The light faded again, and the trio found themselves standing in a dusty tunnel made of well chiseled stone, air stale and incredibly dark due to the lack of any illumination, natural or otherwise. Stanford produced a flashlight from his pocket and shed some light on the situation.
Though Pacifica had informed the Pines members of the psychic entity's attack on this sliver of Bill Cipher, the multiverse scanner was still detecting him, albeit damaged and weak. Everyone had an air of caution to them, knowing they were going to corner a wounded animal.
"This stone work seems borderline medieval..." The older scientist mused while pulling a pocket sized chemical analysis kit as the two younger explorers simply looked about.
"This feels like some kind of hidden passage running through the walls of a dark lord's castle." Dipper spoke up as he and Pacifica stayed close together. "Grunkle Ford, do you think we're on this dimension's earth?"
"No. These stones have been shaped and reinforced using advanced chemistry of alien origin. Someone simply wants this place to look antiquated, probably as a stylistic choice." He announced, analysis complete. "So children, which way shall we go?" he asked, the corridor stretching into darkness both directions.
Without waiting for either of the boys to say a word, Pacifica withdrew a coin from her pocket, flipped it, then pointed to the left. "As good as choice as any..." Dipper remarked, before the three walked off into the darkness. The stone walls stretched on for a difficult to determine amount of time, before finally ending in a flat stone wall, leaving no way forward but backwards.
Dipper however, studied the stone wall intently. "Check for hidden doors?" he asked in a nervous, jokey manner. Grunkle Ford took the suggestion seriously however, and used an electronic multi-tool to scan the area where the wall met the tunnels.
"Good call Dipper, there are electromagnets built into the walls here, the mechanisms of an inconspicuous door. And every door must have a handle..." He muttered, while reaching around in the dark until his hand caught on a lever that when pulled sent the stone wall rolling backwards into the tunnel side, briefly blinding the party of three as light flooded over them.
When the human eyes adjusted, they found the tunnel opening into a futuristic, well stocked hospital room where aliens of various sizes and shaped moved between and laid upon flat cots, tables and shelves stocked with various devices and everyone present wearing all covering, sterile uniforms.
"Oh, great, another contamination vector..." One of the aliens, a long legged fellow with waxy orange skin but otherwise very human looking, spoke. He was some kind of medical doctor, Ford guessed, based on long protective coat, face mask, syringe filled pockets and information displaying electronic tablet. "I mean, good work on finding another passage, always need more storage space, but that is not the ideal place for it to open to."
Quickly taking control of the situation, Stanford replied in a weary but understanding tone. "Yes, they'll probably have to wall this end up completely, we don't need foot traffic routed through here. But, speaking of which, I need to go report this, so excuse us." The mindswimmers the three had effecting their brains did their jobs, and the words were understood.
"Course, course." And with that, the three new arrivals slipped easily through the alien hospital room, not drawing a single second glance from the menagerie present. The three looked about as they made an exit, observing that this was some kind of long term care ward even with the unusual alien bodies about, as the patients lay in a state of faintly recognizable atrophied rest while being fed by tubes and monitored by machines.
When the three humans exited the room, they found themselves in a much more conventional hallway built in the style of an ancient stone castle, this one with windows overlooking the landscape. The younger two rushed over to the view port and gazed along the alien landscape. In contrast to the endless swamp of the last planet they had visited, this place seemed to be in some kind of dry mountain range, as cresting, snowless peaks covered in soft blue plant growth stretched in every direction. The two gasped in wonder, but then frowned as they looked into the valley stretching before their current point.
The valley below them was overrun by a large, dirty and ramshackle looking settlement made of a mixture of spread out tarp or fabric tents and blocky, flimsy looking identical prefabricated structures. Small patches of light and thin smoke columns rose irregularly from the dilapidated settlement.
The two teenagers were quickly called away from the window by Ford, who'd located an interesting feature of the place: a holographic information display being projected over the rough hewn ancient looking stonework.
"Based on this map, I think this place is some kind of converted hospital." The older scientist hypothesized. "The labeling on this map is indicative of specialty wards, chemical storage and examination rooms, but the floor plan is extremely restrictive, better inclined towards defensive fighting then medical logistics."
"That would make sense. If Bill's psychic essence was damaged and he needed a new body as quickly as possible a hospital would give him plenty of desperate people to make a deal with." Dipper thought aloud. "Is this place far enough in the future that Bill might be able to get himself directly repaired with psychic surgery?"
"Possible, but I can't be sure one way or the other yet." Ford answered. "The anachronistic construction makes it difficult to determine the exact technology level we're dealing with. Let's take a further look around, see what we find."
The three humans continued walking through the alien castle, the hospital section of their guessing confirmed by the several aliens they passed, transporting and being transported on stretchers, wheelchairs or more exotic shaped people movers for more exotic shaped lifeforms.
They eventually found themselves rounding a corner to discover a tall, six limbed simian dressed in much less protective clothing then the others they'd passed quickly working to clean up a crate of pill bottles that had fallen from a softly floating cargo cart stacked with similar boxes. Pacifica gestured towards the two boys to let her take the lead, then abruptly put on a furious face and stomped forwards.
"What is going on here!?" she yelled in an outraged tone while approaching mess. The alien worker jolted in panic before beginning to mutter a series of lame excuses in a defensive, frustrated tone. Pacifica cut him off by demanding "Just where do you think you are exactly? Do you think we can afford slip ups like this!?"
"Probably, considering you kept the cost of this big old castle retreat low by shoving all the war refugees into the valley below!" The alien worker snapped back, but instantly regretted his words and began backpedaling. "I mean, um, no, I'm sorry, I understand clean, climate controlled space is at a premium and the amount of supplies and long term patients was much higher then expected when this whole project was set up, but I meant... oh damn it the student volunteer program never said there'd be this much talking..."
Pacifica's expression softened somewhat at the limited explanation of things, and she discreetly interrupted with "Look, I don't really like it either, but that's no excuse for slip up likes this! Just clean it up before anyone else comes by and I'll forget I saw anything."
While the alien worker bequeathed a slew of rushed apologies, Pacifica motioned for the other two to come with her down the halls, away from the situation. Once in the clear, the blond grimaced as if she'd swallowed something. "A little Northwest strategy for motivating the common help." She spat with distaste.
"Hey, I know you didn't mean any of it." Dipper said reassuringly to her, then turned to his great uncle. "That guy mentioned war refugees, do you think this is the same conflict that was touching the previous two places we chased this Bill section to?"
"It's... improbable, but we can't dismiss the possibility." Ford said hesitantly. "The previous two places we visited were in close stellar proximity to each other, but this planet is on the other side of the galaxy from those two. For a war to be fought on such a scale, burning the galaxy from one end to the other... it boggles the mind." he breathed, awestruck and fearful at the concept. "Still, that would be exactly the kind of thing Bill would try to dip his hands into."
The three soon found something out of the usual in the corridors, an advanced looking metal door bolted onto the stonework, currently sitting open on its hinges despite a very clear sign stating this door must be kept closed. Ford poked his head through the gap and grimaced, before stepping through and gesturing for the other two to join him inside. Upon passing the barrier, Dipper and Pacifica knew they were on the right track, because the hospital ward had been transformed into a graveyard.
Well organized lines of hospital beds were filled with alien corpses, and despite the varied physical differences between the species they all shared a withered, shriveled up physique, with some looking as though they would crumble to dust if poked too harshly. Besides the patients, a few hospital staff were scattered around the room, less shriveled and killed in obvious acts of violence.
Ford set to work examining the staff in detail, Dipper checked over the slain patients, and Pacifica began to assess the medical equipment stored in the room.
The younger man of the group pulled a pen light out of his pocket and began examining one of the victims at length. The alien in question had an uncanny similarity to earth house flies, albeit with feet to stand on and hands to operate things with. The body was hard, dry and brittle, badly dehydrated despite a well stocked IV sitting by its bed. Dipper soon found a unusual variable on the body, a fresh, perfectly circular puncture wound on the alien's side, distinguishable from the various injection and IV sites on the body due to its lack of bandaging and large size, as well as the fact that no natural healing had occurred on site, meaning it had been inflicted shortly before death.
Checking the other bodies, the puncture mark repeated itself on all of them, though in different places on different species. Settling on the most mammalian looking of the aliens, Dipper procured an advanced scalpel that had been knocked to the floor in the ruckus earlier and began cutting open the flesh around the insertion, revealing organic tubules similar to human veins, all of them still damp. "Grunkle Ford, I think we're dealing with an arcane vampire organism here. If I had to hypothesize, I'd guess Bill made a deal with someone in this ward for healing, and cast a spell to drink universal lifeforce from all these people. It can't be purely organic hematophagy since a wide variety of species have been drained, some of which had to have been biologically incompatible."
Pacifica was at that moment fiddling with a sealed, untouched drawer on the wall, one of the few containers in the room not thrown open and ransacked. Despite the advanced technology of the location, she quickly figured out it was sealed by what was essentially a baby lock, and disengaged it to find a container of sharp instruments. "Multiverse mystic who knows lots of things, except how to disable a child lock." She snarked while more closely examining an amputation knife.
"Bill must be wounded, mentally and physically." Ford remarked while examining the withered form of a medical worker. "His psychic form is breaking down and he needs to repair his physically decaying body of opportunity using vampire magic. He's in no state to use any of his normal tricks and manipulations, we've got him cornered!"
After taking another look at the perfectly circular puncture wound the drained bodies had suffered, Dipper began examining the IV drip propped up besides the only empty bed in the ward. "We might have a trail." Dipper remarked, but then the sound of sharp, clattering feet on stone began to fill the hear, soft and distant now but steadily growing stronger.
Ford narrowed his eyes and quickly gestured for Dipper and Pacifica to hide behind the cot dividing curtains while he abruptly ripped the lab coat off the medical worker who was the closest to Ford's size and rolled the body underneath a different cot. A moment after he'd completed the disguise, the ajar metal door was thrown all the way open as what was obviously the security staff: a squad of hunched but tall humanoids resembling flies, albeit flies with severely atrophied wings (insufficient muscle mass to propel the body in question) and third set of limbs (which protruded upwards from the shoulders) which were noticeably short, thin and ending in simple spikes instead of hands or clawed feet. The squad's red, bulbous compound eyes swept the room, taking in the carnage with calculated disgust.
Ford snapped at them right away. "Thank the stars you're here! We're in the middle of critical security breakdown, a patient has suffered a critical metastasis of their brain consuming prion disease that has aggravated their aggression centers and unlocked the subconscious limit controls of the skeletal muscle! Do any of you even know what that means!?" He yelled in his most commanding voice possible. When the security insects responded with blank looks and chittering to one another, Ford screamed "That means a super strong lunatic is running free in the hospital! Move out and apprehend him!"
Stanford's commanding tone of voice snapped the guards to attention, and the lead one chittered "Lead the way then! You know where he went!" To Ford, who seemed surprised by the sudden demand but complied after unconsciously casting a look to Dipper and Pacifica's hiding spot. He knew the two could look after each other, and he couldn't pass up an opportunity to surround Bill with a half dozen armed guards.
The teenagers waited until the sound of falling footsteps had faded before daring to breathe, and realized they were huddled quite close to each other in an attempt to stay still. Though both blushed slightly at this, neither felt the need to jump away suddenly, so instead the two simply stepped out from their hiding spot and discussed their options. "We can't let Doctor Pines face Bill alone Dipper, even if he's weakened."
"I agree, those security guards have no ides what they're getting into." Dipper remarked while crossing over to a medicine cabinet. "I have an idea though."
Down the corridor, Ford had taken up a position in the middle of the six insect squad, keeping his eyes out while the leader of the team followed an invisible trail using pathogen detecting goggles he'd slipped on to conduct the chase. The trail of sloughed off diseased flesh and rapidly reproducing bacteria lead to a large outdoor balcony, once able to comfortably fit over a dozen dancing nobles watching the sunrise on this planet but now crammed full of solar panels that collect power for the hospital.
Once they confirmed via wrist mounted hologram maps of the facility that this balcony was a dead end, the guard at the back of the formation pocketed his heat sterilizer, a pen sized projector of heat energy and radiation waves designed to cleanse spaces of microorganisms and maintain hospital cleanliness kept in pocket by most hospital staff, which he'd been using to clean up the worst of the trail, and slung his security rifle off his back, setting it to stun setting.
The security insects, despite Ford's objections, split up and swept through the pathways created by the solar arrays, guns at the ready. The first sign of something wrong was one of the guards screaming in pain as electricity surged through him, having stepped in a recently poured out puddle of water which had been charged with a ripped loose electrical transmission wire from a nearby giant solar panel, electrocuting him with the full power of the sun.
The remaining guards tensed up at the death of one of their own, stepping slowly and switching their weapons to lethal settings. The next attack came from Bill directly, as he directed his puppet to rise up from under a rain tarp protecting a crate of spare parts and ram the blade of a stolen scalpel into the eye of a security guard who had the misfortune to place his back to the demon's hiding place. His screams of agony and panicked firing caught the attention of the rest of his squad, who hosed his general direction with laser fire, shredding apart the solar emplacements in the way and dousing the area with thick smoke from the ensuing electrical fires.
"Stop shooting, stop!" Ford demanded numerous times before the laser fire slowed to a stop as the chemical smoke rolled onto the guards. One of them soon vanished into the smoke, getting out not a single scream but instead a gurgling, wet crunching along wide the sound of a straw sucking the last few drops of liquid out of a cup.
Ford quickly snatched the sidearm and heat sterilizer from the choking guard next to him as the sound of a different guard screaming then falling silent with a wet crunch came from within the smoke, which he back away from, coming to a stop at the railing. The air was silent again, but only for a short moment before another unseen guard let out a long, trailing scream as he was tossed over the railing, plummeting to his death.
"Stay calm soldier." Ford tried to reassure the only security officer left, now shaking in panic and pointing his blaster into the thick smoke. "We're only going to get one shot at him. Make it count."
Unfortunately, when Bill struck, he struck too quickly. A lightning quick tendril struck from the ever closer smoke, a whip of yellow rubber skin snapping onto Ford's hand to send his pocketed blaster over the railing, as it whipped backwards, it turned and stuck fast onto the final security guard's head, and with a sick crunch caused the body to shrivel and crush.
"A proboscis feeder, a perfect body for vampire magic." Ford remarked, attempting to keep his cool while Bill's latest body stepped out of the smoke. The striking tendril was revealed to grow out of the alien's mouth-less face, showing the circular opening on the end to be lined with fresh, jagged, blood stained new teeth jutting from ripped membranes. The alien body itself was humanoid, though its torso and head seemed to mold together with no neck to separate them. The arms were long and thin while the legs thick and stocky. Its skin was yellow and rubber like in consistency, with bandages and wrappings in various places, on top of the standard hospital gown.
"So, you're finally inside a body appropriate to you, a blood sucking parasite!" Ford declared, refusing to show fear to the monster who'd terrorized his family for so long. "You're going to die out here Bill, die a broken fragment of your true self hiding in a diseased body!" Hoping his taunts were distracting Bill, Ford switched on the heat sterilizer he'd stolen, the only weapon in hand.
Bill's new body let out a wet hiss through its proboscis feeder before whipping the lamprey mouth into action towards Ford's exposed neck, but he'd prepared for the action and jammed the hot end of the sterilizer into the path of the blood drinking appendage, causing the alien to hiss and wrench back, clumsily reducing the precision blood drain into a hard slap.
With Stanford dazed as a result of the attack, Bill pushed his body forward, not caring that his stinging, blood drinking proboscis was dragging across the stone ground and shoved him over the railing, gurgling incoherent threats of death the entire time.
"GRUNKLE FORD!" Bill heard, causing him to spin around around and miss his hated enemy splattering to bits across the distant rocks, to see Dipper and Pacifica had just burst onto the balcony in time to watch their mentor go plummeting to his death. Both looked horrified and despair stricken, though Pacifica adopted a look of anger the moment Bill took another step, and she hurled a pilfered scalpel into his shoulder.
Despite the blade sinking into his stolen flesh, Bill's new body quivered with mirth as he advanced on his two remaining enemies, proboscis quivering back into position as feeling returned to the feeder limb. Dipper to had gained an expression of anger and vengeance at this point, stepping in front of Pacifica and shielding her with his body as he walked toward's Bill, a furious expression peaking out from under his hat.
Bill stared down the most persistent thorn in his side he'd encountered in millennia, carefully examining the soft places of the body where blood vessels were close to the surface, savoring the thought of draining his form to a lifeless husk with sunken yellow eyes.
After what felt like an eternity, Dipper snapped his right into a vest pocket and pulled loose a surgical knife, bending his arm back as far as possible to try and hurl it at Bill. The puppet body however had repaired itself sufficiently to spring into action, and its thirsty lamprey mouth twitched with the speed of a practiced gunslinger, burying into Dipper's now exposed armpit.
Bill felt the freshly grown, unnatural teeth in his trunk cut through cloth, then skin, then dove into liquid, and began to drink.
On the underside of this balcony, Stanford Pines meanwhile was not as dead as Bill had hoped. Keeping cool and thinking quickly even when faced with a messy death, the experienced scientist quickly removed his stolen labcoat mid fall. The coat had five buttons on it, so he did up the bottom and top two, along with folding closed the sleeves, head and bottom opening, creating a pocket of air inside the cloth.
Then, he stuck the heat sterilizer into the only open gap of the think, switching it to the highest possible setting to rapidly heat the air pocket trapped inside. Though a crude construct at best, this end result was a rudimentary hot air ballon, which significantly slowed Ford's descent, as well as enabling a small amount of control over his flight path.
Now with a slow, steady but decaying method of flight, Ford turned his path towards the mountain hospital, looking for somewhere safe to land. The first opportunity to present itself was a stained glass window built into a stone facet of the mountain, and while Ford didn't love the idea of slamming through a glass depiction of what was probably a religious icon, he didn't want to risk not getting another chance. Once he was close enough, Ford jumped from the improvised balloon and latched on the window ledge. After finding purchase to place his feet onto, the old man reached inside his original coat and withdrew a handy multi-tool he keeps on him in order to be prepared.
"Please don't be a genuine historical artifact!" Ford begged quietly before throwing the tool through the window, shattering the glass an enabling him to climb through, albeit with a few nicks.
The room he found himself in was still recognizable as a hospital ward, but a strange one. The room was noticeably cold, and the only light in the place was a soft blue hue being projected by the lighting of the room, but disrupted by the now open hole in the wall. Ford would normally have taken quite a lot of time examining the room, but right now his wards were in danger and he had to get back to them. The only thing to slow him down was when weak throated yelling began coming from behind a square of privacy curtains, convincing Ford to briefly investigate to ensure he wasn't in danger.
Behind the curtain was a hospital bed where a strange alien was at rest. All that was visible of it was its head poking out from beneath the covers, a smooth sphere of dark gray stretch flesh, with large flat ears, bulging pure white eyes and a very small, toothy mouth. "Heeeeeelp, they returrrrrn..." It groaned, too weak to make further noise despite the fear it was clearly feeling. Ford felt a moment of pity for the hospital patient, but quickly left it behind to help Dipper and Pacifica.
"The invaders from the bright return to break the ceiling of the world and consume us with their viruses! Help us!" The alien moaned deliriously in an increasingly loud and panicked room as Ford burst through the door out and began rushing ahead in search of a map.
Dipper grimaced and groaned in pain, throwing his head back while Pacifica looked away, unable to bear the sight. Bill was ecstatic and the precious fluids flowed down his proboscis in pumps, draining his enemy with every squeeze of the snout's muscle. Then, the first sweet drop hit the alien axial body.
Instantly, Bill knew something was wrong. The liquid wasn't exploding into his body with a burst of life and the gentle stinging of the meat sack repairing itself, in fact it burned on contact and sent his chest cavity reeling when it hit the bottom of the stomach like a rock. The mind demon knew for sure he'd been tricked when his snout stopped pumping automatically due to the liquid depleting, having drunk nowhere near the amount of liquid a human body contained. Bill ripped the scalpel Pacifica had thrown into his flesh free and and attempted to advance on the two, but found his legs growing weak and uncoordinated, stumbling and eventually falling.
As soon as the puppet body had collapsed to its knees, Pacifica and Dipper's heads snapped back into view, both of them now grinning widely. "I knew you'd never be able to resist draining my life force Bill, even if it'd have been easier to just shoot me with a stolen security blaster," Dipper explained, reaching under his armpit and pulling out a now empty IV bag with a perfectly circular hole in it. "So me and Pacifica stuffed IV bags filled with random drugs over all our vital blood points for when you'd attack. I might not know anything about your new alien body or what any of these medicines are actually made of, but I see I was correct in assuming overdosing is still a hazard of medicine, especially when dealing with a wide range of radically different alien biologies!"
"You sadism is your undoing." Pacifica remarked with satisfaction while removing her own IV bags of drugs from underneath her clothes. By now, Bill had collapsed, shivering onto the floor and spitting up spurts of biological fluid out his trunk, which lay limp against the stone. Dipper advanced quickly but cautiously, readying a sleek white and boxy MK 3 Memory Gun, pre-programmed to seek and destroy all traces of Bill Cipher inside a psychic network. With a steady aim and a pull of the trigger, another fragment of Bill Cipher was erased from existence.
Dipper watched with pity as the demonic malice left the eyes of the alien hospital patient, replaced by rapidly dimming pain and confusion as the original mind regained his body and felt his wounds and internal injuries open back up as the ancient vampire magic that sustained him was burned out of his body, alongside the dream demon that gave it to him, on top of the incompatible drugs he'd been tricked into drinking. The boy from earth offered him a compassionate look and a soft, but sincere apology for being in the wrong place at the wrong time as the alien slowly died, then closed his eyes when the life had faded entirely.
After a quiet moment, Pacifica walked up to Dipper and took his hand, a downcast look on her face suddenly. "Dipper, what happened to Doctor Pines... what happened to Ford back there, I hope you don't blame yourself because it..." Her attempts to be comforting were suddenly cut off when Dipper held up one finger, gesturing for silence as he held up and activated the personal communicators they all had.
"Kids, are you alright!?" Came the older man's voice after a few moments of static, causing smiles to break out on both faces; Pacifica's a sudden outburst of relief that her fears had been dashed, and Dipper the soft smile of being proven correct.
"We're all clear on this end Grunkle Ford, mission accomplished. Bill has been eliminated." he reported with a smile and a proud tone of voice.
"Marvelous, well done, excellent work you two!" Ford praised over the radio. "I apologize if I gave you a scare when I fell over that railing, but I had full confidence in your ability to continue the fight!"
"Don't worry about it Grunkle Ford, I knew from the beginning it'd take more than a little push to kill someone as clever as you!" Dipper responded in a voice that was perfectly praising into the radio, but with a look on his face that was quietly teasing Pacifica for assuming his mentor's death so quickly.
"You can tell me all about how you finished the mission back on earth. For the moment, I think we should hit our fast return switches before security comes investigating. Grunkle Ford, over and out!" He finished speaking before the radio went silent. Dipper smiled a little at his signing off note, as while Stanford had taken to being called "Grunkle Ford" quite quickly, it had only been fairly late into Dipper's apprenticeship that he used the nickname to refer to himself.
Dipper fished around in his pockets and pulled out one of the several quantum entanglement devices he had packed that would transmit between dimensions to the new and improved portal device, activating it remotely and locking on to their coordinates. When he saw Pacifica had hers at the ready, the two smiled at one another and threw the switches, feeling the light overtake them as their bodies were jettisoned across a multiverse that was now just a little bit safer.