolded. "For the last time, if you want something, take it from people who can actually afford to lose it. Shoplifting just inconveniences the workers."
"...So you mean we should just steal a microwave from some rich person?" Keyhole asked. I was about to correct him and say no, but then I paused. "..There IS that guy who goes around killing Fluffims and then paying off the Federation so he doesn't get arrested for the murders…" and the Fluffims were… not very intelligent people. They were cute, adorable aliens that looked a lot like raccoons, but ROUND, who were very friendly and trusting. Just goes to show you what happens when a species evolves on a planet with no natural predators...
"Steal his stuff~steal his stuff~" Pyronica chanted. I sighed. "Alright, get the gang together. We're planning a heist." All this to get a microwave. I suppose it's more fun than just going to a store and getting yelled at by other customers. Even in space, Karens exist. (They have a whole species of them, in fact.)
"Sassparilla to Root Beer, I'm in position. Over."
"Sprite to Sassaparila, that word only has one 'l', over."
"Mountain Dew to everyone, who the fuck cares how you pronounce sasaparillia?! Over."
"Wait, is it sasaparilla or sassparilla? Over."
"Vote we change their code name to something that isn't sassafrassilla. Over."
"Now you're just doing it on purpose! Over."
I sighed, floating in front of the air duct. "Can we just move on with this? I just want a new microwave. Over." I got a chorus of 'yes's and carefully unscrewed the metal frame so I could slip inside. Teleporting was easier but less fun than doing this manually. There was something so satisfying about actually crawling through air ducts and sneaking through someone's mansion. I mean, we were gonna be robbing the place. But I'm just here for the microwave. If Pyronica wanted to grab anything else… well… that was on her to not get caught. I squeaked when my angle bumped the side of the tunnel, fuck. I was stuck. I wiggled. Nope. Stuck.
I shrank in on myself, twisting my form into something better able to run around and climb. I meowed softly, my little kitten paws flexing as I readjusted to this form. Then I took off through the duct, pattering as quietly as I could. I made it to the end that led into the house and peered out through the grate. Hectorgon's map of the mansion's layout was correct. I was right above the kitchen area. "Nestea to everyone, I'm near the kitchen." I dropped the object I was carrying, one of Ammy's blocks, and stepped back as he pulled himself out of it. He gave me a brief glance, noting my current form, but didn't react beyond a, "You're very small." Before slipping his tendrils through the grate and unscrewing it. He tilted it and carefully pulled it into the vent with us, placing it down without a sound. I peered out. There. On the countertop. A microwave.
Yeesh. It really was one of those fancy ones too. So many buttons and settings. It even had Wi-Fi connection. Why the fuck did a microwave need Wi-Fi?!
I looked around for cameras next. Or anyone in the area, didn't sense anyone. It was 'Night' here, so they should all be asleep. There was a camera, but it was pointed at the fridge. And if we stuck to the walls on this side we wouldn't be seen. Pyronica was sneaking in though a window on the lower floor. She, of course, wanted to check on this dude's clothing selection.
I mean, Pyonica in suits was pretty freaking hot, so I wasn't about to stop her. But the body shape would be all wrong. This guy had WINGS after all. Still, I could probably re-tailor them to fit her. Kryptos apparently wanted to raid the guy's office. Hectorgon wasn't on site, he was hacking the security system and camera feeds around the mansion to make sure we didn't get caught. We were going to try our best to avoid the cameras anyway, just in case.
"All clear." I told Ammy as I made sure no one was awake and near the kitchen. He slipped out of the vent and down onto the countertop. I dropped out as well, expertly landing on my legs. Hah! I may not have thumbs but I've got my adorwable kitten refwexes! I blinked. Then I shook myself. Anyway, I padded over to the microwave. This thing was… big. So many buttons. It even had multiple sections so you could microwave different things at once, it was like five different microwaves in one machine, with different doors and buttons for each of them.
I took this time to really look at it. What was so great about this fancy shmancy machine. Well, I guess being able to heat multiple items at once was pretty cool. And being able to choose which atoms in the food in particular you wanted to vibrate could be useful. The spin dish was sturdy… there was a self cleaning function to atomize the splatters of sauce and grease that exploded out when you microwaved things without a cover… okay fine, that was pretty cool. There was a dispenser hatch you could take out and empty to clean it. And this thing actually worked as an oven as well...
...okay fine this was a really cool microwave and I actually did want it now.
Ammy was trying to fit his block over it. The dang thing was pretty big. Ammy glanced over at me. "I need more blocks," he said simply. It took me a few seconds to understand what he meant. "Oh, right." I wiggled my adowable self and my fur caught fire. Ammy reached over with a tendril and pet me down, absorbing my flames and glowing faintly as he grew another block. Then, to my surprise, he encircled the microwave with his blocks and they… split open, forming a large block as the ends attached themselves to each other. Then the large 'ring' of the block lines floated up over the microwave and slid down, the machine vanishing as all other items being placed and 'stored' within Ammy's blocks.
I blinked slowly. Ammy's blocks split apart and went back into their normal configuration. He turned to wave at me. "Microwave obtained." Then he pulled out the mini-Coms that Hectorgon and Kryptos had built for us and spoke into it, "Sasspariallia to everyone, the Boom Boom has been acquired. Over."
Well, that was… really cool. I learned something new about Ammy today.
And then He floated over to open the guy's fridge and started taking stuff. I didn't bother to stop him as I was already opening the cabinets with my mind to take a look at the stuff in there. Truly, we were monsters. Ooh he's got Jincha powder! That shit's expensive and illegal in three different quadrants! I flicked the bottle into another one of Ammy's blocks. The two of us systematically raided the guy's whole kitchen. I could hear Hectorgon complaining over the mini-Coms that we were making his job difficult. Then, I felt someone in the building wake up.
"Ammy!" I hissed. "Code Red!" He nodded, sweeping the entire row of cheese (good job Ammy!) into a block before floating over, picking me up ("Mewl?!") and floating back up into the air duct, pulling the grate back in place. "Root beer to everyone, we have a walker, I repeat, we have a walker. Over." I could hear the others swearing softly as they all hid themselves.
And then we huddled together, staying quiet, as the master of the household, an asshole by the name of Jerkioffa, wandered into the kitchen. From the base level thoughts I was reading, he was hungry. He trudged over, half asleep, and knocked into the cabinets with his wings as they dragged behind him. His pale skin looked even more translucent in the dark, the smooth surface only making the lines of his bones stick out from where his skin showed between the folds of the Fluffim fur robe. I shuddered. Eww you could still see their eye sockets...
He bumped around the kitchen, must have been feeling peckish, and opened the fridge, the dull red light of the night-time bulb flickering on and bathing the kitchen in a demonic-looking glow. I saw him reach around, and then the moment he realized he couldn't find what he was looking for. Ammy was pressed close to me, silent as the two of us observed. The guy was waking up properly now, looking around his fridge and getting more and more agitated as he realized things were gone. He swung away from the fridge and began looking around the kitchen. The missing microwave caught his attention first. I tensed as he began to search frantically.
"Guys, start getting out. He's awake and knows he's been robbed."
I could feel everyone packing up what they were doing and high tailing it out of there. I nudged Ammy and he backed up. I nodded at him and he slipped into one of his own blocks, which dropped to the bottom of the chute… at least it would have, if I hadn't caught it on time and slipped it over my tail to hold onto it. Okay… time to get the fuck outta here.
I made sure everyone got out before I crawled out along the duct myself.
Well, I got a new microwave and I think… (Flicker Flicker) ...yup, Pyronica nabbed a whole stomach full of clothes. (Ewww.) And Kryptos...
...stole the keys to his Ship. HAH! He stole the ship itself! Nice!
...shit, I'm gonna have to build a loading dock for parking that thing now.
Actually…. Why don't I have a docking bay for smaller space ships? I guess I just didn't really like driving. But ships weren't cars. And Kryptos… does he even have a licence?! Wait no, fuck that. You don't need a licence to drive a ship! HAH! Licences were just another way for the Federation to track you anyway! I giggled to myself as I got out, replaced the grate and prepared to teleport home…
BOOM!
...did Kryptos plant explosive charges in the guy's garage?! I stared at the explosion. Ah, it wasn't large enough to damage the rest of the house, no one was hurt. Relieved, I teleported home. I wondered if this was okay? No one was hurt after all. And we didn't take stuff from anyone who couldn't afford to replace what we took. Also, he murdered sentient, sapient people so he could wear their skins, so I think that means he's fair game.
(Back in Seb's dimension)
The triplets and Mystery Twins found Blue and his Ford under a bridge (thanks to Seb), sitting a good several yards up the slope of the concrete under it, not really doing much of anything. (They were a good bit back from the homeless camp-city of assorted cardboard structures and tarps that were there down below them.)
Ford was half-sitting, half crouched in place, with a small array of odd-looking electronic parts and such strewn about in a precise fashion at his left, working on something with both hands he was balancing on top of his left knee.
Blue, meanwhile, was lying down 'upside-down' next to him on the slope to his Ford's right, head facing downwards towards the camp, eyes closed, with his arms crossed leisurely over his lower chest, and his legs crossed at the ankles, too. His hair was short and spiky-looking again.
Stan blinked, "What… are you two doing?" When Seb had led them here, Stan hadn't been expecting this. Wild goose chase that it was, Seb had complained loudly about how the two kept moving around on him. They'd ended up finally giving up and leaving the rest of their family behind (those who weren't used to weirdness-induced wild goose chases), to try and move a little faster to catch up with them first. (Seb was texting the location to the rest of them now. Didn't seem too dangerous here, just a little homeless camp there down the way. Not too many people out and about. ...Okay, and apparently Wanda didn't think it was gonna be a good idea to bring the twins out here, having gone back to the penthouse with them and the 'sleeping' Miz and largely tuckered out at this point Diego. Carla and Abigail didn't sound too up for it, either - or Dillon and Shermie, the big babies - but Kari had been trailing behind them the entire time as they'd went, and she let him know via text that she was on her way at least. Cool!)
Stan blinked again as the first reaction the older Ford had to getting accosted like this was to immediately pull out some sort of hand-held something out of his pocket almost like he was holding a knife and rise up a bit further out of his crouch as he did it, before seeming to recognize them and settle back on his heels a bit. (The triplets didn't even blink at this, but Dipper jumped back anxiously at the motion, placing himself in front of Mabel almost instinctively.)
"Heh." Stan chuckled. "Reachin' for a weapon first? Classic. Fordsie here used to do it all the time too." Sixer pouted. "I'll have you know that the ingrained reflex to defend myself is half the reason I'm alive now."
Ford resettled in place again. He wasn't well-pleased that he'd nearly burned himself, juggling the modified soldering iron in his right hand and the thing he'd been working on, when he hadn't even needed to defend himself. (He only had six fingers to work with per hand for this.) He let out a breath, and slid the electric… for lack of a better word, taser-gun... back into his main outer coat pocket.
"What do you want?" Ford asked of the five of them, frowning a bit. (He didn't wonder how they'd found him; the man-eater seemed to have her own All-Seeing Eye. -So had the man-eater sent them after him for some reason? Or were they here on their own recognizance. -Which was it, and why?)
"So, did you two have fun?" Seb grinned. "Also, rude much? We were worried about you. It's time to start heading back. We have to make dinner, you know?"
"Fun?" Ford blinked at him. "Oh. Yes, it was a productive afternoon." It occurred to him that perhaps the problem in question was that they'd been worried about...
"...You needn't worry," Ford told them next. "Bill's been… 'behaving' himself. Mostly," Ford said slowly, glancing over at Bill (who didn't seem offended in the slightest at his word choice, given his complete lack of response to it). "Don't let me keep you." (Frankly, if they were here to take Bill off his hands and feed him, then… but the man-eater would be there, wouldn't she. He still didn't particularly like the idea of leaving Bill alone with that man-eater. And, for whatever reason, Bill had been staying with him largely thus far, rather than these locals and his man-eating 'sister'. And Bill had continued on doing so long enough since Ford's initial 'carrying him off' that Bill had to be thinking he was getting something out of doing so by doing so, staying with him.)
"I mean, I thought that was the point of the whole, 'seeing the sights' and stuff." Stan blinked. "And, that's good. I guess." He turned to Blue. "Well, are you two ready to come home or are you gonna be hanging out here for a while longer?"
"Are we leaving yet, Bill?" Ford asked the triangle demon evenly, not looking up from his soldering work - though he did resituate the wire hanging off the end of it that was… apparently connected to some sort of odd cube arrangement of batteries, wires, and who-knew-what-else. (Ford heard that as 'go home', not 'come home', as the latter made no sense to him in context.)
"I want to have that math-off challenge with that Ford, and you want to talk with me about things first before we leave," Bill said leisurely to his Ford in reply, without opening his eyes. "We haven't done either of those two things yet. So, no." (Ford made a sort of 'well, there you have it' shoulder gesture at the demon, not looking up from his work.) "Also, I might want to have a word with someone my little sister talked to about a few other things, first," Bill added next, which had Ford shooting him a sharp glance. "...Or we could just stick to those first two things for this trip," Bill added next, likely sensing the discontent radiating from his Zodiac from where said Zodiac was crouching in place next to him, even with his eyes still closed.
Sixer chuckled, scratching his head. "Right, still don't know what that'll entail, but I think you mentioned we needed a blackboard?" And really, he shouldn't be so calm about all this, Blue was dangerous. But so was Miz, and they'd all already decided to show her love and trust, to teach her how to be a good human (a good person), so the least he could do was the same for Blue. After all, how was someone supposed to learn how to be kind if people never showed them any kindness? It was something that Wanda had lectured them all on. (About setting a good example for Miz.)
"Blackboard, whiteboard, wall - something large to write on and all-over. You're going to need it, you idiot," Bill noted.
"Bill, we talked about this," Ford said evenly, as he handled a few more final metallic interconnections on what he was working on presently.
"And I said that I won't be destroying him or enlightening him or even inspiring him as part of this," Bill said, just as casually as before. "I want a referee who will be fair and who already knows all the rules. You probably aren't going to want to come here again. Stanley would probably throw a fit at the idea himself, once we get back. So that's going to happen this trip, or it just won't happen. So it's happening. This. Trip." Bill pointed out to him with impeccable demonic logic.
Ford's lips thinned and his jaw clenched slightly. He finished up his work on the device he'd been working on, and shoved back his coat lapel to reach for an inner pocket, turning off the soldering gun (via convenient 'on-off' button that he'd made for the portable energy cube he'd bootstrapped together for it) and setting it to the side, as he pulled out the other connecting pieces he'd completed over the course of the day earlier.
Sixer was a little worried about this older him. He seemed constantly tense and wary, reminded him of the days behind the portal. Not good days. "Are you alright?"
"Of course," Ford said, not looking up at him as he connected a few wires, mounted a few pieces together with a few quick twists of plastic and spare wire, and then snapped a makeshift few pieces of reformed plastic around that. (He shoved back the left sleeve of his coat to 'bare' his sweater-sleeve at his upper arm.) -A few cycles of black electrical tape around the whole thing to help keep it all together, and he had his makeshift bioscanner wrapped around his wrist and upper arm securely. (Rather subpar; not quite up to his usual standards at all, but it did have a screen to display the results, a small programmed chipset to handle the computations, and a probe to pick up the raw sensor readings for it in the first place. He'd had to make do with worse than this before.) "Why wouldn't I be?"
Ford tapped the small buttons at the side of the screen a few times, to turn it on and get it up and running. (He tested it on a sample strand of his own hair rather quickly, just to check the basic calibration he'd already spent some time programming into the thing.)
"You seem tense? Rather, you don't look like you've relaxed at all today, even when you asked to go sightseeing?" Sixer frowned and Stan sighed. "Wow. I'm a terrible host…"
"New dimensions do tend to be a bit stressful for me until I've gotten my bearings," Ford noted, pulling down his coat sleeve again, before disconnecting the (now cooled off) soldering iron from its power source and putting it back in his pocket. He took a few moments to reconnect the power block to one of his modified 'gloves' (for his right hand), before putting that back on and sliding the power block back into the appropriate internal pocket up his right-hand sleeve. "It's nothing to do with you; you've been a fine host," Ford noted next to the local Stan, as he flexed his right hand carefully, checking the connections and flexibility again. "I'd rather not accidentally overstay my own welcome." That sort of thing usually tended to end badly for him. "I generally try not to stay in one place for very long," he said almost absently.
"Understandable, I'm sorry we haven't been able to accommodate you well enough." Kari told him, sighing. (It had taken her awhile, but after Seb had texted her once they'd finally caught up with their two absent guests, she'd finally caught up with the rest of them. Of course she'd only walked in close enough just in time to hear this last part of the conversation.)
Ford glanced down at them, not quite freezing in place upon hearing her voice, then looked a bit awkward and uncomfortable as he shifted his gaze away from them again.
"Your accommodations have been perfectly-" Ford struggled to find the correct proper and polite term to describe it, then largely gave up and just continued on with: "They've been far better than what I ever would have expected them to be, as has also been your welcome," Ford told them, as he slowly stood up. "I'd simply like to avoid imposing on your hospitality any further. I really should be getting myself to the nearest spaceport-"
And it was at that point that Ford's thought process stuttered and he came to an absolute stop, not quite freezing in place in a slightly bent-knees posture, not quite fully-upright as well.
(Bill, eyes closed, largely horizontal, and still stationary, slowly began to smile.)
"I-" Ford blinked as he realized, and he felt- he began to feel- This wasn't-
"...you… don't… have a… spaceport… here..." Ford said slowly, feeling something like a mix of dread and a sort of proto-precursor to a worry that wasn't quite panic, as the closest word in his native language to the concept did anything but roll off his own tongue as he said it.
"We haven't quite advanced to that point yet." Seb shrugged. "Not for lack of trying," Sixer chuckled. "Fiddleford is more interested in building mechanical prosthetics than helping me with taking apart that spaceship. Apparently Soos showed him some anime about a cyborg Alchemist and he's been quite taken with the idea."
"...I can't get off the planet…" Ford said slowly next, as if the idea was something new to him - one that he was only now realizing that he should have foreseen as being an issue. It had been like he'd been running on something like autopilot, both mind-numb and brain-numb (among other various sorts of shock going on) all the way up until now, and now... now that he'd been confronted with this reality...
"Uh, the guest rooms are still open. You know, like I said?" Stan pointed out. "-'s kinda why I offered?" He lifted his hands, palms out in a soothing gesture. "Look, I get it. Find nearest spaceport to get the fuck out of dodge when things go south. I've been there. But this is Earth. 2018. An' the nerds here haven't gotten that far."
Ford was staring down at his right hand, now gloved with the usual mechanical advantage he liked to have (quite literally) on (his) hand for breaking open doorways and physical locks, just in case he ever ran into that sort of trouble again because he knew that he would, he always did-. He flexed his fingers slightly, the glove augmenting his strength, tempered by the amount of power made available to him through the kludged- and spliced-together most-basic of power units. (He hadn't been thinking. He'd just been thinking of- He'd been thinking of this like any other dimension that he'd been in before, and…)
Ford slowly looked up at them - at the local Ford in particular. "...You… -By any chance, would you... have a…" (Ford trailed off, realizing with a terrible sinking feeling that even if they did have a working portal, they almost definitely wouldn't tell him about it upon questioning, and when it came to the idea of offering to let him use it? That Fiddleford from Dimension 46, that Better World where that version of himself had managed to beat Bill off, that version of himself had been able to create a stable portal device to explore other dimensions… Fiddleford had needed to convince the local version of Ford to let Ford himself use it. That native Fiddleford had in not so many words made it clear that he'd been going out on a limb for him more than just a little bit in helping him with the final design of his quantum destabilizer as well, with letting him go to more than one dimension to get the power source he needed before sending him off to the Nightmare Realm. Fiddleford had had to negotiate its use out of that local Ford for him, and... And letting this group of people know of his interest in using such would likely just lead Seb's Ford to enacting far higher levels of security on and around it, which would lead to him potentially being unable to reach the-)
"This one's 'Institute' doesn't have a working portal," Bill said to him from where he was still lying flat, down on the inclined concrete plane next to him by his feet, and Ford's stomach felt like it dropped down to his feet. "Don't really feel like making portals to other dimensions myself right now, either. Not when the local 'demi-god' could be watching and might actually learn something from it. Maybe." Bill stretched a bit in place, blinking his eyes open. "Don't feel like having that fight right now. -Getting off the planet would take you maybe a month or three, if you really want to be doing that," Bill got a slow grin, "With that spaceship." Bill looked up at him. "Maybe." Bill's grin widened. "If you knew what you were doing."
"Why are you trying to get off the planet?" Mabel asked. "Do you… not like being with us?" (And by Tesla, even as a young adult, Mabel had that same sad look as her younger counterpart.)
"That's not-" Ford started to say, and he was feeling a major disconnect at the moment here, as he slowly sat down again there where he stood - really sat down this time, in not just a crouch. "I just-" He'd been treating this just like any other dimension he'd been in, because… it hadn't been close enough to his own experiences that he couldn't. It had been easier this way. But Ford was now beginning to realize that, no matter what dimension he'd found himself in before, no matter where he'd found himself come out, he'd always been able to... "I-"
"-I can't get off the planet," Ford said almost numbly, and he felt like an absolute fool (as he repeated himself again, as it finally sank in that...). "And there are no portals here." He shivered in place. "I can't-" He couldn't get himself to someplace civilized where he could- he could- Someplace civilized where he could- (And he closed his eyes, gritted his teeth as he lifted a hand to his forehead, shuddered in place at the pure mental disconnect that the following thought gave him next, crouching down a bit lower on his heels as he did so, trying to maintain some form of physical, if not mental, balance-)
Sixer could practically FEEL the stress coming off him. "Look, do you want to talk about this somewhere less… public?" (He glanced farther out and over at the camp of local 'refugees' nearby, farther down the way. They weren't exactly out of earshot of who all might be down there at-present, not from where they were, here.)
"Relax, Sixer," Bill almost purred out next as he fixed his eyes on his Zodiac, sounding both amused and perfectly relaxed, if not outright happy about everything that was going on here. (And Ford shuddered a bit, letting out a gasp for breath and both tensing and relaxing upon hearing this from him.) "You really want off the planet that badly? Give me two weeks and I can have a working spaceship for you to play with. Maybe. -If you ask nicely," Bill added in almost teasing tones, as Ford twisted his head around to stare down at him, eyes widening slightly.
"Blue, stop." Kari said firmly. But Blue was already grinning up a storm, and Ford-
"-You have all those security droids under your control," Ford breathed out at the demon who was lying there at his feet beside him, as things started to finally begin connecting up in his head. "You-" 'took over the spaceship as your lab,' but that hadn't been all the demon had done, had he? -Because Mabel had talked of... "You didn't just make a flight simulator for multiple types of space-worthy vehicles for no reason," Ford realized with a growing horror, stiffening in place. "You've been repairing-" Oh, Oh no.
"WELL. Not in this dimension. Not yet. -Have to PIRATE this one, since it isn't exactly MINE right now. Yet." Blue's grin never faltered.
"You-!" That wasn't-! It didn't make sense- Because Bill- "You're already wearing a-" fully-functional spaceship for all intents and purposes! "Why would you need-"
"-Want," Bill interjected.
"-You don't need a second spaceship, Bill, the one you're already wearing has enough capability to-" Ford paled as he realized - did Bill want it for- "You repaired the weapons array on that ship?!" Ford almost gasped out next. Because that level of firepower was probably capable of splitting the entire planet in half if he-
"Of course!" Bill told him brightly. "Upgraded it, even! -Thing's capable of taking out a small sun on the third lowest setting now," Bill told him quite happily. "Really, Sixer? That's why you think I wanted it? -Do you really think I need HELP pulling off something like that?" And Ford shook his head roughly, because Bill-
"-Then why?!" Ford demanded out of him next, fists clenched at his sides, because for all Bill's talk of 'efficiency' lately, this was HARDLY-
And Bill's grin only got wider as he pulled his legs up a bit, crossed one knee over the other, and kicked his one foot a bit leisurely, as he said, "'Why?' -What did you THINK I was going to do with that thing, after I crash-landed it there? Let you raid it for a small handful of parts, and then leave the whole thing there to ROT? -I've been planning to put that crazy old ship to PROPER use right from the START! Not like my Henchmaniacs enjoy sucking vacuum any more than YOU do," Blue noted to his Zodiac next. "Or did you think I was kidding, when I was talking about handing out galaxies like jellybeans to WHOEVER I WANT?"
"I would have to veto any such use of that spaceship here," Sixer drawled. "The ship is mine. Miz helped me claim it."
"-And she probably did it using the method I taught to her for how to do it before. Hence the term PIRATING," Blue said, "-Counter-claim. Miz isn't here at this specific moment in time, to help you go off and keep it away from me, if I want to steal it AWAY from you next. -Not that she isn't open to sharing things with me in the first place," Blue noted. "Or... I could just steal only a few useful parts out of it instead, and-" Blue added, in almost teasing tones.
"-you and that damn 'universal manufacturing unit' of yours," Ford breathed out next, the numbness starting to evaporate into shock and some new form of pure intellectual offense next. Because Stan had told him how and when Bill must have made that spacecraft-grade suit of his, and Ford hadn't seen... "You've been working on this this whole time-" fixing the spaceship all the way up and back into working order by way of all of those multi-purpose security droids, that many of them - so very many of them, that it hadn't made sense at the time why Bill had gone off and repaired them all and potentially had even made more for holding onto that stage - far, far more than he'd needed to. -Bill hadn't just stored them all in his own hat, he must have made another wormhole opening, or moved the endpoint location of it somehow - that would explain those shifts in the gravimetric readings Fiddleford had picked up on when-! That whole stage debacle had just been some kind of smokescreen for-!
-And even farther back than that, Bill had… had somehow made sure that the ship had crash-landed in Gravity Falls in the first place? He had done it? Himself? More than 30 million years ago?! -How long had Bill Cipher actually been planning to-?!
"-Of course!" Bill told him with a big grin on his face, and a gleam in his eyes. "I've even been using the refitted-IMPROVED fixed-and-repurposed sensor array on the silly thing to fill in what Stanley doesn't want me using my own Eye for viewing in the meantime: the entire town. -SURPRISE!" the demon practically purred out at him next, as he moved his hands away from his chest, to cross them behind his head instead. Ford tensed in place horribly at this.
But before Ford could blow up at him, Mabel noted, "So you built a spy room like the one Gideon had?"
"What?" Blue said, blinking and tilting his head back to take in the Mabel Pines below him. He frowned, and his eyes seemed to unfocus for a few moments. "Spy room… -AH!" Blue sat bolt upright and slapped his hands down onto the concrete below them, turning towards her and looking offended. "'Spy room' in Glasses' robot! HA! -Any Gideon in existence wishes he could do what I do without a bunch of intermediary finicky little 'electronic wireless spy cameras' having to capture things for him from ALL THE WRONG ANGLES," Blue told her, the very picture of injured distaste, if not outright disgust.
"So, do you really like watching what people do that much?" Mabel asked, not sounding all that upset by this, just curious. "I mean, I know uncle Seb and Miz look up stuff when they want to know stuff. So, is this a 'Bill' thing?"
Bill blinked at her at this.
"...'Like watching' 'what people do'?" Blue repeated. (Ford felt equal parts angry that Bill had been so easily distracted, and relieved that he wasn't the immediate target of Bill's focus anymore. ...For about a good half-second. Until he took in a breath and remembered what Bill usually did to other people when he-)
"Like knowing things, and watching people because you want to know what they know and what they're doing." Mabel shrugged. "I mean, I'm on social media all the time because I wanna know what everyone's doing all the time. It's like that right? Like following a bunch of people and just checkin' in on their status updates and their posts?"
"HA! -I absolutely like knowing things!" Blue told her with a bright grin, "But-" (Blue didn't get much farther than that before he was interrupted by-)
Bill had turned away from Ford and started his way down the concrete slope towards the local Mabel- and Ford reached out to grab him by the wrist and yank him backwards… or rather he tried to. He didn't succeed at it (even with the mass advantage he should have had over him, once he'd remembered again that Bill didn't actually have his suit on him while he was here, thus should not have had any mechanical advantage to help keep him in place). All Ford managed to do was to stop Bill from moving forwards. (Then Ford realized that Bill had been - and was still - floating now, his feet not quite touching the surface of the concrete below him...)
"Dude, just get a Tweeter or FaceNote. You'll know all people's deepest darkest secrets, without even needing all that machine stuff," Mabel told him quite seriously. Dipper groaned. "I don't think you should be encouraging him." "Whaa? Oh come on bro-bro- social media is how people connect and make friends!"
"Knowing things isn't the same as knowing people," Blue said with a frown, floating in place (not trying to move forward out of Ford's hold) as if tethered. (Ford, startled by the demon's own admission, let go of him.) Blue floated the rest of the way down shortly thereafter, at a rather quick clip, to touch down on the ground right in front of her, upright. "...What people are you thinking that I should want to know about?" Blue added next, almost suspiciously.
"Well, do you wanna know things, or people?" Mabel asked next (as Ford stomped down the slide of the slope of the bridge rather quickly after Bill, following).
"I know LOTS of things," Blue noted. "Knowing humans usually isn't worth my time. They all DIE on me too quickly!" he grinned out at her, as Ford frowned at this furiously. (Bill was being loud enough that the older scientist could hear every word that was coming out of him quite clearly, and-)
"Aww, that's gotta suck." Mabel frowned. "You know, Miz likes knowing people. And then… she gets sad when they die." Mabel bit her lip. "But we're not like you. I don't think we'd be able to live forever like you guys do."
"I noticed," Blue said next. "That's going to cause problems, unless you all correct your way of thinking."
Mabel shrugged. "I mean, there might be some people who'd be okay with it. But you can't force us to want to be immortal."
"Oh, I COULD," Blue told her with a slightly nasty edge to his smile, "I'm just not going to. -That's Seb's job! Which he is going to figure out and then do for me. Eventually."
Mabel pouted. "Wouldn't be very polite to force people to change their minds. People should only change their own minds."
"Well, yes! Free will is a joke, but it's also a thing. -He will do for me. Eventually. Without all of the 'forcing'," Blue hummed out a bit, elaborating a bit more this time on something he himself had thought was rather obvious. Then he looked over his shoulder as Ford caught up to him.
"You look up things about people all the time," Ford said darkly, trying to catch him in the lie (and trying not to think too much about the fact that Bill hadn't seemed to think he had been lying about what he'd said earlier, while he did it).
Blue rolled his eyes at this. "Yes, Sixer. I do like knowing things about people. Gives me an edge! -Knowing a person is different," Blue corrected his notion next, waving a hand at him almost absently.
Mabel put her hands on her hips. "Knowing a person means having to actually interact with them. You can watch people all you want, but you won't know someone from just that."
"Oh, you'd be surprised how much you can learn about somebody from getting inside their heads!" Blue said almost teasingly, with that edge to his tone again, as he grinned.
"-Stop," Ford said almost immediately, looking incredibly tense, and while Blue shot him a rather nasty look for it, he did close his mouth and stop talking for a bit.
Mabel snorted. "Well going inside heads is cheating. And if you need to cheat to win, then you're losing."
Both Bill's eyebrows went up at this pronouncement. His head whipped back around towards her, his eyes went wide, and his pupils went cat's-eye narrow.
And once he'd gotten over the shock of someone daring to say such a thing to him, Blue's expression then turned truly thunderous.
The triangle demon leaned forward and opened his mouth-
-and Ford slapped his right hand right over it from behind and yanked him backwards (standing directly behind the dream demon as he did so).
"I think perhaps you had better take your family home with you, now," Ford said to the local Stan rather quickly, as he wrapped his other arm around Bill's front, and tried not to wince at the furious sound Bill made at him, as the demon grabbed up at the hand Ford was holding at his mouth. "Yes, Bill. I'm aware cheating isn't losing," Ford said under his breath almost right into the dream demon's ear, hoping to forestall at least part of the worst of the onslaught the demon seemed about to unleash on the local Mabel for her rather nasty challenge there. (Given the way Bill was still seething, but not actively tearing anyone's eyes out yet, Ford was rather hopeful that he'd managed to slow Bill down this time, at least a bit.)
Stan nodded. "Come on everyone. I think Blue needs some time 'fer himself for a while." He placed a hand on Mabel's head. "Don't be mean to Blue. He's at a disadvantage."
Bill's eyes went completely wide at this, and then he snarled out at them all, reaching-
And Ford reached out quickly with his left hand himself, grabbing up both Bill's hands in his own and pulling him in a bit more closely and tightly to his chest with the other.
"-Leave. Now," Ford said next, his heart rate spiking. (He was barely keeping the tremors down. The last time he'd seen Bill anything like this furious at a Mabel had been back during Weirdmageddon when-)
"Right." They all made their way out and away out of sight.
If a certain demon or two had been paying attention at the time, they might have noticed how, even before that Stanford let go of Blue, that the sound had cut out.
Any demon with Sight would be forced to resort down to reading lips, instead - which would have worked, because Blue hadn't done anything with that spell to obfuscate the visuals coming from that little (spherical surrounding) area.
But for anyone not able to read human-looking lips, for beings talking largely in standard American English, they would have been stuck trying to decode what they were seeing from some back-and-forth pacing, gestures, other forms of body language expression...
...and an explosion that was heard a few short minutes later, since that went off outside the range of the sound barrier currently being caused by said perception filter spell.
The Pines jumped. Stan cursed under his breath. "Ok, looks like we teased him a bit too hard." Dipper pulled on his hat. "Really?! You think?!"
"Well, as much as I appreciate that you wanted to test your hypothesis," Sixer rubbed his face. "Probably not a good idea to do so. With that particular Bill." Sixer glared at his brother. "Also, Mabel, maybe don't taunt him either."
The girl huffed. "I didn't think he'd be so sensitive." Stan reached over to ruffle her hair. "You an' me both sweetie." He grunted. "The kid can dish it out, but he can't take it? His Stan needs to work on him for that. We Pines can and WILL ruin each other within an inch of our dignity!" He placed a hand over his chest, looking off into the distance solemnly.
And then Seb smacked the back of his head. "Don't be an ass!" he complained. "Ok, so Blue's more sensitive than we thought. I mean, I'm delicate, so maybe he's like me too? I still don't know how similar or different we are. Even barring the fact that I'm a human now."
"Miz is sensitive about certain things," Mabel pointed out. "But we know what those are, where her lines and buttons are. For the most part."
"And for Blue, he's self-conscious about being a triangle? And thinks that people will think he's dumb because of that. So…" Dipper poked Mabel, "He probably thought you were saying he wasn't good enough when you started teasing him about that."
"That wasn't what I meant!" Mabel complained.
"We can explain in detail what you meant by your teasing once he calms down enough to listen," Seb told her. Mabel still looked a little guilty.
They all jolted in place at the very loud and long 'Bill Cipher' laugh they heard next.
Not because of the 'HAHAHA!' part, but because it sounded some odd flavor of actually happy.
"...does that mean he feels better now?" Mabel asked hopefully. Sixer sighed and waved an arm at everyone. "Stay here, I'm going to check it out." He had the best battle reflexes for dodging if Blue was still mad.
He jumped over the side of the bridge again - no mean feat, they were only just at the junction near the top at the sidewalk above. He edged his way down a bit and around the side.
Sixer was secretly proud that his physique was still good enough to perform such acrobatics. To be fair, he'd gotten back into shape after beginning his Sessions with Miz. He wasn't as muscular as Stanley, but he could really say he felt proud of his reflection.
He peered past the side of the concrete edge, looking about carefully, and… ah. He'd been right not to be too worried about that explosion. It had just been an airborne one, probably largely just a discharge of energy only; he couldn't even see a charred spot down on the ground anywhere within the surrounding area.
Now hopefully the people here would simply assume it was a firework or some other mundane, explainable event, not revealing the existence of magic. The world wasn't ready for that sort of thing. Even with his Center studying it, people didn't think it was Magic. Mainly because of the scientific research and data that Ford compiled about things in Gravity Falls. They were all about the science behind it, so people never thought about how magical it all really was.
Sixer made a careful step out from behind the building, searching for the telltale flash of blue hair. Though if Sixer was to be honest with himself, he was more worried about what that older Ford was up to.
He spotted Blue quickly, still down at the bottom of the concrete embankment with that older Ford. The other Ford didn't seem too badly off; they were standing facing each other, and from the set of his shoulders and his stationary upright stance, that older version of him seemed… a bit confused? More than a little uncertain, certainly; maybe a touch of general wariness, but not… scared. At least, that was generally how he felt when he found himself carrying his own body that way.
He also seemed to be rather all in one piece, despite the way Blue was up in his face like that. Sixer wasn't as sure of the accuracy of his reading of Blue's stance, but Blue seemed both a bit relaxed and a bit tense by human standards, at least.
Blue gestured a bit - punctuating a point? - and Sixer couldn't see the frown on that older Ford's face, but he did see it in the new set of his shoulders.
Drawing on some social reading skill he didn't know he had, Sixer kept quiet and observed for now. If anything escalated, he would step in.
He saw the older Ford sigh heavily, and shift on his feet.
And then Blue turned and started walking up the side of the embankment, the older Ford following closely at his side - or perhaps the other way around. Blue seemed to be talking past his shoulder to the older Ford; Sixer suddenly realized he could hear something of what was going on now, when he hadn't been able to hear anything before. A silence barrier of some sort, stronger than the Perception Filters that Miz loved so much. He took a risk and waved a hand, in as much of a non-threatening way as he could. "Hey, are you two alright?"
He swore he could tell that Blue's eyes had narrowed at him, as the demon immediately swiveled his head back around and tilted his head back to look up at him where he was standing higher up than them. When the older Ford glanced upwards a bit farther, following Blue's sightline, the line of his shoulders seemed to tense up again.
Sixer waved again. "Are you two coming home with us now? Also, I'm sorry if what Mabel and Stan said upset you in any way. They were just teasing. We tease a lot. It's a thing we do." He rubbed his neck.
"Where we are going next is up to Sixer here," Blue called back to him, as they walked their way upwards. "I'm letting him do whatever he wants." 'As usual', was the unspoken refrain from Blue, while the older Ford immediately shot a look his way, but didn't openly verbally contradict it. That was worrying. "And I'm NOT upset. -Either Sixer needs to correct her, or Seb does. I don't feel particularly inclined to waste my time on correcting her myself," Blue drawled out with an edge to his tone, "Because I know that human meant what she said to me down there," he ended, a good bit more darkly.
Sixer blinked slowly, and then, "It's fine if you're upset, you don't have to pretend you're alright when you're not. We don't want to hurt your feelings or make you feel like we're looking down on you."
"HA! You didn't 'hurt my feelings', you idiot, you-"
"Bill," the older Ford cut in.
"We made you feel like- you thought Mabel was saying that you weren't good enough-" Sixer realized.
"'Feel like?'" Blue cut him off with a huff of breath and an eyeroll. "-You all DO look down on me," Blue informed him without much inflection at all. "And I just got done explaining to my Zodiac EXACTLY how he's been doing it all along to me, too. -I don't feel inclined to waste my time 'enlightening' some other broken-Bill's Zodiac. She's wrong; end of discussion." (Ford looked away from him at this, grimacing.)
Sixer sighed. "We actually don't look down on you, not in the way you think, I'm sure. We just… we think you're a child. You're- as a human, right now, in that form- you're younger than Dipper. And we just… sort of treated you like a child. If that upsets you, I'll have a talk with the others about it."
Blue came to a stop about four feet away from him below him, and glared up at him for one long moment at this.
And then he pulled his hands together in front of his chest in one quick fluid motion, in a triangular shape, pushed them outwards slightly while letting his eyes close slightly while breathing out, and then-
...Blue dropped his hands and stomped the rest of the way up the concrete embankment, moving right along past him.
"-Old enough for you NOW?" Blue damn near growled out at Sixer next, as the form of a fit older woman - looking right around the older Ford's age - moved right on past him the rest of the way up the bank, glaring straight forward as he went.
(The older Ford didn't say anything at this. He didn't even blink. He just followed in Blue's footsteps up the rest of the embankment, while sending a long unreadable look Sixer's way as he went.)
Sixer blinked. And then rubbed his head. "Yes, actually. That might help somewhat." He tried to explain, "We're somewhat hardwired to react to others by their appearance, this isn't right, but it's how we've been conditioned from growing up in human society." He rubbed his fingers nervously. "I admit, I also treat Miz somewhat differently depending on the form they wear." He paused, realizing how that would sound, "And Miz also changes their form depending on how they want to be treated."
"Miz acts differently when wearing different forms; it's only polite that you treat her differently when she does that," Blue said over his shoulder back to him firmly without turning his head. "Don't believe me? -Ask Sixer about it." The older Ford grimaced at this slightly, but didn't look about to contradict Blue on this either.
Sixer sighed. "I mean, I have noticed it myself. But she's still the same person, I don't know if I'm supposed to treat her differently or not."
"Then ask her what she wants. For courtesy." Blue kept walking, as did the older version of himself, and Sixer found that he had to start moving himself to keep up with them.
"...and how do you wish to be treated?" By some miracle, Sixer managed to put two and two together. "Because I'm assuming, 'child' isn't it."
(...more than two and two, really, since Blue himself hadn't been trying to prompt him in that way regarding himself, only his sister. Blue hadn't been expecting any sort of consideration out of him or any of the rest of them at this point at all.)
"-Like I'm not some drooling idiot who doesn't know how ANYTHING works and has thought through absolutely nothing in my one TRILLION years of existence!" Blue turned on his heel and shouted back down at him next. (...only to snarl something out that Sixer didn't quite catch as the older Ford kept moving upwards and used a palm to turn him around, and the older Ford kept going; he shoved Blue continually upwards without breaking stride, with a relative gentleness to the motion.)
Sixer considered that. "Alright then. I will pass that on to everyone else." And he did, texting into the family group chat about what Blue wished for, in terms of respecting his identity and being mindful about the racism he had grown up with. They had to start a list for stuff like this. There were Zach's feelings, Dillon's feelings… Miz and Blue were now added to that list.
The older Ford let out a deep and tired sigh as they went up the last few meters, and Blue suddenly snapped out, "But you're GOING to have that Mabel of your apologize to my Sixer-" "Bill." "-because she basically just got done telling him that HE doesn't deserve to live!"
"She will, once you tell her what she did wrong so she'll know what she has to apologize for."
"I'm NOT wasting any more of my time on her, Sixer can tell her, why am I having to repeat this to you."
Sixer sighed, "Can you explain? I'm not quite sure where this misunderstanding began?" He asked the older version of himself.
"...I'd really rather not," the older Ford said slowly. But at the sharp look Blue shot back at him… "But I can likely fill in at least some of the details, given how Bill has told me a few things now about how things are different here," the older Ford ended almost quietly, looking away from him. He didn't exactly look happy about it, but he didn't look like he wasn't holding his own against Blue in some way by saying such, either.
"That would be very appreciated." Sixer smiled weakly, "I actually don't want to make Blue upset." ("NOT UPSET!" Blue called back down to them, having started floating himself up much faster now, getting a bit ahead of them by taking a beeline to the top straight-up directly, to the older Ford's obvious annoyance.) "He's Miz's beloved big brother after all. We see Miz as family and we want Blue to feel good when he's here with her, like, accepted by our family." Sixer couldn't deny having a very questionable Bill Cipher had him a little on edge, but he trusted Miz.
"You aren't family to him," the older Ford told him. "And you certainly should not want to be."
"Tell that to Ma, she's thrilled to have another grandchild, I'm sure she wouldn't care if it was a demon." Sixer made a face and shuddered.
There was a pause as the older Ford stopped in place at the guardrail above to turn back and stare at him.
"I do believe that is one of the most horrifying things that I have ever heard, in my entire thirty years travelling between dimensions." That said rather contemplatively, the older Ford turned and jumped the fence from a standstill, almost without seeming to need to slap his hands down upon it to brace himself going over it for the leverage.
"...if it makes you feel better, my theory is that Ma wants grandkids in her life because she couldn't do much for us in our own childhoods." Sixer heaved himself over the fence as well. Plus the whole… Missing out on 13 years of his and Stan's lives… the entirety of Sebastian's young adult life… some of Shermie's life too… yeah, Sixer was pretty sure they'd put their poor Ma through way too much heartbreak.
"No, that doesn't make me feel any better," the older Ford told him almost absently, before taking off a not entirely sedate running-jog over to the rest of Sixer's family. (Possibly because Blue was hovering in the air on the 'wrong' side of the open air next to the bridge still nearby, and… needed yanking out of the air by a foot and over and down to the ground again, apparently. The older Ford also was not immediately zapped or murdered for his manhandling of the demon, which was an encouraging sign.)
"...didn't really think so." Sixer sighed. He jogged over to them as well, behind him.
(Back with MizBill)
"...well, lets see what loot we got today!" I jumped around, kicking my little legs and wiggling as I ran around the living room. "Come on! Come on!" I urged as my friends continued staring at me. PaciFire was trembling, raising his hands toward me before visibly stopping himself. "Um… Bill?" He finally asked.
"Nyah? What's up?" I asked, absently scratching behind my widdle ears. PaciFire twitched. "Why are you so small and adorable right now?" He (and everyone else) stared down at me in my kitten form.
"What arwe yew tawking abowt? I'm always adorwable!" I protested. PaciFire looked uncomfortable. "Bill, I… I can't…" He turned and walked away, out the room and down the hall. I caught a very strong thought of, 'Too cute! Fuck fuck fuck! I wanna cuddle- but I can't!'
I bwinked. I gwanced at the west of my fwiends. They were all staring at me too. They were all enamored by my cuteness. And right here and now, seeing the way they were all helpless befowe me...
A vewy evwil pwan came to mind and I purred mawishously.
The Federation enforcer frowned down at a box left right outside their office. They weren't sure what this was, there was nothing on the cameras since this box was in the blind spot. They backed up, in case it was a bomb or an acid spitting house plant (you'd be surprised how often they received those) and they slowly pulled out their firearm, just in case they had to shoot the head off a plant again.
As xe nudged the box with a foot, a soft, high pitched sound came out from it. Xe paused, the sound made them… what was this feeling? And then the box moved and the top was pushed open. A small animal was inside. From the fur, it seemed mammalian in nature. Xe stared at it before realizing it was a 'Cat'. Xe had never seen one in person before. They heard all sorts of things about them from people.
They were only dangerous if they were big enough to swallow you. Seeing how small this one was, xe calmed down and put their firearm away. "What are you doing here?" Xe asked the tiny creature.
"Mewl~" the kitten squeaked up at xe. The sound made xe relax, lowering their guard even more as they reached out a hand to gently pet the creature's little head. Oh~ it was so sooooft!
It mewled and rubbed against xir hand. The enforcer looked around before picking up the box with the kitten and bringing it inside.
"Tootsie Uwo to evewyone, I've sucessfwully infwiltrated the Fedewation base. Ovwer."
"...do you have to talk like that? I mean, it's super cute, but I can't take you seriously."
"Dammwit Wonica! Your 'apposed ta say ovwer! Ovwer."
"And you're supposed to call me Pop Rocks. You're the one who keeps insisting on giving everyone nicknames when we do stuff like this! ...over."
"Do we even need the code names? I mean, we are on a private channel? Pretty sure the Federation can't hack telepathic communication. Over."
"Dats not twue Mwilky Way. The federwation stawted hiring tewepaths twee centurwies back. It's not pubwic knowledge. But they onlwy react to certain key words. Ovwer."
"Can you please stop talking like that? I can't understand you. Over."
"For the last time Jaw Bweaker. I don't know what you'we tawlking about. Ovwer." I stretched on the pillow the enforcer gave me. They put me under their desk and then had to leave because xe got called for a job. That was fine. I snuggled against the soft pillow, it used to be on their chair, leave it to the Federation to have uncomfortable ass chairs too. Xe brought this pillow from home. Anyway, xe was gone and I was in the building.
I had trouble seeing inside the newer Federation buildings, they consulted architects to specifically avoid any and all triangles. And then metal plated everything multiple times. So I could Look but it would take longer and be kinda fuzzy. I pressed my paw against the side of xe's desk and burned a triangle in. Faint. Barely noticeable.
Then I slipped out of the box and onto the cold metallic floor. Leave it to those paranoid jerks to have metal floors as well. I wiggled my butt as I padded around the room. Cameras were there and I made sure to be as adowable as pawsible. I felt some movement around me as some other workers noticed me and came out. I mewled and rubbed up against their leg-equivalents.
"""Awwww….""" They chorused before entirely dropping their guards and giving me all the worship I wanted. Whoa. Was this… was this actually a thing?! Yeeees~ worship me~
"Where did you come from little guy?" One of them scritched my ears just right. "I think I saw Gnolok bring in a box. Did someone just abandon this little baby right outside the station?"
"Well, with that new law forbidding predatory type pets, unless you pay the fine, it's owners must have realized they should cut their losses and dump the thing."
"Good thing we don't have any such restrictions!" Another Enforcer cackled. "We're supposed to have the predatory ones, hey, you think we can train this little guy to kill on command?" He stroked his feelers in thought. "Like, we have our attack hounds but a feline can sneak into the target's house and slit their throats in their sleep."
"And justice would be done without any of the hassle of having to break down their door first! Brilliant!" Another cheered. I admit, their conversation wasn't making me feel very happy about the state of the Federation approved law enforcement. What sorts of targets were they sending Kill-Teams after anyway?
"That'll show those criminals for not paying off their parking tickets!"
...what?! Parking tickets?! That's what constitutes a reason for lethal action?!
...Tina's got her work cut out for her. But I made a mental note about this to bring up to her. She wanted only a few simple things from our Deal, to stay alive long enough to enact proper changes in the governmental systems and to make sure there were things set in place to keep things from getting bad again. I talked her through how societies change over time and the new system has to be able to account for and adapt to that. But along with that, I had to help her out by finding all the things wrong and bringing them to her attention.
Hence, spying.
I wiggled out of their hands and walked a few paces off to clean myself, wiping down my fur to try and get their scent off me. They weren't paying attention to me anymore anyway as they talked about all the fun stuff they could do with me. Aye, was this how they entertained themselves?
"Tootsie Uwo to evewyone, beginning phase two. Over." I sent off before I slipped even more out of their view, under the desks. "Hey, it ran off." "Ah, it won't get far, too small to reach the doors." "It'll come back out when it gets hungry."
Jokes on them! I could open doors with my MIND! I padded about, burning more triangles everywhere, though I had to hide behind an unused chair to peer up at the security camera and burn another triangle into the top corner of the ceiling, right behind said camera. Hah! Use their stuff for my own spying! I squeaked when I was picked up. "There you are."
Unhand me you ruffian! Petting is fine- but don't pick me up you-
A plate of minced meat mixed with light cream was placed on the table and I was put down onto said table.
-ooooh nevermind. Thank you for this tribute!
I began eating, squeaking in content as I nommed my way through the offering. Wait no, no distractions! I licked my lips, lifting a paw to clean my face off. Don't think this bribe will be enough to stop me from recording all your conversations and sending them off to Tina and Yoland. Yeah I still kept in touch with her (sometimes, I wanted to reminisce about Pynelope, and Yoland was her friend, she understood a little, how I felt. I should ask if Pyronica wants to go drinking with us sometime). Prinnys were already dead, they couldn't die again unless they chose to enter the cycle of reincarnation willingly. It was a great system if I do say so myself (if you ignored that you had to pay a bit of money to give 'em a new body)- anyway, I paid for her new body whenever she got killed and she ran the press for me. Seriously, being a reporter with actual integrity was a life threatening job. If you were too afraid to die, you'd just repeat whatever lies the government wanted you to say. Or stick to running scandals about various celebrities.
Anyway, I was recording all conversations in here, and getting video footage as well. Cool thing about being able to manipulate energy is that I can translate what I See into actual video footage if I concentrate on it. Very useful for having 'solid' evidence of stuff that I can then use to hold over people. Or when a client wants to get some solid evidence against someone.
Anyway, I finished cleaning myself and wandered around on top of the desk, they really didn't care at all did they? They didn't think I was a thweat. Just because I was so smol and cute. See brother?! Cuteness really IS the ultimate power! I finished 'triangle'ing the room and curled up on someone's keyboard.
I closed my eyes, head tucked under my paws, and began stretching my consciousness throughout the rest of the building. The outside was fortified against psychic beings Seeing in, but I'm inside now and I burned triangles across as many surfaces as I could. I could feel my visual range increase, more information input, I was seeing people talk to each other, discussing things, walking around...
I got my 'in' and I was going to be milking this place of all the info I could get. Sure, I could have EASILY copied one of their workers and built a constructed clone with the exact same Mind, DNA and memories, but I think… that might be rude to do, 'specially since it would involve having to get rid of the original person. Like the whole Synth issue in Fallout 4. I remember that questline surprisingly clearly. I mean, the moral choice system in that game wasn't all that nuanced but I remember the choice it gave me. The people on the island were going to go to war, so the synth leader's plan was to replace two of the people in authority with a synth that would take their place and wish for peace. It was good intentioned, but it still meant two people had to be sacrificed. Four actually, since there were synths who had to give up their entire selves in order to become someone else.
I didn't like that choice, nor did I like the option to let the idiots all go to war with each other. That game sucked. There was no Option D, tell them all to suck it up and leave each other alone. At least I didn't think there was. I was very lost in thought, trying to remember things about a video game I played a lifetime ago. Anyway, I spread my Eyes throughout the building, slowly expanding my power over this area.
Oh, I see… The holding cells here were full. And there wasn't a lot of room in here to begin with. Hm… I didn't have too many Eyes in the Federation prison (which was separate from Time Baby's prison for Time-Criminals) but from what I could see, they were pretty full. I wonder if that was why the Federation was switching over to just killing people who 'broke the law' instead of arresting them? Still, if they were running out of room and other resources to hold criminals, that was a problem. Most people in prison weren't even BAD people. Like, they did some bad things but I didn't think they deserved a life sentence. I mean, there were people in prison for jaywalking.
I added 'overhaul the entire prison system' to the list of things to bring up with Tina. At least the prison system here wasn't a business. It was literally just holding cells, with drainers that sucked up their excess energy and stored in batteries to send out to power other parts of the multiverse. Which was also awful, but they did have a big thing about not killing the prisoners since they couldn't produce if they were dead. And with the nutrient pills they gave as food, they could keep them alive with the barest minimum of effort. It still sucked.
The fact that some of the worst criminals never got arrested, or could buy their way out was utter bullshit in my opinion. I guess this meant it was time for me to stage another prison break. Been a while since I did that. They were due for a prison break. Maybe a 'wild' portal nearby for people to escape into. Send them all off to different dimensions so the police can't catch 'em.
Well, once I had every inch of this place covered, I got up leisurely from my spot, mewling as I sent off a quick, "Tootsie Uwo to evewyone, the cat is in the bag. Begin extwaction. Over."
"You really need to stop talking like that. I think Pac- Erm, Lady Fingers, is going to die. He keeps convulsing… over."
"...Hey Lady Fingers? You have my permission to pet me when I get home..."
"You are a just and merciful god." I heard PaciFire wail over communications.
(Back with Blue)
"You and your 'not floating'," Blue said rather disparagingly, as he dusted off his sixty-something-looking-closer-to-fifty-something looking self, after his Zodiac got done with yanking him forcefully out of the air like that. -Not that he hadn't been potentially expecting that to happen next, but it was still "-RUDE much?!"
"Whoa~ is that Blue? He's pretty hot as an older woman," was the exclamation from Stan before Seb slapped him with an, "Oh my fucking- Fez!"
"You wish. Also: NEVER HAPPENING," was Blue's rejoinder to that. "I, for one, have ACTUAL STANDARDS when it comes to other beings." Blue glanced over at Seb. "-Remind me to tell his wife on him," he said, sounding like a tried-patience older woman in that moment.
Stan chuckled and raised his hands in surrender. "Don't worry, I'm happily married. Just pointing it out, is all." Seb huffed, "I'm still telling Carla."
"And I or Seb will also be pointing it out to her, yes," Blue said, in perfectly aligned agreement with Seb on this one.
"Aw come on! It was just an observation!" Stan complained, to which Seb just grumbled, "You're impossible! I don't know how Carla stands you!"
"Observations involve seeing, not speaking," Blue noted in unchanging tones. And if the demon had been wearing glasses, Stan would have been hit full-on with a very 'stern librarian' sort of look just then. (As it was, it only had about half- to three-quarters effect without them.)
Stan winced. Sixer sighed. (So did the older Ford, deeply.) How were Sebastian and he related to this man? Sometimes he wondered where Stanley got it from. Certainly not their parents.
"YOU. Apologize to my Sixer," Blue stated to Mabel without any teasing of any sort in his tone, dead serious on this matter.
Mabel blinked and although she was confused, turned to the older Ford with a, "Sorry older uncle Ford."
This only seemed to incense Blue even further. "That is NOT how you do an apology!" Blue said to her hotly. "You don't even know-" Blue stopped talking when the older Ford dropped a hand down onto his left shoulder. He just stood there and seethed instead.
"Sorry, you just said it so abruptly I reacted without thinking." Mabel turned back to the older Ford again. "What did I do wrong, sir?"
The older Ford winced. He looked distinctly uncomfortable as he said, "...I'd rather not…"
"-You said 'if you need to cheat to win, then you're losing'," Blue repeated, in tones that made it sound like he thought he was throwing up literal garbage by repeating it. The older Ford looked away again, somewhat tense.
"Did that hurt you?!" The older Ford tried to hide a grimace, and Mabel gasped, looking horrified. "I'm so sorry! I don't know what it means, but I didn't mean it that way-"
"-It's not," the older Ford stopped, trying to wave it off with both hands in a sort of stilted way that she recognized from her own uncle. "That is-" he grimaced again. "You couldn't have known-"
"-Just spit it out, Sixer, because if you don't then I WILL," Blue said next almost threateningly.
...except the older Ford fell silent again. He didn't look particularly happy with himself as he did it, but he seemed to be struggling internally with something, and-
"FINE," said Blue. "Make me do your dirty work for you; waste of my time," he muttered out under his breath next, as he turned back towards Mabel. "Where we're from, everything is a Game-"
"-to demons," the older Ford managed to get out.
Blue rolled his eyes and continued as if his Sixer hadn't so rudely interrupted him, "-and playing a game by a demon's own rules is a sucker's match and going to get you killed-always. Anyone who ends up against a demon cheated to win to STAY ALIVE. Losing means DEATH. -Sixer here ran into a LOT of other demons in his thirty years out there running around in other dimensions and HE'S still alive, hasn't died once yet! You do the math," Blue ended there abruptly next. (He put it in that context because he didn't expect any apology from this lot about his own experiences; he believed he had no illusions there.)
(Ford bristled significantly at the end of what Bill was saying there, going incredibly tense, and he almost said something about how Bill had practically sent most of them his way to begin with in the first place, but in the end he managed to hold it down and hold it back. ...Largely by reminding himself of the existence of the 'three strikes rule' that Bill had instituted, when it came to each of those individual demons going after him. Bill hadn't had to do that for him, and Ford knew full well that he wouldn't still be alive, to have survived to this day, without it. -That didn't make it any better for him, though!)/small
"Oh." Mabel frowned as she processed this. Then she glanced between both Blue and the older Ford. "I'm sorry for making you both think that I thought you two didn't deserve to live. That wasn't what I meant at all. I'm very sorry. If you have to cheat to stay alive- it's fine! I really didn't mean it like that. I'm sorry Blue. I'm sorry other uncle Ford."
The pupils of Blue's eyes narrowed significantly at this (not believing the apology, since it had been directed towards him as well). The older Ford, however, looked a bit pained as he said, "No apology is necessary. I just…" He shook his head slightly and looked away. "You couldn't know how that might be taken by anyone from our…" He trailed off.
Mabel shook her head right back. "No, I do need to apologize, even if I didn't know- like when I used to call Zach, Zully before I knew he was a boy, even if I didn't know, that would still make him feel bad- and I have to apologize and not do that again." She winced. "I had to go through ALL my posts on my social media and fix his name to Zach in all of them! Because I couldn't leave them with the wrong name- it isn't right! So this here-" she waved her hands, "-even if I didn't know, I have to apologize and try my best not to do it again!"
And Ford didn't really know how to react to that.
"Don't apologize if you don't mean it," Blue complained at her. "I don't feel like listening to you lie to me!"
Mabel looked taken aback. "But I am-"
Bill opened his mouth, ready to toss out another scathing retort, and-
"-Bill," Ford cut in quietly, before the demon progressed any further, not quite leaning down to do so - because Bill was a good inch and a half taller now in height than he had been, having 'grown up' just a bit taller as part of his spell-pushed aging process. They were pretty much at a level in height now. "Stop. This isn't helping anything. You said you would leave this to me to explain," he added quietly next.
But Ford was too late. The damage was already done. Because at Blue's angry words and in the face of his irritated glare, to the surprise of everyone, Mabel actually started tearing up.
"Mabel…" Dipper reached for his twin but then flinched when Mabel got mad.
Mabel angrily scrubbed at her eyes. "Of COURSE I'm apologizing to you too! And I DO mean it!" she told Blue. "Because I hurt your feelings- even if you said I didn't! I still hurt you." She scowled at Blue. "Why do you think I'm lying about this? Because you're a demon? Because you're Bill Cipher?! That's not the point!" She pointed at Blue. "You're Bill Cipher, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna treat you like the Bill that we fought against. You're not him! Just like how uncle Seb isn't him!" Mabel pulled her arms back to her chest, gripping her arms. "Wh-when uncle Ford and Stan first came back from the portal and uncle Ford told us that Seb was Bill Cipher… I was so stupid." She admitted. "I got all scared and I started treating uncle Seb was some kinda bad guy- even though I should have known he wasn't-"
"Mabel…" Seb and the others winced. Dipper pulled his hat down.
"-and I should have known that was dumb- uncle Seb had been nice to me all summer and he always protected us- he saved Waddles! But I was stupid." She looked miserable. "And I ended up hurting him so much." She scrubbed at her eyes again. "So I know the difference! You're a demon, but that doesn't mean you didn't get hurt, and it doesn't mean you don't deserve an apology because I hurt you. So," she squared her shoulders and told Blue again, "I'm sorry."
Blue glared at her rather levelly.
"...Are you trying to tell me how I feel?" Blue said next rather coldly. ("Bill.")
"If I didn't upset you, then why are you so mad?" Mabel shot back.
"I'm always mad," Blue said (and Ford both tensed and relaxed at this). "I'm angry for a reason. SEVERAL." He leveled a glare at her. "Don't presume to tell me how I do and don't feel. I AM NOT STUPID. I know what I 'feel', when I feel it, and I do NOT need YOU to TELL ME-" Blue stopped when Ford wrapped his right hand around his mouth again.
"This is one way that Bill sees other beings as looking down on him," Ford told them all with a calm he did not feel. "That others think they know him better than he knows himself, and then attempt to explain him to himself as if he is unable to do so for himself properly, even when he has told them otherwise."
"Then am I supposed to not apologize for saying something hurtful and insensitive to him?!" Mabel wiped her eyes. "Even if it didn't hurt him, doesn't make it okay for me to say things like that."
Ford hesitated at this, thinking over how he should say what to say next (in front of Bill) carefully.
And then Ford said, "...I believe that Bill thinks that your apologizing about anything to do with him is a lie. You would be better off not doing so. He is certainly capable of telling you otherwise if this is not the case." (Ford glanced down at Bill to confirm this; given how he leaned back against him and crossed his arms in a huff, rather than trying to speak up despite the hand at his mouth, Ford hoped that the triangle demon's general lack of openly hostile response meant that what he had said had been, in fact, at least somewhat accurate, in the way that Bill himself seemed to see things.)
"Why?" Mabel was asking Bill now. "Why do you think I'm lying?" She still sounded pretty miserable.
"He thinks that you all think he is stupid," Ford said, as he slowly lowered his hand away from Bill's mouth. "Given what he just… explained to me a short while ago on the very subject of 'stupidity' below us, by his definition of the concept, we all are guilty of this to some extent." He pulled in a breath. "This is not, however, something you should worry about." Ford ignored Bill's glare for the moment. "Frankly, if you'd all just stop talking to him, that would be best-" was Ford's own advice on the subject.
Mabel frowned, as did everyone else. "Then how do you want us to show you that we don't think you're stupid- or rather… how would you want us to treat you that wouldn't make you feel like you're being treated like you're stupid? Because you're not."
"I am not playing this game with you," Blue told her firmly. "I am DONE with repeating myself, over and over and OVER again, and I am NOT going to be wasting ANY MORE of my time with you here, to give any of you more chances to lie to me over and over and over again. -Sixer, pick a direction and location and MOVE," he turned and said to the older Ford next, arms still crossed. "I ate those two apples my sister gave me long-since today, and if I don't have a dinner-meal very soon, I'm liable to start blowing up actually substantial physical things here soon just because I can," he drawled out next, "LIKE THIS BRIDGE," he added - quite practically and with a lot of forbearance for these people and the situation at-hand, he thought. (Ford sent him a glare at this.)
"... Is it because I'm too stupid to understand your rules?" Mabel asked, even as Dipper winced beside her. "You're not stupid, Mabel."
"Clearly I am." Mabel shot back, "If I can't even clear up a misunderstanding like this."
Ford glanced between them, starting to tense.
"This isn't something that-" Ford stopped and closed his eyes briefly, trying to get his thoughts in order.
Then Ford turned to Mabel and said, "Are you absolutely certain that you want me to attempt to explain this to you." From the tone of his voice, it was clear that he didn't think it a good idea.
Mabel nodded, "I don't like that I'm doing and saying things that make him feel so disrespected."
Ford didn't exactly look happy at this (and Bill looked about to verbally bitch-slap her again), but Ford nodded once (and Bill managed to bite down on what he wanted to say but also didn't) before turning to Bill and saying, "We should procure food, and then I'd like to talk to her on this further." Ford turned back towards her. "Do you believe it necessary to speak in-person, or would a cellular phone conversation suffice?"
Mabel blinked. "Cellphone's fine. Do you need my number?"
"Yes," Ford told her (breathing a bit of a sigh of relief - he didn't want to risk exposing her to Bill any more than necessary at this point, given both of their stubbornness on the matter). "I'll need to procure or make one of my own; you'll have to wait for my call from an unfamiliar number unfortunately."
Mabel pulled out her phone and then paused. "Hey Dipper, can he borrow your phone?"
"That's not-" Ford began, then stopped as he saw this Mabel's twin brother immediately reach for a pocket. "-necessary..." he ended lamely. This hadn't been his intent...
"Here, he can borrow mine." Sixer said instead, stopping Dipper from handing it over. "I don't need it right now." He held out his phone to Ford.
Ford stared at it for a long moment, before having to wince when Bill plucked it out of Sixer's hand and slapped it into his (Ford's) chest, before starting to walk off at a good clip. "Come ON, Sixer. Chop-chop! -Seb, call up that Carla, explain, and then hand the phone over to him, would you?" the demon called back over his shoulder at him (and the local Stan) next. "-Consequences!"
The older Ford frowned and gave a grimace, like he didn't like being rushed like this, but he gave a somewhat strained smile and an "Apologies," to Mabel, then a look and a slight firm nod to Stan, and turned to go.
Sixer sighed. "Look, I don't know if Blue believes it or not, but we are just trying to get along with him." Seb winced but added, "We just don't know how to talk to him. But we're willing to learn." He also called Carla on his phone, because he might as well get that over with (even with the way Stan was protesting already).
"You shouldn't be," Ford told him. "He's a demon, and he's not worth the effort. You're all just going to get hurt and used by him if you try," he told them all a bit softly next, with more than a touch of old pain underlying his tone, before he turned away from all of them with a (not meant to be) dramatic flourish of his coat and rushed off to catch up with said demon.
"Our lives are pretty messed up. I have the therapy bills to prove it." Sixer glanced down at his hand, closed into a fist. "So wanting to get along with Blue isn't any odder than anything else." Then Sixer sighed when he looked up from his hands and realized Ford was off in the distance already and probably didn't even hear him. He sighed again. "Is this a lost cause? I feel like Blue just doesn't like us on principle."
"Well, we need ta be gettin' back now anyway." Stan clapped his shoulder with one hand while he winced at the annoyed scolding coming out of Seb's cellphone in his other. "It wasn't serious Carla! Geez! You know how I am-"
The Pines all made it back to Stan's penthouse and were sitting down for dinner, prepared by everyone who'd gotten back earlier.
Then Mabel's phone rang.
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((Warning you all now, some heavy subjects get discussed. Such as depression and suicidal thoughts.))))))))))))))))))))))))))
Abi and Carla got the children (and all of their meals) out of there as Wanda stayed behind to listen in. Mabel had explained what was to happen.
"Greetings? ...Is this signal coming through at a decent strength and volume, consistently and without cutting out intermittently? Testing? Test, test," they heard coming from the speakerphone, as Mabel put it down on the table.
"We hear you loud and clear." Mabel told him.
"Ah, excellent." There was a pause. "Bill has eaten and is now asleep, so I should be able to speak with you on this largely uninterrupted." Another pause. "Are you in a secure location, and able to talk? Or have I interrupted something, and should call back later for this discussion? It may be… a potentially long one, depending on the number and type of questions you may have." (The discussion in the living room after breakfast had taken a significant period of time and had been on several topics far easier, in Ford's own opinion.)
"I'm fine." Mabel assured him. "And I hope you don't mind but the rest of us are gonna listen in as well. So we know what not to do around Blue." The other adults nodded.
There was a significant pause at this.
Then what sounded like a bit of a tired sigh. (Sixer could see himself potentially pinching the bridge of his nose while doing it, giving that sort of sigh.)
"All right," they heard quietly next, then a bit louder: "Then let us begin with the basics: Bill is a demon, and he is very, very wrong, about everything."
"Well, I'm guessing he's insane. Like most Bills." Sixer sighed.
"Yes," they all heard next, then: "The problem is that he can seem sane at times, even though he is anything but." A sigh. "And he does have some sort of seemingly-logical thought process that he uses for things. Stan realized this and has been trying to plumb the depths of his madness; he thinks he is making progress with him - that is a losing proposition, however. Bill's thinking is completely alien to any rational being, far more so than even I myself had realized until very recently. And, like all demons, he has no basic empathy for others. Trying to 'befriend' him simply will not end well for you. He will use you, betray you, and then move on."
"I'm pretty sure the one being in all existence he actually cares about the feelings of would be Miz. And Liam." Sixer sighed. It wasn't a lot, but it means that Blue WAS capable of caring, so it stood to reason that perhaps he could learn to care for more people.
"Bill may seem to care about that man-eater, but that is more a product of his own warped thought processes than being born of any real empathy for others. He sees Miz as himself; therefore, he thinks of helping that man-eater as helping himself." A pause. "And possibly your Seb, as well, if I am understanding the situation correctly. Liam, however… I don't know what the man-eater said to you about that, but this supposed 'Liam' of Bill's may not have ever been real." Another pause, and that older Ford's voice sounded far more tired this time. "Stan believes otherwise, however. He also believes that he can somehow 'force' or trick Bill into feeling a human sort of empathy towards human beings, both ourselves as his Zodiac and other humans in general. I don't believe he's going to succeed on either front."
Seb bristled at that. "Liam was real. At least, mine was- I… I don't know if Blue's Liam was… he certainly feels strongly about him." He rubbed his face. "...I still feel pretty strongly about mine- but Blue wants to bring his Liam back- and that's… I don't know if that's a good idea…"
Another pause. "I cannot speak to your own experiences, but Bill has already expressed one significant difference in how his past differs from both the man-eater's and your own. His experiences are and were likely different than yours were in other ways, as well." A breath of a sigh. "I can tell when Bill is lying now. It was a hard-won skill. The fact that he refuses to discuss this 'Liam' at any time while I am in the same room as him speaks volumes, I think. I've only heard about the existence of this supposed 'brother' of his second-hand."
Sixer paused. "Have you considered… that perhaps Blue doesn't trust you with Liam? Seb never told us about his own Liam until Blue sort of… threw the subject in his face a few days ago."
"I don't see why he wouldn't," was what they all heard next. "He's thrown every disturbing thing I can think of in my face quite easily over the last three decades and counting. I have no reason to believe he'd start holding back in any significant way now."
"I don't think Blue considers Liam to be 'disturbing' so much as… sad. Even if he calls it 'being angry'." Sebastian sighed.
"Stan says that Bill has around a thousand different flavors of 'annoyed'," they heard the older Ford note with a tired sort amusement, with a bit of an underlying dark grim humor there. "Bill doesn't understand human emotion. He himself has admitted this to me somewhat openly, though he may not have realized that I understood it as such from what he was saying. Any words that he uses for this purpose do not have a similar meaning, as most intelligent thinking beings understand them. As I said earlier, he has no empathy for others. Taking what he says at face value when he is explaining himself in such terms is not… wise, and..." the older man's voice slowly trailed off.
"I'm pretty sure Blue's sad about Liam, even if he doesn't equate it to such a thing. The anger isn't a lie, I was pretty damn pissed once I was old enough to understand exactly what had happened to my Liam." Seb grumbled. "I was… I don't even know how to say it. Liam was… he was everything to me. He was my big brother! He-" Seb breathed hard. "Mom and dad always tried to lock his room so I couldn't go in. They always told me not to talk to him, because he was… irregular… they… ignored him constantly. They-" Seb needed Stan and Sixer holding him as he tried as hard as he could to work through this. "They didn't stop the government from taking him away- they knew he would be killed- my parents didn't care-!" He couldn't keep talking, shuddering and breathing hard as Stan pulled him into a hug.
There was a very long pause.
"I am... sorry for your loss," they heard next. "My condolences to you, on the loss of your Liam." Then the phone line went quiet again.
"If… if Blue had a Liam, and even if he didn't and still felt what it was like to have had-" Seb had to take another slow breath. "I… I'm still not over it, but I've resolved to let the dead rest. But Blue wants to bring his Liam back. And he doesn't understand why I don't want the same. Liam is… he's his obsession." Seb paused to breathe again. In that time, Dipper spoke up quietly. "What if we're looking at this wrong?" Everyone turned to him. "Wha?" Mabel blinked.
"I concur that several of you are looking at this incorrectly," came the older Ford's voice from the phone. "But do elaborate on your own thoughts on the subject please, Dipper."
"What if Blue doesn't talk about Liam, not because he doesn't trust you, but because he can't trust those Demons that are in your dimension?" Dipper pointed out. "From what I understand, about the whole 'cheating to stay alive' thing, Blue talked about it as if he had to face them and cheat to live himself. I mean, he was a triangle, I doubt he was always an all powerful demon waaaay back in the beginning." Dipper frowned. "And from what I know about Miz and her powers, bringing people back from the dead is easy peasy. So maybe Blue was afraid that the other Demons would jump on the chance to have some weakness of his to hold over him?"
There was a bit of a pause.
"Doubtful," came the response. "While Bill does have adversarial relationships with several demons to this day, and maneuvers both for and against them to his own benefit… and potentially his own survival, in order to keep what he has," the older Ford seemed to admit, "This is not some great weakness of his. It cannot be. -If Bill had a brother who was killed, and was truly capable of caring about other beings, then this would have been a discovered weakness long ago, and well-known by all at this point. I know this, because I have seen with my own eyes the exact sort of devastation Bill leaves in his wake. If he was hurt that much over it, or if he truly cared about others, he would not be inflicting the exact same thing upon other people, and then laughing about it all as he looked over what he'd just wrought," the older Ford told them all next.
At that, Sixer had to bring up, "...and if Blue was only capable of caring for Liam, and no one else, because he's insane and that's what he thinks of the world? Perhaps siblings, specifically, his own sibling, is the only thing that he could conceivably show any type of empathy for." He then added, "Also, how old was Blue when his brother died?" To which Seb hissed, "I was like… I dunno… the equivalent of 8 at MOST? And 6 at least. Maaaaybe?"
"That does not exactly help the rest of us in existence, and frankly I see it as more likely that he can only feel empathy towards himself and…" There was a bit of a pause. "Perhaps the idea of a 'Liam' that was the same as him, also. ...Bill has said once, within my hearing, that he died, but then refused to die, and was 'confused for awhile', until he was 'no longer confused' again. The other possibility, that my own grand-nephew has offered, is that Bill is the sort of insane where he thinks he had a brother, but in actuality did not." A pause. "The idea of him wanting a brother back from the dead again as the dream demon's driving motivation is, frankly, ludicrous. He believes himself fully capable of bringing anyone back from the dead now via any number of methods. He did, in fact, pull forward Stan's own twin brother recently. There is nothing stopping Bill from doing such a thing for his own brother, and there is no reason for him to not do such that I have seen. His professed goal is that he wants to turn everyone in existence into demons. If all he wanted was to have his brother back, alive and well, then the logic of him wanting that simply doesn't track. He is insane, but I can't see how those two goals could possibly be interrelated to each other."
"...well, in my past life, when… when I… that is…" Seb winced. "I tried to look forward, to see what would happen if I succeeded and Liam was brought back, to figure out how to do it? And he saw the awful things that I had done, and he… was so angry. He was horrified by me. He hated me! I-" Seb hugged himself. "Having Liam back… only for him to hate me for it… was… worse than anything I've ever felt." Seb could feel his family watching him, Wanda reached over to hold his hand. "So… if Blue has seen that too… he might not want Liam back until he's 'fixed everything', as he keeps telling us."
There was a bit of an awkward pause. "While I understand your own reticence on the matter, if you believe that your Liam would react that way towards you, that is a very human emotional response," the older Ford told them over the phone slowly. "And that is rather where things start to fall apart, when it comes to Bill. You were different than he was, at a fundamental level. You were not pure math; he was." A short pause. "You were angry when you realized what had happened and understood it, but then you were sad and grieved and began to move on. Even if you are correct about this Liam, Bill is simply angry. He does not stop and cry when he is sad, nor does he self-reflect or come to terms with events as they occur. He is also fully capable of holding his own in a verbalized fight with anyone; I doubt that the idea of a brother being 'mad' at him would be keeping him from bringing him back to life again - if anything, as he truly believes himself to be so right about everything, I would expect him to want his brother back sooner, so that this Liam of his would be supportive of his goals and help him with all of this." A pause."And even if Bill did, somehow, experience emotions in the same way that you and I do - which I find rather unlikely - he does not express them outwardly in anything like the same way. -You should not anthropomorphize him, or ascribe human emotions or human behaviors and responses to him, in any way. That is highly dangerous for any of you to do - and is in large part the reason why you, Mabel, are having such difficulty with him at present, I believe."
"Well, not as a triangle, of course not." Sixer pointed out. "But isn't he in a human body now? Isn't he feeling all the same chemicals that we do which translates into emotions, now?" He paused. "Blue doesn't seem to understand it, himself. At least, that's what I've hypothesized from our interactions so far."
(Ford grimaced at this on the other end of the phone.) "That reasoning is, as I understand it, the same as Stan's own. He thinks that he can somehow get Bill to relate to us now, because of this. And he points in part to our grand-niece having informed us all of how Bill himself seems to think he only feels one emotion at a time, when clearly something far more chaotic is going on underneath the surface with him, even if Bill himself does not see it clearly and believes very wrongly otherwise. -It won't work," the older Ford told him. "What Stan is attempting to do with Bill is completely futile. Bill does not let himself be overly influenced by any body that he is in at any time. He refuses to change."
"But this isn't just some body that he's in. This is his own body now." Seb pointed out. "Miz told me once that she lost her original body when she exploded and died and created her dimension. And from what I understand, the same happened to Blue. He hasn't had his own body for a very long time."
"If having a body made that much of a difference, then I would have seen a great difference in how he has been acting and reacting to things here, in a 'vessel' instead. His responses as I see them have not changed drastically from those I have observed from him lately, in our own dimensional set," the older Ford noted.
"Perhaps." Sixer sighed. "Regardless, the point I'm trying to get into here, is that for whatever reason, Blue appears to care about Miz. And Miz clearly loves him back. So we want him to be… in less contention with us, while he's here."
"And as I said before, that is a losing proposition, and highly dangerous to you all," the older Ford told them all urgently, though there was a tinge of something else to his tone now (something like despair at something he was beginning to see as a lost cause; he was mourning their inevitable deaths a bit even now, for them not having paid heed to his warnings). "Whatever game those two demons are actually playing with each other, I would rather you not be caught in the middle of it. This cannot, and will not, end well."
Everyone had to pause at that. "Why do you think they're just playing? I'm pretty sure Miz really cares about Blue." Mabel spoke up. "I mean, she cares about us too." At that, Wanda sighed. "But only us, Miz still hasn't tried to make friends with any of the children in the neighborhood."
"I think that they are 'just playing' with each other, because that is what demons do," the older Ford told them all next. "They cannot die permanently, for the most part, so they pass the time by playing games with each other. And when they grow bored with whatever it is that they're doing, then they move on to something else instead... generally after doing something highly destructive to 'reset' what they consider to be the playing field, to disrupt whatever else the other demons they were playing with before were trying to do, just for a lark as they go. And that generally involves a lot of people dying," the older Ford tried his damnedest to make clear to them next.
"...Miz wants to die permanently." Wanda finally said, making a few other people gasp. "She can't though. She… would just wake up again. Here, alive, and still as distressed as ever."
"If she does in fact want that, then Bill would not see her as equivalent to himself. I don't believe this to be the case, but if you are correct and Bill realizes this later…" they heard him say next. "You should avoid having him hear of this while he is here, where Stan is not around to talk to him."
"Blue is protective of her, and wants the lot of us to go along with his 'fixed' system of not being dead when we die, because he doesn't want Miz being sad when we die." Wanda frowned at the phone. "Because he doesn't want her feeling bad enough to want to die again. He already knows." She clenched her fists.
There was a pause. "You are certain that he knows of this? That he thinks it?"
"He told me quite directly that Miz is suicidal." Kari said with a tight tone.
"...Then the situation here is more grave than I thought previously," the older Ford told them all in just as tense a tone of voice. "I'd… admittedly already been worried that the man-eater had tricked him in some way, in convincing him somehow that they are alike, but this is far beyond anything crueler than I thought possible, and incredibly dangerous to you all."
"We're getting Miz a therapist." Wanda told him. "I don't want my daughter feeling like this. We don't want her feeling like this. She's already going through a lot, what with losing her children and the attempted kidnapping-" "Wait, WHAT?!" A few people gasped.
"You don't understand; I wasn't speaking figuratively," the older Ford cut in. "Bill is capable of collapsing entire dimensions; he's done it before. If the man-eater learns how to do this from him, and if she is truly suicidal, she could take a great number of people with her when she goes. And then Bill himself would likely be unable to handle the cognitive dissonance of a… version of himself that he sees as the same as him, wanting to die permanently and stay dead. -He would act highly destructively to begin with as he vents his temper on whomever he felt responsible for driving her towards or enabling her in doing this to herself. He would also most likely bring the man-eater back at some point during this: either to vent his frustration at this betrayal at her directly, of her tricking him into thinking they are at all alike; or to try and 'save' this part of himself, to attempt to change her mind instead. And then two Bill Ciphers capable of gaining for themselves a physical form would be having it out with each other directly: either because it was a trap and the man-eater was counting on him bringing her back, or because she truly wanted to stay dead and Bill had interfered with that. Either way, she would have to kill Bill permanently, either in offense, in order to continue on living after having tricked him in such a way, or in self-defense as it were, to be able to die again without being brought back yet again by him later. -She isn't a true demon; Bill would be able to drag her back into existence far more easily than the rest of them."
"Miz doesn't want to hurt people." Wanda said firmly. "Earlier, she ate too much at the buffet and went back to her own dimension to let off the energy buildup so she didn't explode." She paused. "I confess I don't know as much about the demon aspect."
"She professes she does not want to hurt others, but does not truly mean it," the older Ford told them. "She would not have gone so long without attempting to understand, learn, and practice morality if that was a driving goal of hers. Instead, she kills indiscriminately at the bequest of others without question, and hurts those around her at her own discretion," he told them. "If she is trying to set up a situation in which Bill would be driven to destroy entire dimensions indiscriminately, regardless of the inciting factors or outcome, I don't see how she could have planned to do any worse. -I'd told Stan that endorsing this 'relationship' of theirs was a bad idea, but he didn't listen," 'as usual' was rather implicit in his voice's descending tones.
"So you'd rather that Blue didn't have anyone to care for and protect? No one who would ever love him back?" Wanda almost sounded bitter. After all, her sweet Sebastian had felt alone for so long, she wasn't going to let Miz feel the same. And not Blue either. No one deserved that.
"A demon with a driving purpose, however long- or short-lived that purpose is, is a terrible thing," they were told grimly. "They will drive themselves straight towards that goal, without concern for any others who might be in their way, leaving a mountain of dead bodies and destruction in their wake. I've seen it before," they were told, "I hope to never see it again," he said both grimly and firmly. "-Demons generally don't feel such things towards others, an instinct to care or protect," Ford told them. "But Bill is apparently some sort of exception. I suspect that he isn't from the outside like all of the others; rather, I am almost certain of this now, from several things I have observed of him since he's come back. -This doesn't make him less dangerous a being, far from it," he told them all, "It only makes him that much more dangerous, instead."
"Well whatever this outside is, I don't think Miz is a demon from there." Seb pointed out. "She's not even from your 'game-like' world." And he certainly didn't have any demons like that from his own past either.
"Yes," the older Ford noted dourly. "I concur; she is not. Which is why I stated that Bill would be able to drag her back to life and existence again, causing this problem," he told them. "If she was such a demon, then she could go back to the Outside from whence she came, and simply stay there, away from him and out of his reach. Bill would likely not be able to drag her back in again. -Alternately, if she came back on her own later, Bill would likely treat her the same way he treats every other demon who he feels has 'wronged' him that far, and effectively banish them using whatever unknown method he has for this. It isn't the same situation as the usual. The man-eater is clearly taking advantage of this, with her little play."
"Why are you so certain that Miz doesn't truly love Blue?" Wanda frowned.
"Because she is a demon," was what they were all told next. "If she did love him, she would want to stay with him, and stay alive for him, to be with him. If she is and remains suicidal, then she clearly does not."
"...I don't think you understand what suicidal depression is." Seb hissed out. "There's- there was a time when I thought that the people I loved would be better off without me!"
There was a long pause. "...I'm sorry. I... I agree that I may be misunderstanding something here, then." (Given Seb's immediate negative reaction to what he'd just said, he believed that must be the case, but…) "Is the act of suicide not caused by an irrational desire to end one's life, when all seems hopeless and lost, by someone who is not capable of thinking of or caring about the devastating impact that killing themselves would have on all others surrounding them, all who would surely be impacted in some negative way by their death? Someone who has lost all will to live, for themselves and for others, to despair, or to some other dark ennui from which there is no escape?" The older Ford sounded a bit confused at the disconnect.
"That's not how it- There's premeditated-" Sixer frowned while Seb shuddered again, "All I've ever done was cause problems for my family, for my brothers." Seb whispered. "And after I worked for 13 years to bring them back from the portal, and Ford told me that he wanted me gone and out of his house afterwards-" He clenched Wanda's hand. "I… I wasn't well off. At all. I didn't even know where I would go- where I could live-" He leaned on his wife's shoulder. "If I hadn't found Wanda again… I wouldn't have…" She pulled him close and kissed his cheek. "It's alright Seb. We're here now. Together."
"There are plenty of people who… kill themselves because they don't think of- don't realize that there are people who would be sad that they're gone." Mabel, of all people, spoke up. "I've seen it in the news all the time, and it happens all the time…" Which sucked. It was so awful and Mabel didn't like it at all.
"...Seb, I cannot imagine that all you have ever done is cause problems for others. Even your own family clearly believes otherwise," the older Ford said slowly over the phone (as if worried that he might not be talking someone safely down off of a very steep ledge nearly carefully enough).
"We didn't think you-! Not-" Sixer huffed. "Our father had-" And then Kari took over. "My former husband had been abusing Sebastian ever since the day he was born." Her tone was as frigid as the arctic. "And I, an absolute fool, allowed it to happen, because I wasn't able to stand up to him. Not until it was too late and I'd lost all my children. Filbrick disowned Sebastian and he threw out Shermie as well." She shook her head. "I failed them all."
"That's not true Ma!" "You were the one who taught me how to be a kind person! You always loved me enough to make up for that bastard-" "Ma that wasn't your fault!"
"...And I do believe that such thoughts are generally forestalled with being confronted with the reality of the situation, as you are all doing now, correct? Which is successful if the person being confronted cares about not causing pain to those other people, rather than wanting to inflict pain on those others in the one way they feel would be the least amount of effort to take, in order to do so."
"Yes." Kari said simply. "The issue we're having, is that sometimes we're not around to be there to remind people that we love them."
"But surely there are ways and means of doing that here, in this first of those two cases, to make this merely a temporary lack of rational thought - one that is easily corrected, rather than a constant and overwhelming ailment of serious concern," the older Ford noted. "You all have instant communication devices, and ways to monitor brainwaves. Most civilized dimensions have the same. They simply scan any being periodically who might fall prey to such wrong thinking, and… I believe it is called, 'stage an intervention'? Automatically?" He sounded a bit confused again, as if he truly didn't understand why they hadn't done so with Seb yet, if this was still a cause for concern.
And then Wanda had to speak up. "I didn't notice how bad Sebastian was doing, back when we were teenagers. I had to find out from a damn note and his roomates telling me that their gun was missing and then I didn't have ANY news about Sebastian for over TEN YEARS and-" She heaved in breaths. "We DON'T have any of those fancy brain wave scanners in this dimension. People don't have any way to know for sure that they can stop someone in time!" She was holding Seb so hard, her knuckles had turned white.
"...If you don't have such here, and Seb is in his right mind currently and amenable to doing so, I could fashion such a device or two for him to wear, that could help him with this," the older Ford noted (and offered). "I'm a bit surprised that your brothers didn't run into similar in their own dimensional travels, to do such for you before now," he added to Seb (with a frown, because this didn't sound like it was a new problem for him to Seb's family from Ford's point of view, given how little shock had been expressed on the other end of the line at the discussion of Seb's thoughts of suicide here, compared to when they had been discussing Miz). "Are these devices and methods not as pervasive throughout your dimensional set here, as they are in my own?" the older Ford said slowly next, as if the thought of such had simply not occurred to him before.
"I'm fine now." Seb stressed, embarrassed now. "It's Miz we're worried about. And no, we don't have anything that'll detect suicidal thoughts and stop them. Hell, we didn't even have available therapy for such a thing for a long time- and the stigma against such therapy is so bad that most people never even try to get the help they need!"
"That… sounds similar to my- to my dimensional set, up to a point," the older Ford noted. "But I believe that there should be other newer technology that exists here now… ah, CT scans, and EEG wave-graph monitoring, and MRI imaging methods? That technology has progressed somewhat since then?" (He'd run into issues after Weirdmageddon, going in for a check-up - Stan had insisted on one before they both went off sailing together - because most of the common methods hadn't been able to work or would have been downright dangerous, due to the metal plate he had in his head. It hadn't been too much of a problem, though, given that he knew how to read things past the plate in his head, and had been able to do so even with his old Project Mentem.) "Unless the technology in this dimension has stagnated greatly relative to my own. ...But you have these newer smartphone cellular devices here, though. Do you not have these other technologies here as well?"
"-Like fuck, I didn't even get any help for my ADHD until just a few years ago!" Seb rubbed his face as he continued ranting. "Like, I had to start therapy when the twins were born, because I kept hurting myself-" Wanda patted his back. Sixer took over, "We have scans like that. But once again, it's not the problem of whether we have them or not, it's the fact that they aren't commercially available to people who need them." Sixer sighed. "The healthcare system is terrible, and many people go undiagnosed and unable to get any help for their ailments. Or they don't even want to be tested."
(Ford wondered why they were discussing the common local healthcare system when…) "Is Fiddleford not a technical genius here? Were your own skills not honed during your own dimensional travels? Why do you not simply build such a device for him, if he needs it? Surely you don't have to wait for this problem to be solved by someone else, and then made commercially available to you," he noted, feeling oddly as though he was stating the obvious here, and wondering if he was truly the only one who could see it when it was something actually workable, or if it was just him being blind somehow to a rather obvious problem preventing this all from somehow taking place. "Your Stan himself could likely pay for the development costs, for an entire staff of researchers to help you with it."
"We've been working more on environmental sciences to stop the Earth from self-destructing." Sixer said dryly. "Kinda hard to work on helping humanity with their mental health issues if there's massive climate shifts that flood entire cities or… what was that other thing?" Sixer turned to the teenagers. "Earthquakes, droughts, hurricanes… and that's just in the last year." Dipper deadpanned.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
"...You ...did not run into such technologies on your interdimensional travels... that you could not simply adapt to local use?" the other Ford said slowly next, trying to confirm...
"There was some terraforming tech, but we don't have the element used to construct it here, but Miz has been helping me with some of that, reworking the tech into something that can be built with the supplies we have- it's… coming along. Got the water purifier up and running. Working on the plastic disintegrator now." Shoot plastic with it and the substance would break apart back into the elements that formed it! The problem was the resulting release of energy from the bonds breaking all at once. So Sixer was rethinking it from a gun into a sort of furnace, taking the resulting energy and using it to power buildings or putting them into batteries- the energy crisis was real and Sixer wanted to solve it. He was going to need a closer look at Miz's stomach for that, though.
(Ford was rather flabbergasted at this point.) "I… don't understand," he said next. "Didn't you have to hone your skills at such a thing to create your own quantum destabilizer, for use against the local Bill here?"
"Oh, we asked Miz for the blueprints and spent the 13 years finding all the parts." Stan shrugged. "I didn't want to have to wait for Ford to figure it out himself, so I just asked for a short cut." to which Sixer sighed. "Which may have been a mistake, we just defeated Bill with the memory gun anyway so I feel like the quantum destabilizer was a waste of time." Sixer shrugged. "I took apart a lot of the tech I found behind the portal. I was… trying to make my own weapon for killing Bill…" He winced at the fact that he'd also been trying to make a method of killing Seb.
It was at this point that Ford realized… "I see. You were only traveling on the other side of the portal for thirteen years, and… that man-eater has been playing a longer game with you than I thought," the older Ford said next, wheels spinning inside of his head. "She sabotaged you then, so that you would not have the requisite skills that you could rely upon now. -You depend on her now for her help with all of your work here, instead." (It was straight out of the usual manipulative demon's handbook, in Ford's opinion.)
"Actually, we were only with her for a week. After that, we ended up back in our set, still behind the portal. That first time was a fluke from Miz helping Sebastian fix the portal on his end." Sixer paused. "And if she did sabotage us about the Quantum Destabilizer…" He glanced at Seb and winced. Stan sighed and slapped him on the shoulder, "Because brainiac here was still thinkin' of shootin' Seb. And Miz didn't want that." "Look, I wasn't in a good place, I thought Seb was Bill-" ""We know. It's fine. You got over it."" "-only after I-" "It's fine Sixer, really!"
"You think she gave you a series of blueprints that did not work as well? ...I suppose that stands to reason." (Ford doubted that the demon would hand over something that would actually work, given that it could then be used against her next.)
"Well, it worked. But she gave me the blueprints." Stan pointed out. "Sixer wasn't allowed to see them."
"Hence, the sabotage I was originally referring to, with your brother not learning the skills he would need for doing so himself on the other side of the portal," the older Ford said. "Assuming that the second form of sabotage was not also taking place, and the gun would have still fired at all once you had the local Bill in the crosshairs."
"It fired. I just… missed." Sixer said sheepishly.
"-Intentionally?" Ford sounded shocked. Then: "...Apologies. No damage was caused?"
"I was startled, there was a Weirdness wave and I aimed higher than I meant to." Sixer sighed. "I didn't hit any people. Which was… good. Too many people already died during that awful week."
"Given that you were, I expect, given a design without an auto-lock feature or steadying unit, rather than rushing to try to both design and build such yourself, that could have been part of the flaw in the design," the older Ford noted. He himself hadn't had the time or patience for such additions to his own gun, and given that he'd been planning on using it in the Nightmare Realm, rather than in a stable dimension with a stable gravity field, such 'features' would have hampered him rather than helped. "That gun wouldn't have killed him, once he had gained physical form in a stable location like Gravity Falls, if it was of the same make and design as my own. I was only hoping to push him back into the Rift when we reached that point; it didn't have enough energy to rip apart both him and his physical form entirely, not once he had gained the latter having finally escaped outside the confines of his own Nightmare Realm."
"Maybe. Either way, what happened has already happened. It's done, Bill's gone, and I think the design Miz gave us was one that would tear apart the energy of a creature and scatter them. Wouldn't exactly kill Bill, but it would make him essentially gone for a very long time until he could pull himself back together."
"Understood. My own quantum destabilizer was of a very different make, then." A pause. "If you don't have the requisite skills yourself, or the time to enact them with the… looming global climate threat? -I could take some of the designs that I know and adapt them accordingly, to help with Seb's potential issue. -It could be specific and solely tuned to your own brainwaves for your use, Seb; I could make up something like that quickly." Another pause. "I am still somewhat surprised that you don't think that Fiddleford would be able to do so himself, if he was capable of making a memory gun here," the older Ford directed back at Sixer again next. "Unless you are concerned about possibly not being able to check all of his work. Though if you were also able to create a working Project Mentem here yourself, I would suspect that you are capable of such a thing?" the older Ford asked of Sixer carefully.
"Ah, I hadn't even considered it." Sixer rubbed his head. "I guess this would be why Blue's so angry at me for not thinking things through."
"Bill finds more independent beings more fun to play with," the older Ford noted dryly. "If I were you, I'd consider that something of a defensive mechanism, and not fret overly over what Bill does or does not think of you, as long as he's largely leaving you alone. Frankly, I think you should throw the 'math challenge' of his. You'll be far safer in the long run if he doesn't find you interesting."
"Well, I don't even know what it entails yet. Could be fun." Sixer admitted. "But if it gets distressing, I can throw the match." He didn't get how math could be traumatic though?
"The rules of a basic challenge are rather simple. It involves you, as the challenged, picking any problem you'd like, presenting a solution to as close a form of completion as possible, and then the challenger picking it apart as ruthlessly as possible. The challenged then picks apart the challengers own logic and math, and so forth, and points are scored repeatedly, depending on the skill and the depth of the arguments made. And I would recommend against throwing the match in the middle of it; rather, you should simply concede before it begins," the older Ford told him. "The final person standing gets to give one last argument before the end, with no penalties or loss of score or standing, and Bill could say literally anything at that point while feeling as though you'd have no choice but to listen. He will realize if you throw the match on purpose partway through, and he will not react well to it - if you concede the match from the beginning, before it's even begun, you will avoid that particular issue entirely."
"Uuuuughhhhh neeeeeeerds…" Stan complained.
"Then consider it a game of ping-pong, where the concessor needs to let their opponent hit them with any ball they like wherever they like at the end of it. Planet-sized bowling balls included," the older Ford said over the phone next in sheer exasperation.
"HAH! That sounds funny! Hey Sixer! Just challenge Blue to ping pong instead! See how far you can-" "No Stanley, I am not playing planet ping-pong again. That once was bad enough…" Sixer deadpanned. "Fine, I will concede to him before the match." He sighed. "Getting along with Blue is a difficult task indeed."
"An impossible one, truly," the older Ford noted dryly (while breathing an internal sigh of relief). "I will help as I can with that. -Please don't take what I have to say to Bill personally in any respect, once you have conceded the match." He sounded a bit reserved, and Sixer could hear the wince and worry in his voice.
"Well, I have more items to put on my list of work to do now…" Sixer sighed. Stan complained, "No working this summer! It's a vacation! We're supposed to be enjoying ourselves!"
"I could simply give you the designs to pass along to Fiddleford? It would be little to no trouble for me to do so. Unless you'd like me to try and make up something for you before I manage to talk Bill into leaving and taking us back… which might take a not insignificant amount of time, admittedly." From the sound of things, it was clear the older Ford thought that he'd be completely unsuccessful on that front, and that they'd both only be going back when Blue felt like it.
"That would be appreciated. I'll look them over later. And no, Stanley, that wouldn't be considered working. This is my 'nerd stuff' that I do for fun." Sixer nudged his brother.
"I'll see if I can scrounge up something to write on then, next." A pause. "Ah, Seb? What is… Ae'Dee acH'Dee?" (Ford wasn't sure if…) "Is that some sort of complicating factor, for suicidal thinking, that I might need to take into account?"
"Open the Journal app on my phone. You can write and draw and zoom- it's a very useful app." Sixer told him. "And ADHD is…" he glanced at Sebastian. "Well, yes I suppose it did contribute to my brother's problems."
"The Journ-?" His voice dropped off in volume abruptly. There was a short pause. And then there was a click on the line, as the phone call ended abruptly.
They all stared at it.
"Did he just close the call?" Mabel blinked.
"It would appear so." Sixer actually wanted to laugh. He'd done that a lot back when he was first learning the smart phone.
The phone rang again. Mabel touched and flicked on the little slider icon to answer it.
"...Apologies," came a slightly-sheepish voice. "This interface is a bit different from the ones I am used to."
"That's fine. You… asked about ADHD?"
"Yes."
"ADHD is 'attention deficit hyperactivity disorder'. It's a medical condition that affects how the brain develops and it made my life extra difficult growing up. And even now." Sebastian explained. "I only got diagnosed a few years back. And actually… " He turned to Wanda, who nodded as she took over, "We have noticed a few things with Miz as well that worry us. I don't think she's got the same condition, but I do want to get her tested." She paused. "And yes, I do know that trying to map human disorders and such to a demon might not work the same, but Miz was human once. And I know I've seen certain behaviors that don't seem demon-like and aren't quite… normal, either."
"Supposedly, she was a human, who became a demon later," they were told. "So you would be trying to map human disorders through a demonic individual back at least one lifetime to a human one." A slight pause, then: "Are there any books on the subject of ADHD you might recommend that- You idiot. You want more information on something? If you're already 'stooping' to using electronic storage for ideas now, just use the damn internet like every other 'modern' human out there.
" Followed by a pause and a flat and not-horribly-surprised, simply resigned: "...How long have you been awake."
"Internet phone app. Looks like a little green ouroboros eating its own tail. Use it." Another pause, and a rustle of clothing and movement. Indistinct talking.
Then, around two or three minutes later, finally…
"Apologies, I think he has settled down again." A slight sigh. "Seb, if you could speak to your own, personal experience with this brain condition, I believe I would find that helpful. -If you don't find talking about such too distressing," the older Ford added. (He'd just got done checking a few things online on their local internet quickly, after talking with Bill briefly and not getting any useful information out of him on how long he'd been awake, other than a 'Does it matter? I have an ALL-SEEING EYE, Sixer, remember?' Frankly, Ford felt he might need the clarification on what types of symptoms Seb was presenting, to help narrow things down; this seemed to be a very broad and not well-defined strict set of ailments - the whole phenomenon itself seemed rather too fluid for him to feel comfortable trying to make any guesses about such at present with the old triangle demon-turned-human.)
"Well for me," Seb rolled his eye. "My ADHD makes me have severe impulse control issues, I literally, physically and mentally, have trouble stopping myself from doing things sometimes, or saying things that come to mind, even when I realize that I shouldn't have. I have trouble paying attention to stuff if it doesn't catch my interest… made schoolwork HELL and school even worse."
('That sounds rather familiar,' Ford thought, glancing over at an either slumbering-again or faking-it-very-well Bill.)
"There's also trouble keeping his emotions in check, he had outbursts all the time as a child." Kari added. "And fidgeting, being unable to sit still and stay quiet. I… didn't know ADHD was a real disorder, always ended up punishing him for being so hyperactive."
"I've done some research into it," Wanda tacked on. "And ADHD sometimes affects girls differently from boys. They're more quiet, but no less distressed in terms of trouble with their emotions and impulses." Wanda frowned. "Sometimes Miz can't sit still, she'll start running back and forth across the hallway, almost as if she were in a trance. She also likes climbing on things. She'll do the laundry and then sit on top of the machine… which could just be for fun, but I put it on the list anyway. She had trouble with boundaries, and is very OCD…" the more Wanda thought about it, the more she was sure that there was something going on here.
"...Oh'Cee-Dee?" Ford asked, wondering about all these... acronyms? (Yes, apparently this one was an acronym as well, not just another unfamiliar word in his own language or borrowed from a different language with similar phonemes.)
"Obsessive compulsive disorder. Miz has confirmed to us that she does have it. Back when she was human, and even still now." Wanda nodded. "Miz likes to organize things. And she gets incredibly distressed when that order is messed with. Like she puts the spices in order and if we take one to use, we have to put it back or she gets upset. I have talked with her about it, and she's been able to relax enough to allow 'put back in the same general area'. It's not too big of a deal to go along with, for her comfort." Wanda waved her hand helplessly. "But it's not just about item placement. She doesn't like food crumbs or food in general, being dropped on the ground. She has a thing for cleanliness. She doesn't like when certain routines she'd made for herself get interrupted…" Wanda paused to bring out her own phone and wrote this down. "I should send Linda a list of things, maybe she'll know what it all means."
"The actual symptoms of OCD are that it causes repeated behavior, thoughts and sensations, an urge to do certain actions, and most of the time, they're unwanted compulsions." Dipper read off from his own phone. "Huh, is that like my pen biting, or is that something different?" "I'm pretty sure your pen biting is more of a bad habit, but you do need to bite something when you're thinking really hard." Mabel pointed out.
There was a long pause from the other end of the phone.
"...I take it that the unwanted and, ah, potentially unwarranted aspect is the reason why these behaviors are considered problematic?" the older Ford said slowly next. "Because I've found that knowing exactly where everything is, and having a strict placement and order for everything that I carry, has helped greatly with my own survival in battle conditions on the other side of the portal. Seemingly unpredictable behaviors can also be useful in confusing enemies, and several other things that you've mentioned could be called, ah, 'stress behaviors' in most species. The rest of them sound to be similar to… ah, sometimes the results that are left in the aftermath of…" There was a bit of a wincing pause. "...a 'mind flaying', may be the closest translation, I suppose," though he didn't sound too certain of that, and just as clearly didn't want to talk about the last bit of that any further.
"Yes. The unwanted part is the problem." Wanda told him. "Not the least because they cause Miz a lot of stress. The disorder part isn't about wanting to organize things, it's about how emotionally distressed those who suffer it become when things are unorganized. In a survival situation, that would be seen as a boon, I'm guessing, based on what you've said. But getting agitated and breaking down crying because a cereal box was put back on the shelf facing the wrong way… isn't a good thing."
"Wait, has Miz actually done that?" Mabel gasped. Wanda sighed. "We… thought it was a joke, didn't realize this was an actual thing."
"But I haven't seen her doing any of that stuff in the time she's been here?" Stanley frowned. "Well, this isn't her kitchen. This isn't her territory." Wanda explained. "But our house, is. Because Miz is our daughter now, and we made it very clear to her that our home is her home now. And she asked about organizing things, which we gave her the 'okay' on. Of course, she still acknowledges that me and Seb are the home owners, and we all have our own spaces. But the kitchen is hers. She stresses about things like cleanliness, contamination, ordering…" Wanda listed. "And here's the kicker, Miz's OCD is considered a MILD form of the disorder."
There was a pause on the other end of the line for a moment. "...Are you entirely certain that her behaviors are OCD?" was what the older Ford said next.
"The stress it causes her is what makes this a case of OCD."
Another pause. "I would find it stressful and a cause for concern, if someone I did not trust was contaminating, moving, or otherwise doing unknown things with and to what I consider to be my own safe food supply."
"..." Everyone stared at the phone, then, tentatively, Mabel asked, "Are you a little bit OCD mister older uncle Ford?"
"...No," the older Ford said next. "I simply have a very firm grasp on what can happen to a person who has had their food supply tampered with in various ways and then partaken of that no longer made-safe food supply. Especially when the tamperer is another demon," he told them all rather firmly. (And yes, he had shot both people and demons in the face over such problems before. On multiple occasions.) A slight thinking pause. "You have said that the man-eater travels back and forth between your set and hers quite frequently, yes?"
"Yes. She slips back and forth when she sleeps." Wanda blinked.
"And she is able to bring demons or others from other sets with her?" the other Ford said next.
"She's only brought Blue so far." Wanda wondered where he was going with this. "She's brought us over to her side before." Sixer added.
"But she can, and it has demonstrated that other beings and demons can make the trip also, both with and without her," the other Ford said next, and they all realized what he was referring to with the 'without her' very personally there - himself included.
"...I suppose that is an issue…" Seb frowned. "Huh, gonna need to ask about what sorts of protections this dimension has…"
"Not enough, clearly. Which means she is likely right to be concerned about the safety of her own food supply, given how much she seems to need to consume per day and at each meal," the older Ford told them. "The very first thing that I did once I was able to this afternoon, was to make a bioscanner for my own personal use here, first. Being able to determine whether something is safe to eat or drink is crucial to one's continued safe existence when traveling between dimensions. If I was not able to tell when Bill is lying, to ask that of him, I would not have eaten anything you gave to me or let me use for my own consumption here," he then explained to them next.
"...she's more worried about our health than her own, to be honest." Wanda paused. "You're really paranoid. But if your survival out in what sounds like demon infested dimensions says anything, you have every right to be."
"If that infestation can come here," 'and has' was heavily implied in the pregnant pause there, "Then it isn't paranoia, it's simply being prudent," the older Ford told them all next. He didn't know what to think about the former statement though, other than… "If the man-eater is paying close attention to what you eat, and potentially making much of it herself for your consumption, you are going to be in a great deal of trouble when she finally gets bored with you and decides to use that to 'improve' you in some way to her best liking." (If she didn't simply decide to murder them all, or poison their poor trusting souls and laugh as she watched them all die horribly, writhing on the ground as they finished retching their liquifying insides out all over the floor. He'd seen other demons do it before.)
"Well she does want us to agree to be immortal so we would never die and leave her." Wanda probably sounded more blase about that than she really was.
"So does Bill," was the bland reply. "He rather likes keeping what he considers his around for his own continuing amusement, rather than having to replace them all so frequently." Unlike other demons, who just jumped from one to the next to the next, killing each one as they were done with them (or worse-).
"Well, they're siblings after all." Kari sighed, almost sounded amused. "Though in Miz's case, I believe she's just afraid to be alone."
"It isn't funny," the older Ford said quietly after a while. "And all things being equal, I'd rather wish they all would leave us alone. We're all trapped currently, and I know I have already been compromised, but I will find a way to kill him permanently, to keep him from torturing us all for the rest of a long and infinite existence," he said, and the ringing character of a firm and impenetrable metal came through in his tone.
"So you, like me, also believe it's better to die when our time has come?" Kari asked him simply. "Because I've heard some of Blue's plans, and his idea of a 'heaven' where no one dies for real, isn't going to work out."
"Stan has already given himself over fully to Bill, without even realizing exactly what it is he has done," the older Ford told them all next, clearly frustrated. "I know what he's likely planning there, as a last resort, but I can't leave him alone, to have to try and deal with Bill alone for the rest of an unending, unyielding life. He's signed himself up for a lifetime of hell, not any sort of 'heaven', in an existence where everyone is going to be turned into demons, whether they like it or not - himself included. I can't let that happen," he told them all next. He sounded absolutely opposed to the idea, but there was also an undercurrent of fear underneath it all, there. (Largely because Ford was afraid that he wasn't going to be able to stop him from doing it: not Stan, from sacrificing himself like that for the rest of them; not Bill, from enacting whatever horrible plans he believed he had going.)
"Well, even if you did become a demon, that doesn't mean you'd be forced to go around doing whatever it is that demons do?" Seb blinked. "I mean, you'll still be you?"
"All societal structures are built off of a few basic truths," was what the older Ford grimly told him next. "One of which is, namely, impermanence being a limiting factor to all of existence, and death being the great equalizer to all beings, one that most species have an ingrained instinct of self-preservation to work to avoid, prolonging their existences as long as possible, while yet knowing that an inevitable end will eventually be reached. -If Bill had his way, then that underpinning, - which is crucial to every social structure in existence, except that of the demons' make and ilk - would be ripped away and out from under everyone entirely. And what does cooperation and companionship matter, if you have an infinite eternity within which to get something done? With no limits, there is no reason for anyone to limit themselves, and it is far easier to destroy than to create. Every single social structure in existence would immediately and irreparably fall apart completely. Most beings can find significant amounts of short-term pleasure in destruction, and there would be no reason or ability to strive for any common goals, with a rather large cross-section of a population consisting of every being in existence putting themselves towards the effort of mindlessly breaking everything down around them instead. -And that would all happen rather quickly," he told them all, "Given what it is like in several fully-subjugated dimensions for those beings who would want to take complete and immediate revenge on their demonic overlords and masters, and how easy it is for individuals to become drunk on power when even some limits are lifted, once they have tasted it… it would spread outwards from those dimensions quite quickly."
"..." Dipper pinched the bridge of his nose. "Well, considering all the school shootings that happen nowadays, and the people already drunk with power having their way, I'm almost tempted to think that it wouldn't be any worse…" Yes, he was rather bitter about the state of the world in recent years. Also the drill that his school had a few months back.
"But these shootings are in a society where death is still something to be avoided - not celebrated, if not looked forward to, as paving the way towards something new and possibly better," the older Ford said to them next, grimly. "If there were no killing consequences to these shootings, and or capturing the enactor would only slow them down briefly, before they died or killed themselves, came back to life, and started shooting more people again… do you think that they would ever stop? And how many people would then join in with them?"
"At least it would mean that children aren't being shot to death while at school. They'd be able to come back. And I know that means that the assholes would just go hog wild on their killing sprees, but at least if people could come back, we wouldn't have to bury so many kids anymore." Dipper pulled on his hat, rather upset that he had remembered this point. "Also, I'm pretty sure people would get bored of it eventually." He shrugged. "Like when you're playing a videogame with god-mode on. No challenge really takes the fun out of it."
"Except when one shooter finally stopped, another could start up again; the population would be ever-increasing because no-one would ever stay dead. And school as we know it would likely become an outdated concept as well, because very few people would feel inclined to study and learn things if nothing could come of such later." (Most people, he'd learned over time, wanted to study only to better themselves or others, to 'get a leg up' on the competition, or just to learn enough to be able to continue to survive. Very few did such for the sake of pure learning itself.) "Even those who wished to learn would have themselves constantly interrupted by killers, their teachers killed periodically and the necessary supplies wholly destroyed, setting them back and unable to proceed with their studies. It would be rather hard to conduct a chemistry lecture without undefaced textbooks or unbroken glassware, or a school building that was still standing and not burnt down ages ago by either students or adults who thought such a thing funny." they were all told rather dryly.
"Yes. That was something I noticed as being the problem as well." Kari sipped her drink. "Though if we asked Blue, he'd probably say something along the lines of limiting birth rates, or stopping that altogether." She sighed. "More than making it so people didn't die, there should be measures put in place to stop people from killing each other." She pointed out. "Or violence in general. I imagine he's thought of that, but I'm unsure how much."
"...Frankly, I'm a little worried that you've been talking about this with him at all," and he did sound very worried for her (mind and sanity, among other things). "Listening to Bill for any length of time generally does not go well for most people. He has a habit of turning things around on the beings he spends any significant amount of time talking with, far too easily. I've seen the results of that more times than I like to think of." And he grew quiet at that.
"I figured, based on how much you wanted to keep Blue seperate from the rest of us." Kari drawled. "That IS the reason why you didn't come back with us, isn't it? Despite having nowhere else to go, and Stanley inviting you over?"
There was a bit of a pause.
"...I'm rather used to having to take care of myself in other dimensions," the older Ford said slowly. "I was admittedly not thinking everything through all that much here at first, other than needing to immediately secure a few essentials, and… also trying to get Bill away from the company of most other civilized beings, for everyone else's safety, though that was not quite the issue at the forefront of my mind, right from the start," he admitted a bit painfully, then seemed to stop himself from continuing to explain any further.
"That's fine dear, I'm simply worried about you being out on your own with no money or anywhere to go." Kari told him quite seriously. "I had enough of that when Sebastian was a child."
"I have a working bioscanner, and I know how to properly forage for, secure, and prepare both food and drink in dimensions far more inimical to human life than this one, I assure you," the older Ford said to her next. "It's warm enough out that I don't even need my coat as a blanket, and we're high enough up that even if we were in a region of intelligent, ah, non-human predators, I would be able to wake up and defend myself quite easily," he told them next. "And even without the local currency at-hand, I do know how to barter for goods and services quite handily. You have no reason to worry about my ability to be out on my own by myself," and there was an undertone of confusion that some of those present realized was borne from this other Ford wondering why Kari seemed so concerned about him, and his health and well-being.
"...alright, as long as you're going to be alright." Kari nodded. "And, if it's not too insensitive to ask, please take care of Blue. He seems high maintenance." That got snorts out of the others.
"If by 'take care of him' you mean kill him permanently as soon as possible, I do believe I have said I am trying," the older Ford told them with a sigh (having thought that he'd made that perfectly clear before).
"...I mean make sure he's eating and has a place to sleep. Poor dear looked quite tired." Kari clarified.
"Yes, well, I'm not about to give him a ready-made excuse for attacking me in the meantime, while Stan has made it quite clear that he's expected to follow the agreement he has with him while fed, watered, and sleeping properly," the older Ford noted quite dryly. "I don't believe that he'll be able to convince Bill to go along with this little charade for the next month more, let alone the next three years or so. I know he doesn't realize exactly who Bill is, or what he is capable of, given that he thinks he can 'handle it' when Bill decides he is bored with the whole affair, and wants to resort to burning everything down, both figuratively and literally," and there was a deep frown in his voice as he said this. "But I'm not about to stop Stan from trying. ...I'd say I wish he was here, but I don't think things would be going any more smoothly at the moment if he was," ('far from it', Ford realized quite slowly). "He'd likely be incensed; I'd have to be the one keeping him off of Bill here, most likely." They all heard the older Ford sigh. (Because between yanking him out of his body and along for the ride without asking first, let alone discussing it with Stan? Pulling Stan away from his brother like that in the process, right after getting him back?)
"What if your Stanley's plan actually works?" Kari asked, folding her hands together as she rested her head on them.
"With all due respect," the older Ford said. "If you don't believe me and my thirty three years of experience on the subject of all matters pertaining to this Bill… Then perhaps you should be asking your sons whether or not they think that any Bill would seem amenable to stop doing anything that they truly want to do and have set their sights on. All of the Bills that they know of, both past and present, up to and including the one you all are calling Blue for some unfathomable reason."
"Well the one we killed? Definitely not. Blue? Probably also not." Stan shrugged. "Miz? Well… I'm gonna have to turn to Seb and Wanda for that one."
"Miz tries to be a good child." Wanda sighed. "But she's stubborn." And wasn't always used to having a parent who could set rules for her. It wasn't too much of an issue, as Miz was mostly self sufficient and knew how to behave for the most part, but now and then, she was very stuck on something and it took a lot to make her back down.
"All Stan's plans hinge on changing Bill's mind. But Bill utterly refuses to do so. He asserts that he has not done so at any point over his one trillion year existence to-date; that he never has, and never will in the future. ...Stan is stubborn, but I don't believe he is that stubborn," the older Ford said. "He isn't trying to stand firm with Bill; he's been bending and compromising while saying certain things aren't acceptable past a certain point, instead. Bill has not crossed that line in the sand that Stan has drawn with him yet again, but it's not because Stan has made him unable to do so or could stop him somehow if he tried. All I know is that Bill has actively tried not to cross that line with him yet since his return; what I don't know yet is why not."
"Well, there's compromise." Wanda suggested. "We do that with Miz sometimes. When she wants something and we don't agree with it. We talk, sometimes she'll back down, but sometimes she needs some sort of compromise."
"True compromise requires that both sides are willing to give something up to reach a common, agreed-upon goal or some sort of other mutual understanding that all parties in question will then abide by," the older Ford noted. "Bill, however, is unwilling to give up anything that he wants, his goals are not something anyone with a rational working sense of self should ever want to agree to, and he has no real working empathy for anyone who is not himself. -I think you may see the problem here, when it comes to what anything resembling an actual compromise with him would then entail." Then: "...Are you going to go to sleep anytime soon, or am I going to have to chuck something large and heavy at your head. …You may see my point proven rather firmly, with this example of his idea of compromise that he has just given you here."
"...Miz is willing to compromise. So, there's one." Wanda rubbed her head. "But I do see where you're coming from. Blue doesn't seem like he would ever agree to anything if he didn't want it himself."
"Yes," the older Ford said lowly. "And given that he also refuses to change his mind on anything he considers truly essential… which seems to be... almost everything he does or wants at this point..." but the older Ford was talking a bit more slowly at the last, as if suddenly considering an old problem from a bit if a different angle than he was previously. "You idiot. GO TO SLEEP before you burn out every last synapse in that stupid vessel's brain that I made for you there. Idiot. " A tired sigh. "I do believe I should pick this up at a later time and date with you all. Bill is getting a bit…"
"Understandable, sleep well, be safe." Kari told him. "Good night my dear."
"Ah, yes. Of course. ...And a good night to all of you as well?" the older Ford sounded a bit confused at the last, Kari's reply to him in particular, before he definitively hung up the phone for the night.
As the call cut off and Mabel took her phone back. Kari sat back in her seat and took a deep breath. She clicked her nails on the table for a bit, tapping them all with little clicking sounds before she finally said, "Those two are broken," she said simply. "They can't even…" She turned to look at Wanda. "Take care so Miz doesn't grow up to be like them. She's still capable of accepting care and love from others. Still capable of realizing she can do so. Make sure she doesn't lose that."
Wanda nodded solemnly. "I refuse to let that happen."
"Good. Now, I do believe dinner has gone cold." Kari sighed. "Help me take these to the microwave."
