Illusion is Reality

Chapter 126

-Hot tip for ya-

The cooks were more than happy to share their recipes with the two of them. They'd apparent gotten multiple variations of the lasagna recipe. The one Xin taught them used goats' milk cheese, and that was the one they had used for the current lunch. One of the cooks said she was asking Dr. Wexler to see about making cheese out of almond, oat or soy milk for more variation. That had started Ford and the cook (an elderly lady named Marisala) onto a discussion about allergies and dietary requirements among the staff. Ford made a note to check on Dr. Wexler to see her 'cheese making' research. Cheese making was actually more complicated than he originally thought. Sure, it was simply an addition of acid, a coagulant and various processing time, but there were so many ways to ruin the final product. Many of the cooks here made their own cheese, and took pride in telling their boss all the different ways they utilized their supplies and ingredients to do so.

Ford's bright, eager smile made the cooks coo over how adorable it looked.

And when Ford finally turned around (after filling two whole pages front and back of notes), he saw Lee leaning up against the door back to the cafeteria, doing something at his left arm and waiting.

"Oh! I'm so sorry Lee, I didn't mean to take so long!" Ford flushed.

Lee tapped his personal-eyes-only screen closed again (only shown to him in his heads-up display, relative to the placement of his fingers over his left forearm, from the bracer), and looked up at him.

"Nerrrrrrd," he said, fairly good-naturedly, as he pushed up off of the wall that was behind him. "What'd I say about talking to people about nerd stuff, in this place?" He was stifling a bit of a grin though.

"...it's fun?" Ford said sheepishly. He just liked learning new things, is all.

"That I could leave you alone in this nerd lab full of nerds, and you'd be doin' a bunch of nerdy talk with a bunch of other nerds here about almost anything, within five minutes," said Lee, crossing his arms and waiting for him as he walked his way back to the doorway where he was, while giving him a 'yeah, I knew I was right' kinda look.

Ford just blushed harder. "I'm sorry. I lost track of time."

"Yeah, Ford. I kinda noticed," Lee teased, the grin breaking out. "C'mon. Let's go show you how to cook some real stuff without takin' you all day." Lee rolled his eyes at the very thought.

Ford bid the cooks a fond goodbye and they tittered, waving him away with a friendly, "Go on sir, have a good day of science."

"Thanks, Marjory!" Lee called out again (to the woman who had actually told him the specific recipe that they'd used today) with a quick wave to her and a grin on the way out. "Gonna steal all your customers, you're not careful!"

"Ahahaha! I'd like to see you try young man!"

Lee kept his head around the corner of the door for a moment to give her a cheeky grin and call out, "You don't get a second line up by tomorrow, I just might set up my own crappy stall!" He laughed at the tossed towel at the door, pulling it closed quickly. "-Think she likes me," he said with happy amusement to Ford, who just shook his head.

Ford was smiling. "I'm sure they adore you." Stan was always good at charming people. Though Lee was much cheekier about it.

"You say that now," said Lee, working his way back across the cafeteria with him, headed for the lengthy hallway. "But I bet tomorrow I'll be gettin' the stink-eye," he said next with perfect assuredness as to the upcoming situation.

"As long as there aren't any food fights." Ford laughed. Then his expression softened. "I really should speak with my staff more, I hadn't considered all the different things I might be missing out on…"

"I make no promises," Lee said very mock-piously, then he looked a little bit more... "Seriously, though," Lee said next. "You good with me settin' up a food stall in here tomorrow, or no?"

Ford blinked at him. "I think you'll have to ask them for permission. I'm their boss, but the cafeteria is their space."

"Could set it up in the hallway, or the front lobby instead," Lee offered up practically, without missing a beat.

"I guess I'd have to ask Fiddleford for that. He got rather frustrated with me that time Blue and my interns covered the cafeteria with paper for a DDNMD game."

"Bet if I tell him he can set up his banjo music as background stuff there, that'll get him on-board and make the lunch ladies happy," Lee said, mulling this over. "Shouldn't take more than, what, maybe half the paying customers here? 'Cause half of them seem to really fall all over getting away from all that banjo music."

"Oh definitely." Ford nodded with a snort. "It'll start some sort of war!" He managed to hold a straight face for about three seconds before he snorted.

"Dunno about that," said Lee. "Unless there's some kinda loudspeakers in the cafeteria you don't know about yet." He was thinking more of a 'music' war than a food one. It had looked to him like at least half the crowd there had wanted something quickly, and some of them had tried to time things so that nobody showed up all at once - wasting less time. Some folks had grabbed multiple trays and run off, not sticking around to eat in the large cafeteria. There was some room for improvement, over here.

"Think we can set up a few benches out there in the front, maybe?" Lee said next. "Grab a few tables and things? -You've gotta have a couple sets of chair and folding tables and stuff stored someplace around here, for open houses or somethin'," Lee noted, looking over at him.

"Plenty. If not extras lying around, we have a storage room with them."

"Don't want the ones just lyin' around," Lee said. "Could've got science'd all over 'em. Probably need a lot more cleaning and stuff, there." He knew full well what usually happened to clear surfaces, when a nerd decided they needed more space. "Storage room ones are probably fine. Just need a wipedown for dust."

"Yes, they're cleaned thoroughly before being put away." Their janitorial staff were all very well trained in different chemicals and how various cleaning products would react to different substances.

"Well, if they've been sittin' there awhile, they'll probably need at least a wipedown," Lee noted. "When's the last time you swapped out the filtration for this air system?" It wasn't exactly space-grade stuff here, but… Lee wasn't sure what hypoallergenic standards were for actual humans in most buildings. (...Maybe he could ask Program about that?)

"We change it out once a week. More often for the labs where they're testing chemicals, because of the fumes."

"Yeah, I figured for that," Lee said next. "But for the rest of the building, on the main air supply?" Lee looked over at him, as they turned the next corner for the hallway with the tent in it.

"Once a week. The cleaners take them out to put in a clean one. And then take the old one to be sanitized and cleaned out. I've also set up more cleaners for any dust that might get built up in here.

"Huh," said Lee. "Seriously?" (Ford nodded.) "Maybe it's cause you're so near the woods, all those animals and stuff," Lee sort of half-muttered, before shaking it off. Or his own standards were off.

"Yes, there's a lot of dust, dirt and pollen that gets in. If we don't have the place cleaned once a week… it builds up quite quickly." Ford frowned. "Well, Miz and some of my other staff have dust allergies. It's as much for their comfort as it is for sanitation. I hadn't considered the problem until that time Miz walked through the storage room and started sneezing-" Ford shuddered. "She… has trouble controlling her powers when sneezing… took forever to catch that centaurtaur…"

Lee nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I know about that one - the whole 'control problems' thing. ...Guess the air near the water is just cleaner," he wondered. "Or maybe Blue put somethin' on the boat I don't know about yet." He let out a sigh as they came up on the tent.

"Well, it was something I hadn't considered, and it was good that I noticed, so I could have it addressed. I've had some of my staff come by to thank me for it."

"Be better if she learned how to filter air outside her nose or whatever," Lee said next rather grimly, "So she don't have to sneeze. -Wait here for a minute, okay?" Lee told him, "Gonna talk to Blue for a minute. See if he wants to go off into another room or somethin', before you come in."

"Ah, yes." Ford blinked.

Lee ducked into the tent (using the arm lifting the flap motion he usually did) and vanished inside it. Ford blinked at this (He'd had to look up the style when he'd come in this morning. It was a very small regent pavilion tent, fully walled off, with only about three feet on a side for the square peak at its top, and maybe seven feet tall at its peak. The front canopy sloped upwards here in the hallway, and the poles that rested against the opposite side looked like they were mounted in some sort of small rubber bases, only about a half-foot wide. To walk past it, one had to walk under the canopy, but it wasn't actually blocking the hallway; the octogonal base only reached out about four feet in diameter from what looked like the central pole there, and not more than five feet out, the canopy was high enough that even someone a good several inches taller than Ford would find no need to even so much as duck their head.)

He was absolutely sure it was larger on the inside. (Unknown to Ford, Miz had come by to study the thing earlier that morning, and had made a pouting expression over not having 'viewing rights' for any part of the exterior composition, let alone the interior, and therefore had not been able to fully study it properly - she'd only been able to take a good look around it, to study its barrier-warping effects. It had thrown off, or pushed off, rather, the barrier field entirely around its perimeter, and shining a strong light at it had obviously dimmed it below a certain level before it had even hit the side of the tent.) He wanted to study it, but wasn't sure he'd be allowed to (unknowingly having the same issue Miz had). (Though, perhaps if either of them had thought to simply ask about it… if it weren't for Miz being unused to asking for help, and Ford being too afraid to somehow piss Blue off again...)

After about a minute, Lee poked his head outside of it again.

"Yeah, he's gonna sit this one out," Lee informed Ford. "So yeah." Lee held the flap open for him and gestured past it with his other arm, saying, "C'mon in?"

"Thank you." Ford ducked down to head in.

The first thing that he noticed was that there was no center pole. There was a larger criss-crossing girder-like structure running around the periphery of the room, on several of the sides behind him, and around him, and the walls past it did look like they were made of cloth.

It was clearly a sort of waiting area. There was an eastern Mediterranean(?) sort of staging circle - of rugs, cushions, and pillows, seemingly haphazardly strewn in a loose circle - not a few steps in front of him. Beyond that was a sort of kitchen bar with stools set up and tucked under the overhanging of it (solid on the underside a few feet in), and (Lee had not been lying) a full kitchen area beyond that, with quite a lot of countertop space, it seemed.

The room was octogonal, as was the outside, and Ford could see that one could fit maybe about a twenty foot square within the interior here, with the kitchen bar seeming to cut in into two smaller and partially-separated chunks, about eleven or twelve feet farther in. The kitchen, he noted as he walked his way forward after Lee, took full advantage of the octogonal shape of the room, though; this ended up making the area both far wider and bigger than it first seemed.

Ford also noted the other 'kitchen bar' furniture pieces that were of a much darker color, without bar stools in front of them, two of which on either side (following the octogonal wall-shape of the room) sectioned off the center of the staging circle (and guest entertaining?) portion of the room a bit from direct access to a few well-placed 'doorway flaps' that were to the farther left and farther right. They were a little over four feet tall - just as the other one was - and set up a bit of a 'hallway' sort of funneling arrangement, and prevented a direct rush towards those doorways from either the front entrance or the guest area in the slightly-offset 'central' area in the room. (And, as he found out later, while they looked almost pure black and opaque from a standing height, from a seated position down in the guest area, they were actually a transparent mesh - rather see-through, though only from fairly close to the right set of angles. The move was likely meant to help generate trust in any visitors there for more benign purposes, letting them know that no-one was set up in an ambush behind the otherwise potentially-strategic places that could be easily set up for said ambush.)

Lee just walked right on over into the kitchen area, and Ford found that the kitchen bar was less of a C-shape, and more of an I-shape instead; there were several small shelving units, containers, and appliances that looked rather like the usual series of double-doored refrigerators and single-doored freezers that he himself was used to seeing, just ones of a fairly different height.

...up until he saw Lee shove the door of what looked like the freezer to the side, instead of pulling it open, and watched it wrap around the side of the middle-sized appliance instead. It was an interesting hinge sort of an arrangement.

"Fascinating." Ford looked around, the kitchen looked pretty standard, the sinks, gas burner, oven range and so on. He even saw a rather standard-looking microwave hanging there, attached to the wall above the stove there. There were cabinets and shelves with pots, pans, and all other cooking supplies. There was even something that Ford thought could be a dishwasher there under one of the countertops. Some of them had more of what looked to be those special hinges. That was a good use of space, being able to 'move' the set pieces around like so. They only seemed to need about an inch gap of clearance around either side. Ford walked over and peered inside to check the fridges, of which there were two - chock full of all sorts of various items, and just marvelling at it all. He watched as Lee pulled open what looked like a small closet (tall, but not very deep) off to the side, and from the inside of the door he pulled a thin- oh, that fell open into a basket- and Lee grabbed a few odd fruits and vegetables and tossed them into it there.

"Take what you want," Lee told him, leaving the door open to the closet there, as he headed back over to the counter over at the closest of the two sinks. And Ford, rather curious at this point, stepped up to it and... Oh. The closet there was absolutely filled with fresh fruits and vegetables. He pulled down another one of the baskets from the inside of the door (and found it not too hard to figure out that he needed to twist it sideways to lock it into an held 'open' non-collapsible position), then peered further inside. He noticed after a few moments that there were what looked like metal tracks under the 'basket' shelves inside the closet; upon experimentation, he discovered that they could be pulled out, and... he was able to slide one out around three feet or so - far more than just the six inches it looked to go back - and it left him staring at all the apparent space in there. He looked up to see a series of hanging baskets which could be pulled out (and down off of their hooks?) as well. And as he tugged at them, he felt something tap into his shin at his side, and looked down to see… He took a step away from the side of the door, and the seemingly now-loose section that was… attached to it? …And once he was far enough out of the way of it, it dropped down the rest of the way to the floor, unfolding as it went and... it seemed to also create a set of stairs? Ford was already getting lost in his exploration of this space. With the way that things seemed to be folded into things hidden inside other things...

Ford looked around and found some tomatoes. Well, they were simple to use, correct? They were making lasagna, and there was tomato sauce in it...

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lee shove the one basket up onto the countertop there, then turn and head back over to the series of shelves up under the kitchen bar counter again.

And he couldn't help but freeze in place and stare as Lee put his hand under a shelf and shoved upwards, almost like he was pushing it to remove the whole shelf (which would, under normal circumstances, cause rather a mess)-

-except the thing disappeared with a sort of soft chunk-click! into the top of the bar counter above it, without much effort at all, and Lee did this three more times before he started pulling out a few canned goods here and there, (another shelf shift) and a bag of rice, (another shelf shift) and four cans of tomato sauce...

"This is so cool!" Ford squealed.

Lee blinked and looked over towards him, then let out a light chuckle (as he picked up a larger can of tomato chunks).

"Y'know," he said, setting the larger can down up on the 'kitchen bar' counter, "There's a way to make these without all the space folding. Takes a bit more space," he added, as he shoved up on another shelf, "But it does the same sort of carousel thing."

And Ford watched as Lee shoved up on the shelves three more times and- the prior shelf came up from the bottom again?

Then Ford thought about it. "This is amazing…" (Ford didn't know that Miz had done something much like this in her 'nest' in the Twin's bedroom, though Miz had mostly made stairs that were also drawers, that could slide in and out of the wall, and a section of the wall that could slide up and open to become 'her' room.)

"Space recursion," said Lee, as he scooped up his canned goods in his arms (and topped it with the bag of rice), before walking it all over to the countertop. "Blue wanted to test it this run over here. Stuff inside stuff inside stuff, with a couple loops in places and extra-expansions and things. -This ain't the big one, just the backup tent. It's only got a good twenty rooms," Lee set his load down, "And almost everything in here is on some kinda loop." He rearranged his stack a bit, then pushed it a little farther off to the side. "The main one we usually use just creates a bunch of spaces as we need 'em, without losin' a damn thing. Let's us rearrange the order pretty easily, too. This one's all pretty set in stone kinda, here. Anything we want to move around, we gotta do it all by hand, or pull out and program the 'bots for it. And they can get a little weird about it all, sometimes," Lee said, making a slight face at this, as he reached for a mechanical can opener - the twisting kind.

"I have looked at the way Miz builds her sub-spaces. But I feel this is quite different." Ford trailed a hand along the hinge. "More of a… using all available space within a space as opposed to making new space and building more 'rooms' outward from there."

"Maybe? Dunno how she does it," said Lee. "But half of this junk is sci-tech, and half of it's kinda more magic-y. Blue did most of it, kinda swaps stuff out on me sometimes." Lee shrugged at this. "Always makes sure he puts all the stuff inside the stuff pretty much back in the same arrangement though, which is good. Otherwise, it'd be a headache and a half to find anything," Lee told him, as he finished up opening up all the rest of the cans. "So, yeah," Lee said next. "First lesson: vegetable chili. You got your cans of beans and tomato sauce and tomato chunks," Lee gestured at all of this. "And you got your slow-cooker crock pots over here." He pulled one forward from where it had been sitting up against the wall. "Dump 'em all in," Lee did so. "Grab a bunch of spices," which he did from the cabinet above him (pepper being chief among them). "Get some of that in there, too," (which he did next). "Then you gotta stir it up a bit." Lee reached over, grabbed a spoon from one of the metal holders hanging against the back wall below the cabinets there, "Toss the spoon in the sink," he did so, "Put the lid on it," which he did next, "And set the thing on 'high' if you want it in about four hours or so, 'medium' if you want it ready in around seven." He twisted the knob on it several clicks over from 'off' to set it to 'high'. "Thing's 'smart' enough to click itself back over to 'low simmer' there if you leave it too long on the one setting. And you're done," Lee told him. "That much is good for about four or five meals for one person. We've got single-meal containers I can dump that into and freeze it, if I feel like nuking it in the microwave after - 'cause it tastes different - or I can shove it in the stasis-'time freezer' over there, and pull it out warm whenever I want. Usually a good idea to just let it stay simmering as you eat it all down, though. Gives it more flavor. You can dump in more cans as you go if you want instead, too. Takes, like, five minutes there, and you're done. Yeah?" Lee said to him next. "You can try if you want. Second one's right over there?" he nodded at it, not too far away on the counter. "You can do the whole fresh tomatoes thing instead of the canned ones, if you want. Got plenty of cutting boards and knives," Lee added, glancing over at Ford's basket.

Ford nodded, pulling out the needed materials and cookery. He knew the prepwork had to be done first, washing the tomatoes and cutting it up, for instance. (Ford knew it would take significantly longer than just using the canned ones, and a large component of what Lee seemed to be focusing on here was speed, yes, but... he was curious about the potential differences in taste, and right now, he didn't mind taking just a little more time to be trying this out.)

"Blue usually likes different add-ins than I do," Lee told him, as he himself headed over for the stasis-freezer. "I've already got some ground beef in here I made a couple weeks ago," Lee let him know. "Gonna cheat a little right now and just add it in. -You want me to show you the 'normal' stuff, or the 'does it for you easier' stuff, too, for these things?" Lee said, as he pulled out an insulated ceramic container of still-steaming (rather well-cooked) ground beef.

"...kinda curious about the latter." Ford admitted.

"We can do both, ain't a big hassle," Lee said. He held the container in his hands and paused. "You want some of this stuff in yours, too?" Ford nodded, and Lee pulled out another container of it, before kneeing the stasis-freezer closed. "Careful, it's kinda hot," Lee warned him, before pulling the lid off his own, lifting the lid up on his own crockpot, and carefully dumping it all in across the top without splashing anything anywhere. (It was fine; he didn't need to stir it in. It was heavy enough that it'd sink down on its own.) "We can fry up more ground beef next," Lee told him, "But that usually takes, like, ten minutes in the pan. That ain't gonna be fast for you; after the first five minutes you gotta go flipping it around almost constantly, doin' it the normal way, brownin' it. ...Guess you could just do the whole canned brown meat thing instead though, for most stuff." Lee shrugged that one off. "Unless you wanna do meatloaf instead. That takes, like, five minutes, before you shove it in the oven. Need the ground beef for that, a couple eggs, breadcrumbs, chopped onion, milk… can add whatever spices you want, but I just like plain ketchup for that stuff. Just gotta remember to grab it outta the oven once you hit your hour mark," Lee told him, as he rummaged through one of the other overhead cupboards for a couple of glass 'breadpans'. "And never, ever use metal pans for these things. Ever. Burn it every single time. -Use the glass ones. And always make extra," Lee said next, as he pulled a good six of the glass cookware pans for it down. "You can cut this junk up and eat it as sandwiches cold. -I mean," Lee let out a laugh, "Man, it's a hell of a lot better than lunch meat, lemme tell ya! -Or crackers," he told Ford next. "You put this stuff on crackers with cold ketchup and man…" Lee let out a sigh. "Oh, hey. You can do the whole brown gravy and mashed potatoes thing, too. -Doesn't have to be fancy for all that stuff, either," Lee told him, starting to grin. "They got these cans of the gravy stuff, and these boxes of mashed potato stuff too? Stuff keeps forever," he told Ford. "I swear it doesn't go bad at all, ever. Microwaves and those auto-hot-water things are the best."

The two cooked peacefully, Ford finishing up his chili while Lee paused for a minute on the meatloaf front (remembering what he'd wanted to do before, that day, when he opened the fridge) and just started slapping sandwiches together one after the other from pre-sliced bread and odd condiments; it was a calm time. Ford enjoyed this, how… domestic it all was. He even told Lee so. "I almost feel like… I could even cook for others. I mean, not that my cooking is bad, but I don't have much faith in the taste. I have a bad habit of being too hasty with flipping my eggs, so they don't get as firm as they should. Or get that nice char on them where the egg browns a little." Ford's specialty was just roasted meat over a fire, really.

"Oh yeah," Lee said. "I figured that one out. Asked a fry cook. Either you gotta have one of those professional hot griddle things, gets so hot it'll fry your hand off? And do it all quickly? Or you do it on the stove instead and do it with the heat real low. -You get too impatient and turn the heat up too high, don't move 'em around enough? It does something weird to all those proteins and stuff. They all come apart? It's like eatin' rubber," Lee made a face. "Only takes maybe three minutes to let 'em sit there in the butter, then flip 'em real careful, leave 'em for another minute and you're done? Only tricky part's timin' the toaster to go off when you want it to, so you can shove it on the bread while they're both still warm." Lee actually sent a glare at the thing. "Hardest part's holding off doin' stuff too fast because of the smell. -Sometimes I fry up some onions on the side while I'm at it, use one of the big griddles? I do the onions in the middle, eggs on the left, sausages on the right. ...Kind of a timing thing there, too." Lee hadn't really ever thought about it before all that much, honestly. (He finished up with the sandwiches - bagging them all at this point, really - and shoved them all in the stasis-freezer. Then he went back over to the fridge and started in on grabbing all of what he needed for making the meatloaf. He still had some diced uncooked onions from that morning's breakfast, so he grabbed that up to use that up first.)

"Eggs are such a complex substance. The fact that they're essentially formed to be an enclosed womb is amazing if you really think about it. The inside is meant to dampen any impact and the protein's so thick..." Ford nodded. "Then again, that's what makes them so versatile." He had a fond smile. "You know, during the time I was lost in space with Stan, one of the first things we ended up seeking out, after a couple years in, were eggs." He laughed lightly. "Stan and I used to fight over them, they were like a treat. We mainly boiled them, since we didn't always have a pan. But we made stew. Stew's easy. Just cut up stuff and pop it in a pot, and it wasn't hard to simply toss an egg in, after washing it, and then fishing it out at the end." Ford had a far off look in his eyes. "But you should have seen the fights we had over bread. And sweets. I distinctly remember Stan socking me in the face to get that Deril-bee honey…" He laughed, and seemed a little surprised at that. "Our years lost in space were hard, but… I also… had a lot of fun out there." ...and he kind of missed it. Exploring new places, hunting for food… but Ford never admitted this aloud.

Huh. "You wanna come with then?" Lee asked him, as he finished (carefully, using his palms, not touching the sides with his still-slimy fingers) putting the last meatloaf pan in the oven, and closing the door right up. (He set the timer for an hour, doing it 'hand-less'; it'd run that long the usual way, then stasis-freeze the contents of the whole thing until he gave it any further instructions.)

Ford's eyes widened. "Oh, I couldn't. I…" Ford looked away. "My family is here. We're all together again, finally. And I have my work here and…"

Lee let out a laugh. "Hell," he said, "I was just talkin' about the one supply run, not carryin' you off with me forever like some kinda pirate," he grinned. "You were wantin' that type of nanofabric stuff or whatever here, right? Figured it'd be easier to go out and get some for you to play with, than have to make it all from scratch over here."

Ford blushed. "Oh." He chuckled, "Right, yes." Of course. What was he thinking?

"I mean," he said next, "Not like I'd be able to talk Blue into doing the no-age thing on you for a bit, if you did want to go off places for a couple years. Maybe jump back to a couple seconds after we left, sure, but," Lee shrugged at him next.

"I don't know if I trust Blue to cast magic on me…" Ford said dryly.

"Yeah," said Lee. "That too." He tapped in the air above the sink, near and in front of the faucets, and the handles turned for him, temperature set. He shoved his hands under the soap, then began washing them again. "I wanted to know what was what first, before sayin' 'yes' to that, too. Figured I should know what I was gettin' into, if I said yes. Turned out Blue kinda didn't want to do that to me, until I understood all the equations and junk for it anyway. So I guess that kinda worked out," he told Ford next (though he had a little bit of a frown as he said it for some reason).

"So you don't age?" Ford wondered. Made him wonder how old Lee really was.

"Kinda, kinda not," Lee said. "If I didn't change at least a little bit, my brain wouldn't even work a little bit right. Or anything else. And I wouldn't heal right either, new skin or bruises or otherwise." That'd make fights really dangerous, if he'd screwed that one up royally.

"Ah. Very true." ("Yeah, it's sorta complicated. Took me awhile." Lee left out the full 'why' of why Blue had done it, though: he'd wanted Lee to know how to undo it and re do it on his own, if he needed to. Without him around. Lee had actually done it to himself, and only partially kind-of. He'd checked it over with Blue first, though. And the devil-demon had actually seemed a lot happier about that.) Ford nodded. Then he hesitated, "If we're heading out to some other dimension… would you be uncomfortable with Miz coming along?" Ford asked. "I can ask her to stay quiet and not speak for the duration? As some sort of penalty for whatever she did to you yesterday?"

Lee stopped for a minute. He didn't really like the idea, but he did think about it.

"You want her with you, yeah?" Lee said glancing over at him, as he turned off the water faucet, and dried his hands off.

"...I feel more comfortable having her around, when I'm out there…" Ford admitted, sounding almost a little ashamed of this… dependency.

"Probably good for you to have a backup, in case me or Blue go 'rogue' on you," Lee said next. "Not like you know us all that well. -Could be a 'trap'!" Lee grinned, waggling his fingers at him next.

"...I'd like to think you weren't that sort of person." Ford rolled his eyes. "Blue would get mad at me for not being more suspicious, probably."

"Hey," said Lee, lowering his hands again, "I wouldn't be sayin' it if I wouldn't be thinkin' it, in your shoes," Lee said. "And Blue gets that way with anybody he don't want to see dead in a ditch on the side of the road anytime soon. Don't sweat it too much about it."

"...I'd feel reassured that he didn't want me dead, if I didn't know he only cares because Miz claimed me." Ford deadpanned. "He's made it quite clear to me that he doesn't like me at all, otherwise."

"Yeah, no," said Lee, turning around to lean sideways up against the counter, crossing his arms. "You don't want him likin' you. Not like that. If Blue actually wanted you, you'd be runnin' for the hills, or climbin' the walls, like that older Ford is. -He's only this chill when he don't want somethin' out of you that badly," Lee told him next.

"...chill?" That was chill?

"Trust me," Lee said, "You don't wanna see what he's like when he's tryin' to show off. ...It's actually kinda weird," Lee said, looking sideways. "He's way more impressive and junk when he ain't actually trying," Lee said, (thinking of his first 'real' interdimensional trip with Blue, outbound for that one marketplace trip… with that first 'side trip' through that Nightmare Realm place of his). Lee let out a sigh.

"What he deems impressive isn't at the same standard as our own tastes, I'm sure."

"Yeah. There's that," said Lee, pushing off of the counter, "And then there's professional appreciation," Lee told him, "Where you know enough about the shit he's managing to pull off there, without breakin' anything like a sweat at all. Devil-demon's smooth as anything," Lee said to him. "You know card tricks? Ask him to show you a few sometimes. With and without actual magic. The technical shit he can pull off is insane. And he does this stuff like breathing." Seriously, the more Lee learned about stuff… Lee let out a breath, shaking his head at this, as he ran a hand up over his head, scrubbing it through his hair as he went.

"...I sort of of hate how amazing Blue is, it makes me want to hang out with him, and then I end up hurt in some way. And almost feel a need to take my anxiety meds just to deal with it."

"Yeah," said Lee, a little caught up in his head there at the first bit of that, and off and running. "He's utter crap at people, until you realize he still gets what he wants bein' a complete asshole to most people - sometimes even faster than you know he would if he'd been bein' all 'nice' to people instead - and y'know he actually likes it that way." Lee rolled his eyes at this. Then he stopped when the rest of it caught up with him. (Wait. Anxiety meds? Hurt? Hold up-)

"...Miz has the opposite problem, in a way. She tries to be nice, but doesn't always get 'nice' right. She manages for the most part, but sometimes, she-"

"-Wait wait wait," Lee said, waving his hands at him. "Hold up. Blue hurt you? Like, physically? And you're on some kinda meds?"

Ford blinked. "We were doing a training exercise, and he set off my nerve endings to incapacitate me with blinding pain, without dealing any physical damage." He explained, "And I used to have severe anxiety. Used to have breakdowns. I've been working on getting better, trying not to stress myself out, and then Blue came and… well… I've been rather stressed recently. Had one PTSD flashback, and a screaming match with him, but… I… I've been holding together pretty well aside from that."

"Uh. Yeah." Well. Lee blinked at this. Guess this was a thing. "...Probably not a good idea to go dimension-hopping when you're just… holdin' yourself together and on-meds." He frowned at the pain thing; that was actually pretty mild for Blue, but… during some kind of training exercise? He was gonna have to talk to Blue on this one, get the full story here.

"I'll talk with Blue about that junk later. See what I can do. Hittin' you with pain outta nowhere for no reason just ain't okay," Lee said to him seriously. "-Look, mac and cheese and the instant mashed potatoes while we talk here, okay?" Lee said to him next. "Seriously, you'll feel better. -And don't worry about yelling at Blue," Lee told him next, as he went back over to the 'looped' rising shelves. "Long as you don't call him flat or stupid, and you don't go actually tryin' to take a swing at him, he'll just keep on yellin' right back. You need to take a break though, or have him stop talkin'? You give him a time. Just say 'five minutes' or somethin' like that. -That's different than a stop or no, means you want a breather to pick shit up again later." Lee told him this as he was grabbing up the box of instant flakes, and two cardboard boxes of the good Crafty Cheez stuff. "Can postpone it, too, but he'll like that one less. Also gives him more time for better ammunition," Lee warned him, "Not just you." He'd seen older Ford do that one with him sometimes. Blue usually ended up taking him - Lee - off to some other dimension in a huff after that. "If you really want to do that, instead of just a stop or no with him." Older Ford usually went with those two instead, these days. "-Pots are over there, for boilin' water; need about six cups for each of these two boxes. Maybe grab two? Or one of the bigger ones instead," Lee directed him. Ford walked over to do so, wanting to help out in the kitchen so he wasn't going to just stand around while they talked.

"I've been doing better. Haven't really had to take my meds yet. I think, having you here to explain certain things to me, in a way I could understand, helped. And I read through some of the definitions last night. Haven't finished yet, but having a way to process and understand has done wonders for setting my mind at ease." Ford got one of the larger pots of water measured and boiling - by the expedient way of starting out with some very hot water directly from the sink's tap to begin with, rather convenient - and after Lee dumped in the two boxes of macaroni, Ford stirred the pot as they continued on cooking. ("Gonna zap up some gravy," Lee said, after setting up a seven minute timer for the noodles, going back for another can.) -Lee was listening to Ford, he just figured this was the time to let him do more of the talkin' than him. And he'd figured giving him something to do with his hands, stirring the noodles, was probably a better idea here right now than not; why he went for the pot, instead of the microwave.)

"Well, hey. Guess I'm good for somethin'," Lee shrugged good-naturedly. (Thirty seconds later and he had the can open, dumped in a bowl, and in the microwave there for about a minute.) "So, you're feelin' better now? Don't really need the meds?" (He prompted Ford, as he got the electric kettle full of water next, and started that boiling for the potato flakes next; that one was gonna go quickly, Lee thought, as he pulled out another two larger serving container bowls, and a strainer for the macaroni noodles, which he easily just tossed down into one of the sinks.)

"I'm fine. Really, I had my stress tested over the summer, my family all together in one place… pretty chaotic, having that many of us Pines in one place, and adding Miz into the mix? I'm amazed we survived." Ford chuckled as he cut up the butter to put into the potatoes, dumping it into the bowl Lee pushed over to him for holding just that. "Actually, thinking back, I wonder if Miz was testing my boundaries, to see how much I could take or not? But she's never managed to make me lose it quite like Blue. He's insufferable." Ford made a face. "Miz likes to embarrass me, which… I think she picked up from my brothers, we have a running competition to see who can mess with each other the most, and… I wonder if that might be a bad influence on her…" Ford frowned at the thought, "But Miz actually helps me calm down and feel… comfortable much more often than not."

"How's she help you calm down?" Lee asked, as the microwave 'ding!'ed, and he pulled out the bowl of gravy, tonset down on the countertop just to cool a little. (Next thing he went for was a bowl of canned corn - not creamed - and shoved that in next, for another three minutes. He turned around and went for the stasis-freezer next for some chicken...)

"Being nearby, for me to hold. And that purring thing she does just relaxes me. And sometimes, when I'm feeling down about myself, she'll cheer me up with encouragement. And she's always eager to help me when I'm stuck on a part of my research." Ford smiled at the thought. "And… I don't know, it's just… comfortable when I'm with her…" then he frowned. "But whenever Blue's around, she… lets him take point, and his points tend to hurt."

"Huh. That's weird," said Lee, as he pulled out the (still pretty warm) already-cooked chicken breasts (and then headed for a sharp knife, pair of tongs, and a good cutting board back at the counter). Because it was weird to him - and not just because Ford was basically just describing some kinda happy-therapy talking snuggle-pillow there, either. "Kinda went the opposite way in my dimension. Miz was the one runnin' around, all hell on wheels almost. Blue was just... " Lee frowned. "Cleanin' up her messes before she did 'em all, half the time. -She didn't listen a whole hell of a lot to anybody but him, though. Maybe the old-man-me a bit. Kept 'forgettin' shit a lot, and was all 'oops!' about it. Pretty sure we would've been in trouble, if Blue hadn't caught that so many times." Like the wrestling-the-dragon thing. Or the thing with the wish for Carla. Or - and he hated to even think it - the thing with literally shutting his twin brother up. (Because if he'd kept going on, and Miz had gotten even more offended… what would she have done to him, then? Lee didn't know, but he was pretty sure he was glad that he hadn't had to ever find out.)

"...huh, strange. Then again, Miz does seem to behave… differently, around her brother…" Ford frowned. "I remember when I first met her, she was going by William back then," he thought back. "And she was pretty mature, calm and patient…"

"Mature and calm are not two words I would use to talk about her, ever," Lee said with a snort. "Patient, maybe a little bit sometimes. -That's the one big eye kinda human lookin' 'guy'-ish one, right? Miz showed us a few, before they all left." For awhile. Until Blue had come back in a huff...

"Yes. That's the one." Ford nodded, "Well, I think at the time… I wasn't doing well at all, I was an utter mess. I was falling apart at the smallest things… perhaps William reigned herself in so as not to stress me more? She sort of… took care of me and Stan, until we had to leave when the residual portal energy on us opened up and we were pulled away.

(The microwave 'ding!'ed again, Lee left it alone for now.) Lee finished cutting up the first half of the pan-fried chicken from the container into smaller bites, then pointed to the kettle as it turned off. "Need around four cups of mashed potatoes here, unless you wanna make more? -Measuring cups are in the drawer below the crock pot you were settin' up over there." (Ford nodded and started on the instant mashed potatoes.) "Yeah… dunno about Blue. I've seen him male a couple times before now; it ain't pretty. Female is a hell of a lot more 'calm', if you're comparin' them." He got a lot more murder-y destroy-ish doin' the whole male-bodied thing. Lost his temper a lot easier, too. Sometimes, he jumped over straight to- "Yeah. Don't do the yelling match thing when he's male. He might actually rearrange your face. Literally. I've seen him lose it and do it."

"...noted." Ford shuddered at the idea.

Lee winced a little at the shudder. "-Hey, he turned the guy back later. After he went female again. And we got paid." Lee snorted, as he pulled the corn out, and the timer went off on the macaroni. "And after the guy groveled for a while." The scary part hadn't been so much that the guy hadn't deserved it, when he'd done it; it had been the 'snap!' with no warning at all. Lee was used to the devil-demon giving out warnings at this point. (They'd had a long talk after that.) "Twice our usual fee, for the other guy bein' a jerk." And trying to set them up for- well, this Ford didn't need to know that. "We blacklisted him, too," Lee said to him next, as he pulled the macaroni off the stove and poured it all down into the strainer, then reached for the other large empty bowl and the two sauce packets. "You wanna hand me the butter?" (Ford did so.)

"Well, I've only seen Miz really truly angry once…" Ford shuddered. "We almost didn't stop her in time." He paused. "I… don't know how different Miz would have handled that anger as a male. Xin's normally friendly. I haven't interacted with Jan or Yun enough to know. And William seems to shift back and forth between male and female without any physical indicator so it's hard to tell…"

"Blue says female humans 'cycle' and male humans 'spike more'. And he can't always keep down the spikes fast enough to not go all lashin' out; says females got a slightly longer sort of rise. Gives him more time to work with, gettin' a handle on things. -Think it's some energy thing with him," Lee noted. He knew Blue had that cycling always-rising hum thing. And he only got loud enough to hear (when he wasn't doin' the whole 'purr-hum' thing) when he was doin' the high-energy thing.

"Fascinating, I wonder how Miz's energy changes when male or female, I've seen some variation in her behavior depending on her form, but I haven't tied that to her sex and gender yet."

"Could be just Blue. Not like they're exactly the same." Lee shrugged as he came back over from the fridge with the milk he'd just retrieved, took the butter from Ford, and got everything splashed into the macaroni bowl for the full mac and cheese mix. "-You good with the mashed potatoes there?"

"Yes, I just need to add some salt." Ford sent him a smile, before his expression dropped. "I… have only seen her triangle form a few times, the first was when we first met, and she changed into William when she realized I wasn't reacting well to her. And the second time was… when I asked to see it… and I was with Xin at the time, and he was hesitant about my request, and then- I wanted to bandage his wrists since they'd gotten hurt from a thing we were testing, and he told me to let go of him, but I didn't, so he turned into a triangle to escape my hold- and then I had a bad reaction to it…" Ford grimaced. "I shouldn't have done that."

"Uh." Lee was pretty sure that… "Yeah. Don't go grabbin' the dragon-demon's wrists. That'll get you blown up." Lee sort of shrugged off the triangle form thing. The whole eye-mouth thing with the pointy teeth was definitely creepy, yeah. (But he'd also seen a lot 'worse' since then, by this point.) He pulled down a couple more bowls, and grabbed out some big spoons. "Why'd you do that, anyway?" Lee asked him. "No means no, yeah? Listenin' to 'no's goes both ways, y'know."

"Somehow, I got away without being blown up." Ford wilted into himself. "Which just goes to show how much she'd trusted me, despite how stupid I was. But… I just wanted to bandage him! He was bleeding! And that had been my fault, I wanted to fix it…"

"Pretty sure you could'a just handed over the bandages," Lee said. "Or let him just dump the vessel thing and make a new one." Blue had talked about doing that before. (As in, he'd complained that he couldn't do that with a body. And warned him that he might be doin' that here with some kinda vessel-exoskeleton thing here, whenever, 'just because'.)

"Yes- I was so stupid. He turned into a triangle, changed his form, and I just… couldn't take it." The hurt in William's eye when Ford had recoiled from her...

"Eh, it is kinda creepy," Lee noted, as he took the mashed potatoes from him, and dumped a bunch in the bottom of each of the two bowls. "Don't worry about it."

"It's not creepy at all!" Ford protested (he'd never found Bill to be creepy, he'd been fascinating. Wonderful-), "I just… she looked so much like my Bill and- I… I hated him, killed him…" Ford closed his eyes. "I hurt her feelings, when I reacted the way I did, to her triangle form." He said guiltily. "And this was on top of that stupid thing I did before that."

"Look," Lee said. "Those demons can look, all, however they want. Okay? It ain't that big a deal," Lee told him next. "Seriously, don't worry about it." He took the mashed potato base in the bowl, and he did half mac-and-cheese on the one side on top of it. And on the other side? He expertly tossed down a layer of corn and a bunch of the chicken… Then topped it all off with some of the brown gravy, and then…

"Miz has some… self image problems, I've noticed." Ford admitted. "She tries to make her other forms 'attractive'. But her triangle form was… what she really looked like, as a mortal triangle, before she became a demon." Ford winced. "So having me react the way I did…" ...to what was essentially her 'true'ish form? It was bad.

Lee let out a 'pfft'. "Yeah, she does 'attractive'," Lee said, sticking a spoon into each bowl and handing over one of the bowls and a big beer stein mug of cold milk to Ford next. "Went full huge breasts and curves and junk at our high school. Had Blue set it all up for her, 'cause she didn't know how to do it herself. Practically had her chest falling off doin' laps around the track in the gym. And yeah-" Lee gave him a grin, "Blue gave her so much teasing smug-ass crap over that one, like you wouldn't believe. Had her stopping that shit and just doin some kinda filter, the next day." (Devil-demon had known exactly what he was doin', givin' her what she wanted up to the hilt, and then teasing her into the better option of not actually having to be the part there, just look it. Was kinda creepy, how good he was at stuff like that, with pretty much everybody and their dog.)

And Ford turned bright red. "Ah, yes. I…. I saw that one, recently." He coughed.

"Look," Lee leveled with him. "Bodies really don't mean shit to demons. They can switch stuff up whenever they want. Nobody's stoppin' them," Lee told him. "It's like clothing for them. It ain't the body," Lee reminded him, "It's who's inside it. Right? -You wouldn't be sayin', 'oh well, it's my fault for needin' to wear sunglasses if she's putting out more light than the whole freaking sun', right? And she shouldn't be complainin' about needin' to wear a lampshade, so you don't go burnin' out your eyes tryin' to look at her when you're talkin' to her. It's the same thing," Lee said easily, as he finished pouring his own glass of milk, and getting the gallon jug back into the refrigerator.

"I… suppose so." Ford sighed. "I feel like she just likes messing with people." ("Well, yeah. Demon.")

Lee just shook his head, as he grabbed his own bowl, spoon, and mug of milk.

"C'mon," Lee told him, with a tick if his head back towards the central 'guest' area. "Let's go sit down over there with the best comfort food around, almost."

"Yes, food." Ford nodded quickly, then blinked and said, "Almost?" (Lee let out a chuckle as he walked around the kitchen bar 'island'. "I'll tell ya once we sit down.") He hurried over and sat down. "You know, if I didn't know better, I'd think she was trying to seduce me, or something. The way she's been messing with her other forms and asking me for my opinion on them." He covered his face at the blush that remembering that FemaleXin gave him.

"Well, if ya don't like it, just tell her to stop," Lee said, as he sat down himself, lounging back across a few of the cushions, and he let out a sigh as he settled in to them.

"It's not that I don't like them. They're simply too distracting." Ford sighed.

"Then tell her that," Lee said, setting his mug down in the air on a designated 'floating' spot (above a 'circle' on the ground, he got to pick the height where he shoved it in; easier than tables or coasters).

"I will. Really, I don't know why she's asking me for my opinion. Seb's the fashion guru, and Stan's the one who appreciates a woman's body."

"Askin' for your opinion on what?" Lee said, before digging in himself (and then having to stifle a small groan, because- oh yeah, that was the stuff).

"On how she looks." Ford blinked. "She kinda… posed? On my lab bench?"

"Girls do that when they're messing with you," Lee noted blandly. "They don't actually want an opinion. They just want you to tell 'em they're cute. Or whatever adjective they're lookin' for that day." Lee took another big bite, then got himself a good mouthful of milk.

"Oh." Ford blinked again. "I'm very bad at this sort of thing."

"Heh. Ain't like I'm all that much better," Lee told him next. "And yeah, I know we just had lunch. That ain't the point. -Try at least one bite. You don't gotta eat it all or nothin'."

Ford scooped out a spoonful, blew on it a little, and took the bite. He hummed, chewed and swallowed. "This is really good."

"Yep," Lee said, popping the p. "And y'know what makes it even better?"

"Milk?" Ford asked, gesturing at the milk Lee was drinking.

"Heh. That too." Lee grabbed up another spoonful of it, "Swappin' the chicken out for a couple hunks of meatloaf, instead." He took another bite.

"Ohhh!" Ford pulled out his journal to scribble that down.

Lee nodded, finished swallowing. "Kinda wish ma hadn't been all… I mean, I know we weren't all kosher or nothin', not really," Lee sighed. "But, I mean… meatloaf," he complained. First time he'd ever had it was in a restaurant that Blue had taken him to, and... "Tell me you've had it at least once before, someplace that knew what they were doin'?"

"Meatloaf? Yes, Melody made some before." Ford paused. "Yes, Ma does tend for more traditional cooking. Blue seems to like it, since he's going over for tea or something with her now and then."

"Shit. That's smart." Lee took another bite, then sort of mumbled around it. "He'll do just about anything for tea. -I mean," Lee swallowed. "Not, y'know, anything-anything. But if it ain't too outta his way," Lee shrugged. "He really likes the whole tea party thing. And it ain't even some whole 'big party' thing like he usually does when it comes to parties, neither," Lee added, gesturing with his spoon.

"Should I keep tea around to get Blue to leave me alone when I wish to be left alone?" Perhaps bribing him? He could bribe Miz easily enough with food.

"Dunno," Lee took another bite, and relaxed into the cushions a little bit more. "Depends on if he trusts you with handin' him food." He swallowed, and was reaching for his mug again as he told him, "All I know is, tea and chess and some kinda 'edible' snacks? Gets him every time. -I've seen him walk into so much shit, just to do that with somebody," Lee said. "Kinda funny though. Half the time, he almost ends up makin' friends when he does it?" Lee took a long draw of his milk. "-Or, well, frenemies. Whatever. 'Friends' is a real loaded word for the devil-demon there. Be real careful with that one there, too," Lee warned him about next.

That made Ford shudder in on himself. "...I used to love doing that with my Bill…" And how it hurt to think about it.

Lee blinked at him at that. "Doin' what? Frenemies?"

"Playing chess and drinking tea. It was… fun, I looked forward to it… and then I learned that he never cared about me at all. He'd just been playing me all that time. N-none of it meant anything to him!" Ford's hand closed around his spoon tightly.

"-Woah, hey!" Lee got up halfway and got himself up, to shove himself over and sit down right next to him, bumping shoulders again (so he could lean into him if he wanted to; the guy really seemed like…) He'd been about to tell the guy that- but then he'd gone from zero to sixty or something in somethin' like, he didn't know, almost two seconds? (It was weird; his brother used to do this stuff when he was a lot more little with him, when he'd still used to do the whole 'leaning in' things with him, too. But this guy was older than him, and he still-) "C'mon now. That jerk is dead now; you got him good, right?" he reminded him (setting down his own bowl of food down to the side).

Ford closed his eyes and focused on breathing. Stupid- PTSD- ugh! Ford breathed in and out, slowly, until his heart rate slowed and he could hear more than just Bill's mocking laughter. "I'm… sorry. I didn't even realize that was a trigger…"

"You, uh…" Lee blinked at him, a little worried. "...You okay?"

"Oh, nothing much, just a flashback." Ford said, almost casually, before sighing and leaning his face into a hand.

"Yeah, uh," Lee shifted, feeling a little uncomfortable at his side now, "I don't know what that means."

"Post traumatic stress disorder, that's my diagnosis." Ford told him. "The anxiety is part of that. Made worse by it? Well, my Bill messed me up a lot. And I'm still… I shouldn't still be having trouble with this, he's dead. But I still…" Ford shook his head helplessly. "...I'm working on it."

"Yeah, uh… maybe…" Lee sort of took a chance, and tossed an arm over his shoulders. (He could shove him off, right?) "Maybe gimmie a minute to- yeah, okay," he said, as Ford closed his eyes and leaned up against him instead of shovin' him off. Lee sort of bit his lip at this, then blew out a breath and shoved his other hand in his back pocket, to then pull out his 'old' phone. "Yeah, Program?" he asked, and the male-looking 'Blue' poked his head over, then slipped the rest of the way onto the screen. "What's, uh…" He glanced over at Ford again. "Some 'post trauma thing that Ford here just said about a minute ago."

The sprite floated in place on the phone screen. "Processing. -One result returned. 'Post traumatic stress disorder'." It paused briefly. "Information is in-database. Display parameters?"

"Rich-text, on-screen," Lee said next, then pulled the phone in a little closer (tightening his arms around this Ford's shoulders a little bit unconsciously) and started reading, scrolling along as he went. His thinking frown got deeper, and deeper, as he went.

"...Shit, man," Lee said after a while, lowering his phone. "No way you should be going with us outbound on a trip, then. Blue's gonna want to stop at a cafe or somethin' for dinner. Don't want you losin' it, you see him sittin' at a table with me. Or sittin' at a table with us."

"I'm fine with tea, just… tea and ch-chess… it's fine. I was able to play chess with my brother."

"No, seriously," said Lee, "You don't get it." Lee scratched the back of his head with the hand that was holding his phone. "Even if those places here don't have the game just lyin' around? Blue brings his own chessboard and stuff; he likes finding people to play." Lee hesitated for a second, then told him. "He likes makin' 'em pay for his snacks and his goodies. Usually gives 'em advice while he does it, if he likes 'em and they don't all go tryin' to cheat some stupid way." Really, the demon treated it all like some kind of good-natured con… give him the tea and the cookies, and nobody gets hurt, maybe… (Well, okay. Only for the not-a-trap ones. But yeah...)

"...oh." Ford sighed. "Yes, that… might not be good. For me. Blue reminds me so much of Bill sometimes. Too much…"

"Uh." Lee hesitated a bit. "You know that he's, uh…"

"Yes. I am aware he is a Bill Cipher. Just as Miz is. I know they're different." Ford nodded.

"Okay, yeah, good." Lee was about to say. He'd thought that he'd said that before?

Lee looked down at the bowl Ford was still holding.

"I'll eat if you do," Lee tried, reaching for his own bowl again. (He still kept the one arm around him, though. Not like the guy had shrugged him off yet.) Ford took another bite. "...is eating supposed to make me feel better, or is this some sort of stress comfort eating thing?" Ford wondered aloud.

"Uh, both?" said Lee next, looking over at him, as he put his (not visible or tangible by anybody else but him and Blue) phone back away.

"...isn't stress eating a bad thing?" Ford still ate another bite. Well, he didn't eat that much for lunch, so, he could just use this as an early dinner, and then skip dinner.

"Only if ya do it so much you end up some kinda butterball," Lee told him. "Not like you ate a lot earlier, anyway."

"Huh." Ford blinked. "True." He sighed. "Well, good news, I've calmed down. Though whether that's from the food or…" Ford looked away. "Ah, it's probably the food, I don't know."

"Yeah," said Lee. "Food and milk usually helps with that. Yup." Lee tried to fight down the blush, looking away from him for that. (He didn't move his arm away from where it was slung across the back of his shoulders, though.)

"Yes well, just don't tell my Stanley about ANY of this. He would never let me live it down." Ford coughed. "But I like hugs. There, I said it. Now don't ever repeat that to anyone."

"This ain't a hug," Lee said back to him very curmudgeonly (for a twenty-something year old). "It's a manly… something. Thing. Here." Because as far as Lee was concerned, it really was. (Lee stifled the sigh and felt kinda bad for him, if his Stanley didn't like givin' out real hugs to him, ever - just some kinda half-assed ones instead.) "Yeah."

(If Ford had known that Stan had done something similar for that other Stanford, well, he'd have teased his brother endlessly about it. No sympathy! This was how the Pines boys go! Alpha twin! Alpha twin!)

(Lee only got a pass for being younger than Shermie, even. And for all the good math puns.)

Either way, Ford enjoyed his hugs, glad that none of his brothers were here to see this and subsequently use it as fodder for their never-ending one-uppance of each other in the pestering department. After a while, Ford coughed and drew back. "...thank you for that. I think I am quite alright now."

"Wasn't nothin'." Lee let him go instead of trying to pull him in more. "Uh. You wanna maybe look over stuff?" Lee reached for the interface on his left arm. Then something occurred to Lee and he stopped. Because, he realized that he didn't actually know for sure that…

"...Or, uh, maybe I should talk to Blue first." Lee suddenly looked a bit sheepish. "Dimensions could be different here. Different set." Then he winced slightly. "Probably should have him do his whole eye-thing, lookin' around for all the best stuff."

"If the dimensions here are those same ones like the ones I went to while behind the portal, I should be ok with it. Just…" Ford blushed. "...want Miz with me."

"And no stops for tea?" Lee scratched the back of his head. "That ain't what Blue's gonna complain about first."

"Yes. And that." Ford nodded. "What is he going to complain about?"

"Demons in the details," Lee said. "I ain't sure how much he's been around other dimensions around here yet. He'll want to take a look around first, before we go running out anywhere. Kinda doesn't like it when people try to stab him in the front, or the back. Not expectin' it would be even worse," Lee tried to explain. "He always wants to know what's going on first, before going anywhere. He nevers jumps before he goes out looking at everything."

"He's… very cautious, I've learned, from the times I've known him." Ford noted. "It's quite odd, Miz has almost no caution at all."

"Yeah, well," Lee said. "She's the one that didn't run into any other demons before Blue now, right? And Blue's kinda the opposite. He knows the score on all this stuff. So, yeah."

"Yes. She was… left alone to do whatever she wanted without any supervision or proper discipline. I'm amazed she's as nice as she is despite that."

"Yeah," Lee said next. "You kinda said that already."

"It just boggles me, is all." Ford frowned. "I know she's killed before, but she doesn't behave anything like my own Bill had been. He reveled in causing pain. And Miz gets… all upset whenever she accidentally hurts people?"

"Dunno anything about that one," Lee noted of Miz, before finishing off the last of his milk. "Blue ain't exactly some kinda bleeding saint, either. Pretty sure he likes reigning terror down on some people, sometimes."

"Miz's idea of reigning terror appears to be non-lethal pranks and causing people embarrassment." Ford shrugged.

"Dunno about that one there, either." Lee knew older-Ford had had some trouble with her before. Still didn't know all the details of that, though.

"Anyway, should I wait for you to ask Blue before I contact Miz?" Ford asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"He won't put up whatever 'masking' thing he wants to, if we don't," Lee let him know.

And then the timer for the oven went off.

"Hey," said Lee, and he got up, and headed back over there again.

Four of the meatloafs ended up in his stasis-freezer. Two got wrapped up to go back home with Ford. (Carefully, because they were really, really hot still.)

"Eat it with lots of ketchup," Lee reminded him. "Not just the little bit there on top. Yeah?"

"Right, really flavor it." Ford nodded, writing that down as well. He wondered about the look on Miz's face, when he surprised her with some homemade food sometime? He would have to practice it, to be sure it was good.

"Meatloaf-to-bread ratio for sandwiches should be about as thick as one and a half bread slices. Y'know, the pre-sliced store kind of bread. Pick your favorite. -Just maybe not one of the nuts or seeds kinds," Lee added, making a face, as he handed the two bundled together packages over.

"Right. Possibly because the nutted bread's textures don't go well with it…" Ford also made a note beside this recipe to learn how to make bread.

"I was thinkin' more than nuts and seeds and meat don't really mix well, but sure," Lee said next, shrugging. (He tried not to snort at how this Ford was managing to juggle two loaves and his book-journal thing there.)

Ford barely noticed, easily handling the items. He'd had to handle more out in space when his pockets got full. Or when he was trying to read multiple book at once. Or work on multiple projects at once- well, the list went on. If there was one thing that Ford had worked hard to master, it was his manual dexterity. He also liked to one-up Stanley on how many things he could handle at once. Really, these Pines triplets were too competitive.

Lee sighed, running a hand through his hair as he looked back at the counter.

"Hell. Wasn't meanin' to keep you that much longer than your lunch break," Lee said with a slight wince. The fact that the hour timer had gone off… and his display read two hours after they'd first headed for the cafeteria to go off getting in line… hell. "Don't want to keep you. I know you got all that important science-y stuff to do," Lee waved off. "Maybe knock at the entrance after you're done with your nerdy stuff for the day, if you ain't too tired, and I'll show you the good stuff?" He hadn't even gotten around to doing anything with what he'd pulled out of the (stasis-)'fresh cupboard' yet, with that basket sitting there all lonesome in the counter. "Can show you how I usually do things around here, when I don't feel like goin' for the canned goods and just zappin' stuff up in the microwave." He looked out across the counter, hands on his hips. "Not like I wasn't meanin' to make up a bunch of meals here again. -We don't use this thing too often," Lee told him, "So we just shoved a bunch more food in here and went. Haven't really had a chance to take the raw goods to 'ready' just yet."

"I just have to read over some scans and I should be ok for the day." (Lee perked up a little at that, until...) "I'm being forbidden from any practical tests until Miz is around, after all. Blue… really seems to think I'm going to get myself killed, even though I haven't done so in all this time before he came." Ford sighed. "It's frustrating."

"He don't think you listen to him," Lee told him bluntly. "Thinks you either don't remember what he tells ya, or just don't hear him in the first place. He was rantin' about it all last night."

"I will admit I'm spiteful enough." Ford admitted. (Lee visibly winced at this, 'cause that wasn't a good idea, there.) "I… guess that means I'm the problem here. Either way, there's a lot of thinking I need to do. Of what I want to do with my life… security is important, and I can't just… have fun making stuff I'm interested in."

"Yeah, well, it goes both ways," Lee noted dryly, on the topic of 'spite'. "Y'know, he set up an actual field that goes through the wall there," Lee thumbed in the direction of his lab, "That cuts out anything that draws down more than maybe three or four amps; 125 watts of power at most per device, max." Barely above the regular power outlet threshold. "Covers your whole lab room in there. Almost set it at 25 watts at most, instead of that." Lee had actually had to argue him into letting that one still go on through. Otherwise, this Ford would've been sittin' in there in the dark. And, y'know, picking up all his toys and shit and movin' it all elsewhere. And a move of everything out of 'safe range' like that would've kind of defeated the point. (He'd also vetoed Blue putting up some kind of barrier against removing electronics and junk from the lab, too. Which apparently the demon had been planning on doing to him also.) "It ain't like he's tryin' to make everything all not fun," Lee told him next. "It's… just the way that he thinks."

Ford sighed. "Worrying about all the security, I suppose, it kind of makes my work… not as enjoyable anymore. I've had more fun today just talking with you and cooking. Weird as that sounds." He shook his head. "Didn't make the portal device until Blue brought it up, I kind of feel like he's pulling me around by the nose. Miz never demands me to make projects for her. She just helps me to do what I feel like doing." He ran a hand through his hair. "...I haven't been able to enjoy science lately, with everything Blue's been demanding out of me."

"Yeah, well," said Lee. "I'm good with doin' things like cookin' whenever too. Kinda like you; just puttin' everything else on hold for a while sometimes? -But it's kinda the opposite for Blue, okay?" Lee tried to warn him. "Really, really the opposite. He just can't 'forget' this stuff, or take his mind off it. -He don't have someplace he considered 'safe enough' to do stuff in? He can't really relax," or have fun spendin' time doin' what he really wanted to do, but he couldn't tell this Ford that - devil-demon would be all over him for lettin' that one out outta the bag. Lee let out a sigh. "And yeah, he told me about that whole thing with you. -Operational security, so I can't tell ya much," Lee noted, "But you ain't wrong about the whole grabbin' you by the nose thing. Whole thing's got to do with teleportin' all over the place to start with," Lee told him. "And he was real back-and-forth on whether he should do anything to point you towards goin' off makin' your own for yourself or not. -You got any idea why?" Lee asked him next, knowing full well why himself.

"I have no clue. The only thing I can think of is Blue wanting to make me more 'worthy' of his sister or something. He keeps 'testing' me. And I have no idea what he wants from me!"

Lee let out a sigh, and rubbed a hand across his own face.

"Yeah, okay," Lee muttered out next, through his hand. "Guess I'm gettin' to used to the demon." He dropped his hand, looked up at Ford, and said, "It ain't about bein' worthy, okay? It's about whether he thinks you're gonna try to kill, capture, or torture her, " or him, "Or not," Lee ticked off one finger. "Whether you're gonna try and get in her way and try to stop her from gettin' what she wants or not," Lee ticked off another finger, while letting out a consternated breath, "And whether you're able to help defend her or not, or just be a liability instead that gets in the way or can be exploited by her enemies, somehow." Lee ticked out a final finger, and gave him another long 'get it?' look next. "That ain't just Blue; that's how most demons think. Except instead of defending people, most of them just care about keeping their stuff." Lee made a face at this. "-He don't give two shits about 'worth' the way humans look at shit. Miz bein' happy around you? That's just a bonus. You gotta hit those first ones before anything else really matters to him." Usually. "-He was thinkin' about tryin' to get you your own portal tech, because it would run interference for Miz bein' able to do what she does, and it means you can go where she is when she's in trouble." Then Lee paused and gave him a look. "You havin' that tech also means that you can maybe get to where she is, wherever she is, and track her down, cause trouble, and run around tryin' to kill her. -You see where I'm goin' with this?" Lee asked him next. "Everything with him? Is about staying alive first, and getting what-all else you want second. And then keepin' it third. Just like any other demon," Lee said. "Except for the ones who think it's fun to die."

"I don't know how to protect her…" Ford whispered. Then more loudly, "It's ridiculous. Be smarter so I can help her, but being smarter means I'll know more about how to hurt her? What does he even expect me to do?" Then Ford frowned. "And why would any of that matter? Miz is the one who's feelings on this matter should matter!"

"Yeah," said Lee. "I know. That's why he's tryin' to have you doin' safe portal tech, instead of blowin' yourself up or tryin' to stop you - 'cause Miz likes you, and Miz's feelings matter to him." Blue just put that sort of shit as 'his little sister getting what she wants'. "-And yeah," Lee told him, leaning back against the countertop and crossing his arms, "It's freaking ridiculous and impossible. Even he don't know how to guarantee any of that with her, yet. If he did," Lee told him next, "Then he'd know what he was doin' with you. And her. But he don't. That ain't the whole point to him, though. -And yeah," Lee told him with a sigh, "He knows that gettin' you up there, that far enough to actually be able to do shit about things, means that you can hurt her." And maybe him too. "He probably knows that better than you. That's probably why you're drivin' him halfway up the wall, for just, y'know, bein' you, and not bein' dead. It's just all the usual noise from him, when he gives a damn about somethin' that he thinks actually matters. So, yeah. Welcome to the club?"

"..." Ford sighed. "Miz values her brother's opinions. I'm… I'm afraid that him pointing out every little deficiency I have would make her start to think- but no. Miz isn't like that." Ford frowned. "For whatever weird reason, she likes me. I have no idea why. But I need to trust her more, to not abandon me just because her brother doesn't like me." Ford worked through that in his head. "She thinks I'm intelligent. And she likes me." His voice was more confident as he spoke. "And I shouldn't let Blue try and convince me otherwise."

"Miz ain't exactly listenin' to him right now, 'case you hadn't noticed." Lee frowned. "Why do you want her around so bad, anyway?" The whole abandoned thing, not wanting to be abandoned by her, thinking he was intelligent and liking him… "What d'you think's gonna happen if she 'abandons' you, anyway?" He really didn't get why this Ford was acting this way about her - not here, and not in the cafeteria before now.

Ford twitched. "I… think this is one of those things I need to work on… I shouldn't be so attached to people…" He looked up, "Am I clingy?" he asked suddenly. "It took me a while to get over Stan being all the way in New York and… away from me… I mean, I'd gotten so used to having him with me in those years we spent behind the portal. It was weird to be alone again. I used to enjoy being by myself, since I thought my brothers were suffocating. And now I just like the idea of having someone there, when I want company. Is that… weird?" Ashton had told him there was nothing wrong with wanting friends. But… to worry about it so much, wasn't that… weird? Then he paused. "Sorry I'm just laying this on you, but if I asked Stan, he'd probably make fun of me for being a baby or something."

"Uh…" That was a lot to take in at once. Where was he supposed to start there? "...you think your brothers are suffocating, but you think you're clingy, attached to people, and want other people around? Just, what, not them?" The heck? Oh, and apparently thinking brothers were suffocating and- the other him here was behind the portal with him, too? What? (Lee was frowning at this, all confused. Especially since, if this other Stan was gonna 'make fun' at this Ford over something, Lee was pretty sure that it probably wouldn't be bein' a baby - it was probably gonna be over the or something instead, and not so much 'making fun' as being pissed…)

Ford sighed. "I… didn't get along with Sebastian very well when we were kids. He was too active for me. I just wanted to sit and read quietly. Didn't mind someone else being there, but Sebastian couldn't sit still, so it got difficult." Lee was still frowning at him (his twin had read a lot, but he had never only just read), and Ford tried to find a way to explain this. "And after what our father did to us, I started hating Sebastian, I kept comparing myself to him, trying to make sure I was nothing like him. He was the freak, and being a freak meant you got hit. I didn't want to get hit- so I started avoiding my brothers." Ford twitched. (And Lee's frown deepened further.) "I remember one time we were playing together, and I think we tracked snow into the house? Or was it mud? Either way, our father wasn't happy." Ford unconsciously brought a hand up to his face. "Anyway, Sebastian and I have mended our relationship now. But I spent many years blaming him for… getting me in trouble… and me getting hurt- blaming him for everything bad that happened to me." (Lee shifted in place uneasily.) Ford sighed. "So, back then, I wanted to get away from them. Sebastian and I just couldn't get along, and poor Stan was caught in between trying to be there for both of us, and after Seb was thrown out, and I went to college… we went our separate ways, and I never even cared or thought about that until years later when I finally realized how miserable I was." Ford shrugged. "So… I miss having them around now. But they've got their own families, jobs, and I can't just tell them that I want them around now, after spending most of my life telling them that I just wanted my own space…"

Lee wondered if this was the kind of thing he'd have to figure out for Shermie sooner or later.

He still tried first, "...You sure you don't want the devil-demon in here for this one? 'Cause he's pretty good about threatenin' to murder folks for ya, when you get to rantin'." At the look Ford gave him, Lee winced a little and said, "Hey, it kinda puts it in perspective for me usually. Sorta."

"...Miz already attempted to murder our father for us, but we stopped her. I don't want her killing people who aren't trying to kill her first. Self defense is fine, but attacking an old man who can't even walk properly is something entirely different."

Well, shit. "Okay," Lee said, pulling in a breath. "No demons, then. Uh." He frowned, trying to think about this. (And also tried real hard not to think about what he still didn't really know or not about the Filbrick in his own dimension - why he had left and hadn't looked or gone back yet, until he was feelin' ready for all this stuff there and then.) "Okay. Filbrick was an asshole, and… I mean, Seb don't act like anything bad happened between you ever, right? Didn't seem like it any last night." He glanced over at Ford to confirm this.

"Sebastian is too forgiving." Ford deadpanned. "Whether or not I deserve it." He winced. "I mean, he's forgiven me for that time I tried to take Zach's head off…"

Lee's back went up at that one before he even knew it was happening. He straightened up away from the counter and he dropped his hands to his sides.

Ford quickly shook his hands. "I wasn't in my right mind! I was having a flashback- hadn't slept because of nightmares- I thought Zach was Bill!" He winced. "And that's when everyone dragged me to therapy. So that I wouldn't do that again…"

"You-" Lee pulled in a breath. He shoved down on whatever and said, rather stonily, "Seb know you did- this?"

"He's the one who stopped me before Zach was hurt." Ford winced. "He kinda… went monster form and threw me across the room…"

"Yeah well," Lee managed to cross his arms again with an effort, "Pretty sure you deserved that one right there." He was still standing pretty rigidly in place.

"I did." Ford nodded. "That was years ago. I still don't know how I was lucky enough to have Sebastian forgive me, I didn't think I would deserve… don't quite…" Ford sighed. "But I'm ok now. I don't ever want to do anything like that again. I'm still a little worried to be around children, just… afraid of accidents." He couldn't possibly be a father, even if he liked the idea of having his own son or daughter (someone he could teach the wonders of SCIENCE to), he was too worried about it.

Lee eyed him. And he wondered if this was what the devil-demon felt like sometimes. Because he could say somethin' like, 'Hey, pretty sure you can change your mind there, and go to them instead,' because demanding that he wanted them to come to him was just way too much… but the Stan here apparently had kids. And Seb had kids, too. And if he said that, and this Ford went all stupid in the head again… forget accidents, dropping a jar was an accident. Stubbing your toe and falling over was an accident. But tryin' to take a little kid's head off? When they were, what, maybe two? Shermie's age, and- nope. No. He was not gonna think of Filbrick here, damnit-!

Lee blew out a breath and looked away from him. Clenched his hands around his arms a little harder at his elbows. And-

"Oh, look," a voice drawled out from behind Ford. "Yet another reason why eating, sleeping, and communicating with others to help amend your own thinking are all very important."

Ford didn't even grace Blue with a groan. "I am aware. Ashton has made that very clear. And Miz keeps urging me to eat and…" he paused. "...using herself as incentive when demanding headpats to drag me to bed…" He… hadn't actually thought about that in such a way before. Was she doing that for his sake?

"Because my little sister isn't stupid," Blue said very dryly. "And you need proper training apparently, since you REFUSE to learn instead."

"Blue," said Lee, "I don't know whether I want to toss you back through one of those doors right now, or just-" The devil-demon finished walking across the kitchen (around Ford), and right up next to him, to turn in place at his left side and lean up against him, almost right under his shoulder there.

Lee didn't exactly look happy about it to Ford. But after not more than a couple seconds or so, he dropped the crossed-arms posture and tossed an arm over Blue's shoulders there next. (Blue leaned casually up against him more thoroughly.) Lee was looking off to the side now, and he… was relaxing. Slowly. His shoulders weren't quite slumping, and he didn't look happy, but-

Ford looked at the two of them. He was a little annoyed at Blue being here, but he wasn't quite that upset right now. He took a deep breath and looked away. "Anyway, not that it'll mean much in terms of the bigger picture, but I like Miz's company. She's my dear friend. I care about her very much. And I can trust that if anything happens, and I might end up hurting a child, she would stop me." Ford looked away. "And the fact that she apparently feels a need to take care of me is… nice. I suppose."

"Oh," said Blue. "So it'll be her fault that you do it then next time. I se-" Blue ended in a squawk as Lee reached the hand up that was over Blue's shoulders to mess with his hair.

"That's not what I said. Or what I meant." Ford bristled a little. "You always turn everything I say into some crime against humanity!"

Blue pushed Lee's 'messing' hand up off of him, and held it there, turning back to Ford to say-

-and Lee's hand came down further, on top of his head, Blue's hand below his and between them, and… he just let it rest there. He didn't say anything.

And Blue twisted his head around to eye a look up at him.

Lee just stared down and back.

The silence drew out between them.

"...You weren't happy," Blue said next, apropos of nothing. "He talked about-"

"-I know." Lee looked down at the devil-demon without much expression.

...Blue let out a huff of breath at this.

And then the demon turned his head back around front-and-center a bit, sort of, pulled his hand down to fold his arms across and under his chest in a huff, and then slouch up against Lee a bit, not quite sideways, more like tucked up a bit against his chest and halfway under his arm. (Lee let him, while watching all this.)

Lee seemed to look a lot more relaxed with his arm mostly over the demon's shoulder, not quite hanging down parallel along Blue's own left arm.

Ford blinked. "...I'm sorry?" he asked, as a question to Lee about what just happened here.

"Pretty sure you should be apologizin' to Zach and the rest of 'em," Lee said, "Not me."

"I have. Multiple times." Ford told him. "Wanda didn't let me anywhere near her children for over a year. And they still don't leave me alone with the kids. One of them is always nearby."

"Yeah, well." Lee lifted his head a little bit to give him something of a steely-eyed glare. "I don't blame her. Or Seb." Freakin' menace. Lee flicked his gaze away from him. "You don't go around hurtin' kids." Or family, but hell if this one knew what that meant. Thinkin' of people as suffocatin' until, what, he realized that maybe he needed them?

Ford wilted into himself. "I know. But at the time, I thought Zach was Bill. His hand was on fire, he was playing with Diego and I thought he was going to hurt Stan's son… I wasn't thinking…"

"Then you freakin' grab the other kid and run," Lee was staring at him incredulously now. "Or get a freaking fire extinguisher before he hurts himself any more!"

"I realized that afterward." Ford ran his hands across his face, vigorously. "God, I was so messed up back then!"

"Who the hell thought it was a good idea to let you watch a bunch of kids when you were all tired, anyway?" Lee said, frowning furiously. (He unconsciously pulled Blue in a bit towards his chest.) "Even Blue don't watch a couple of toddlers alone; it's too easy for one of 'em to get away from you when you've gotta do somethin' with the other one of 'em," he complained. Hence, him and Blue doing 'babysitting duty' together! Even the devil-demon wasn't so stupid!

"My family, apparently." Ford sighed. "They… didn't know how bad I was, hell, I didn't know how bad I was. I never talked about it. Ashton says I can't always keep everything up inside. So I'm working on talking more about my… feelings." Ford coughed, looking away.

"Yeah, I kinda noticed. -Pro-tip," Lee said next, "Don't go tellin' people how you almost killed your own nephew 'cause you didn't sleep enough. Not gonna make you a whole lotta friends."

"...noted." Ford nodded, straight up pulling out his journal to write that down.

Lee stared at this.

"You didn't know that one before now?" Lee told him, incredulously.

"...I have trouble with human interaction." Ford said sheepishly.

Lee frowned at him furiously. "That ain't a yes or a no," he said flatly.

"...I wouldn't use that as an ice-breaker…" Ford looked even more sheepish.

Lee stared at him. (He wondered if maybe he should just tell this Ford to tell everybody he was actually an alien instead. Maybe save some time with misunderstandings there.)

Lee scrubbed his free right hand over the side of his face. And left it there.

"...you maybe want to go and do your whole 'readings' thing for a while there," Lee said next, not removing his hand. "Maybe come back in a hot minute or two." Lee wasn't looking at him right now.

"Yes. Right. That thing. Very good." Ford nodded quickly, turning around quickly and almost stumbling over his own feet. He regained his balance easily and continued nodding. "Yes. Should go and do that. Yes." And he made his way to the tent flap 'door' entranceway to leave.

He didn't hear anything else behind him, and went through it easily, to emerge, blinking, into a hallway that suddenly seemed rather harshly-lit by the glare of the overhead lighting.

He shook his head and went back to his lab for nice, easy to understand, science. No chance of awkward silences here! Just some good hard data!

Lee listened to this Ford who was visitin' him here leave.

...back to the outside, in his own dimension there.

"What. The fuck." Lee didn't know what else to say, as he lowered his hand and looked down at the demon, leaning up against his side.

"What? I said that he doesn't think properly," Blue said. "Went a lot further than my own 'Hand did, about two weeks in to my return."

Lee not quite glared down at him.

"Do I even wanna know?" he asked the demon, which of course meant-

The demon turned his head and part of his body back towards him, looked up at him, and said, "Stanley says that he wouldn't have done it to Pine Tree or Shooting Star. Never on purpose, and not by accident."

Lee clenched his jaw a bit. He knew that tone of voice.

"...But?" Lee said, and he hated himself for it. A lot.

And the demon smiled up at him and told him.

...

...

...

Perspective, yeah. Demon was always givin' him more than a little perspective, here, was't he.

Damn him.

Ford finished his readings, sighing at how much he wanted to do something else. So he flipped his journal open and started doodling the plans for an ocean cleaner that would be able to sweep across both above and down below into the oceans to pick out plastic waste, while leaving the animals safe. He liked the idea of it. Wasn't there that island made entirely out of trash, in the middle of the ocean? He should do something about that. To make the planet better. That was what Ford really wanted to do. Change the world, fix the damage that humanity had done to it…

(Make sure there even IS a world for future generations.)

And Ford ended up moving from doodles to a full on blueprint, to grabbing some plastic water bottles to test on, to the beginnings of a prototype 'plastic-magnet' that would only attract plastic bottles. He connected a few wires, flipped a switch and watched a plastic bottle on the other side of the lab fly at the 'attraction' end. He threw his hands in the air and let out a whoop!

He turned off his device and then realized he'd lost track of time. "Oh shit!" He jumped to his feet and went back out to the tent. He stood there for a second with his hand above the 'door' and then knocked, sheepishly. But knocking on fabric wasn't really… knocking, was it. Just a bit of a 'foof' against the side. Ford realized that afterward and started at the tent dumbly before smacking himself on the face and knocking on one of the 'poles' that was holding up the canopy instead. One of the ones bracing back against the structure, rather than the ones out at the far ends, holding up the ends of the canopy that extended out across the hallway.

There was a pause.

And then he heard - rather more closely than expected - "Yeah, come on in."

Ford ducked down to go inside. "I'm sorry- I lost track of time!"

He didn't see anyone just at or inside the entrance, though, and it took him a moment of looking around in confusion to see Lee lying down across a few of the cushions in the central circular area, more facing the kitchen than the doorway.

"S'fine," Lee said. He didn't quite shove himself completely upright. "Needed some time, anyway. ...You want ta come sit down over here for a minute, there?" he heard Lee say next. There was a pause, as Lee rubbed a hand over his face. "Blue ain't gonna be comin' in again unless somebody's tryin' to murder me."

Ford relaxed unconsciously. "Well, I am not planning for any murdering of any sort." He walked over to sit down. "So… I… assume you wish to… talk?" He asked, rather hoping he was reading this right.

"Yeah," said Lee, as he forced himself to sit up a little more. "But you probably ain't gonna like this."

"Oh boy." Ford rolled his eyes. "Bad news? Or just really accurate assessments of my character in a way that'll make me feel like shit?"

"Think we'll just call this one a really shitty idea that I had that ain't gonna make anybody happy, and call it a day," Lee said to him next. Then, "How much did that demon here get inside your head. Not Blue, or Miz. The other one."

"I let him right into my mind. We had a Deal. It was awful." Ford shuddered. "He was messing my vocabulary, and sending me nightmares about every night, made it hard to sleep. The only relief I had was sleeping within Miz's house, that first week behind the portal. But… ergh…"

"Yeah," Lee said neutrally. "Kinda what I was afraid of." He pulled in a breath. "This thing with Zach happened after you killed him dead, right?" he asked to confirm.

"Yes. Over a year after." Ford nodded. "And I had run a few tests on Sebastian and his children. They inherited his powers after all, I wanted to know why."

"Yeah, okay," said Lee. "Blue ever use the word 'deprogramming' around you?"

"...no?" Ford blinked. "Not that I'm aware of? He might have said something but I don't know?"

Lee nodded once. (Blue had to him. Lee had asked a couple questions about some things after Blue had finished talking about older-Ford at him. Blue had brought it up once in front of him in the cafeteria here, apparently. But with the way Blue had relayed it to him, Lee wasn't surprised that Ford didn't remember it, though. It has been said in a completely different context, and this Ford had already let him know that he didn't always listen to Blue out of spite. So Lee let that one go.)

"You said you've got this PTSD stuff, though," Lee said next.

"...I didn't know I had it back then, if that's…"

"Ain't what I'm asking here," said Lee. "You talked about havin' triggers too."

"Yes. They're… very specific though, so I don't normally run into them."

Lee nodded once, shortly.

And then Lee asked, "Did that demon that you ended up killin' know about Wanda? She and Seb, were they a thing, back before he died?"

"...yes? I think I heard that Bill threatened her once? But I didn't even know Sebastian had a girlfriend until long after."

Yeah, okay. Lee nodded grimly. "So he could've known that maybe Seb could've been thinkin' about havin' kids with her, at one point. Or at least sex, or somethin'."

Ford sputtered. He blushed and looked away. "I-I suppose that is possible…"

"And you've got a bunch of triggers inside your head right now."

"...yes. I am working on getting over them- or handling them better…"

"Yeah, well, you better find every one," Lee said. "'Cause, and I ain't sayin' that it maybe wasn't just you, because maybe it was," Lee said next. "But maybe you should be really freakin' sure whether or not all that shit wasn't, or not." Lee gave him a long, really grim look. "'Cause you had a demon inside your head, who was doin' things to it. Like vocabulary. And dreams that weren't so great for you, there." Lee pulled in a breath. "And maybe wakin' nightmares that he stuck to a bunch of other thoughts in there, too."

And Ford went cold. He started shuddering in place. Bill had been in his head. He could have… planted something inside him? But wouldn't it be gone now? Just like everything else Bill had done?! His hands were shaking at the thought- what if Bill had left something inside his head?! That might have been set to trigger something in him? Some horribly awful thing that he might end up doing if some switch got flipped or-

Lee let out a breath. Damn it. He hadn't meant to freak him out that much.

"Look," Lee said, getting up to go over and sit down next to him again. "Lemme level with ya, here. You got these anxiety meds things, and you were havin' problems 'cause of nightmares and stuff, and tired as hell 'cause you weren't sleepin' a whole hell of a lot. Right?" (A tentative nod.) "Yeah. So this junk didn't come outta the… uh, nowhere. Didn't come outta nowhere on ya here. Right?" (Another nod.) "So you know when you've gotta watch out for stuff. This mental trigger junk - wherever it's comin' from - isn't just, like, somethin' you can't fight here at all. You just gotta know about it in the first place, to start with. Yeah? This ain't some… vampire hypnosis voodoo situation," Lee said next, "Or some weird siren thing. So… yeah." (Okay, maybe Lee knew he didn't stick the landing there, but still!)

"Yes, I've gotten much better at handling it. My recent breakdown was triggered by Blue a while back, during the summer. But my brothers were there, and I managed to calm down without freaking out too much." Ford sighed. He was still shaking a little, but he was trying to assure himself, that even with his triggers, he would be able to control himself, if he was well rested and had people he trusted around him.

"Okay, so, that's a thing." (Great, another thing he needed to yell at the demon about. Maybe.) Lee paused for a second. "-Don't freakin' go blamin' the dead demon unless you're absolutely sure it was him, though, okay?" Lee warned him next. "I mean it. That'll turn shit over on you like you wouldn't believe, with anybody who might know you, if they think you ain't taking responsibility for what happened." His family would probably never speak to him again. "You're still responsible for fixin' stuff with you. That's on you." Lee shifted in place. "But this maybe ain't just some PTSD thing. And even if this one thing was that, you should probably still find somebody who can look you over for somethin' more than all this PTSD stuff too, just in case. ...Maybe figure out however many other words he mucked up on you all, up there, or somethin', while they're at it, I don't know." He reached up, and dropped a hand on top of Ford's head. "Yeah?"

"...if Bill did want to…. 'Program' me to hurt Sebastian's children, as some sort of revenge against the lot of us…" Ford shuddered at the thought. "I won't let him win. Besides, he shouldn't be able to- Bill couldn't have known about Wanda before I got my metal plate in. And it kept him out of my thoughts- he couldn't have gotten into my mind after that point." Ford shook his head. He was afraid of that thought, but even if Bill had done something to him, it… well, Ford wasn't going to let that control him.

"Yeah, okay," said Lee. He wasn't sure if that made it better or worse, what this Ford had almost done. "But this inside your head stuff still sounds like it's a lot more than a PTSD from stuff outside your head thing. So you'd probably need more something to help out with it, anyway," Lee told him next, lightly mussing up his hair. (Mostly just moving his hand back and forth, just a little bit.)

"It's also paranoia, and a little sleep-deprived insanity…" Ford coughed into his fist. "It's not a very good time of my life. I want to move past it. But I also have to remember what it was that I'd almost done, to remind myself why I should never let myself slip that far ever again."

"Yeah, well." Lee grimaced. "Might want to make sure you don't let anybody push you that far again, either."

Ford nodded. "I've been keeping in mind that Blue is not the same as my Bill, as awful as he is."

"Yeahhh…" Lee kind of winced at that, pulling his hand back off and away from the top of Ford's head slowly. "About that…"

"...do I want to know?" Ford asked, in much the same tone as Lee had earlier with Blue.

Lee let out a deep sigh.

"Hell if I know," the younger Stanley told him, bracing his elbows across both of his knees. "Look, he… said a lot of shit I can't repeat without him wantin' to take my head off at the shoulders," Lee told him honestly. "Hell, I'm still tryin' to figure out…" Lee rubbed the back of his neck. "I mean. He's a demon, you know? But that ain't all of it. So you…" Lee trailed off more than stopped, thought for a minute, then said, "Okay. Yeah. So… That old-man-me's Ford calls him a knowledge spirit, right? But that ain't really right, and… uh..." Lee trailed off at the look on Ford's face.

"Well, my Bill claimed to be a muse. I suppose he was acting as one for me. But comparing what he did for me and what Miz has done, and taking into account what Blue's been doing, I'd say Miz is more of a real muse? But she's a demon. More than that, she's a being of pure energy and thought. And she's also insane." Ford said quite simply. "And Blue is also utterly insane. And a sociopath."

Okay, Lee sort of had a better idea where he could go with this now. (Blue was all about the plausible deniability. Some things, if Lee said 'em as something older-Ford said, or stuff like that? It was fine, as long as it was actually somethin' they said and wasn't too 'sensitive', and it wasn't him sayin' he heard it from Blue directly. Blue didn't want people knowing how much stuff he told him, among a couple other things that Lee definitely, definitely agreed with.)

"Okay, yeah, he's insane, sure," Lee said. "But the problem is, where we're from? Everything's kinda insane. So, you gotta be insane to see it all clearly. -Least the way older-Ford's started to talk about some things about him, anyway."

"No offense, your dimensional set sounds messed up."

"Yeah, well," Lee shrugged. "No place is perfect." Lee scratched his head. "And things didn't get a lot better for him when he died."

"...Blue?" (Lee nodded.) Ford blinked. "You mean after the other set of Pines defeated him? Not quite sure how they did it, since they didn't have a Sebastian there to sacrifice himself…" Ford rubbed his chin.

"Uh- oh. No. Not that one," Lee told him. "Pretty sure that one didn't count, 'cause none of the deals he had still goin' actually stopped there with that. -I'm talkin' about the first one," Lee told him next.

"Oh. Wait, what other time did Blue di…" Ford trailed off, thought about what he'd heard from Blue during that time he was screaming/ranting at them all. Then put that together with something Miz had said on occasion. "The time when he died as a triangle? And then his dimension burned?" Ford asked quietly, almost… sympathetic.

"Yeah," Lee said. "Thing is," Lee told him, "He told the old-us'es that he died then, but then didn't die? And… there's this… ascension stuff, too," Lee told him. "He made it up all the way up to the lizard or somethin'. Ended up energy. Didn't burn up completely. But he got stuck in the Mindscape, didn't have a body anymore." 'Like a ghost', Dipper had told him what Blue had said to him, when he'd gotten yanked outta his body and into the Mindscape, then been unable to return to his own body. For Dipper, it had been because 'Bill' had been possessing him, apparently. But for Blue…?

"...I sort of think I get it. Miz has told me she was a mortal before she died and then became a demon. And then she was a demon, and didn't know what to do. But she lost her home and was alone with no one but her AXOLOTL for a long time. And her Time Baby, but she hates him, so I doubt having only him as company did anything to help her mental state…" Ford winced.

"Yeah, well, Blue knew what he wanted to do, and he figured out a way to do it. He thinks so, anyway." Lee let out a breath again. "Thing is, other-Ford ain't exactly wrong about the whole 'knowledge spirit' thing, not completely. 'Cause he died. But he was still around. But he wasn't exactly alive either. ...Sound like somethin' you've heard of before?" Lee said almost leadingly.

"Blue's a ghost?!"

Lee gave him a sideways smirk. "Pretty sure he ain't anymore, now that he's got his own body," Lee told him, "But older Ford's pretty sure now he used to be." Dipper, too.

Ford paused. "The blue flames? That ghost at the Northwest's place had blue flames too… I wonder if there's a reason for it…"

"Maybe," Lee said. "Dunno about color for ghosts. Blue's magic is blue, so…" Lee shrugged.

"...is Miz a ghost?" Ford frowned. "She doesn't have a real body. She's just possessing an empty vessel. Sure, she creates them herself, but possessing people isn't beyond her abilities…"

Lee shrugged. "Dunno about her, but… what I do know from older-Ford is that there's a couple problems with ghosts, the older they get, right? -That the same thing here, too?"

"The longer a ghost is around, the more they lose themselves, get consumed by their 'obsession' that had tied them down in the first place, keeping them from passing on. The most common obsession is 'revenge' for one thing or another- but they get more and more powerful with age and more dangerous…" Ford thought hard about his research into them.

"Yeah," said Lee, settling in a bit. "And what kinda stuff can the really old powerful ones do? Like that Northwest ghost maybe?"

"Well, the one at the Northwest's could turn people into wood, petrify them via arboreal magicks."

"Uh huh," said Lee. "Think he'd have any problem puttin' together a portal, if he already knew how?"

"...no… if he were that powerful, and with Blue being over a trillion years old, he'd be one of the most powerful ghosts. He'd have more than enough power for that…" Ford frowned because something didn't add up. If a ghost could do that, why did Blue need people to build the portal for him?

"And the old ones kinda go insane, too. Can't even talk to them anymore, yeah," Lee said. "So it looks like it all breaks down there…" And Lee said that almost leadingly, except...

"Blue is insane." Ford huffed. "And we need a dictionary to even understand a fraction of what he means!"

"Yeah, he is. He even screams a hell of a lot and calls it all singing," Lee said to him next. "But you can still talk to him. And he hears you and talks right back. How much harder did it get to talk to any of the older ghosts that you ran across?" Lee asked him next. "You maybe run into the same patterns here, too?"

"They only really talk to you if you're hitting onto their obsession, they need it to be mentioned, whether that's you helping them to fulfill their unfinished business or are trying to stop them from enacting their vengeance."

Lee nodded. That squared with what he'd heard before. "And how much do they listen to anything else you say, the older they get, and the more obsessed that they are?"

"Almost never." Ford sighed. "So, are you saying that Blue was a super old and powerful ghost, but he's been resurrected into a living body now, and he can't quite fully switch back to anything stable in terms of thought process, as he's still getting used to being 'alive' again?"

"Yeah, no, not exactly. Not like he was ever human to switch back to, to begin with, either," Lee told him next.

"Triangle, then." Ford said wryly.

Lee gave him a look. "You ever try mucking around in a body a hundred times bigger than you, with a bunch of limbs you don't know how to use?" What part of gettin' used to that did this Ford think would usually go in-stride?

"Well, I don't… think Miz has a ghost obsession… or at least, I haven't noticed some overwhelming 'thing' she's into-" Ford cut himself off in the middle of his musing as he heard Lee's question. And then Ford blushed bright red and looked away. "I-I th-that was… oh… I mean, it was a vessel, not a body- I didn't- we didn't actually do anything-" He was sputtering pretty badly, looking incredibly flustered.

Lee raised an eyebrow at this. And managed to keep a straight face and not laugh.

"I'm askin'," Lee said, "Because I'm wonderin' if you're got any idea how hard that might be, even bein' all 'sane' and not maybe all ghostly obsessed and confused still."

"The wings were so hard to get right!" Ford bemoaned. "I told her, learning to fly from the top of a cliff was a bad idea!" He had his face buried in his hands.

Lee couldn't quite hold back the smirk. "So yeah, not that easy to handle, right?" Lee said. Then Lee said, "Big bad trillion year old somethin' can't push around more than a few buttons and switches on his own really, or some kinda sock puppet, can talk about anything you can think of and then some, and doesn't obsess over the same old thing over and over again that you know of. Doesn't sound very ghostly, right?" Lee said next.

"N-no. No it doesn't." Ford coughed, trying very hard to get rid of his blush. "Ahem. Anyway. So… if he's not quite a ghost, then what exactly was he?"

"...aaaaand now you're at the whole knowledge spirit thing there again, which ain't right. Yeah?" Lee couldn't quite stifle a grin.

"...I wonder if I should ask Miz about that. I know she and Blue are different, but would she have at least some insight into all this?"

"Dunno what she thinks,," said Lee, putting his elbows on his knees and propping his chin up. "But I do know what I think. -Want to hear my theory?" he said next.

"Yes, please." Ford gave him the go ahead with a nod.

Lee gave him a tight smile. Then he pulled in a breath.

"These next-level ghosts, who start gettin' all powerful and junk," Lee said. "I'm thinking there's kind of a straight-up tradeoff that happens there."

"Power in exchange for their conscious thought and intelligence, you mean? So Blue simply… placed all his points into INT instead of STR?"

"More focus, stronger will, more drive," Lee nodded. "They also lose a lot of wisdom, too. Yeah? Can't think their way out of it, or how to handle it well. Think it's all on them. And then their obsession gets stronger, and it all just keeps going, right?"

"So he simply specialized for some sort of Warlock, or Wizard build instead of…"

"Yeah, I ain't so sure Blue startin' doin' any kinda reallocatin' like the rest of 'em." Lee had never heard of any ghost going the other way; meant they all got shoved into revenge probably, and it was probably some kind of one-way trip, too. "Kinda jumpin' ahead of me with a bunch of nerdy stuff there, Ford," Lee told him dryly. "Pretty sure those ain't dead, either."

"Well, there's a sub-class of Wizard into the Necromancer specs that could go into Lich-"

"-Ford." Lee gave him a look.

"-which would make them an undead, with high intelligence, but they would need to consume souls to keep themselves together-"

Lee smacked him upside the back of his head. Ford squeaked.

"You gonna maybe let me talk here?" Lee asked him, lowering his arm back down again.

"R-right, sorry." Ford chuckled sheepishly.

Lee sighed, and ran a hand over his face.

"Look," Lee said, dropping the hand. "Are ghosts people anymore? The new ones, and the older ones later?"

"Now we're getting into the philosophy of deciding at what point a person stops being a person, and some ghosts are still sympathetic, and helping them to pass on in peace is a much better solution than simply trapping them in a mirror for all eternity or otherwise. I mean, ghosts still have some rights of person-hood in that they also have wants and desires, and some modecrum of free will, even if that is limited by their obsession-"

"-okay, maybe I didn't say that 'nerdy' enough for ya," Lee cut him off finally. He was pretty sure about this one, but... "How much is a ghost like whoever they used to be alive, the older they get?"

"The older they get, the more they lose who they used to be." Ford wasn't stupid, he could put that together.

"And what's that get replaced with?"

"Every part they lose is filled with their all consuming obsession."

"Right. And then they get all super-powerful and stuff, and can move around whole portals and everything. So Blue didn't do that. Right?"

"Well, his 'obsession' appears to be… fixing things, so that he can bring his brother back."

"Except he's also super-pissed at the lizard," Lee pointed out.

"...for allowing things to happen as they did, how unfair everything had been." Ford still found himself almost pitying the demon.

"And that sounds like a huge revenge deal'y motivator right there. Which would have him all losin' sight of all the other stuff, right? Except that didn't happen."

"It should." Ford sighed. "But Blue's more intelligent than that. He's a thinker, thinking about all the possibilities, angles," Ford stopped to chuckle slightly, "Pros and cons, and what the costs would be…"

"And I'm pretty sure I figured out the hat trick he pulled off here," Lee told him, "'Cause the asshole really is that damn smart. -There's stuff he wants to do," 'fixing things' and whatever, that was all that operational security junk of Blue's that he wasn't gonna get into with this Ford too much here, for reasons, "Stuff that ain't just killing the lizard. So he can't go the whole revenge route, because he'll lose sight of all that other really important stuff if he does, and he knows it. So he has to find another way around it. So what does he do?"

"...Is that what his Zodiac is for?" Ford breathed.

"Nah," Lee said. "Doubt it. Old-man-me says Blue didn't even get his prophecy from the lizard 'til way later. Couple hundred billion years in, at least."

Ford furrowed his brows, thinking hard. "He wants to replace the Axolotl. I know that much."

"...Yeah, but that's the revenge route, and just one thing," Lee said. "Okay. Pretty sure he didn't say it here then. -I'm kinda cheatin' here," Lee let him know. "He's said it to the old-us'es so many times it practically stopped meanin' anything to them, I think." Lee scratched his head and said: "Blue says he refuses to change. And he always says it, every time he talks about refusin' to die the first time."

Ford blinked. "Ah. So he won't let himself become like other ghosts. Won't let himself slip and lose himself."

"Yeah," Lee said. "So… what happens to a ghostly kinda type who's all obsessed with never ever changing? Ta-da." Lee made jazz hands at him then.

"They'll be more focused on what they want, and won't-"

"-lose any parts of themselves, 'cause that's what they're obsessed with not having happen, yeah." Lee lowered his hands back down again as he talked.

Ford grunted, rubbing a hand across his face. "But learning is changing? Wouldn't it be? That's the part I don't understand. How can someone learn so much, and not change?"

"Definitions," Lee pointed out, and Ford groaned. "So he just HAS all that new knowledge and information, and just… doesn't incorporate it the same way as anyone else, who's capable of changing from learning?" The idea left Ford aghast.

"Dunno about that one," Lee shrugged. "But it does kinda explain why he's still actin' like some shitty teen, ever since forever. And didn't stop carin' about all the same shit he did before he died there too, maybe." At least, Lee had gotten that last one from the way the old men had talked about stuff with the devil-demon sometimes, anyway.

"I wonder if he was a teenager when he died…" Ford mumbled. Considering how much like a child Blue acted...

"Probably," Lee said next. "Old-man-me's pretty sure about that one. And Blue don't feel really comfortable when he starts aging up his body."

"Miz… I have no clue about how old she was. She oscillates wildly back and forth from child to adult. But Blue is more consistent."

"Because he's all 'I will never change'," Lee told him. "So yeah, he's tryin' to be real consistent here, still," at least on how he was thinking about things. Lee leaned back a bit. "Funny thing about bein' alive, though…"

"He's changing. He HAS to. Even if he doesn't want to. He's… growing up." Ford twitched at that.

Lee nodded. "Blue says he ain't; old-man-me's pretty sure he is. Older-Ford is torn in two different directions about it. Pretty sure you can guess why." From that hard twitch right there, Lee kind of figured he did, at least a little bit.

"Well, if we're going for theories, he's growing up and doesn't want to." Ford didn't know if he wanted to laugh or cry at that.

"-And older-Ford is scared to death that he's gonna get worse," Lee told him. "The guy's even more afraid of hoping that he'll get any better. Because if Blue can't and ain't stayin' the same anymore," Lee said with a sigh, "Then there ain't any more guarantees on what he's gonna do and not do anymore, either. Far as older-Ford's concerned, anyway." And the whole thing seemed to be messing with older-Ford a lot.

"...well, I've noticed Blue wants to set a good example for his precious little sister, but how well that would turn out is anyone's guess." Ford rolled his eyes.

"Heck, he even said yes to havin' her as a new little sister in the first place," Lee noted. "Pretty sure all bets are off already. -How many ghosts you know who ever added stuff to their list?"

"It's unheard of." Ford noted. "And I'm worried now, about what this'll mean." He grumbled. "I'm also worried about what Miz is. I don't believe she's a ghost. She doesn't hit many of those points. I've seen her more often in some state of high energy, dragging everyone around to her whims, but when we're alone and it's just the two of us, she gets… quiet. And when she's alone by herself she gets even quieter…" There was a theory there. "It's almost like Miz is just acting the way she does to play to an audience, and her real self is really just… quiet. I don't know what that means." Ford wanted to ask Wanda about that. If she had seen or noticed anything with Miz. He heard about Miz's art studio corner in Sebastian's house. How Miz would sit and work on making crafts for hours. At least until she got bored and had to run around.

"Blue goes high-energy sometimes," Lee told him. "Pretty sure that's the whole 'actin' like Bill Cipher' thing. He does low-energy, too." Not like he had a comparison; he'd never seen what 'Bill Cipher Triangle' had acted like before he'd come back. "Haven't seen him do that one around you, yet," Lee noted. "Blue usually plays to audiences, too. It's hard for him not to do that, when there are enough people around and payin' attention to him. If it means the same thing to her as it does for Blue..." Lee frowned. "Eh, she don't do the whole 'operational security' thing though."

"He's agitated by me, perhaps." Ford deadpanned. He sighed. "Miz on 'high-energy' tends to be more trouble. I've heard that she's an absolute angel when she's just quietly doing chores around the house, with Wanda or Seb."

"Don't know about angels or nothin'," Lee said. "But Blue ain't so bad when he's actually relaxed, not tryin' to fight, show off, push or pull."

"I haven't seen him awake and relaxed around me. But asleep… He's almost cute." Ford admitted.

Lee blinked at him. "...He fell asleep around you?"

"...yes? He sleeps on the couch in my lab? I'm sure you've heard me talk about it?" Ford blinked.

"Crashin' on your couch overnight is a hell of a lot different than not making sure he's always awake around you." Lee sat up fully in place. "You're tellin' me he did that."

Ford nodded slowly.

"Well. Shit." Lee was blinking at him several times. He scratched the back of his head then, and looked away from Ford, frowning.

"...is this a problem? I mean, Miz sleeps around me too. In fact she doesn't let me leave her side when she does so?" Ford was quite worried now. "But Miz doesn't like sleeping alone, she shares a room with the twins, or climbs into bed with Wanda and Seb. She just needs someone in the room with her or she gets distressed." Ford blinked. "Are you saying that Blue is not like that?"

"Hell no," said Lee. "Blue don't go fallin' asleep around most people, usually. He likes sleepin' alone. He don't usually sleep around other people." Not unless he had some reason he was doin' it. That stuff about the picnic tables way back when? Lee had seen that footage; that had been an accident for Blue, he was pretty sure. And so was old-man him. Except no-one had messed with him, and...

...well, he wasn't doin' it out and around there anymore. Not after he'd brought that other Ford back. "Only places I've seen him do it are under some barrier or somethin' that he's made, around people who's he's pretty sure aren't gonna just try and mess with him for the hell of it," Lee told him, leaning forward a bit, over his knees, while turning his head to stare at him. "Think I'm gonna have to ask him about this one." Pattern-breaking for Blue usually meant trouble; Lee knew that pretty well by now himself.

"Ah, well… I guess that would be why he doesn't sleep at Stan's place anymore. My brother thought it was funny to pile stuff around the barrier he set up." Ford paused. "I suppose, for someone like Blue, who cares so much about security and such, being around my family is difficult. We like to mess with each other, constantly." Ford admitted sheepishly.

"You tried messing with him, yet?" Lee asked him, then paused for a second. "The bled stuff wasn't somethin' you did while he was sleepin' on the couch, right?"

"I threw paper airplanes at the cup of water he put his security bracelets into. I… also attempted to put shaving cream on him, which didn't work." Ford looked away. "Pranks and such are… kind of a thing in my family." he paused. "...might be why Miz likes us so much. She loves pranks."

Yeah, Lee didn't know about that last one. "How big a pile of stuff," Lee said to him. "You know what this other me of yours tried to put up on him?"

"Pillows, towels, pool toys… then the children got into it as well, made a game out of it, how much and how high they could pile things up and around Blue without his barrier getting in the way and pushing them off." Ford listed off.

"Okay, yeah." Lee got it now. "That shaving cream stuff ain't that heavy. That other stuff is. -You weren't tryin' to suffocate him or nothin' with it, right?" (Ford blinked, then shook his head.) "Yeah. Probably why he's got no problem with you, but he ain't goin' over there anymore. Devil-demon probably thought they were tryin' to set up half-a-collapse on him, then. He don't even like sleepin' under blankets, he don't gotta."

Ford paused at this. "Miz likes to build nests around her bed in a similar way as Stan and the twins did there around Blue, though. But she's very… defensive of her bed. Only the twins are allowed in, and everyone else needs permission to touch it, according to Wanda." He paused before adding, "But she doesn't seem to have any issue with going into other people's beds."

"Into her room? Or into her bed," Lee asked him.

"Into her bed. She's sharing the twin's room over at Wanda and Seb's house, so she defers to their judgment on who's allowed into the room. But her bed is hers."

"Huh." Lee thought about this. "Blue can get touchy about his rooms, and he definitely ain't…" Nah, he probably shouldn't talk about 'beds' on flat floors with this guy. "He'll go into other people's beds sometimes, but not all that often," Lee kept it vague there for a reason, "And definitely not anybody who's on the 'tryin' to kill him or do other junk to him' list. He's pretty serious about that shit. ...I mean, okay," Lee winced a little bit, "I guess I am too. And pretty much everybody is? Don't usually like thinkin' about it that way, though," Lee admitted.

"Right." Ford looked around the tent-space they were in. "So… if Blue's sleeping around me… he… feels… secure?"

"Are you wantin' to try and murder him, or do something to him he don't like, while he's sleepin' there? -Not like paper airplanes exactly count. Bet you weren't even tryin' to him him with 'em all, really." Wasn't exactly the impression he got from this guy here.

"No. I don't have any desire to kill him or anything. He's Miz's brother. I know how much she loves him, and aside from that, I might want to strangle him for being annoying sometimes, but I would never actually try to kill him."

"Yeah," said Lee. "That's about as 'secure' as he'd used to ever gettin' there, y'know." Lee leaned back on his hands behind him. Probably hadn't trusted it right away, either. The thing Lee was going to have to ask the devil-demon was, why had he even started doing that in the first place? Going into there when it was feeling kind of Mindscape-y to him while he was awake was one thing. But actually falling asleep in there?

"...were there really that many people trying to kill him in his sleep?" Ford wondered aloud to himself. Then he made a face, "Well, considering how I wanted to kill my own Bill Cipher, I can see how his Ford might have wanted to do something like that."

"Blue didn't used to sleep for a really long time," Lee told him. "Least, that's what older-Ford told me. Sounds like that's what most people thought, all around. -Demons don't sleep, y'know. Not the Outside ones, anyway."

"I don't think my Bill slept either. He was, as he often liked to remind me, 'always watching'." Then Ford paused. "Miz sleeps. Though, I'm pretty sure, from what I've heard about these Demons from the Outside, that Miz isn't one. They haven't really explained that to me yet."

"She ain't one of those, yeah," Lee confirmed. "And yeah, Miz sleeps. Blue taught her how. Heard she was havin' trouble with it, before meetin' him."

"That sounds awful." Ford said honestly. "She loves sleeping. I can't even imagine what it was like for her to be unable to do so…"

"If you try and tell me next you don't know what that feels like, 'cause you ain't some night owl when nobody's around to smack you upside the head and make you sleep, I'm gonna say I don't know you at all," Lee deadpanned to him next.

Ford coughed into his fist. "Yes, I do know how awful it feels, but she's a demon. Wouldn't it be different in some way?"

"Thought she used to be human before?" Lee pointed out, propping his chin up on the palm of his hand.

"She told me she had a human family, and lived as a human. But I don't know if that was some sort of outlier to the rest of her existence."

"What," Lee snorted. "You think she was maybe some kinda adopted pet cat instead?" Lee looked really amused at this. "-Pretty sure she was human-human before. Old-man-me ain't that slow on the uptake."

Ford furrowed his brows. "How would that even work? She was human… then became a triangle… and then a demon? Shouldn't that have involved some loss of self over time? Sebastian went from triangle to demon to human and he's lost a lot of the demon he used to be."

"You're askin' me? Blue was a triangle, then a 'being of pure energy' that went 'welp, guess I'm gonna be a demon!', before he ended up all whatever the hell he is now," Lee shrugged off, then sort of froze for a moment, and slapped his face. "Shit," he muttered out, "I almost forgot what I was talkin' with you about." He dropped his hand again, looking over at him both wincing and looking sheepish.

Ford blinked. "What?"

"Uh. The whole, 'is he as awful as your Bill was or not', thing," Lee said to him next, flexing his shoulders a bit like he was stretching them a bit, then relaxing them again and frowning. "-We're all pretty sure he's changing now. Dunno how bad yours was, exactly, but Blue could either go better or worse. Even if he don't think so himself right now," Lee let out a sigh, "'Cause he don't want to actually admit it." That maybe he could, and the world wouldn't freakin' drop to pieces all around his shoulders and Mind and just end if he did.

"Well, Blue hasn't gone around stabbing people and laughing as they bled out. Or eating children. Or invading my dreams to send me nightmares of him possessing me and forcing me to kill my family, so I will put that as a point in the 'not like my Bill' column."

"Uh," said Lee. And there was kind of a really long pause there that Ford didn't exactly like.

"...please tell me Blue doesn't eat children?" Ford deadpanned. With how gentle Blue was with the kids, Ford couldn't believe such a thing was possible.

"I mean," Lee scratched his cheek. "There's that veal stuff, right. And… think there was somethin' he wrote in one of those journals of other-Ford's about eating people's childhood dreams?"

"...you have a point. It is rather messed up that veal is a thing." Ford frowned. "I mean, eating meat, and killing animals to do so, is one thing. But people? People children? My Bill used to taunt me about that, about how I couldn't stop him from doing what he wanted, how he'll always get what he wants. And what he wanted was to kill other people and tear my dimension apart to continue his 'fun'." Ford shook his head. "If we were to talk about 'goals' and such, my Bill only ever cared about killing and spreading misery."

"Oh. Uh. Dunno if he's ever done that. He don't usually eat people, if he can help it. Kinda gets in the way of the whole... talkin' to 'em, thing. Guess I could ask him," Lee said to him next, frowning a bit. "Dunno about the tearing dimensions apart thing as 'fun'. I know he's done it, yeah, but…" Blue hadn't said it was or wasn't fun, but Lee had kind of gotten the impression from him that he hadn't exactly enjoyed doing it. -Not that that was enough; Lee had learned that he always needed to ask to be sure about that sort of shit. Could be a 'I didn't like it that time because I had other things that needed doing, and this is some extra dumb thing I have to do first now right this damn minute' frown, could be a 'I hate this shit because it ain't fun' frown.

"My Bill definitely thought it was fun. He told me so. Often. And asked me to do it too, said that I would enjoy it and then join him in his fun. He kept trying to recruit me." Ford shuddered. "Meanwhile, I do not believe Blue would eat people-children. I know Miz has eaten people before. Though, I don't know the circumstances around it all. I do know that she once found a species of alien who looked indistinguishable from hamburgers and she ate a few before she realized they were people and brought them back." Ford grimaced at that.

"Guess it's a good thing we don't look like hamburgers to her, then," Lee told him with a grimace. "...Uh, anyway. You wanna maybe talk about somethin' that ain't the demons, here? Kinda gettin' hungry here, figured I'd make dinner here real soon."

"Ah yes. Would you like to heat these?" Ford reached into a pocket to bring out the meatloaf packets he'd saved from earlier.

Lee brightened up a bit. "Actually, let's do both, yeah? Cut those up and make 'em into sandwich things, so you know how to do that one for sure," Lee began, taking his time pushing himself to his feet, "And I can pull the still 'hot outta the oven' ones outta the stasis-freezer for comparison."

"Grilled sandwiches?" Ford asked hopefully.

"Uh, sure," Lee said, scratching the back of his head. "Maybe one of each? Never tried grilling meatloaf for sandwiches before. I usually do 'em cold, straight outta the fridge," Lee explained, as he offered Ford a hand up. (Ford took it, and was pulled upright easily, as Lee braced himself.) "Think we can whip up some more of those mashed potatoes for the not-sandwich hot stuff. I can get out some more canned gravy; got plenty of it, it keeps." Had a lot of the dry packets of it, if he got desperate or something. "Got plenty of ketchup, too. -How d'you usually grill sandwiches up? Besides grilled cheese ones, I know how to do those," Lee asked him next.

"Ah, my idea here was… toasting the bread and putting cheese in between, and pressing it down, like a meatloaf grilled cheese sandwich!" Ford grinned. "I drew up some possible ideas, to experiment with, in terms of cooking. Try out various methods of making meatloaf into other forms of cuisine."

Lee blinked at this.

"Never done cheese with meatloaf, sure," Lee said, as they both started walking back over to the kitchen area. "What kinda cheese were you thinkin' of?"

"Hm… the meatloaf is already well flavored, so something strong wouldn't go well, it'd just be competing with the meatloaf for taste. Perhaps a milder cheese, something with a low melting point, so it would permeate through the bread and meat as it heats up, make it really gooey." Ford looked around in the fridge. "Would mozzarella or swiss work better?"

"Hell, I don't know," Lee said next. "You wanna cut it up into small chunks and try eating a piece of it with a hunk of meatloaf first, before you try goin' all in there on somethin' you ain't sure about there?"

"Yes! Experimenting! Testing hypothesis against a control! A baseline, as it were, with plain meatloaf. Then other small chunks for testing various cheeses for melting and flavor!" Ford was getting excited about this now.

"Sure," Lee said, good-naturedly. Wasn't like he didn't know what a hypothesis was. "So… we do meatloaf-itself, meatloaf-with-ketchup, meatloaf-with-gravy, then start doin' meatloaf with chunks of cold cheese and melted cheese." Lee walked over to the fridge. "-Oh, yeah. Probably need to do it with the hot and cold meatloaf, too. And the different breads. ...Uh, I'm thinkin' maybe small chunks. Kinda... small-marble-sized. Could end up gettin' full, just off of this, if you want to eat some more meatloaf or bread in-between, to 'clean the palate', or whatever." Wasn't like he hadn't done all sorts of tasting parties before for clients; a good solid half of what he usually did as selling goods places was foodstuffs and seeds, sometimes other similar things, too.

"If I get full from just using myself as a test subject, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make," Ford said solemnly with twitching lips. (Lee let out a laugh at this, as he started pulling out a whole range of cheeses - he kept it to the 'Earth human' ones this time, though, and left Blue's section completely alone. Blue's was in a compartment behind a second 'hidden' door. Had to try and move it the opposite way that the hinge went, in a very particular way, while knowing it was there, to even have a change of getting at it.) Ford even began to draw out a table in his journal to fill in with his thoughts on taste, texture and mouthfeel.

Ford grabbed a cutting board and a knife from the countertop (cleaned since he'd last been in here earlier that day). He cut up the meatloaf chunks into even, same size pieces that were small enough to eat many of, and large enough to include enough meatloaf for proper chewing.

Lee brought an armful of different cheeses over, and put them down on the countertop next to him, there.

"Gimmie a minute," he told Ford, before tapping on the countertop close to the edge, and- a screen with words in Standard Galactic Common popped up, right above the counter, a half foot away?

Lee flicked through the menus, finger in the air, then swiped and clicked and swiped in rapid succession. A rectangle of light appeared, glowing in the countertop's surface, and Lee reached forward, tapped it once, and then...

Lee touched his fingers to the right side of the inner part of the rectangle, pushed down a bit (the countertop seemed to rotate downwards at the one edge, as if hinged at the other edge). And then Lee pulled his fingers up and over, and the countertop rotated with him, then- caught once level and started rotating at the centerline of the rectangle.

And from below that clear piece of countertop, as if screwed or affixed in place somehow, an odd rectangular hot-plate looking arrangement(?) with a lid suddenly rotated up into view.

The countertop stopped there with a click, and then...

-Lee was pulling off the lid, while setting a few things at the digital interface at the front - it sectioned itself out into two squares from the rectangle, then the nearest set of squares in half after that.

"You can drop the cheese pieces in the front two," Lee told him. "Use a wooden spoon to scoop 'em out when they look hot enough. Shouldn't get up higher than a really hot pan there," Lee told him, as he turned and was headed for- the stasis-freezer apparently, since that was the box that Ford had seen him put the other four meatloaf loaves in before. "Leave the big square for a meatloaf for now, wanna keep the one of these warm, 'stead of letting it go cold on the counter there," he was told.

"Are things like this all that common?" Ford wondered. "I've seen various technologies out behind the portal, but I never got good looks at the more domestic sides of technological development. We were always on the run, we cared more about learning the vehicles and weaponry…"

"Dunno," Lee told him. "Anytime I'm showing off samples of stuff, and ways on how to cook it, we usually end up sellin' at least one or two, maybe..." Lee thought for a moment. "Every four or five customers places, sometimes? -Depends on the dimension," Lee told him next. "Nobody's really used to the counter pull-up display thing," Lee told him, as he brought one of the 'hot' meatloaf loaves back over, to dump in the one square there - to float in place (and stay warm by the ambient balancing heat). "But that's Blue's space-savin' thing."

"Perhaps I could work on something like this, myself. If I ever get done with the list of projects I'm already working on." Ford sighed. "I have too many things I want to do." He placed some of his cut cold meatloaf squares and cheese into the smaller rectangular sections at the front as indicated (where the contents also floated in place). "Though I think a new type of kitchenware would be much easier and less dangerous to patent. So long as I make sure competitors can't reverse engineer the things I made to use for something more dangerous."

"Hey, if you get the safety features right," Lee told him with a shrug. "Remind me to show you how I usually make up Blue's salads for him a little later. -Not that I always do that," Lee said quickly. "Just when I'm wantin' to eat some myself; I make extra," he said to Ford next.

"Will do." Ford nodded. He really had to be more up on his game about security.

"Anyway," said Lee. "Lemme just grab some bread here. Figure we can do a couple of the cold sandwiches first, just ta give ya a baseline," Lee told him, as he opened a nearby cupboard (next to the fridge) and pulled down a few different loaves). "Plus," he added, as he went back to the fridge for some ketchup (and one of the cold meatloaf loaves he'd remembered to stuff in there before, after the stasis-freezer - he'd had to pull it back out, almost kicking himself over that one), "I really really want one." And Ford didn't need to see him toss the grin back over his shoulder at him, to hear the grin that was in his tone of voice.

Ford chuckled. "Don't let me keep you from getting a good meal." He slid the container of meatloaf over. "Is Blue going to be eating anything?" The demon needed food now too. Ford didn't see him eat anything for lunch, but Blue could have gotten a meal in during the time Ford wasn't here.

"Hell yeah it's a good meal," Lee told him, grinning up a storm. He started in on un-twistie-tying the wheat bread, then reached out with one hand and yanked over the toaster. (Ford blinked as the electrical cord did a sort of whiplash and ended up against the side of the toaster there, not seeming plugged in at all.) "Don't go worryin' about Blue eatin' or not," Lee told him. "This ain't our only kitchen in here." He tossed two slices of bread in the toaster, and shoved down on the lever. "Not like it'd make sense for one of us to be entertainin' in here, and the other one of us have to barge in or go hungry instead. Sometimes, it's just one on the other of us," Lee told him next. "Not tryin' to do it as both our thing, both bein' seen." He grabbed another cutting board from back against the 'wall' there, a knife from the nearest knife holder, and started in on the cold meatloaf there, cutting slices.

Ford helped with preparing food for a while before asking, "So, you two do this often? Camping out and traveling space together?" It sounded fun. Travelling space salesman. Heh. Of course.

"Ain't really camping out," Lee said, "Other than pitching an actual tent lookin' thing. -Even this thing's almost got more rooms than old-man-me's house," Lee noted next. He was done with what he was doing for the moment, and just leaning up against the counter. "Cozier than my own boat is right now." But then, Blue was insisting that he be the one to fix up his own boat. Lee figured that maybe he should be thankful at this point that Blue hadn't demanded that he replace all the 'protections' first with his own ones instead, before showing him how to do anything else anywhere on the Lee O' War to it.

"But yeah," Lee told him next. "We do this stuff 'often'. -Blue ain't around as much anymore, 'cause I've pretty much got my bearings most places. Anytime I'm thinkin' about goin' out someplace new, though, I make sure to tell him and have him with me. We talk it all out first, and plan it. He looks at junk; the whole nine."

"That sounds fun." Ford smiled. "Miz sometimes takes me out to check out other dimensions, but we don't stay too long. And it's always with just my mind, we haven't taken my body with us on our adventures, if you could even call it that."

"Yeahhhh," Lee rubbed the back of his neck. "That ain't anything like the same as actually talkin' to the people there. -Blue usually does 'visual trip's there, first," Lee said to him. "Kinda like one of those… virtual reality training things? Wants to make sure I get all the local customs right," Lee noted next. Then the toaster popped up.

Ford poked at the floating pieces of cheese with one of the smaller wooden spoons, and picked some up to put on the heated meatloaf chunks. He eyed the toaster, as Lee pulled out a plate and dumped the toast onto it quickly.

"Ah, c'mon," Lee complained, as he saw what Ford was doing. "You gotta at least try the best one out first!" He slapped a somewhat thick slice of meatloaf onto the one side, practically sprayed some (quickly shaken up) ketchup down onto the other, closed it up, and handed it over to him quickly. "Yeah?" Lee looked at him hopefully.

Ford chuckled and took the plate from him. "Ok then." He looked around, "I notice there's no outlet. What is the power source for everything?"

Lee blinked at this, and then the lightbulb seemed to go on, like he was slapping himself in the forehead.

"Oh, right," he said, and reached around the back to grab up the end of the cord (to better show it off to him, and… the plug seemed to be plugged into a black cube, about one inch square.

"Power plug," Lee said. "Runs off of ambient gravity. Kinda like- uh," Lee paused. "Well." He looked away from him quickly. "-Hey, you want some milk to drink with that? Or maybe lemonade or somethin'?" He turned away (almost as if in a hurry) and went back over to the fridge, presumably for such items. "I got beer, but it ain't anythin' to write home about," he said without trying to look at him, as he stuck his head in fridge.

Ford blinked. "Runs off gravity… like some sort of gravity battery?" (Lee visibly winced in place where he was, almost halfway inside the fridge.) "That's kind of cool. Would it only work if it was in some space that had a stable gravitational pull?" He paused. "How would it generate the energy? Is it kinetic in nature and the movement of the planet itself generates the energy?" He wondered. "Or some sort of magnetic thing? No, perhaps the attractive pulling of gravity against something within it…" He didn't seem to notice the uncomfortable way Lee was looking.

Lee blinked at hearing all this behind his back, but didn't quite relax yet. (He'd had a theory about some of this stuff with Fords and their science fair projects, sure, but…) Lee pulled out the milk jug, the lemonade jug too, and… left the beer alone for now. He turned around slowly and looked over at this Ford, then pulled in a breath and said, "...uh. Maybe eat that sandwich first before I start talkin' about stuff. So I know you've got something in you before you... maybe… get mad about stuff later," Lee ended kind of lamely, as he set both the jugs down on the counter at his side, on the other side of the hot-plate from Ford. (Lee turned away from him a little bit, and reached for the cabinets above, to pull down another two glass beer stein mug things. He was keeping this Ford in his peripheral vision, though. Mostly out of 'dimensional traveling' ingrained habit.)

"Mad?" Ford blinked. "About what?" He hadn't gotten all that angry about talking about Blue after all.

"Eat the sandwich first, Ford," Lee told him, as he poured himself a mug of lemonade. "You good with lemonade, too?"

Ford picked up the sandwich from the plate he was holding and bit into it. Humming to himself. "Some lemonade would be wonderful, thank you very much."

Lee handed over the first mug, and then poured himself a new 'second'.

"So… what's the angry inducing thing that I need sandwiches for?" Ford asked, biting off another piece. It was very delicious. "...does it have to do with that gravity battery? Is it dangerous?" Ford looked at the cub worriedly.

"Could be dangerous," Lee said, "If I fucked it up. Don't think I did, though." He didn't exactly sound excited about it. He took a long gulp of lemonade, then put in another pair of bread slices into the toaster, shoved the lever down. He kinda wanted his own sandwich here.

"Oh, you made it? That's amazing!" Ford grinned at him, pleasantly proud of this other Lee who was doing so well for himself. Made Ford wonder how his own Stan could have done things if he'd been into science.

"Wasn't my idea, really," Lee muttered out next. "Just took somethin' I saw that sorta worked, and went from there."

"Well, innovation and inspiration from other sources are just as valid, you still made this, yes?" Ford smiled.

"...Yeah. I did." Lee said it almost cautiously, not looking at him.

"That's amazing." (Lee winced and grimaced at this, just staring down at the toaster.) Ford sipped some more of his lemonade. "Makes me wonder what my own brothers would have done, if they'd been more into science. Sebastian's wonderfully creative. And Stan could do so much better for the world than just playing the capitalism game."

"Wasn't creative," Lee told him. "I just knew that extension cords were a mistake and a half, with all the water, and got tired of luggin' all those batteries all around the boat." He'd wanted to move the appliances in the kitchen away from the wall, but the cords didn't make it to the galley table or the opposite side, and trying to run up a new set of outlets would've just been a headache and a half. Practically got tangled all up on them once, anyway. And once he'd made the bigger ones downstairs, to charge the batteries off of… the batteries had still taken up way too much damn space.

Ford shrugged. "Whatever works. You saw a problem, you found a solution. That's what science had always been about. Making things that would make the world better, more efficient."

"Sound like Blue when you say that, almost," Lee noted. The toaster popped up. He did the same; add a slice, ketchup, grab a plate thing as the last one. Then he picked up his plate and he turned back over towards Ford.

"I don't know how I feel about sounding like Blue." Ford grumbled. ("Figure that's better than sayin' he sounds like you, instead.") Ford chewed on his sandwich. "But I suppose he's got some good points too."

"Yeah," Lee said. "Three good points on him, if older-Ford's tellin' it right." (Ford snorted at the 'three points' comment, Lee rolled his eyes.) He picked up his sandwich. "Kinda don't wanna tell you this thing, and ruin the mood. But if you want to talk about it, I ain't gonna be able to keep from slippin' up, so." Lee took a bite of his sandwich, then blew out a breath and relaxed, just a little, due to the taste, as he chewed. "You want the whole 'pussyfoot around' the whole thing? Or you just want me to rip the bandaid right off?"

"...sure? I've eaten plenty and I'm ready for it. Lay it on me."

Lee grimaced, and got sort of a 'yeah, okay…' look. "So, yeah. I gotta theory about Fords," he started out. "But anyway." He sort of half-cleared his throat and looked up at him. "My twin made a science fair project thing, with equations that didn't match. It was actually a gravity battery. I ganked the concept for myself after." And then he shoved the sandwich in his mouth, unable to keep looking at him in the eye after that.

"Well, yes. The Perpetual Motion machine isn't actually a real motion machine. It was fundamentally flawed. I realized that halfway through college once I thought about it." Ford winced. "I… never realized it's a gravity battery though. Huh. Interesting." He rubbed his chin.

Lee stopped chewing for a hot second or two, then slowly looked up at him again.

He chewed and swallowed quickly, and said, "Uh. You're takin' that better than I thought." He stared at him. Then mentally shook himself. "I mean-" Lee said next, resituating himself over his feet (relaxing a bit further, the longer this Ford wasn't yelling at him), "I ain't so sure every Ford's project ended up some kinda gravity battery machine. 'Cause the equations didn't fit. I mean, match." (Which didn't surprise him; his twin had never claimed to be any type of engineer, or any sort of decent mechanic. He looked down on all that shit, instead.) Lee wasn't about to bring it up with older-Ford; he'd probably be okay with going through it with him, but it wasn't like they had his own project around anymore to still be able to check anything. And Lee was a little leery about asking Blue about this one, what with all of his 'knowing things', not with how screwy Blue always got when the subject came up. (Like he wanted to start doing that chittery-giggle thing of his, every. damn. time.)

"Well, I was… at the time… I was so upset at Sebastian, I… never touched it again, too many bad feelings. Only had my realization a few years later, and even then I didn't think much about it…" Ford looked guilty. (Lee tried not to wince. He looked exactly like older-Ford had, in the hold down in the boat way back when, when he did that.) "I apologized eventually, after my therapy and everything, because I realized that whether he broke it or not didn't even matter in the end. And… everything he was forced to go through, because of me…" Then he shook his head. "No, it wasn't my fault. It was Filbrick's." He said firmly. "I need to stop blaming myself for the things I did as a child. It was our father who disowned Sebastian. It was our father who abused us. It wasn't our fault… we didn't deserve the way he treated us and Ma."

Lee looked kind of uncomfortable, especially at that last part. And he figured it wasn't his callout to say anything, one way or the other here. So he just said, "Yeah, well. You and Seb figured stuff out now between ya both, right? So…" Lee took another bite of his sandwich and just chewed. Keepin' his mouth shut.

"Yes. We're alright now. But… ugh…" Ford sighed, sitting back. Then he looked over at Lee, worried. "Are you alright? Your father… he didn't…" He looked strained.

"M'fine," Lee mumbled around a bite of sandwich. He chewed, swallowed, then said, "What you want to know about the power plug, anyway?" he said, changing the subject.

"I..." Ford looked at Lee carefully, checking him over for any scars. Sebastian didn't exist in Lee's world, so who had borne the burnt of Filbrick's ire? Wait, no Seb would… hopefully mean less strain on their finances, and no glowing yellow eye- so no medical bills from having to try and remove it… "I'm glad you're alright." Ford said in relief. "So, ah, that battery thing, does it work for anything plugged in? How'd you get the wireless plugs to still send energy to all the other appliances?"

Lee snorted at this. He popped the last of the sandwich in his mouth, washed it down with lemonade (after setting the plate down), then told him, "It ain't wireless. -I didn't get the thing actually usable 'til Blue took me over to the lake in the 'Falls, in the dimension where the old-us'es live, and I found out about those crystals that grow and shrink stuff. Then I could get 'em as small as I needed to, so I could move 'em around, and all that. No chargin' other batteries from some bigger gravity battery, to move around in-between stuff to use." Lee tossed a thumb at the toaster (and, presumably, the power plug that it was plugged into). "They start out about a foot to a side, makes 'em easier to work on; put together, too. Got that thing tuned to 120 volts, up to 15 amps, AC. Just like a normal house power plug," Lee then told him.

Ford wrote all this down in his journal. Having a powersource in such a way would vastly give him more space in his lab. And making things run off something like gravity, would do WONDERS for the whole, environmental work he was already doing.

"Thing's still a battery, though," Lee warned him. "You draw too much power down, it'll bottom out 'cause it can't recharge fast enough for ya there."

"So a limit on it, to stop any more drainage of energy, for a set amount of time to allow the device to charge and build up again."

"Yeah. Try to draw down too many amps, it shuts off the power. Got something on the input side, too, so it don't try to overcharge or overheat. Overheatin's finicky, gotta account for that when you go off makin' them small. Less surface area," Lee told him, "Even if you've got less field lines strength goin' through it, or whatever you want to call it, when it's gravity. Prob'ly ain't exactly science-y to talk about it like it's electricity, when it ain't that at all. Just the output, that comes later."

"Oh, Dr. Clark's creating an insulator for just that purpose. A sort of slime/gel thing? It's amazing, can withstand being blasted with a flamethrower with no sign of damage. We just need to test it long term right now."

"Ain't tryin' to insulate it," Lee told him. "You gotta do the opposite, bleed off the extra heat instead. Don't want anything melting on you inside that thing, believe me." He took another sip of his drink. "...Heat sink, maybe," Lee said, after a long moment of thought. "Still gotta let it out eventually. Ain't real sure about all the right terms," Lee noted once again, this time a little different way.

"I see, well…" Ford thought about it. "If they're wireless, could put a battery on the kitchens to let off the heat into the ovens so we use less electricity for that." Then he laughed. "Or make a new breakroom with a sauna!" He started giggling madly at that.

"They ain't wireless, they ain't beaming any energy anywhere, and you gotta plug wires into the things," Lee pointed out frowning. Did he really screw up explainin' stuff that badly, here? "Wait, you talkin' about making a heat sink battery or somethin' there?" Lee said, blinking. He hadn't quite gotten the change in the topic at first.

"I could. I made one to help with the solar panels up on the roof of the Center."

Lee gave him an odd look. "Don't they got water tube ones and stuff for that?" It heated stuff, circulated the water, boom? He'd thought he'd read about that somewhere, when he'd been looking up stuff for the boat; run a bunch of lines up across someplace in the sunlight - like the top of the cabin on his boat - then use the hot water for showering, and also attach a sort of gear-flap arrangement thing to it, a little like a closed waterwheel? It was one of the things he'd planned to do, before Miz and the old guys had started going hog-wild with a bunch of new tech-y stuff.

"We have those too." Ford nodded. "But there's some odd thing with the sunlight around here, probably because of the Weirdness in the atmosphere. It needs extra work. But it works well."

Extra work? "What needs extra work?" Lee asked him, before taking another gulp from his lemonade mug. He leaned up against the counter a little bit, standing sideways and facing Ford here. He looked somewhat relaxed again.

"Energy sources." Ford explained. "I have solar panels that take in solar radiation and store it to help power everything in this facility. But there's so much ambient Weirdness in the air that it… for lack of a better word, makes there more energy to be absorbed and contained. So plenty of energy for me to use, if I can do so. But it meant creating all new types of storage for it. I've got multiple types of batteries for all different sources of energy. It's quite impressive, well, at least..." Ford rubbed the back of his head, "I'm proud of it."

...Huh. "Well," Lee frowned a little at this. "Be careful with the Weirdness energy stuff. It ain't exactly… clean. -Kinda wants to seep outta everything and just change a bunch of stuff, you get it too concentrated," Lee explained. "I don't mess with that stuff if I don't have to. Doesn't work really well anywhere else, either. Blue can handle it like a pro, but even he warned me about how much I'd have to be cleanin' the stuff up, if I wanted to use it all 'responsibly' for some 'boring' thing." Lee made a face.

"Yes, Miz mentioned that too. It's why she helped me with a filter. She'd been doing a lot of work with filters, to 'clean' it first." Ford nodded. "Besides, I've been doing a lot of readings on Miz's energy. She's almost entirely made of Weirdness. Compressed into such a small form." Ford sighed, his gaze far away, "She's… amazing…"

Wow. Uh. "-Yeah, don't go pointing any readings stuff at Blue," Lee warned him, setting down his mug. "He'll blow your shit out, then turn around and make you wish you hadn't. And that's when he's in a good mood," Lee then told him, as he poured himself a new glass of lemonade.

"I will keep that in mind." Ford sighed.

"In mind, nothin'," Lee told him next, remembering what this Ford had said about spite earlier. "I'm tellin' you. You want anything electronic around here to survive, don't do it." Lee frowned at him. "I've seen him make somebody's readings tap dance across the screen, then spike the readings to write a virus into the damn thing, and wipe out every last system it was attached to, including backups. -He don't play around on that stuff. He sure as hell don't like to play nice."

"He really doesn't like people reading him, I'm assuming it's some kind of operational security thing?"

"The biggest of big ones there is, yeah," Lee told him. "Be like some alien tryin' to scan you for vulnerabilities. Figure out how to make a bio-weapon that works on you, maybe try readin' your mind while they're at it, from all the neurons firing in there, and all the chemical sniffing."

Ford shivered a little. "I see, when you put it like that, it does sort of seem like something unpleasant." He drank the rest of the lemonade. "I don't like people messing with my mind."

"Yeah, well, neither does Blue. And the demon goes overboard on this stuff. Passive scans, he still either spikes or just ghosts as nothing showing up on the scans at all. -Not, like, a black hole in the middle of the sensor net thing." Those stood out like sore thumbs and a half. Amateur hour, Blue called it, and Lee couldn't say he disagreed. "He handles shit so it gets ambient readings and everything else around him; just not him. Drives people nuts."

"Miz doesn't mind my scans, I never thought about it, but I should probably tell her to be more wary about that. She… doesn't have much self preservation at all. It's… worrying." Ford frowned. "When she gets hurt, she doesn't want any help to heal, she just… bears with the pain, almost like she thinks she doesn't deserve help for it…" Ford rubbed his face. "I worry about her."

Huh? "She don't kill the feed, swap the input, or drop the vessel?" Lee asked him next, frowning. (He reached for a bread knife, for cutting up the bread slices. Then paused for a moment, and put a few slices in the toaster again - he'd butter them for a more 'grilled sandwich' taste to some of the bread there, for Ford to try out with the rest of it.) Sure, he couldn't see Blue asking for help - but the demon practically made it his thing to not get hurt in the first place. And yeah, he couldn't see Blue asking for help when potentially vulnerable either, but there were other reasons for that.

"Her vessels heal faster than a human, but aside from the time when I tried to bandage her against her protests and she changed forms to get away from me, she just… lets herself continue hurting." Ford winced. "...I also get the feeling she's suicidal? But I think she's doing better now. Up until we all die, and leave her alone again…" Ford frowned at that. "...I can see why Blue's so frustrated with all of us."

"Uh, yeah," Lee said, staring at him. "Pretty sure you'd be up in arms if… I mean, you got a Shermie here?" Lee asked him, as he went for some butter from the fridge.

"Yes. My youngest brother." Ford nodded.

"Yeah," Lee nodded. "If he was feelin' that way, and doin' all that - at least, if my Sherm was? I'd freakin' be punching people left and right over that one, no joke," Lee told him next, pretty grimly.

"Yes, I… actually have some experience with that." Ford grimaced. "The therapist Miz is seeing now used to be Sebastian's. For… his…" Ford looked uncomfortable. "Well, he's better now! And I'm going to make something to keep him safe." Ford looked down at his hands.

"-Hey, woah," said Lee, picking up on his discomfort. "Don't gotta tell me. That's somethin' he should get to decide, right?" Seein' psych folks was serious business. (...For a guy from the early seventies, given what the situation and state of the field used to be like, back then.)

"I don't… want to lose my brother. Never again. He… he's gone through so much- we all have. It's…" Ford leaned back, rubbing at his eyes.

"Hey, you… just saw him last night?" Lee said, walking over a little closer, to reach out and pat his on the shoulder with a hand. "Things are better now, right?" He wasn't really sure what was supposed to be wrong with Seb, he'd seemed okay to him...

"Things here were messed up before. We've all worked hard to fix it. We're finally happy now, for the most part."

"Okay, so that's good." Ford was probably just. Lee rubbed his shoulder back and forth a bit. "You're probably worried about nothin'. He seemed pretty fine to me. Didn't he seem okay to you? You're okay, he's okay..."

Ford lowered his hand. "Miz wants to make us immortal, so that we wouldn't age and die and break her heart all over again. Is… is it cruel of us to say 'no'?" He asked Lee suddenly. "I mean, Seb is fine now, that's great. But, what about Miz?"

"Uh." Lee stood there and stared at him. "Way to drop an easy question or twelve on a guy here, huh?" He chuckled kinda nervously. "Thought we were talkin' about science-y stuff. Yeah?" What was he even supposed to say to that? He didn't know these people. And Miz herself was… (As far as Lee was concerned, he didn't know enough to know that for him and Blue. And Blue had told him that starting to understand eternity meant being alive for at least a million years first, before making that kind of decision. So...)

Ford sighed. "I just got to thinking about it. How much I loved the way Miz always helped me out with my work. She never asks for anything in return other than my company and some head pats." And when they said 'no' to the immortality thing, she had been upset but hadn't forced the issue, despite how much she clearly wanted to. "Then I got to thinking about how afraid I was at the idea of losing any of my brothers. And, with how much Miz loves us, what would that do to her when she loses us?" Ford ran a hand through his hair. "I mean, part of the reason she originally came here to live with us in the beginning was because her children passed away and she couldn't handle her heartbreak and wanted to drown it out by having fun to distract herself." Fat lot of good that did, she only managed to get herself attached to them instead.

"...Pretty sure that guilting you into a payday for her that never ends is kinda askin' a lot," Lee said to him slowly. "Would be kinda cruel to ask you to write her a blank check, when you don't even know what you're sayin' yes to." Lee frowned a bit, thinking of what was goin' on with the symbols back home. "Be really cruel for her to force you to do somethin' you don't want to do, too." The toaster popped then, and Lee got down to buttering it up after that.

"Yes." Ford agreed. "And we've said 'no' to her offer. She hasn't brought the offer up again, unless the topic comes up. I just feel bad knowing that she only has her alien friends and Blue. And even then, Blue would be the only one who would fully and actually stay with her forever." Ford grimaced. "But…" and here, Ford looked contemplative, "As Miz is someone Blue loves, in his own twisted way, perhaps she could inspire changes for the better in him. But in order for her to do that, she's going to need to be raised properly." And it was weird, how Ford associated Miz with 'must raise and protect' but he thought of Xin as… Ford couldn't put it into words, but he felt a tingling warmth at the thought of Xin. He had similar feelings for Jan or Yun, though not as intense, he didn't know them as well. And as for William… Ford blushed a little and cough, "A-anyway, we won't be guilted into signing away our souls to her or anything. We're not that stupid."

"Good," said Lee. "'Cause Blue's had that talk with me, and it sounds like he don't think anybody could decide on 'forever' not goin' in blind without hittin' at least one million first." Lee frowned a bit as he thought. Because Blue had been talkin' more… life extension stuff with him, he wasn't going for a hard 'yes' right now, or even trying to. The two of them weren't even anywhere close to sure about the whole line-zodiac thing yet. (He'd been burned by his brother pretty badly, and was worried about Sherm; Blue had been burned really damn bad by his other zodiac and the lizard himself, and hadn't had anybody else helpin' him out he could trust like Lee'd had, far as Lee could tell.)

Lee cut up the buttered toast into little inch chunks, did the same with some of the untoasted bread, and passed the plate over to Ford. "So... you wanna do this taste-testing thing, or what?" he asked this nerdy science-y Ford with a quirky smile.

"Oh yes!" Ford was quick to jump into this change of topic. Anything to push aside the confusing feelings inside him.

Lee handed over the plate, got some mashed potatoes and canned brown gravy made up for a more substantial addition to his own meal of hot meatloaf, while Ford focused more on his taste-testing, and... they had a lot of fun eating meatloaf with different cheeses and other additions in lots of various ways.

And by the end of it, Ford had several recipes he wanted to try making for Miz.