A/N: *sigh* Sorry for the delay, folks - I'm not usually this tardy. But this month, I swear, it's like everything in the universe decided to blunder in and wipe its collective feet on my carpet every other day of the week, and I have not had much time to concentrate on anything except rolling with the punches, much less writing.

What didn't help was the fact that I just couldn't be satisfied with anything I wrote for this chapter, and I kept having to rewrite until it was in the Goldilocks zone. I kept worrying that it was too zany or too serious, too oblique or too opaque, too clever or too blunt, and by the end of it, I was about ready to chew my fingers off.

Suffice it to say that the next chapter will be significantly shorter, partly for the need to alternate between long, rambling exposition chapters and comparatively short, decisive action chapters, but mostly for the sake of my own sanity.

Anyway, this chapter will be extremely talky and expository. However, most of what's being exposited is not details from The Park/TSW, but a hurricane of canon-welding fabrication: this is me making shit up, so you can rest assured knowing that I'm not providing you with crossover details, but inventing stuff off the top of my head.

So, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Gravity Falls/The Park/TSW is still not mine.

This chapter's soundtrack is The Emperor's Throne Room by John Williams.


It took every last atom of Ford's self-control not to panic as he went about explaining himself to the Pyramidion.

The hell of it was, he'd thought he'd be more composed at the sight of the figure towering over him. After all, it wasn't as if this was actually Bill Cipher; the Bill he'd known was gone for good and couldn't harm Ford or his family any longer. And yet, a single glimpse of the Pyramidion was enough to bring that all-too-familiar sense of crippling dread rushing back into the forefront of his mind; in a matter of seconds, the cloying, all-consuming paranoia was back as well, and suddenly it was as if Bill had never died – worse, that the last thirty years of recovery and healing had never happened. It was as if he was fresh from that first terrible bargain all over again: alone, bleeding from his eyes, and terrified that any minute, Bill would tear through the dimensional barrier and lay waste to the world… and the fact that his interviewer probably wasn't going to do this didn't do much to calm Ford's anxieties. Frankly, he'd feel a whole lot better if he knew what the Pyramidion's real agenda was, but right now, the guiding light of the Illuminati wasn't going to spill the beans until Ford had finished telling his story.

He wasn't sure how long he rambled on for, but it couldn't have been much longer than half an hour, and he covered almost all the relevant points: his investigation of Gravity Falls, the summoning of Bill Cipher, their partnership, the construction of the portal, Fiddleford's disastrous encounter, Ford's plunge into the portal and the three decades of adventures that had followed, and his return home.

And through it all, the Pyramidion listened intently, hovering back and forth across the room at a gentle pace, circling Ford in an almost hypnotic fashion; occasionally, he would ask questions, gently probing the story for inconsistencies but never once accusing Ford of lying. He didn't even raise his voice. In many ways, Ford would have preferred a Bill Cipher-style tantrum-and-torture, if only because it had been pretty easy to guess at Bill's mood and prepare himself for the worst; but with the Pyramidion, there was no guessing at his mood, no interpreting his tone of voice. The blue triangle kept everything suppressed, his manner calm and deceptively sedate, his voice a flat, cold monotone; for all Ford knew, he might have been planning to have him flayed alive as soon as he was finished talking.

Naturally, the story concluded with Weirdmageddon, the resistance movement, the failed attempt at using the Zodiac against Bill, Stan's winning move, and the death of Bill. As an afterthought, he also added a sentence or two about how he had ended up on Solomon Island before running out of breath. In its wake, he was left staring up at his interrogator in mounting dread, trying to figure out if he was about to congratulated or executed.

For a moment or so, the Pyramidion hovered noiselessly in the air, gazing down at him with a faintly quizzical stare. Then, with a snap of his fingers, he opened the cuffs around Ford's wrists, releasing him from the chair.

"Polygraphic surveys confirm your story is true," the Pyramidion said at last. "More to the point, what you've told me is more or less consistent with the Bill Cipher I was most familiar with… however, the version of him I knew died nearly sixty years before the two of you ever met. It certainly raises a lot of interesting questions concerning the scale of the multiverse. Great Scott, McFly."

Ford's eyes narrowed. "So… this universe has its own iteration of Bill Cipher from another iteration of the Second Dimension?"

"Had."

"Fair enough. But how did you come to be here? How could Bill Cipher have been killed without the aid of the memory gun or the Circle? I mean, those elements wouldn't have been possible at the start of the 20th century, so unless our universes differ in that way as well-"

"Far simpler than that, my young padawan."

"What?"

"Our two worlds differ in physical laws and even reasons for existing in the first place, but that isn't why Bill Cipher was killed. The version of Bill I knew didn't become the master of the Nightmare Realm, nor did he ever lose his physical form. Constants and variables."

The Pyramidion conjured a cigar from nowhere, lit it with a snap of his spindly fingers, and reclined on thin air. "You've told your story: TLDR. Now let me tell you the story of my friend and the shapes we once were. Let me tell you the story… of Bob."

Ford took a deep breath, wondering if he was about to hear something he'd later wish that he could forget. "Go on…"


Dipper groaned and lurched awake.

How long had he been out this time? Three hours? Four? Five? He couldn't tell; he didn't have a watch on him, and the Fog-shrouded landscape visible through the door offered no clues whatsoever: it looked a little bit brighter, but with all that grey shrouding the sky, it could have been anywhere from 11 AM to 5 PM.

Lorraine was now fast asleep in the entrance, having presumably nodded off while on watch, and was now slumped across the threshold with her back resting against the doorframe. Every now and again, she would twitch and mumble in her sleep, shuddering as if in lingering pain, so Dipper could only assume she was in the middle of another nightmare.

Had this happened last night, Dipper would have taken this as the perfect opportunity to sneak past her and make a run for it; as far as he could tell from this distance, the only monsters out on the cliffs were zombies of the slowest possible kind – to the point that they hadn't even considered crossing the bridge that connected the island and the lighthouse. If he'd wanted to go looking for Grunkle Stan and Mabel, now would have been the perfect time… but as anxious as he was to see them again, he knew he'd never be able to find them even with a clear route from the cliffs to the beach. Mabel had no doubt swum to shore by now and probably rescued Grunkle Stan as well; they'd either be looking for medical attention, or they'd be trying to find him again.

The best thing he could do now was find Archibald Henderson's hidden cache. Henderson had been the most feared wizard on the island, so If there was anything that could help unravel Lorraine's delusions and get Dipper back to normal, it had to be hidden somewhere in or around the lighthouse… and if not, maybe there'd be some link to what could do the trick.

Getting to his feet, he set off, ready to explore the building-

-and promptly tripped over his own shorts, crashing helplessly to the floor – chin-first.

Muttering a few words that would have gotten him grounded for a month had anyone heard them at home, Dipper awkwardly hauled himself upright, hiked up his shorts, and drew the drawstring under the waistband as tight as it would possibly go. Even then, the shorts were still incredibly loose, and he had stop every few minutes to hitch them up again; he didn't even bother trying to put his shoes on again.

Privately, Dipper hoped that this search wasn't going to involve monsters: right now, he was about five years old at the most, at the peak of his clumsiness and even more prone to tripping over his feet than he was as a twelve-year-old. In his current state, he wouldn't even be able to run away without falling flat on his face, much less fight back… and that was just the physical side-effects. If his mind regressed as well – or if he found himself thinking like Callum again – then he'd be toast.

Still, he had to get this done, and quickly. He needed to crack this case and find the info that could fix Lorraine's brain before she got any worse.

Or, he reflected gloomily, before I get any worse...


"Once, billions upon billions of years ago, my name was Bob.

As I'm sure you've guessed by now, Bill Cipher and I were both born in the Second Dimension. Our world was one of castes, where our social status was decided by shape – with Decagons the ruling class and Circles the lowest of the low. Right on the edge of total ignominy were us Triangles. We at least had running water and adequate housing, maybe even a scholarship or two if we were lucky. But we were still dirt-poor, still walled off from the plum jobs, still looked down on by everyone from the Rectangles to the Octagons and ignored by everyone above them. Unpersons doubleplus ungood to goodthinkers.

Bill and I were friends – well, as much as two wildly differing personalities can be friends without annoying the bejesus out of each other: I was the good kid who did his homework and cleaned his room without being told; he was the wild child who goofed off in class but somehow always knew the answers whenever the teacher zeroed in on him. Can someone press my reset button? Apart from our origins, the only things we really had in common were our intelligence, a desire to get out of the slums, and a shared ambition to prove our worth. The reason we became friends – and stayed friends – was because neither of us fit in anywhere else: not with the well-behaved kids, not with the crazy kids, and certainly not with our own families.

We grew up in the same crappy tenement building, endured the same kind of fantasy-squashing parents, attended the same soul-destroying classes, impressed the same corrupt officials… and in the end, we got the same kind of scholarship. Before long, doors were opening to us: one of the most prestigious colleges in the land gave us a place within its halls, and by the end of our time there, the two of us ranked among the greatest students the faculty had ever seen. It didn't matter that we didn't have any friends, or that every Octagon and Hexagon on the campus hated our guts, or that we were only tolerated at parties because we knew where to find the best dealers. It didn't matter. We had each other, and that was enough: Bob and Bill, a nerd and a bohemian getting ready to take on the world. Titanic didn't have shit on us.

We graduated with distinction, walked away with major degrees in particle and theoretical physics, even found ourselves with job offers from a major research group. For a while, we thought we'd won, thought we'd finally be able to change the world. Bill even bought a top hat and cane, thinking that his status as one of the regime's intellectual powerhouses made him fit to stand among the elite and wear their fashions. Made it, Ma! Top of the world!

Eventually, we learned that certain things were expected of us. Our official job was to research new forms of energy, weapons technologies, methods of transportation, and other things that could enrich the shapes of the world; unofficially, as the token Triangles of the workplace, we were meant to prop up the supremacy of the higher orders of shapes. Bill and I would be paid generously for every research project we completed, but the credit would always be given to other scientists, as would the real accolades and perks; lesser shapes received the recognition we were due for our discoveries, and so, the great and the good retained the privilege of looking down on us. 'You see?' they would say. 'Elevate Triangles above their station, and all you'll get is disappointment.'"

The Pyramidion/Bob paused, as if for breath, and then added, "I'm sure you can guess just how well Bill took that."

Ford considered this. It was hard to imagine Bill as a kid, even harder to imagine him as a scholarship student or a scientist – even after the corrections he'd made to Ford's equations decades ago… but still, it wasn't hard to envision the kind of temper-tantrum that would have followed Bill being told to give credit for his work to anyone else. He wouldn't have had powers yet, but Ford could almost see him trashing his workspace in a fit of pique, overturning desks, destroying equipment, shredding research papers to confetti, smashing keyboards down to the last button as Bob looked on in growing alarm.

"After six months of being repeatedly humiliated in the name of the ruling order, Bill was at his wits' end. He no longer wanted us to prove ourselves to society, for such a thing was impossible; he wanted to overturn society and replace it with something better – and he believed that our research into harnessing Weirdness could make it possible. Better power rates for less than $300 a year – sign up with our exclusive services at Pyramid Incorporated today!"

"Let me guess: you tried to talk him out of it, you couldn't change his mind, and the two of you had a major falling out. Next thing you knew, you were enemies and running your own energy projects, with you planning to use your power to champion moderate change and Bill using his power to advocate total upheaval."

"You've seen too much of X-Men: First Class. Either that, or you're trying to cast us in the same roles as you and Fiddleford. Cute, but no. I was on Bill's side from the very beginning. Like I said, Bill and Bob were out to take on the world."

"Seriously?"

"I was in the same boat as him, Ford, and I was his equal in genius and ambition. After half a year of being treated like a whore and seeing all my discoveries used to grind down my fellow Triangles a little bit further every day, do you really think I'd be part of the Give Peace A Chance crowd? Fuck no. I wanted to see society flipped on its head like a pancake, drizzled in lemon juice, marinaded in an ocean of delicious golden syrup, and eaten with a side of crispy bacon. Viva La Revolution!"

And I think the metaphor got away from you there, Bob. Also, thanks a lot: I'm now hungry.

"However," the Pyramidion admitted, "there was a disagreement about how we wanted our new society to be organized when we finally got around to the big breakthrough. I imagined a world where individual ambition was not subservient to caste, nor shackled to the demands of the many: I wanted a society that could encourage the long-enslaved shapes of our universe to strive for their own profit. And Bill-"

"No, don't tell me, he already gave me a precis during Weirdmageddon. Bill wanted a fun world, no more restrictions and no more laws, a party that never ends with a host that never dies. He wanted a world of total chaos where the only rules were the ones he could dream up on the spot and forget all about. Am I on the right track?"

"Pretty much. Bill never really grew up: he'd always chafed under rules, always hated to be told 'no', always dreamed that he could be immune to the consequences of his actions. He never forgot a slight, harbouring one grudge after another until reality itself became his enemy. The humiliation of seeing others rewarded for his hard work was just the final straw… but even I didn't think he'd become as monstrous as he did." The Pyramidion sighed. "At the time, I thought he'd eventually lose interest and focus on something more productive – if only because he usually got bored with long-term strategy. Because I thought his ideas were too fanciful to ever be achieved, I didn't oppose them until it was too late.

Weirdness takes many forms across the multiverse, commanded by many masters and going by many different names: in some universes, it is the essence of magic, while in others, its exact opposite. Whatever the case, our research confirmed that Weirdness was the key to undermining reality and substituting a new one in its place; Bill and I sought a pure source of Weird Matter beyond our dimension to siphon power from, believing it was the only thing potent enough to manifest our ambitions. It took nearly three years of working away behind the scenes, until at long last, we had our masterpiece: the Weirdness Siphon.

I still remember seeing its first activation, seeing that fissure in the ether opening above the siphon – seeing the power pouring through it, ready to be harnessed. From that moment, we had the means of channelling all that energy in whatever direction we pleased… and I thought we'd be using it to topple the Decagon regime and create our society of equals on its ashes. I thought that Bill would see reason, that nobody in their right mind would actually want a world of chaos. I was still thinking that when Bill started to laugh. It's alive! It's aliiiiiive!

He'd cheated me: behind my back, he'd built a control focus into his cane so he would have sole command of the siphon and its energies. I tried to stop him, tried to tell him that channelling too much Weirdness at once would be dangerous, but he wouldn't listen. Next thing I knew, reality itself began to dissolve around us; Bill's proto-Weirdmageddon was nowhere near as chthonic as the version you witnessed, but no less devastating. For two minutes, our world was the lawless "fun world" that Bill had wanted all along. Then it all fell apart: the interdimensional energy source we'd tapped into was too pure, and Bill had bypassed all my safety protocols with his control focus, so when he finally lost control, the Weirdness wave that was unleashed upon the world was nothing less than purest entropy.

The Second Dimension burned before our very eyes, consumed by the blue flame of Weirdness, entire continents vanishing on our monitors as we looked on. In the final moments of our world, I tried to get Bill to stop the siphon, to try to fix what he'd done. But he thought he could still have his fairytale kingdom if he could just retain control for a little while longer. I turned on him in a rage. You were the chosen one!

So, for the first time in our entire lives, we fought, and in our struggle for control, we became channels for the flood of Weirdness. Infused with agonizing power and burning alive, we fell beyond the grasp of gravity and plunged into the fissure in reality we had made. The fall destroyed us, shredded our physical bodies down to the last atom, reduced us to nothing more than empowered spirit, and left us stranded in the void between realities… but we were alive – and we were the only survivors of the Second Dimension.

And the battle between us wasn't over yet: we had lost everything, but we both had so much more to fight for – Bill for another shot at building his perfect world, me for a chance to take revenge on my erstwhile friend. It took a while for me to get used to travelling around the multiverse as a bodiless essence, but I eventually found that Bill had tracked down the source of the purified Weirdness that we had harnessed and had firmly grounded himself there in the spaces between spaces. In your world, you call it-"

"The Nightmare Realm," Ford finished.

"Just so. However, in the history that I lived through, my Bill didn't have a chance to fully merge with the entropic weave of the Realm: he never became a dream demon, never became known as the Beast With Just One Eye… and not to sound immodest, I'm pretty sure that I can claim the credit for that. In my attempt to kill him, I ended up tackling Bill out of the Nightmare Realm before he could fully acclimatize to it, and once again, we fell – this time into another dimension and into corporeal reality. The descent nearly killed both of us, left us as dying wraiths stranded in a world we could not touch, and in our final plunge, I lost track of Bill. I didn't see him again for billions upon billions of years, and by then, the two of us had changed beyond all recognition. For then, I was lost in an unfamiliar three-dimensional world, a castaway on Earth."

There was an expectant silence, and then the Pyramidion added, apropos of nothing, "Wilsooooon!"


By the time Dipper had finished scouring the outside of the lighthouse, he'd officially exhausted his lexicon of bad language.

He'd spent the last few minutes picking his way along the edge of the pinnacle on which the lighthouse had been built, looking for any sign of a hidden cache in the wall, the cliff-face, or even in the water below – without much success. More than once, he'd lost his footing and very nearly gone plummeting into the water below, only to end up falling in a different direction and just graze his knees. At least twice, he'd caught a glimpse of something huge oozing through the shallows far below him, and he'd been forced to duck out of sight just in case it happened to look upwards.

On the upside, at least he'd managed to avoid waking Lorraine up. On the downside, it was clear that there was absolutely nothing to be found on the outside of the lighthouse: no alcoves dug in the cliff, no hidden wall compartments with switches concealed in the brickwork, no magical x-marks the spot, zip, nada, zilch. Either Winter really had found the cache and picked the site clean before he'd been forced to shut down the park – in which case, Dipper was well and truly out of luck – or the cache was hidden inside the lighthouse.

In which case, Dipper fumed, I really should have checked there first instead of worrying that I wouldn't get a chance if Lorraine woke up. Why did I bother with this stupid approach?!

Grumbling more choice expletives, he hitched up his shorts again, pulled his socks up over his scuffed ankles, and headed indoors.


There was a painfully long pause, as the echoes finally died away.

Ford was the first to break the silence: "But how did you survive?" he asked. "Assuming that what I heard from Bill holds true in this dimension, then you would have landed on Earth long before the evolution of sentient beings capable of saving you through magic or technology, so how did you even live through those early days?"

"As I'm sure you know well enough by now, Stanford Pines, the hidden history of this world is slightly different to yours. More to the point, this dimension is even older than yours and guided by different physics: this world has seen many Ages, and each one has birthed marvels beyond imagining and horrors beyond endurance; though few beyond the secret societies know of it, we are living in the Fourth Age, and some believe that we are approaching its climax… but when I arrived on Earth, it was at the height of the First Age."

Ford briefly considered asking how long an Age was supposed to be; after all, though he could practically hear the capitalization of the word, so there was no need to ask about its significance, but at the same time, there was no indication as to whether it should be measured in decades, centuries, millennia, or even longer. In the end, though, he decided not to – if only because he wanted to reach the most important points of this story.

"There were entities alive on Earth in those days," the Pyramidion continued, "and as luck would have had it, I was detected and rescued by the most advanced of them: the Host. The Builders. They who had built the Hell Dimensions as a first draft; they who made the Earth and the universe that contained it as their finished work; they who laid the foundations of Gaia, the divine biocomputer herself. With their technology, they were able to give me a new body of imperishable stone and undying crystal, housing my tattered consciousness within an immortal CPU of near-infinite complexity, binding my wounds with raw data, and replacing my lost limbs with powers most mages can only dream of. Like a boss."

"So… you're a supercomputer?"

"Beep boop, Ford, beep boop. A magical supercomputer that would make the Turing Test wave a little white flag and go home in tears. I was only a pocket calculator next to Gaia, but compared to nothingness, I was more than willing to accept second place."

"I did wonder why you sounded so… clinical. But if you're a computer, then how are you appearing before me like this?" Ford indicated the Pyramidion's hovering triangular figure. "Is this a hologram, or-"

"A raw manifestation of my spirit, projected through magic and fully capable of physical interaction." By way of evidence, the Pyramidion reached down and gently squeezed the armrest of the chair into metallic pulp. "I don't often manifest myself this way – helps maintain the mystery, makes it harder for ambitious underlings to find ways of replacing me, not that they'd ever find any of them. I don't use my powers so blatantly either: it's quite a drain on my systems, and I always have to take downtime to recover from every single occasion I've had to act directly. The Host aren't known for design flaws, so I can only assume that they gave me this limitation deliberately just in case I ever went full-blown Bill."

"But the Builders who rescued you, this Host, what were they like?"

"You may have seen a few modern representations of them in church. Under their rule, the Earth was a garden, and all races lived in harmony… until humanity was born to Gaia. The Jinn protested the new arrival and were exiled; the Host themselves became divided as to what to do with their masterpiece, and from them were born rival factions – Grigori and Nephilim – and the garden burned in the rebellion that ended the First Age-"

Ford held up his hands for silence; it had taken a long while for the clues to stack up, but now there was no way of ignoring the implications. "Hang on a minute! Are you saying that… you were rescued by angels?"

"Like I said, you may have seen a few modern representations of them in church."

"Then… angels created the world?"

"And by extension, they created God – in the form of Gaia."

"But that… that's incredible! How… how is this even possible when… I mean, some of the texts I read in the Illuminati library suggested that the gods of the Egyptian and Norse pantheons were real as well, so how can-"

"There is a popular saying within our secret world: 'everything is true.' There have been other Ages of the world, Stanford Pines, some of them with vastly different physics than this one: quite a few of these other gods reigned in those lost Ages, before an apocalypse levelled their kingdoms and began a new Age. Some of those gods are still alive today, believe it or not."

"But what were you doing through all those Ages?"

"Recuperating. Falling through dimensions isn't something you can recover from in the space of a week, even once you've been given a shiny new supercomputer body, and my mind still hadn't fully pieced itself back together again. While I was stuck singing "If I Only Had A Brain," the Age was ending, and that really took a lot out of me. I was sawing logs up until the end of the Third Age; then, and only then was I awake… among specimens of humanity that was just starting to build cities again."

"And so… you got in touch with them and formed the Illuminati?"

"It was a collaborative effort. There were already people who shared my perspectives on how the world should be run: intellectual achievement, free enterprise, imagination, profit-centric thinking… when you get right down with it, I simply showed them the way to accomplish their ideals. Handshake protocol in action, stand by for marionette activity."

"But why? Why make the jump from being a scientist to the head of a secret society?"

"Why not? I had eternity ahead of me and didn't have anything better to do. Improving the world was the only thing I could do that seemed worthy of my time. Once I was finished getting used to being a giant hunk of metal buried under the Sudan, I reached out with my newfound powers and began contacting receptive individuals: I gave them access to my computational brain, to my database of long-forgotten magic and technology, to my more… esoteric abilities. In return, they banded together under my banner and followed my orders. Before long, I was no longer Bob; I was the Pyramidion."

"Then you headed north, into Egypt. Am I right?"

"True, true. There was a very good reason why Egypt devoted itself to the pyramid so diligently; in your history, I imagine that Bill was the one who influenced them towards the worship of the shape, but in this dimension, I took that role. My children, the followers of the Eye and the Pyramid, made Egypt a power to be reckoned with through secret knowledge and intellectual might: though none of us ever took high office, we ruled the kingdom from behind the scenes, commanding the influence of the Pharaohs through advisors, scholars, and priests… until an army of labourers went south and dug me up so that I could oversee my lieutenants directly. Egypt's success was owed entirely to our magical experiments and wise council… up until the events of Akhenaten's reign forced us to leave, but by then, Greece had already become more interesting; and when Greece failed, Rome was blossoming to fruition. Wherever we went, we went for the same prizes: wealth, magical artifacts, technological wonders, and above all else, brilliant men and women capable of building our utopia – a world where self-interest and profit would lead to perfect order instead of chaos. Rise, Rapture, riiiiiiiiiiiiise…

Oh, I won't pretend we've made it to the finish line yet. There've been quite a few speedbumps on the road: the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the fall of Rome, the Templars kicking us out of Europe, the rise of Orochi… we're still opposed in Europe by the Templars, in Asia by the Dragon and the Orochi Group, and the Council of Venice persists in its attempts to enforce its spectacularly limpdicked rules. But here in America, we've built the nearest thing to our promised utopia yet, developing technothaumaturgical innovations that most other societies can only dream of and remodelling ourselves along corporate lines; in the process, we've gone from the power behind the scenes in a few dozen nations to the guiding force of the single most powerful nation on Earth. 'Merica, FUCK YEAH!

In fact, it was in America that my brethren finally healed the damage to my mind when they first connected me up to the Internet, replacing my networks of watchers with cameras and internet connections, sealing the last of my psychic injuries with raw, unfiltered data. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him."

That certainly explains all those non-sequiturs, Ford mused.

"Today, we have more than I could possibly have imagined back when I was starting out. These days, we work the magic of the drunken evenings with senators and chiefs of staff; we shake down demons and negotiate with sorcerers; we have stocks in Hell… and compromising photos of angels. And the best part of all, there hasn't been a president elected that we haven't been able to control."

"Does that include Quentin Trembley?"

"What, the guy we drowned in a vat of peanut brittle? Yeah, we could control him… but after the last few dozen fuckups, he'd become too much of an embarrassment to tolerate. Anyone else, we'd just let someone Lee Harvey Oswald them into martyrdom, but Tremblay was a special case. Eliminating and unpersoning him was the best thing for the old bastard, really… but unfortunately, his removal led to the Northwests coming to prominence – another headache we had to deal with down the line."

Ford took a deep breath. This was the moment he'd been waiting for: up until now, he'd been content to let the Pyramidion ramble on, partly because he was genuinely interested but mostly because Bob was almost as in love with the sound of his own voice as Bill. Now, though, it was time to get the information he'd needed, and as luck would have it, the Pyramidion had given him the perfect opportunity to put a word in edgewise.

"Does that mean you had a hand in what eventually happened to Gravity Falls?" he asked.

The Pyramidion hesitated.

"Come on, Bob, you said you'd tell me everything I wanted to know if I told you about Bill. Why stop now?"

"True… you have been patient. Very well: if you have any questions of the history of this world, of Gravity Falls, of Glass Shard Beach, or of Solomon Island, ask. I will answer."

"Then I think it's time you told me all about what happened to Gravity Falls…"


Dipper had almost given up.

He'd spent nearly half an hour pouring over the lighthouse's ground floor for the cache, looking for hidden buttons in the dim hope that it might unearth the clue he'd been looking. He'd even tried to take the elevator to the top level, hoping that the cache might be hidden up there, but the call button didn't respond; a handwritten OUT OF ORDER sign had been taped to the door, complete with the signature of someone named "Sam Krieg," and a demand to be left alone.

And just when Dipper was about to throw in the towel and get some rest, he happened to trip down the rickety metal steps leading to the elevator, toppling off the staircase and landing just to the right, amidst a snowdrift of dust and cobwebs. Normally, he would have taken this as another sign of his monumental bad luck, but and as he was hauling himself to his to feet, he happened to bring his hand down on one of the flagstones just under the staircase – and was immediately rewarded with a suspiciously hollow sound.

It turned out that Archibald Henderson had a much more prosaic form of security when it came to his deepest, darkest secrets: instead of concealing them inside password-locked prototype laptops or in hidden compartments with cunningly-disguised switches that nobody would recognize without the help of his journal, the old man had simply dug a pit under the steps and stashed his things inside, trusting that nobody would look twice at a loose flagstone in the dirt under a bog-standard flight of stairs.

Inside the tiny alcove, a notebook bound in oilskin had been squeezed into place, almost too dense to fit in the space that had been dug for it. Practically shivering with anticipation, Dipper plucked the notebook from its shelf and started reading…

"I told you before that I didn't know what became of Bill when the two of us fell to primeval Earth, and I meant it. To this day, I'm not entirely sure how he survived long enough to attain a body of his own: I suspect he was in the same boat as me, a dying ghost stranded in an alien landscape, but with no Host there to save him he shouldn't have survived. But he clung stubbornly to life, his spirit lurking in the soil of what would one day become Gravity Falls, until he… fused."

"Fused – with the soil itself? Are you saying he became Gravity Falls?"

"Not quite, but I'd be lying if I said he didn't form a major basis of it. What he became was, as his later followers were to describe it, a monolith. Sounds impressive, but it's really just a solid lump of petrified soil: it was good enough to prevent Bill's spirit from dissipating, but it couldn't move and it was buried six feet under, so I doubt it was very pleasant for Bill. I have no mouth and I must scream. Ford, why are you smiling?"

"No reason," said Ford, hastily forcing the grin off his face. "Just a bit of history repeating itself."

"Eons passed, Ages came and went, forests layered his resting place, and eventually, all signs of his arrival were erased. Anywhere else, the crater he'd left might have drawn attention, might have even prompted early humans to dig him up break him down into magical relics… but the flying saucer that eventually crashed there drew all attention away from him. Could this have been made by ancient astronauts? Is such a thing even possible? Yes, it is!

I don't know how long it took for him to regain consciousness, whether he remained asleep until the dawn of human civilization in the Fourth Age, or if he was awake through all those billions upon billions of years. Click here to purchase your own specially designed mattress for the price of your dignity! Either way, he only had a thimbleful of Weirdness to draw upon and just enough telepathic ability to speak; if he wanted to make his dreams a reality, he needed help from someone greedy and ambitious enough to accept his offers of power and build him a new siphon."

"And then the Northwests came to power in Gravity Falls," Ford sighed.

"Exactly. And you can imagine just how badly they wanted to rise above their humble origins; Bill's offer must have seemed very tempting to them. Being rich and successful was one thing… but walking side by side with the divine was something else. So, they began a project that was to last for generations, all with the aim of restoring their new master to life, rebuilding the Weirdness siphon, ushering in Bill Cipher's promised utopia. At the time, I'm quite sure they thought themselves partners; in truth, they were his worshippers."

"Hence the tapestry. However, that does raise some interesting questions about the Northwests in my dimension: Fiddleford ended up buying the Northwest Manor after Weirdmageddon, and he told me that same tapestry was hanging in the entrance hall. Now, Preston Northwest sided with Bill at the start of Weirdmageddon, and he immediately got the consequences square in the face... but if my dimension's version of the Northwest family started out worshipping Bill as they did in your reality – except with Bill trying to escape from the Nightmare Realm – why didn't we end up with an early Oddpocalypse? I mean, with the entire family throwing its resources at the problem over the decades, then why didn't my Bill have a portal built much sooner?"

"Two possibilities: either the Northwests lost sight of their original goal and got more interested in material wealth than world domination, or they literally couldn't find someone capable of building and designing the portal, so Bill lost interest. In a contest between a once-in-a-generation intellect and a gang of chinless wonders, the inbred plutocrats never come out on top."

"Oh. I'll try to be flattered."

"Anyway, I didn't figure out what was going on in Gravity Falls until the Northwests made inroads as far as Washington DC during the turn of the century. They were looking for political influence and occult information… and they didn't realize that I had informants everywhere; under the pretence of a business meeting, I had one of the Northwest emissaries invited to New York so I could study them up close. Immediately, I noticed the smell of Weirdness, that stink of ozone and rotten fruit. Air fresheners for sale at only $6.66 a box! I knew they were Bill's servants, and once I was finished having the Northwest's properties bugged, I knew what they were trying to do. I even knew that they had even successfully dug up Bill's monolithic body and were storing them in a warehouse somewhere in Gravity Falls. In the face of the progress they had made, there was only one option."

"Then you were to blame for the fire of 1909," said Ford, coldly.

He'd wanted to be angrier about this, to scream the accusation at the top of his lungs, but by now, he'd heard enough to guess what had happened and the shock had long since been lost.

"As I said, it was the only option available to me: the location of Bill Cipher's body was known only to the Northwest patriarch, and he was too paranoid to discuss it anywhere that a microphone could be hidden. I couldn't afford to be discriminate, not when there was an entire family of loyal scum that would no doubt continue their apocalyptic mission even with my old friend dead for good. Besides, Bill had contaminated the very soil with his presence; for all I knew, he might be able to return from it even if I destroyed his body. I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit; it's the only way to be sure.

So, I handled the matter myself: over the course of three long days, I focussed all my power on Gravity Falls, channelling my wellspring into a lightning bolt, then the winds I needed to fan the flames…"

A split-second later, Bob was hovering directly in front of him, suddenly pitch-black with rage and tall enough to carve divots out of the ceiling with the brim of his hat.

"AND I BURNED THE BASTARD," he thundered, his voice still a deathly monotone despite the change in volume.

The Pyramidion took a deep breath, gradually shrinking back to normal size. "I made sure that every single building big enough to hide Bill's body was incinerated; I made sure their contents were heated to the surface of the sun and shattered to dust; I made sure that every single Northwest with a trace of Weirdness on them was burned or suffocated to death; I made sure that the very soil had been permeated and denatured by my magic… and through it all, I made sure to listen for Bill's screams. I heard him telepathically howling in agony that night, screaming for me to have mercy on him. It felt like justice. It felt like victory."

"The Northwest children were also killed in that fire," said Ford, icily.

"JUST LOOK AT ALL THE FUCKS I GIVE. They were damaged goods, Ford, links in a chain of rotting meat and diseased bone: they had been segregated from outside influences, conditioned to revere Bill Cipher as a god and bring about his apocalypse. If I'd let them go, they would have continued the mission like good little Northwests. I hadn't worked for the better part of five thousand years to build an ideal society just so it could be undone by a couple of brats working in the name of a dead god."

A tiny ember of rage was beginning to heat up in the back of Ford's mind, getting hotter and hotter by the second. "And what about Glass Shard Beach?" he said, barely keeping his voice neutral. "Was that you as well?"

"Perceptive, Ford, very perceptive. I hope you're not getting upset just because the fire ended up killing your alternate self. Constants and v-"

"Answer me, goddammit!" Ford shouted.

"Yes… but I admit, the collateral damage was not intended. But that's the trouble with using fire to sterilize an infection: it has a nasty habit of spreading."

"An infection? Are you… are you suggesting that there was Weirdness loose in Glass Shard Bay?"

"Not loose – yet. I had to act quickly to avoid a breach in containment and sending in a team of my best operatives would have taken too long. Fire was the only way I could safely eliminate the threat… and believe me, it was more than justified, regardless of how many lives were lost. In this dimension, Bill Cipher's chosen energy is a plague on reality, second only to the Filth in sheer universal toxicity. Danger, Will Robinson!"

Ford was dimly aware that he was gripping the armrests of the chair, doing his best to suppress his anger. He needed answers more than he needed an argument, and the sooner he got his information, the better; he just needed to keep reminding himself that he'd met worse people than the Pyramidion – that as cold and ruthless as Bob was, Bill had been a thousand times worse.

He took at least a minute before continuing, doing his best to keep his anger in check. Then, he plunged right back into the fray: "There's one thing my sources didn't explain; just what was Nathaniel Winter doing there?"

"Ah, Nathaniel Winter, the human dose of the clap himself. If there was one child that didn't deserve the help of the foster care system, it was him." The Pyramidion fumed for a moment. "It still amazes me that some fatherless West Coast brat with a godlike sense of entitlement managed to prove such a nuisance to us in so short a space of time. Even Mark Zuckerberg doesn't piss me off as much as Winter. If I knew who his parents were, I'd have their remains publicly violated as a warning to all the other annoying fucksticks."

"Er… can we get back to the subject at hand?"

"Alright, alright… You've no doubt heard of his visit to New York, then?"

"I did read that far, yes. Something about heart trouble and a private clinic."

"That was Winter's cover story, yes. Error 404: Blatant Lies. At the time, he didn't need medical attention: he'd recovered from the heart attack he'd suffered earlier that year, and he was having some difficulties with his lungs, but nothing out of the ordinary – he'd been suffering from respiratory issues since childhood – but nothing that could justify a year-long vacation in New York. No, he was applying for membership with us."

"Seriously?"

"As serious as a giant Dorito living inside a supercomputer can be. Nathaniel Winter wanted to join the Illuminati, petitioned us directly for a place in our ranks; don't ask me how he'd found out about the secret world, much less about how to contact us, but contact us he most assuredly he did. He didn't just want to be a contributor, though; he wanted to be taught how to use magic. Yer a wizard, Harry!"

"Why? What could possibly have inspired that? I mean, from what I've read, he had just about everything a man of his position could possibly want: money, political influence, a legacy, a family… he didn't have any scholarly or scientific interests, and he didn't really strike me as much of a fantasist, so why would he want to learn magic?"

The Pyramidion laughed softly. "You're too innocent for your own good, Ford: you don't really understand megalomania. For some, having all the money and power in the world isn't enough, and for some, the realization that there are other kinds of power has a habit of digging holes in the ego. Old Moneybags caught a whiff of a power he didn't have, and he wanted it all. I wanna be the very best, like no-one ever was … but in the end, we turned him down. 'It's not you, honey, it's us: we don't like you.'"

"I admit, I half expected that," Ford mused. "The last article I'd read claimed that Winter had left New York in a bad mood, claiming that someone had turned down an offer from him. What I want to know is why you refused him; I mean, I'd have thought a man of his wealth and influence would be a useful asset to the Illuminati."

"As an asset, yes. We have thousands of such: politicians, plutocrats, warlords, mercenary leaders – useful, but never valuable enough to be counted as real Illuminati. Winter didn't want to be an asset – he wanted to be a member of the Illuminati… and he didn't realize that there are some things that money can't buy: we accept only the most talented and the most ambitious among our ranks. Winter had ambition, but his talents were garden variety real estate exploitation. He wasn't a prodigy, he wasn't a genius, and he wasn't a financial wunderkind: he was just the 1% who survived the journey uphill out of sheer dumb luck. Given time, he'd have probably gone bankrupt and been forgotten like all our other assets over the centuries… but you try telling these people that money doesn't buy true power. News on the march: Hedge Fund Manager Shoots Self In The Balls, Admits He Never Had Any To Begin With!

As for magic, he didn't have an ounce of magical talent in his body: no genetic gifts, no psychological aptitude, no grasp of arcane knowledge. If he wanted to learn, he'd have to study for years on end to master the simplest spells, and frankly, he wasn't worth the effort, not when he'd probably blast himself to pieces just trying to get that far. Besides, he wouldn't be satisfied with that much: he wanted to be the best, and he wanted it yesterday. Too much ambition, not enough talent? Dangerous liability in this organization: we take shortcuts when necessary, not when ego demands it. So, we showed him the door, the exit sign, and the car park."

"But he didn't stop there, did he? He kept taking shortcuts: that was why he kept seeking out all those sites of occult significance, wasn't it? He wanted to find something that could make him the best mage in the world."

"Correct. Now you know why we had to destroy the Weirdness relics in Glass Shard Beach. Can you imagine what an entitled gasbag like Winter would do with the power of Bill Cipher?"

"But why the stopover in Gravity Falls? Why did he bring back the Cipher tapestry?

"Good question, no fucking clue. I can only assume he'd heard about the town's reputation for unusual activity; in truth, it would have afforded him very little. Gravity Falls is not as rare and precious a thing as it is in your reality, Ford: the paranormal is much more widespread yet much stealthier. Thankfully, Bill was dead long before Winter started sniffing around."

"And so he found his prize on Solomon Island – or at least, he thought he found it."

"Astute as ever. Solomon Island has belonged to the Illuminati ever since the eighteenth century, so we kept a close eye on him during his construction of Atlantic Island Park; he was using designs bought from an architect he'd encountered in the Calypso Deep, so we knew the power source he hoped to tap into had to be something special – we just didn't know what it was. Our intention was to wait until he'd gotten his hands on the power he'd acquired, and then seize it for ourselves. How are you gentlemen! All your base are belong to us."

"And then his business fell apart, the park was shut down, and Winter turned up dead. Did your agents find anything in the ruins?"

"Nothing we could extract without getting into a shit-fight with Winter's estate. Legally, he still owned the damn thing, and we couldn't delve too deep without first taking a flamethrower to all that red tape. Besides, from what little we were able to learn from the machines on site, the process he was attempting to achieve didn't work. So, we decided it wasn't worth salvaging and abandoned the project… up until our field operatives reported that Atlantic Island Park had somehow started up again in the wake of the Fog."

The Pyramidion's eye crinkled into a smirk once again. "There's a Bogeyman living around there now, straight from the darkest reaches of under the bed. It's pulling the strings of the park, and I suspect, Lorraine Maillard as well. And from I've heard from your conversations, you suspect much the same thing. I know that you know that I know that you know. QED: PWNED."

"How do you know about Lorraine? From what Stan was telling me, she was meant to be a top-secret asset of the Council Of Venice, their ace in the hole by the sounds of things-"

"Exactly: was. I've no doubt Lorraine was priceless when she was first recruited, back when mullets were still cool, but times have changed: in the last couple of years, every major secret society has been snapping up members of Gaia's Chosen like hot cakes. Fact of the matter is that Lorraine just isn't that special anymore. And as for 'top secret,' they did a pretty decent job keeping Lorraine's status hidden even from me, but once Lorraine ended up making the news, all those attempts at clandestine activity go out the window. Right now, the Council think they've managed to keep Lorraine under wraps." The Pyramidion practically vibrated with suppressed laughter. "They couldn't be more wrong."

"What do you mean? What did Lorraine do that was so newsworthy?"

"Long story. Suffice it to say that with everything that Utterson's been up to Solomon Island, the Council might be forced to share of its real secrets with us by way of reparations, ROTFLYSST. We just need to find the right bit of information to blackmail them with-"

"You were telling me about the Bogeyman that's been pulling Lorraine's strings."

"Oh. Right. You had questions, then?"

"Dipper had a few ideas about who was responsible for Lorraine's condition, and I admit there's some merit to them, but I still have doubts. His current theory is that the Bogeyman behind all this madness was Archibald Henderson, and it makes sense based on his track record of atrocities across the island and the applications of the power he was trying to harness. The question is, why? What's Old Man Henderson's motivation for toying with Lorraine, for doing any of this? What does he get out of this supernatural site?"

There was a befuddled pause, as the Pyramidion gave Ford a look more commonly associated with drug-induced non-sequiturs. "Scuzzi?"

"I mean, it's got to be something to do with immortality or godhood or something like that, but-"

"I must apologise; I keep forgetting you don't have access to all the data."

"No – in part because I couldn't get at the Illuminati archives hidden under the academy."

"Then there are a few things you should probably be aware of: the Bogeyman is a creature of illusion, yes?"

"I… I've heard as much. Why is that relevant?"

"Because your nephew is labouring under a terrible misconception, Stanford Pines, a misconception that the Bogeyman has already done his damnedest to encourage. There's something you should know about Archibald Henderson…"


At first, Dipper was disappointed.

As far as he could tell, the notebook was just Old Man Henderson's random thoughts on everyday life, a page for every day of the week, and most of it consisting entirely of Henderson's increasingly bitter diatribes about anyone who had gotten on his bad side. By the sounds of things, he had very little love for the people of Solomon Island, least of all the "fawning Illuminati lapdogs" at Innsmouth Academy. In fact, the only person he seemed to have a kind word to spare was his daughter, Samantha, and he lavished such praise and obsession on her in text alone that Dipper could only shudder to imagine what this kind of behaviour had been like in person.

However, scrawled on the bottom of every page were arcane symbols and strange codes that Dipper couldn't make head nor tale of; assuming that he hadn't just been doodling in the margins for the heck of it, the old man had been taking notes on magic using this book, so perhaps it was worthwhile after all.

As he neared the end of the book, the notes grew more and more fevered, including strange diagrams of magical constructs, arcane designs, ritual formulae, interspersed with page after page of paranoid rambling: apparently, Henderson was deeply concerned that someone was stalking him – his home had been broken into, his files leafed through by persons unknown, and Samantha had apparently heard someone creeping around outside her bedroom door in the middle of the night. The latter seemed to drive Henderson into a frenzy of protectiveness, as the next few pages of enraged chicken-scratchings illustrated.

SHE IS MINE, the old man had scrawled furiously. I have protected her from everything: from the Indians, from lesser suitors, from the lusting eyes of the Illuminati, even from my own servants, and I will not stop now. I have already created an army to protect what is mine, and the scarecrows have been effective – up until now. But if they are sneaking inside the house without the constructs detecting them, I must do more. This wicked, wretched world has stolen so much from me – my wife, my son, my eldest daughter, even my hope for a normal life – but it shall not part me from my beloved Samantha. The people of this island will call me a monster for daring to try, but they already call me a sorcerer and a devil-worshipper for daring to take justice into my own hands. I must be something worse than a monster in order to keep my last child safe, something worse than any devil of the pit. I shall shatter the very laws of creation if I must; I will see this dimension BURN before I ever let anyone take her from me!

Was that why Henderson had become the Bogeyman? Had it all been to protect his daughter? But if that was the case, why had he toyed with Lorraine so viciously? As far as Dipper knew, she didn't have anything to do with Samantha Henderson. So why had Henderson gone out of his way to torture her?

The last page was a little less fiery, but no less fevered. Indeed, the words had been written in such a hurry that they actually seemed to blur before Dipper's eyes, the text fading in and out of focus as he struggled to make sense of the spidery handwriting.

I can no longer leave my work unsecured, it read. They are watching me, just waiting for me to make my fatal mistake. I must move my most precious work underground, where none will think to look for it: the designs for the harvesting ritual, the infusion enchantment, the clarity spell – all have to be kept secret until my work is complete. I will rely on my own memory until then.

The spell of clarity must be kept protected above all others, because the Illuminati no doubt seek to destroy it instead of merely stealing it. It has the power to cut through any falsehood imaginable, dispelling illusions, banishing preconceptions, undoing even the deepest-ingrained madness, forcing all who fall under its sway to see the world with perfect objectivity. The followers of the Eye and the Pyramid will not want such a thing loose in the world; it would destroy their hegemony entirely – and the same goes for all the other secret societies.

I have buried these materials as far away from my farm as secrecy can allow, next to the path leading east from Illumination Way, just beyond Von Ickstatt drive; the burrow is carefully concealed, but nobody will ever find their way through the warren of passageways I've dug. They won't track down this cache!

And there it was: the spell of clarity – the very thing he needed to break through Lorraine's delusions and get her to see reality. And if Dipper knew this place well enough, the place where Old Man Henderson had hidden it was barely half an hour's walk from their current position! All he had to do to snap Lorraine out of this was to talk her into getting as far as the country lane behind Atlantic Island Park and find the cache.

Hopefully, Henderson couldn't stray beyond the boundaries of the park to protect it.

But apart from that minor, minor danger, they were practically home free: Lorraine would be thinking clearly again, and she'd be able to help him find Grunkle Stan and Mabel again, and then they'd rescue Grunkle Ford from whoever had kidnapped him; once they were all back together, getting home would be a piece of cake.

They just had to go a little further, and then everything would be right with the world...


"Oh god," Ford muttered. "This is bad. This is very, very bad. We need to get back to Solomon Island, now!"

"Who's 'we', exactly? What makes you think you're going anywhere?"

"I told you everything you wanted to know! I thought we were done!"

"And have a man from another dimension roaming free across contested territory? I don't think so. Weirdness is written on every cell in your body, smeared across your soul like dirty fingerprints; you ever think what might happen if someone with the know-how were to get their hands on you? Dimensional travel could be reverse-engineered from your blood. That escalated quickly. Right now, you're staying put until you can be shunted back home where you belong."

"But my family's on Solomon Island – my brother, my niece and nephew – they're in danger! Last I heard from them, they were trying to escape from Lorraine, and even if they managed it-"

"Unlikely: Council forces on the island are reporting disaster."

"Then Dipper is going to want to go to the lighthouse, and if your info is accurate, then whatever he finds up there is going to lead them straight into a trap!"

"Look upon the field where I hath sown my fucks. Behold, it is bare!"

"And what if the Bogeyman is working on some kind of apocalyptic plan? What if Dipper and Lorraine are exactly what the Bogeyman needs to end the world?"

"Apocalypses and bogeymen don't mix. All that matters to them is their next meal, and as far as we know, the current master of Atlantic Island Park is content with what he has."

"But-"

"If it turns out your hypothesis is correct, then we'll order in the troops. Until then, your family will just have to fend for itself, just like all the other supernaturally endangered families in the United States. And please, don't beg for compassion: a bleeding heart can only slow you down."

"For someone who was happy to see Bill Cipher dead, you're really not showing much gratitude considering my brother and I killed him."

"You killed a version of Bill Cipher. You didn't kill my Bill Cipher. Besides, it's not as if the news of it can give me any joy, is it? You can't give me the memory of his death to savour for all eternity. All I've got is the satisfaction of knowing that you're not one of his pawns sent to destroy my world as well."

Ford blinked. "But what if I could?" he asked softly.

"What?"

"What if I could find a way to give you the memory of Bill Cipher's death? Back in my world, I had a machine – Project Mentem – that could scan the human brain in its entirety; it's intended purpose was to bioelectrically protect thoughts from Bill's influence, but it could also project the contents of the user's mind on a screen, including memories. Now, if I had access to the right resources, I could rebuild Project Mentem here in this dimension, I'd be able to show you the very moment Bill died – from my perspective and Stanley's perspective. I'd even be able to record it for posterity if you wanted."

The Pyramidion said nothing, but Ford could tell from the narrowing of the eye that Bob was deeply suspicious.

"But I'll only do it if you'll let me rescue my family," Ford continued. "And if you really want to see that moment, you'll have to help save Stan first: he's the one who was there when Bill's mind was deleted."

"And you think you'll be able to get a clear picture from your brother's memories, even after what you had to do to them just to erase Bill? You think he'll even remember the moment of death at all?"

"He's been able to remember just about everything else in the days since then, so I don't see why not. Project Mentem will clear up any errors in his memories, and it'll be able to give you the first real taste of revenge you've had since the dawn of the 20th century. When your Bill Cipher was killed, you didn't get to see him die – you only got to hear it. This way, you'll get to see a version of him that was even worse than the one you knew, and you'll be able to witness every second of his demise up close and personal! Now, after all the millennia you spent brooding over the loss of the Second Dimension, why wouldn't you want something like that?"

Bob hummed softly to himself, arms folded, brow furrowed with consternation. When he spoke again, the unearthly monotone of the Pyramidion's voice was tinged with something not unlike menace.

"I'm going to very blunt with you, Ford," he said quietly. "I accept your proposition only because, as you say, it's something I've wanted ever since Bill's first death. But I want to make this nice and sparkling clear, my droogie: this is the arrangement as it stands. You don't get to work out any other deals until such time as you've fulfilled your end of it. As soon as Stan, Dipper, and Mabel are safe, your nose will be to the grindstone until such time as Project Mentem is completed or you're fucking dead and beyond all necromantic interference. Savvy?"

"Of course."

"And it goes without saying that you will complete this bargain to the letter. You will give me everything you promised. Everything. And if you try to renege on the deal, or if you've somehow figured out a way to fool the polygraph, I will make you and everyone close to you suffer: you will be arrested, sent to maximum security prison with consecutive life sentences, and I will make sure you live through all of them in solitary confinement; your brother will be condemned to a separate prison and made a target for every other inmate in the building; and as for Dipper and Mabel, I will see to it that they end up in juvenile detention, except on the rare occasions they accidentally end up in the same prison as you, right among the worst sadists and rapists in the building. I will to see to it that you and everything you love rots a slow, painful death…"

Suddenly, the Pyramidion was right in front of him, his body seething with energies, his eye red as blood. "AND THEN I'LL REALLY COME AFTER YOU," he thundered.

There was an ominous pause, as Bob slowly returned to normal. Then, in an almost cheerful tone of voice, he added, "This, incidentally, should in no way be construed as a threat. So, will you abide by the terms of our agreement?"

Ford nodded wordlessly, keeping his smile fixed so the anger and the fear couldn't show.

"Good. Then let's shake on it."

One spindly hand shot out, long, daggerlike fingers reaching out in an all-too-familiar gesture. But where Bill's handshakes were always wreathed with electric-blue flame, the Pyramidion's hand was shrouded in a haunting, almost radioactive sapphire glow. And where Bill's handshake had seethed with heat even from a distance and sent a feverish warmth rippling across anyone accepting that fateful bargain, the only thing Ford felt in the presence of Bob was an eerie, almost deathly chill. To Ford's terror-crazed imagination, it was the cold of cities lost in eternal winter, of nightmarishly beautiful buildings agleam with frost, of frost-shrouded streets where only machines could function and human beings lived only as long as the blizzards allowed it; it was the cold of perfect order, governed with all the ruthlessness and brutal flair of chaos.

Slowly, hoping against hope that he wasn't making a terrible mistake, praying that history wasn't about to repeat itself in the worst possible way, Ford reached out…

…and shook Bob's hand.


A/N: Up next: the search for the final cache! Feel free to furnish me with your theories and predictions - such things give me the strength to get out of bed in the morning!

For everyone else who feels like decoding atbash, here's the code to the next chapter:

Uork gsv Glk-Szggvw Svinrg. Gsv Svinrg dzmwvih rm drmgvi, uzi mligsdvhg. Sv ulfmw gsv zmhdvih sv dzh ollprmt uli… yfg gszg dzh mlg vmlfts. Mld sv zhkrivh gl gsv urinznvmg.