A/N: I had intended to post this chapter a couple of days ago, ladies and gents, and I can only plead extenuating circumstances - namely dental appointments and pain. Suffice it to say that wisdom teeth are not my friend. I can only beg your indulgence and hope that this chapter is up to standards.

Northgalus2002, thanks for the review - and I hate to add another question, but here's something fun to consider: even if - and only if - Fiddleford and the others can be saved, will they be able to recover from what Bill did to them?

Kraven The Hunter: yep, Bill's a very "burn them to dust, fuse the dust into glass and shatter it into dust all over again" kind of guy. Suffice it to say that he's also been encouraging Fiddleford's mechanical aptitude into a desire to modify his own body; if anyone ever manages to actually find the manufactory where he's been imprisoned, Fiddleford is going to look distinctly inhuman by the time they catch up with him.

Guest - I'm glad you liked the chapter, and I hope this chapter provides an entertaining and original game for Robbie.

Guest 2 (If you're the same reviewer as the first guest, please forgive me): I love long reviews - thanks so much for your theories and analysis! To answer your question, I know the SCP foundation very well, and I'm familiar with the one you suggested - though I wasn't drawing inspiration from 217 when I decided Fiddleford's game; I was thinking a very weird take on the Absorbing Man if you can believe it. I love your idea for Dipper and Wendy, and while I can't confirm if I'm going in that direction, I can only hope my conclusion lives up to the hype I've had from dedicated reviewers and theorists like you! Thanks so much!

Fantasy Fan 223: Once again, your reviews are a joy to read! In regards to Dipper not seeing Fiddleford, Mr A mentions Bill having cut off the manufactory from the usual loopholes - including tangibility and visibility: in other words, Fiddleford could never be seen through the windows and the skylight was just a cruel joke on Bill's part. As for their powers, Bill feels perfectly confident with giving his enemies these abilities is because he believes that they a) are under his control and b) he can remove them any time he likes it. For good measure, some of these powers have restrictions that mean that they can't be used against him - as you'll soon see. Of course, Mr A hints that they might develop beyond these restrictions; as for if he's correct... well, wait and see. There'll be some more hints as to Mr A's identity in this chapter - feel free to keep guessing! Also, I'm honoured, truly honoured at the thought of fanart regarding my work: whatever you produce, I'm grateful for it. Thanks again!

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter: feel free to furnish me with your lovely long reviews, critiques, criticisms, corrections, theories, recommendations, glowing appraisals, searing flames, and opinions of any kind - especially concerning the inevitable typoes. Read, review and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Gravity Falls is not mine, and neither is Dear Hearts and Gentle People. No lyrics are included, but just thought I'd mention it.

The first thing Robbie noticed was the air-horn blaring down at him from on high, rousing him from what had almost been a sound sleep and pounding mercilessly at his defenceless eardrums with all the crushing force of a steam hammer.

Flailing desperately for a grip on the waking world, he toppled out of bed and landed with a crash on the ice-cold concrete floor; instinctively, he forced one aching eye open, only to immediately shade them against the brutal onslaught of searing white light being poured down on him. It was like staring into a spotlight from less than three feet away. In the end, he could only close his eyes and cover his ears, hoping that the bombardment of noise and light would stop if he just waited long enough. But no sooner had he done so, someone hauled him upright by the scruff of his neck, swiftly wrenching his hands away from his ears and prizing his eyelids open with vicelike fingers, forcing him to finally witness the world around him.

He was no longer in the Fearamid. More to the point, his heart was back in his chest, his ribcage was closed, and the massive incision down his front had healed. Unfortunately, by the looks of things, the improvements hadn't gone very far.

The room he'd awakened in was tiny, a phone booth-sized cubicle just large enough to fit a bed, a toilet, a sink, himself, and the two guards currently holding him upright. On all sides, rough concrete walls and harsh fluorescent lights loomed over him: no windows could be found here, nor were there any decorations of unless you counted the loudspeaker still roaring down at him. The only exit was a heavy steel door, and by the looks of things it couldn't be opened from the inside. On the upside, the guards at either side of him had left it open; on the downside, escape didn't seem possible, for no matter how much Robbie struggled, he couldn't free himself from their grip.

The guards themselves were nothing short of nightmarish, and not just because they were at least three feet taller than he was: their bodies were impossibly thin, with long, spindly pipe-cleaner arms and torsos so sunken they looked more like desiccated apple cores – withered cylinders distinct even under their imposing black-and-gold uniforms. By rights, they shouldn't have been able to hold him still at all with the state of their muscles, but somehow their emaciated frames were strong enough to keep their prisoner almost completely immobile. And worst of all, they were staring right at him, allowing Robbie to see that from the neck upwards the guards were composed almost entirely of eyeball.

They didn't even have faces, just a single bloodshot eye from chin to forehead, slit-pupiled and sickly yellow.

Then, just as quickly as it had begun, the air-horn finally fell silent, and the guards finally released Robbie's eyelids. A moment later, a human voice echoed down from the loudspeaker, dull and official-sounding: "Attention A5 residents: workshift 1 commences in fifteen minutes. The following Shepherds are to report to the assembly enclosures: Madsen, Hammond, James, Lowry, Smith and Valentino. Security personnel are to assist new Shepherds through orientation. All hail Bill Cipher, Master of Earth."

And with that, the guards frogmarched Robbie out the door and into the most humiliating ten minutes of his entire life: first, they sat him down in front of a mirror and shaved his head, ignoring his every shriek of protest as they crudely sheared away the eye-covering fringe and mowed his scalp bare.

Then, they yanked him out of the barber's chair and proceeded to slice his clothes off with a pair of scissors: as if being undressed in front of two intimidating strangers wasn't bad enough, he then had to watch as his favourite jacket and skinny jeans were unceremoniously tossed into an incinerator, along with his shoes, piercings, wallet and phone – and all he could do was whine "But I didn't even had a chance to upload my selfies, man!"

After that, the guards escorted him down the corridor to a shower room, where they kicked him under a deluge of freezing water, shoved him in front of a wind tunnel to dry him off, and then forced him into an unspeakably ugly grey pair of coveralls.

And as if the look wasn't bad enough (what was he supposed to be, a janitor?) the coveralls itched.

A lot.

Ten minutes later, Robbie was dragged out of the warren of corridors bordering his new home and out into the unforgiving grey sunlight of a new reality: he was standing on the edge of a vast plaza large enough to accommodate all of Gravity Falls and probably all the neighbouring towns as well; all of it was brushed concrete tiles and stainless steel fixtures, decorated only with shallow moats of deathly-still water and terrifyingly minimalistic statues – most of them depicting eerily abstract figures staring at the ground, featureless heads bowed in submission.

Above them, massive concrete towers stretched into the sky like grasping fingers, windowless and bare except for the long yellow banners dangling from their uppermost ramparts. Each banner was decorated with a single distinctive symbol – one that Robbie recognized almost immediately.

;(

The winky frown.

Tearing his eyes away from the mocking banners, Robbie swiftly realized he and the guards weren't alone: all around him, miserable-looking people bustled to and fro across the plaza, either en route to the nearest building or leaving for the narrow streets. All of them were dressed in similar sets of coveralls, some grey, some green, some brown, some black, and just about all of them wore the same expression of mingled fear and depression. On every street corner, more guards stood on watch, their cyclopean eyes scanning the crowd for any signs of disobedience; more still mingled with the crowd, escorting groups of coveralled workers in and out of buildings.

Eventually, the guards finally brought Robbie to a stop in front of a decent-sized gathering of people standing in the middle of a roped-off enclosure, perhaps fifty to a hundred strong. Unlike the rest of the crowd, however, they were dressed in little more than rags. All wore the same uniformly blank expression, and all of them remained completely still and silent as the guards escorted him towards them; none of them moved, not even when the guards shoved Robbie at one of the nearest congregants. Instinctively, he hastily flung his arms out in front of him to stop himself from toppling forward, accidentally grabbing the blank-faced man by the arm as he did so.

It was then and there that, as he struggled to haul himself upright, that Robbie noticed that the man in front of him did not appear to notice that he was being used as a ladder. He didn't seem surprised or angry or even mildly confused; he just stared straight ahead, his gaze blank and lifeless. His slate-grey skin was ice-cold to the touch, and unless the movies had lied about how to properly take a pulse, Robbie couldn't find a pulse either in the guy's arm or his neck.

But it wasn't until Robbie noticed the distinct absence of breath that he finally realized that the man was, in fact, dead. Anxiously, he checked the man standing next to him: also dead, as was the woman standing beside him, as was the nine-year-old child standing to her right. Everyone in this roped-off enclosure was deader than disco – a zombie gently mouldering in the cold grey sunlight.

At that point, one of the guards slapped Robbie across the back of the head. "What was that for?" he demanded, trying not to sound as whiny as he felt.

By way of an answer, the guard held up a single piece of paper: get to work, it read. Shepherd reanimated human remains to the power plant, supervise their conversion to necrofuel, and then return here for additional duties. Failure to begin assigned tasks within five minutes will result in corporal punishment. Now get to work.

"Shepherd?" Robbie echoed. "How am I supposed to shepherd them, man? They aren't even reacting to anything! What the hell am I gonna do?"

The guard turned over the paper in his hands, revealing another block of text: Command them, it read. Direct with speech, hand gestures, and if necessary, the power of your mind – assuming you have one. You have been empowered to command the dead by the edict of Bill Cipher himself. Make use of this power to dispose of human waste and provide this city with fuel, or you will be punished.

"But why me? Why was I given this job?"

Because it's the one job you couldn't screw up, you underachieving ass-ache, said the other side of the paper. Now get these cadavers off to the power plant and stop wasting my time.

With that, the nearest guard shoved him back in the direction of the zombies. For twelve awkward seconds, Robbie stood in front of the group, hemming and hawing as he tried to figure out what to do next. Then, trying not to sound like an even bigger idiot than he felt in that moment, he gave his first experimental order to the zombies:

"Um… okay, guys. Follow me."

As the zombies shuffled to life, an idea struck Robbie, and he voiced it almost without thinking: "Does anyone know where the power plant is?"

Without missing a beat, the nearest guard reached out and punched Robbie in the ear.

As Robbie staggered backwards, clutching the side of his head in agony, the other guard grabbed him by the collar and pointed in the direction of a building somewhere in the distance: it took a little while for Robbie's smarting eyes to focus on it, but eventually he saw that it was a gigantic dome-shaped structure bordered on all sides by colossal industrial chimneys, all of which were continuously belching long plumes of smog into the stark-grey sky.

"Oh," Robbie groaned. "Okay then. Come on, guys, let's get moving."

It took over an hour for him to escort the zombies all the way to the power plant, and it was all uphill – figuratively and literally: once they were out of the roped enclosure, the zombies weren't all that inclined to stay together, and required constant ordering just to keep them from staggering to a halt in mid-march. Fortunately, they didn't seem inclined to eat anyone's brains. Unfortunately, letting the zombies to get too close to the other workers was an open invitation for the guards to attack him again, so Robbie had to remain alert at all times until they'd finally reached the entrance.

Once they'd arrived at the heart of the power plant, all he had to do was wait for the workers to open the massive glass-panelled doors to the furnace, and then order the zombies to step inside – where they were promptly incinerated.

That wasn't the worst of it, though: because he was to "supervise" the act, Robbie had to stay and watch through the insulated portholes as every single zombie was seared down to their bones and dissolved by the heat of the furnace. The sight alone was bad enough; the smell was worse. Once that was done, all he could do was walk back to the enclosure.

Fortunately the guards didn't seem to be paying as much attention to him on this leg of the journey, so along the way, Robbie managed to snatch a few seconds of conversation from other workers bustling across the plaza: from what little they could tell him, all of them were real people from around the world; fresh from being displaced and terrorized by the advent of Weirdmageddon, these unlucky men and women had been rounded up seemingly at random to serve as workers in this weird new city – wherever it was, if it even existed on Earth. As for the zombies, they'd supposedly been shipped in from around the world just like the people, except they were here to serve as fuel for the city: only a handful of people in the entire metropolis had been empowered to command them.

When Robbie finally got back to the enclosure, another batch of zombies was waiting for him, and the whole grisly escort mission started all over again. About the only upside to the whole thing was that he didn't actually recognize any of them. For twenty straight hours, he herded corpses to the incinerator, watched the uncomprehending faces of complete strangers melt off their bones, walked back, intercepted a fist or two from the guards, and did the whole thing all over again.

Eventually, his shift came to an end, whereupon the guards frogmarched him back to his residential block, shoved him into his apartment, shoved a tray of dry bread and gruel into his lap, and locked him in for the night – ready to drag him out of bed in another six hours to do the whole thing all over again.

(And Robbie had thought high school was bad...)

Doubly unfortunately, the zombies couldn't be used for any escape attempts, nor could they be coaxed into attacking anyone – not directly at any rate. Robbie quite naturally found this out the hard way after losing his temper and ordering his current mob of walking dead to kill the nearest guard; all the zombies had done was stand there, staring blankly ahead while the guards had pummelled him into submission.

The next day, Robbie returned to work with two heavily-bandaged hands and a black eye.

Lather, rinse, and repeat. No variation, except on the days Robbie had to actually reanimate the dead and bring back the resulting zombies from the corpse moat on the city's outskirts. Other than that, there was nothing: no entertainment, no free time, no privacy, no meals except at night, and no social interaction except for the few seconds of talk he could get before the guards caught up with him.

Even when he was alone in his cell, there was always a baleful yellow eye staring down at him from the ceiling, and nothing for him to do except wonder about what could have happened to his friends, hoping against hope that Tambry, Wendy, Thompson and the others were still alive somewhere.

Most of all, he hoped that Tambry was okay.

About the only time things really got interesting was the days when some joker (probably Bill) decided to project Robbie's internet history in the sides of buildings, and Robbie spent most of those days hiding his face with embarrassment as the entire plaza laughed at him – all while the banners across the plaza screamed "GET ANGRY, YOU WHINING COWARD! PROVE THAT YOU'RE NOT JUST ANOTHER JAMES DEAN WANNABE!" at him in furious red letters.

Robbie could never muster more than a split-second of anger at this, let alone a ghost of his old anarchic streak; the beatings had taught him to keep his head down.

So, he kept working, kept walking his feet to the bone and wearing his nerves thin in the constant effort of keeping the zombies from wandering off and avoiding corporal punishment. After all, what else was there to do? Where the hell would he go? As far as he could tell, there was nowhere to escape to: outside the city, beyond the putrid boundaries of the corpse moat, the ground dropped away into empty grey skies; there was no ground beyond the city, nor were there any other cities, or any sign that Earth lay somewhere beyond that cloudless grey void. This place, this hell, was its own self-contained world and there was no escaping from it.

Besides, as much as he hated to admit it, he really didn't want to get his fingers broken again.

Two weeks after he'd arrived in the city, Robbie found himself being flung out of bed for the fourteenth time in a row, this time scarcely bothering to struggle as the guards hurled him out the door. By then, he wasn't expecting much of the day apart from boredom, abuse and the occasional bit of public humiliation; resisting Bill's rule was the furthest thing from his mind, if only because compliance hurt less.

But then, as the assembly line slid into view, something amidst the waiting crowd of zombies caught his eye – a familiar length of vivid red hair glinting faintly in the dull sunlight.

Wendy?

He stopped short, half-expecting the vision to disappear, or at the very least to find that he'd been mistaken once he got close enough to see it for what it was. But no: standing just on the edge of the crowd was Wendy Corduroy herself, dressed in the same ragged gear she'd worn when Robbie had last seen her.

Then, just as he was beginning to recover from the shock Robbie's heart did a somersault inside his chest as he recognized the figure standing to Wendy's left; there was no mistaking that shock of purple hair, with its distinctive pink highlight: Tambry.

Even two weeks of mind-numbing work with the smell of roasting zombies filling his nostrils every other hour hadn't been enough to drive the thought of her out of his head or make him forget just how much he'd been missing her. If anything, the time he'd spent in this dismal place had actually heightened the longing, the sights and sounds and the sense of helplessness and isolation slowly sharpening everything he'd felt about her to ridiculous extremes – everything he'd left unspoken and bottled up silently building towards an explosion. And now that she was here…

Suddenly, Robbie was in motion, hurling himself down the brushed concrete paving stones at a speed he hadn't reached in what felt like centuries.

He knew that the guards would almost certainly beat him black and blue for running in the plaza, and he was dimly aware that he might have gone slightly mad from lack of company and stimulation, but in that moment, he no longer cared. All that mattered was getting down there and seeing that Tambry was okay, that Wendy was okay, that his friends were there, and they'd be together again and all would be right with the world for once.

And as he sped on, he saw more familiar faces waiting for him among the crowd: Thompson was there too, and so were Nate and Lee; the entire congregation was composed entirely of people he'd known from Gravity Falls. Even Dipper and Mabel were here, and Robbie couldn't help but rejoice at the sight of the annoying twins looking back at him from the multitude, if only because now there was hope that someone here might just have a way of getting out of this hellhole!

Finally, Robbie skidded to a halt right in front of the enclosure, immediately lunging forward and hugging Tambry fiercely around the shoulders.

"I missed you!" he shrieked, voice on the edge of hysteria. "God, I missed you so much! I missed all of you guys!"

Silence.

"Uh… Tambry? Tambry, are you okay?"

Tambry said nothing; neither did Wendy, Mabel, Dipper or any of the other people waiting in front of him. They just stared blankly ahead of them, eyes dull and unblinking.

"Tambry?" Robbie whispered. "Say something. Please, just say something, anything. Talk to me… please?"

And then logic finally caught up with him.

At long last, he noticed the grey skin, the dead gaze, the lifeless bodies, and the one fact that he'd deliberately overlooked up until now – the fact that they were in same enclosure as all the other walking corpses he'd been shepherding for the last two weeks. Tambry, Wendy and all the others weren't going to answer. Just like all the others who'd ended up in this enclosure before them, they were zombies. Tambry, the girl he'd missed more than anything else about the world before Weirdmageddon, was dead.

In that moment, one of the guards delivered another open-handed slap to the back of Robbie's head. Turning around, he saw that the eye-faced monstrosity was once again holding up a message on a piece of paper: Get to work. These have got to be incinerated by noon.

For a moment, Robbie's mind refused to process these instructions. Then, he blurted out "But they're my friends!"

They're necrofuel, to be burned for the sole purpose of keeping you and every other human in this place from freezing to death in the night. Get to work.

"But-"

The guard brought one massive hand down on Robbie's shoulder, claw-like nails instantly digging deep into his flesh.

Do you want me to break your hands again? The paper read. I don't care who these people were. Someday, your parents will be here, and you'll be expected to have them melted down like all the rest. Now stop wasting time and make something of your life, you pimple-faced wannabe iconoclast.

And in that instant, with five syringe-like talons buried in his shoulder, Robbie saw the future:

He saw himself doing as ordered, shepherding the animated corpses of Tambry, Wendy and all his friends and not-quite-friends off to the incinerator; he saw himself watching helplessly as people he'd known and befriended and even loved were slowly rendered down into featureless ash, watching as Tambry's face burned and charred and finally disintegrated in the heat of the furnace. He saw himself doing the whole thing all over again, this time with his parents; and again – sometimes with people he knew, sometimes with complete strangers. Before his eyes, the entire human race died, was reanimated and consumed by the power plant… until eventually the city was empty except for the guards and Robbie himself – the only human being left to burn.

Then the moment passed, and Robbie found himself back in reality… and suddenly realized he couldn't bear another minute of this.

With a scream that was probably only audible to dogs, Robbie wrenched himself free of the guard's grip and punched him as hard as he possibly could – right in the middle of his eyeball.

As the guard reeled backwards, Robbie turned to the gaggle of zombies and took to his heels with a shout of "RUN!" A moment later all eighty-five zombies followed, sprinting down the plaza as quickly as their shuffling gait could carry them, bowling over pedestrians and upending garbage cans as they loped away.

Behind them, Robbie could already hear the sounds of the guards clomping after him, but he had a head start of about thirty yards and there were too many zombies between him and them – too many for the guards to reach him easily. As long as he kept moving, he'd be safe; as long as he ordered Tambry, Wendy and the most important members of the horde to the front of the crowd, close to him, they'd be safe from the guards as well… so long as he could get to safety before the bastards caught up.

And safety was just a few yards away: ahead, the plaza came to a short, dissolving back into the tangled streets of the city proper; there were alleyways, derelict buildings, underpasses, bridges, and god only knew what else – a multitude of places where he could hide, where he could keep Tambry and the others safe. All he had to do was get there and make sure the guards didn't chip away at too many members of his little following before then.

Less than ten feet away from him, the guards brought two zombies crashing to the ground; slightly closer to home, a zombie caught its leg on a park bench and went crashing to the ground in a heap, tripping up five more – and by the time they were on their feet again, the guards were already restraining them. Moments later, a quartet of guards pincered in from the left and right, narrowly missing Robbie's closest ranks and cutting a vast swathe through the zombies behind him.

More guards dropped in from above, soaring in from the sky like vultures and scything down almost a dozen zombies between them. But even with members of his little entourage dropping like flies, none of the guards got anywhere near Robbie himself, and Tambry and the others remained completely unharmed.

Had Robbie been thinking clearly, he might have found this a little suspicious; he might have even wondered if the guards were moving a little slower than usual. But in that moment, these thoughts didn't dare enter his head: in that moment, all he cared about was getting himself and his friends to safety.

At long last, the narrowest of the street entrances loomed ahead: there were only twenty zombies left by now, but those were all that he needed. As the buildings rose around him, he spun around, pointed at the few remaining zombies outside of his immediate circle of friends and hollered, "STOP!" Instantly, the zombies stopped short – right in the middle of the alley entrance. As the guards behind him ploughed headlong into the undead barrier, Robbie, Tambry, Wendy and the rest of the zombie escapees sped on down the lane, around the corner and into the welcome obscurity of the alleyways.

But still they kept running onwards, not stopping until at least fifteen minutes later, when they were well into the warren of decrepit backstreets and alleys that wound their way between the city slums, and Robbie was certain they weren't being followed. Only then did he finally relax.

"Okay," he panted. "I think we can relax now. Everyone sit down."

The zombies obediently lowered themselves to the ground; by now, only his friends and not-quite friends remained, the rest of the flock having been scattered all of the plaza and arrested by now.

Naturally, Robbie had no idea what he was going to do now: he knew for a fact that guards didn't often patrol this part of town, hence why they usually kept the alleyways carefully fenced off with razor wire, so at least he didn't have to worry about being caught just yet.

Unfortunately, that was the only bright side to his current situation. Tambry was still dead, Wendy was still dead, Thompson, Nate and Lee were still dead, and the Pines twins were still dead, and presumably they were going to start decomposing soon – something that Robbie didn't care to witness again, not after that incident with "Mr Leaving-It-A-Little-Too-Late" at the funeral home. He couldn't even communicate with his friends: the zombies he'd shepherded couldn't think, let alone speak, and even if you could command them to do so, they'd just be responding to orders. And sooner or later, Robbie would have to face the fact that his friends were dead and gone forever.

But were they? Was death really so permanent in Bill Cipher's new world?

Robbie had seen Bill do all sorts of impossible things in the time he'd been conscious: he'd stopped time, warped gravity, changed people's shapes – Robbie clearly remembered having his own heart ripped out of his chest and being forced to chase it down a flight of stairs, and somehow surviving. Maybe, if Bill could do all that and even grant people the power to animate and control the dead, maybe he could also bring them to life.

Perhaps Robbie could find a way of reaching Bill if he moved carefully enough. He didn't know if he was to try and make a deal or figure out some means of threatening him, but somehow, he'd make him restore Tambry and the others.

"I'll find a way," he muttered. "I'll find a way if it kills me."

"Oh will you?" sneered an obnoxious voice. "I'd love to hear your ideas on the subject, Zits."

Robbie very slowly looked up and found himself staring into the face of Bill Cipher himself – accompanied by no less than a hundred and fifty guards.

Then, everything went black.

"I gotta say, Zits, you're even more boring than I thought."

Robbie jolted awake, immediately lurching away from Bill's voice on instinct – only to find that, wherever he was sitting, he'd been thoroughly strapped in.

"I mean, where's that famous rebellious streak I heard so much about? Where's the spirit of the awesome Robbie V and the Tombstones? Where's the vandalism? Where's the TPing, the egging, the petty theft, the graffiti, the backtalk, the mischief, the chutzpah? I'd have thought you'd at least have a reputation to defend after getting bailed out by a twelve-year-old!"

"Wh… what are you talking about? Why are you doing this to me?"

"Because I was honestly hoping to see if you had it in you to be a real rebel, not just another dime-a-dozen teenage wannabe-rebel poseur."

Somewhere deep within Robbie's badly-mangled sense of pride, a tiny spark flared. "Listen, pal," Robbie snarled, "I'm no poseur; I don't care who told you-"

"Nobody told me anything, Zits. I've been watching you just like I watched the rest of Gravity Falls, and you got on my nerves real quickly: I mean, it's like you don't know how to define yourself except as a rebel, like you don't feel alive unless you're graffitiing a muffin on a water tower or playing in some tone-deaf band."

"FOR THE LAST TIME, IT'S NOT A MUFFIN!" Robbie exploded. "IT'S A-"

"Mushroom cloud, I know, I know. Normally I wouldn't mind – it's always fun to be an iconoclast – but you made being a rebel look boring, zits. Like, what's the point of rebelling if you can only do it by egging some loser's house? What's the point of ruining stuff if it's just to annoy authority figures and impress some hypothetically like-minded girl? What's the point of defying the system if you don't wreck all of it? And believe it or not, you got even more boring after Weirdmageddon went global. I mean, all my playthings gave me at least something to work with for their psychodramas – even Question Mark gave me something to work with; all you've me are hormones, teenage angst, text messages, selfies, and one insipid relationship after another."

"Then why did you bother playing with me at all?"

"Because I thought I could make a real rebel out of you if I gave you the right challenge. I mean, there's enough material there for an entire century of entertainment: you could lead a rebellion, be defeated, go to prison, be tortured, lead an uprising among the inmates and break out! You could set yourself up as a subversive ringleader in the underbelly of society, start a proper revolution, overthrow the guard leadership and institute a new government with yourself as the head… and then you could see the whole thing fall apart as the new society becomes just as bad as the last, leaving you to either resist and be overthrown, or play along and get killed when a foreign power invades! That would have been so much fun to see in action - and you didn't have the balls to even try it. Faced with something you could really rebel against, you turned into an even bigger coward than usual, and you didn't even lose your temper when the public saw your internet history! I mean, you actually thought of using the zombies to attack people – not that it worked – so why didn't you go further? You could have stolen chemicals, made bombs, inspired innocent people to die in your name! Seriously, I gave you an adventure, and you couldn't bring yourself to have fun with any of it."

And with that, the lights flickered on, and Robbie suddenly found himself sitting in the middle of what appeared to be a movie theatre, his arms and legs firmly strapped to the chair. Bill was sitting right next to him, a massive bucket of popcorn in his lap.

"Well," the top-hatted triangle continued, "If you can only rebel for the sake of that purple-haired texting machine, that's fine. You wanna spend the rest of your life on the streets with zombies, you do that. In fact, I want to see how you deal with it: with a bit of setup, that might be just as much fun as the rebellion idea… but first, you're gonna pay the price for wasting my time."

He waved a hand, and suddenly, Robbie found his eyes being forced open by two cold metallic clamps, his headrest suddenly fastening down on his skull like a vice, keeping his gaze focussed on the distant screen.

"Oh hey," said Robbie, trying not to sound as pained as he felt. "I've seen this in a film somewhere! Aren't you gonna make me watch violent movies set to classical music?"

"Why the hell would I do that?" Bill demanded, drawing a bottle and a pipette from seemingly nowhere. "You'd only enjoy it!"

"Good point."

"No, I want you to watch something a bit more personal…"

As Bill gently moistened Robbie's eyes with a pipette, the screen lit up, displaying a montage of brightly-coloured scenes – all of them depicting people around Gravity Falls, all of them shot from Robbie's perspective: his memories, project for all to see. Tambry looking up from her cellphone to smile at him; Wendy finally forgiving him, clapping him on the back; Thompson juggling eggs and splattering them across his face while Lee and Nate laughed; Mabel playing matchmaker; Dipper giving him a free shot; his parents cooing over him, indulgent as ever. For good measure, the whole montage was set to "Dear Hearts and Gentle People," a piece of music that he hadn't heard since the last time he'd visited Grandma's house.

"I want you to commit these faces to memory, Zits. I want you to remember every single face you see on the screen… because you're never gonna see any of them ever again."

"Oooh," Robbie sneered, as more eyedrops rained down on him, accompanied by a curious tingling sensation. "Real creepy, dude. So I'm never going to see my friends and family ever again – so what? They're already dead! What am I losing?"

"Reality is infinitely flexible from my angle, acne face," said Bill, as he applied more eyedrops. "You might have a zombie version of Tambry here in the city, for example, but your girlfriend might just be alive and well in another part of the world, but you'll never know, because you'll never get a chance to see her in your lifetime."

"Oh." The tingling had turned to an itching for some reason.

"And by that, I mean that your eyedrops have been laced with hydrochloric acid."

"WHAT?"

"Pretty self-explanatory, Zits. Don't forget to scream."

And then the agony rippled out across Robbie's face, a scalding pain that seared his eyelids away and left his eyeballs to bubble and simmer wildly in their sockets. His eyesight already beginning to warp and dim, Robbie tried to reach up, to wipe the acid away from his eyes in a desperate attempt to save his vision, but even if he could have managed such a thing his arms were still strapped to the armrests of the chair. In the end, he could only sit there, screaming in fear and pain as his eyeballs blistered, burned, and finally melted away, plunging him into darkness once again – this time for good.

The last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was the sound of his own agonized screams drowned out by the infuriatingly jaunty refrain of "Dear Hearts and Gentle People."

During his days spent working as a shepherd for zombies in a city set up to torture him into becoming a rebel, Robbie had often wondered how his life could possibly get any worse.

To his immense displeasure, he now had his answer: being blind and homeless in the same city.

Quite apart from being forced to eke out a miserable existence around the alleyways and street corners, the weather had taken a turn for the worse since he'd gone blind, and he spent far too many days of the week being soaked to the bone by storms or being washed away in the flash-floods sweeping up from the sewers. Most of his waking hours were spent begging for food.

Before his blindness, this would have been a waste of time given that the meals were only served to cell-occupying workers, but apparently the city had changed just for him. Now, people could buy food with supply tokens awarded in place of actual money. Unfortunately, most of the time, the people he begged from barely had enough tokens to feed themselves and few were willing to spare any on him; worse still, the eateries refused to serve Robbie, and being found with tokens on him usually carried the risk of being beaten up by the guards monitoring the eateries. So, his only option was to wait until a food-toting customer crept by... or go back to trying to catch rats.

On the upside, at least he still had his friends with him. True, there were starting to smell a bit, but he could live with that.

On the downside, he was assaulted by fellow workers who finally had an outlet for their frustrations and anxieties in the form of someone who was even lower than them on the social ladder.

One morning, Robbie awoke to find someone kicking him.

"Who's there?" he croaked.

"Your messenger, apparently," grumbled a voice from above. "Some guy just walked up to me and told me to give you this letter."

"… wha… who? Why?"

"Some guy calling himself Mr A."

"Mr who?"

"Don't make me repeat it. And don't bother to ask me what he looked like: he was wearing a mask– along with a suit and a sash for some goddamn reason."

"Did he say what he wanted?"

"Other than to deliver this letter? Nah. He told me he'd had trouble finding where you'd ended up – and by the sounds of things, he didn't know you were blind. Said he was having trouble "seeing" through this reality, whatever the hell that means. God only knows what he'd want to do with you of all people, but he paid me enough supply tokens to compensate me for my time, so what the hell. Here."

Something small and papery landed in his lap.

"You couldn't read it to me?" Robbie asked.

"Have you got any tokens to spare? I might be willing to help out if I was suitably reimbursed."

"…I'm a beggar."

"Doesn't mean you don't have any tokens."

"You're asking a beggar for money."

"I take it you don't have any, then?"

"Dude, I think that was pretty self-explanatory."

"Then go fuck yourself."

As the pedestrian stomped away, Robbie turned over the envelope in his hands, wondering if anyone on the street could possibly be bothered to read the letter to him. Would anyone out there be kind enough to help out, or would this just end up with the guards marching over to investigate? The latter was a safer bet.

He paused and turned in the direction of where the zombies were presumably still sitting.

"Do any of you feel up to reading anything?"

The zombies, of course, said nothing.

"Fantastic," Robbie sighed. "Tambry, would you mind giving me a hug – if you can?"

From somewhere behind him, there was a rustling of bones shuffling across the concrete, and then a familiar pair of decomposing arms slowly wrapped themselves around him.

"Thank you."

A/N: This chapter's soundtrack choice is Nightfall by Christopher Gordon.

Up next - Ford's game!