Bill walked a good distance from the house before he came across a parked car with no one near it, giving only vague responses to Dib as he followed behind him and tried again and again to get the demon to change his mind about taking his body driving.
"I'm not even old enough to drive!" Dib burst out when Bill stopped by the car and contemplated it with his hand on his chin. "You won't even be able to see over the dashboard! You'll get pulled over and then I'll get thrown in jail!"
"Relax, kid." Bill glanced at him over his shoulder. "Sheesh, you worry too much! You got anything in your pockets that can unlock a car door?"
"No, I don't! Because I don't drive and I don't steal cars!"
"Oh well, like the saying goes, more than one way to skin a cat!" Bill laughed. "Believe me, I've tried them all!" He stepped backwards, swung his foot up, and slammed the heel of his boot into the lock with all the force Dib's body could muster. It snapped right open and a rusty-sounding car alarm started blaring.
Both Bill and Dib flung their hands over their ears. "Wow! Glad these things are so poorly constructed!" the demon yelled over the noise. He called up to Dib, "Hey, Foureyes, better make sure no one's coming if you really don't wanna be arrested!"
Dib fumed. Gritting his teeth, he floated up a little higher. "I hate you."
"You'd be surprised how often I get that!"
"No I wouldn't."
Bill opened the car door and climbed in, closing the door again behind him but rolling down the window with a crank on the inside. He had to sit on the very edge of the car seat to even be able to reach the pedals and steering wheel, and as Dib had predicted the top of his head barely reached the dashboard and he had to crane his neck to see over it at all. "This is perfect!"
"You don't have the keys," Dib pointed out, crossing his arms.
"Keys, shmees!" Bill said. He ducked down under the dashboard, fiddled with something for a minute, and the car's engine roared to life. The alarm even cut out cut out with a double beep.
Dib gaped and started to ask how he'd even done that—or knew how to do that—but Bill was already waving goodbye.
"Nice workin' with you!" he called. "Hah, I'd invite you along, Mothman, but the car would just leave you behind!"
Dib jumped at the use of his Swollen Eyeball Network codename. "How'd you know—?"
Bill laughed. "I told you I know lots of things, kid!" He switched gears, gave Dib a mock salute, and then proceeded to swerve backwards over the sidewalk and rear-end a mailbox. "Haha, whoops, they should fire the guy who labeled this gearshift! Okay, let's see here... 'park, reverse, neutral, drive—' Aha, drive! There we go OKAY." He waved at Dib again. "Leaving for real this time! Later, suckers! Well, sucker. BYE!" He revved the engine, rolled back over the sidewalk with a bump, and drove off haphazardly down the road.
"Seriously, Bill, you can't—!" Dib shouted after him. The car didn't stop. Dib cupped his hands around his mouth and raised his voice. "At least put on your seatbelt!"
Humans had gotten one thing right. Driving was fun.
His stolen body's mouth pulled back in a fanatic grin over bared teeth (hard enamel-coated bone nuggets sticking out of a round, wet orifice in his face—that would never not be weird) and he leaned forward, peering over the steering wheel and hungrily searching the road for any cars that might be in his way.
It was still a bit difficult to tell exactly where things were in relation to him. Suddenly having a new visual dimension to deal with still took a little getting used to; he kept trying to compensate for lack of depth perception when there wasn't any need to anymore! Funny. Of course, seeing depth seemed to be all that having two eyes was good for. The pupils had to move together; if he tried looking at something with one eye while moving the other to look at something else, all he got was a headache, which was more annoying and disorienting than anything.
He pressed the gas pedal down further with his foot, his eyes going wide as he was pushed backwards with the exhilarating feeling of the car's acceleration. He rapidly gained ground between himself and the cars in front of him, coming up to about a hairsbreadth between them and then swerving around to the outside, sparks flying as the side of the car scraped against the metal guardrail. He caught the horrified faces of the people looking at him from the other cars and waved, his hand bumping into some distracting card stock object dangling from the rearview mirror. It was one of those good-smelling air freshener things. And it was shaped like a pine tree, which, of course, was pretty hilarious. He laughed and tore it down, tossing it in the backseat.
"Let's see what horrible human music they listen to in Nowhere's-ville, Michigan!" he said, reaching down and flicking on the radio. It crackled with static and a song started playing.
"With a thousand lies and a good disguise, hit 'em right between the eyes, hit 'em right between the eyes—When you walk away, nothing more to say—See the lightning in your eyes, see 'em running for their lives—" He switched the station with a click.
"Disco girl, coming through, that girl is—" Click.
"AGH would someone just BUY our tacos, we're practically GIVING! them away at this point!" Huh! That was just a weird commercial! Click.
"—And besides in the mean, mean time, I'm just dreaming of tearing you apart—I'm in the de-details with the devil, so now the world can never get me on my level—" Click.
"…don't start 'til I walk in. Don't stop! Make it pop! D.J. blow my speakers up! Tonight, Imma fight, 'til we see the—" He winced at the auto-tune-induced spike of pain in his head and changed that one quickly.
"Boys are a bore, let's show 'em the door, we're taking over the dance floor! Oh-oh! Girls do what we like, oh-oh! We're taking over tonight!" Click.
"We're receiving reports of what looks to be a preteen boy barreling down the highway in what is possibly a stolen vehicle—" He just turned the radio off completely.
"Hah! I was right! This is all terrible!" Bill said. He stuck his tongue between his teeth and jerked the steering wheel to the left, veering up over the concrete median dividing the two lanes and hurtling into oncoming traffic, blasting the car's horn with both hands. The people driving toward him screamed and careened around his car. From some distance away he heard a piercing siren and caught flashing red and blue lights on the edge of his vision.
"Hey, look, it's the police! Ho-ho, this is getting interesting!" Bill said, laughing and turning the car back over the median and into the right lane. "Do you people even realize who I am? I'm a centuries-old dream demon—I've been to, I dunno, three thousand dimensions or something like that! You'll never catch me alive!" This was almost too much fun. He sped up and ran a couple of red lights in a row, narrowly missing the cross traffic, then swung around a turn. This was fantastic!
He grinned again, clasping the wheel in both hands and twisting his head to look over his shoulder, leaning out the window slightly. There were no police cars in sight. He must have lost them. Cool! Bill looked back out the windshield, smiling broadly, and suddenly realized that directly in front of him was a very thick, very sturdy-looking pole sticking out of the ground, and it was coming up very, very fast.
Bill let go of the steering wheel and threw himself backwards into the seat, screaming. That was all he had time for before the car met the pole and something exploded out of the steering wheel in front of his face, and everything went black.
Dib had tried to keep up with the car at first. He thought that since he was an intangible ghost at the moment he should be able to fly as quickly as he wanted, but that proved not to be the case. Bill was just driving too fast—well above the speed limit, Dib was sure—and he soon lost sight of the car entirely.
He hovered above the street for a few minutes, wondering if he'd ever been this completely powerless or alone before. No one other than Bill had any idea of his predicament. There'd been one other time when an impostor had taken his place, but that had been a shoddy robot built by Zim. Dib had even managed to gain control over its vocal processors and warn Gaz about what was going on. No chance of that this time…
"Come on, Dib, get a hold of yourself," he said. "You've gotten out of worse situations than this."
Yeah, maybe, but every one of those times he'd actually had a corporeal body and was capable of interacting with the world. He had to go someplace and try to find a way to get help, and with Gaz being unresponsive, he only had one other choice.
He sighed, then gained altitude and looked around to get his bearings. Once he knew where he was he turned and flew off in the direction of a certain odd, purple-and-green house.
When Dib reached the front walk of Zim's house, the giant lawn gnomes stationed in the yard paid him no heed for once. One advantage to being a ghost, he supposed. He flew over the lawn and phased right through the purple front door.
"Hello? Zim?" he called. The house only had two rooms (a living room and a kitchen with a toilet in it so maybe it doubled as a bathroom? Oh yuck) and both of them were empty. Maybe Zim was down in the extended underground base. Dib was just about to look for a way down there when the front door crashed open and a little teal-eyed robot skipped in, toting a pig in his arms.
"I got somethin' in the fridge for you!" the robot chirped to the pig, leaving the door hanging wide open and running to the kitchen.
"Hey! Weird evil robot thing!" Dib flew down in front of him, waving his arms in the android's face. "Where's Zim?"
The robot didn't acknowledge him at all and continued into the kitchen, opening the fridge and pulling out a large bowl of some goopy substance that Dib didn't even want to try to identify. He tipped it forward and held it near the pig's mouth. "OPEN WIDE!"
The pig squealed, squirming away and kicking the robot in the face, then jumped to the ground and galloped out the front door.
"Bye-bye pig!" the robot called, waving. He shoveled a handful of the fridge glop into his mouth and put it back away, humming as he walked back over to the couch and flopped on top of it.
"Look, um, GIR—that's your name, right?" Dib said earnestly, floating back over to him. "I know you can't really hear me, but could you give me some sort of hint about where Zim is anyway? C'mon!"
GIR picked up a remote control and flipped on the TV.
"Are—are you ever any actual help at all? To anyone? Ever?" Dib said, dropping his arms.
In the background, some lady announcer on the TV was in the middle of making a news report. "—And so, seeing as the 'missing left sock' phenomena is possibly paranormal in origin, naturally we put Bill on the case."
Dib whirled around. "Bill?!"
Instead of a floating yellow triangle or even Dib's own body with yellow eyes and slit pupils, a tall man wearing sunglasses and a trench coat appeared on the screen. "Yes, it's me. I've deduced that while many people believe elves are behind the sock theft, the more likely answer is that the socks simply fell behind the washing machine and were forgotten about." He leaned toward the camera. "But that doesn't account for all the times you've lost the pen you were just writing with! That really was taken by time-traveling elves, and used in a colossal space battle taking place across three multiverses!"
Dib glared. "Oh, it's that guy." He was the alleged paranormal investigator who had dragged Dib around town on Career Day, chasing after costumed cereal mascots while Dib had been trying to catch Zim in the act of molting.
The announcer continued on. "This just in—we're receiving reports of a speeding car being driven by what looks to be a preteen boy!"
"Okay, that's the Bill I need to know about!" Dib rushed forward, looking closely at the screen. "Where's the car? Does it say where the car is? Or where it's heading?"
"You know what, I just now realized you're back," the base's computer voice said suddenly. "Zim was looking for you."
Dib looked up, missing the rest of the news report. "Huh? Zim was looking for me?" Oh wait, the computer was actually talking to GIR. Of course.
"He thought you were kidnapped or something and went out somewhere," the computer went on. "Maybe you should go find him before he does something stupid and gets himself killed because otherwise I'll be out of a job."
That was the most useful piece of information Dib had heard so far. Evidently Zim wasn't here at all and he probably hadn't been for some time. But where had he gone? And why did he think GIR had been captured? The robot was quite obviously fine. Oh well, that wasn't overly important right now. Dib had to get back to Bill and find a way out of this mess. He looked back at the TV but it was now showing someone reporting the weather. Dib frowned, gave up, and headed toward the front door.
…Although… He stopped just before leaving and looked over his shoulder, taking in the alien house with calculating eyes.
Being basically nonexistent to everyone and everything gave him an advantage that he'd likely never have again. Maybe he should take the opportunity to find his way down to the base and take a look around. Just for a few minutes…
Yeah, that seemed like a reasonable course of action. Bill couldn't do too much damage in his body, right?
Dib located the entrance to one of the elevators and phased through the floor into the tube, gliding down into the heart of Zim's base and preparing to take a lot of mental notes.
About ten cars drove straight past the crash site, the drivers staring at the wreck with wide eyes and then hurrying away, before one pulled up next to it. After seeing one stop a few others followed suit and the drivers clambered out of their vehicles, rushing over to the crashed car.
"What happened?!" someone asked.
The driver-side window was rolled down, so one person peered inside. "There's a kid in the front seat! I don't see anyone else."
There was indeed a small boy lying unconscious in the seat, possibly having been knocked out by the airbag. He had a couple of obvious bruises and his nose was bloody.
"Was that kid driving?"
Someone else peeked in. "Wow, he looks all kinds of messed up."
"Is he still alive?"
"Well I mean the airbag deployed, right? But he's, uh, barely breathing. I think. I can't really tell…"
"—have to get him to the hospital. Anyone know where the hospital is?"
"Call an ambulance."
"They're already on their way!"
"Who is this kid?"
"I dunno—wait, isn't this one of Professor Membrane's kids? The weird one who's always ranting about ghosts and stuff?" One of the onlookers whipped out their phone and started an Internet search, pulling up a photo of the great Professor Membrane with two small figures standing in the background. "See?"
"Oh yeah… So Professor Membrane's his dad? Should we try to send him some sort of message about this?"
At that moment, there was a loud siren, and an ambulance pulled up next to them. Most of the people in the group took that as their signal to scatter and go about their business.
Bill tumbled onto the ground and lay there for a second, eyes wide. No, wait. He blinked a few times. Eye. Oh—okay then.
Well that had been a moment of sheer heart-stopping terror he wasn't used to.
What had caused that? Had he actually been petrified with fear or had that been an automatic reaction of his stolen body? Oh, that last one, definitely. Right, the body, haha, that kid with the glasses and the… weird pointy hair. Was he still in that body? No, he was lying flat on his back in the prickly gray grass somewhere; he must have gotten kicked out of the body, and he wasn't entirely sure where he was since it was, hah, a little difficult to make out his surroundings from this vantage point.
He jumped to his feet and looked around, catching sight of a car a few yards away that had its front end crushed in. A couple of adults clustered around it, talking, and nearby there was a parked ambulance with a few paramedics lifting a tiny, dark-clothed figure onto a stretcher.
"Hey! Wait!" Bill called, but of course no one could hear him. He blinked, his pupil constricting. The black-and-white world around him was fading a little to be replaced by an inky void filled with stars. His foot slipped right through the vanishing ground.
Bill snapped to action at once, yanking his leg out. "Whoa whoa whoa wait NO!"
He pelted toward the car he'd inadvertently totaled; the world around him was still fading, more quickly now—he couldn't exist here for long in his real form without latching onto an unconscious mind, and with no one around here summoning him or on the verge of falling asleep he was being drawn back into the dreamscape.
He reached the stretcher seconds before it disappeared completely and touched the small booted foot hanging off the edge, quickly re-entering the body. Everything went dark once more, but it was a different kind of dark than what he'd experienced when he'd crashed.
Bill laughed. It was just light snickering at first, then it grew, the laughter swelling until he was pitching back and forth in hysterics and his eyes snapped open. The world was solid and in color again. He grinned, stretching his lips over his teeth. "Whoo! Hahaha! I made it!"
The giant face of a paramedic loomed over him, eyes wide in surprise. "You're awake? You're lucky you did make it. I'm amazed that collision didn't kill you."
"Huh? Oh. Yeah! That too!" Bill sat up on the stretcher and slid down onto the ground, to the shock of the paramedics carrying the thing. As soon as his feet hit the asphalt his knees buckled and he ended up face-planting on the ground for the second time in a couple hours. He blinked and raised himself up on his elbows, trying to wiggle his toes. "Hey! I think my legs are dead!"
They certainly felt dead. They also kinda felt like someone had recently been smashing lead weights into them and his back wasn't much better off. His face, too, felt hot and swollen, and he prodded at the stiff skin with one finger, frowning. He tried to lever himself back up and, right at that moment, his stomach heaved and emptied its contents right out of his mouth and onto the road. He spluttered, spitting and squirming backwards in horror. "Oh—Oh! I didn't sign up for this! What is this?!"
"Kid, we have to take you to the hospital!" one of the paramedics said, kneeling down next to him.
"Hospital?" Bill coughed, rolling over onto his back and glaring up at him. "Why? I'm perfectly fine!" He retched and shuddered and for some reason his face drained of blood, becoming cold. "Dumb—hahahaha—humans!" He picked himself up, tried to get back on his feet, and fell over again on his side. "I don't have any weak—hrp—any weaknesses!"
Actually his stomach was roiling and it was kind of doing weird things to his eyesight. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them back up but it didn't make a difference. Everything was a little blurry and he almost wondered if the kid's glasses had fallen off his face. Also his eyes were watering a bit and the blood-pumping organ buried in his ribcage had gone into overdrive and was making him take really fast, shallow breaths, and his chest and legs ached, which was interesting, but all of that made it pretty difficult to want to get back up. How did humans stand this?
His muscles tensed up as the two paramedics gripped his arms and pulled him to his feet again, trying to set him none-too-gently back on the stretcher.
"Hey! You know what? I'm kind of in a hurry!" Bill struggled against them, panting.
"Should we restrain him?" one paramedic asked the other.
Bill glared for a second, reached into the pocket of the coat he was wearing, and managed to grab the box of matches resting in there. He picked out four and struck them together. "Sure, restrain me to this!" he said, and dropped the burning clump next to him on the stretcher.
The cloth caught fire right away and the paramedics yelled, releasing him. He jumped back down again and stumbled, catching himself on his hands this time, and regained his footing, swaying a little as he stumbled away. "Gee, hope you've got a fire extinguisher handy in that big van of yours!" he said, gesturing to the ambulance. "I'll just be off doing the things this big-headed kid usually does!"
The paramedics were preoccupied with the burning stretcher and seemed to have forgotten about him entirely. Still, he didn't want to take any chances, so he turned and loped off.
While Dib found himself finally managing to explore Zim's base without fear of discovery, Zim had gone to Dib's house and met with unexpected resistance at the front door.
"Zim, you're not making any sense," Gaz said, one eyebrow raised.
Zim growled. "The circle symbol!" he burst out. "What is that circle symbol the filthy Dib has with him all the time?"
"…You mean that face on his shirt?"
"No! The other one!"
Gaz frowned, partially opening her eyes to fix him with a scathing glare, and grunted. "Stay there." She disappeared back into the house.
"I will not stay here!" Zim called after her. "You can't tell Zim where to—! …Oh, you're back."
The girl thrust a piece of paper and a pen at him. "Draw it."
After a second, Zim snatched them from her. "Fine! If it's the only way to get it through your thick hhhhyoomin skull!" He kneeled down on the front walk, spreading out the paper in front of him and clicking open the pen. "Okay, there's a couple of circles and stuff. And a dot, and… pointy… things." He drew two wobbly concentric circles with a dot in the middle, then 'greater than' and 'less than' signs on either side.
"That looks kind of like Dib's secret society symbol," Gaz said, peering at it. "There, you can go now."
"I knew it!" Zim crumpled up the paper in his fist and jumped to his feet. "Dib is behind this! I think I know the building where this 'society' lives. I've seen Dib going there before."
Gaz started to close the door but Zim blocked it with his foot. "Where is the Dib now?" he demanded.
"What's he done this time?"
"He stole my robot—" Zim gnashed his teeth. "I mean, that's none of your business, puny… Earth head!"
Gaz snorted. "For an alien insult, that was pretty pathetic. Anyway, Dib's not even here right now. I'm done talking to you." She snapped the door closed in his face and he didn't manage to catch it this time.
Zim scowled. He clearly remembered that the men who had broken into his house and stolen GIR had been wearing that very insignia. And if Dib was connected to that symbol, he had to be behind it!
Bill stood before the building, looking up at it with his hands on his hips and his face cracked in a smile, completely over the ordeal of the past ten minutes or so.
"Ah, here at last!" he said. "Now all I have to do is break in!" He paused for a moment, head tipped to the side as if in thought. Then he grinned again. "Oh, wait! Now I remember!" Laughing, he reached out and pressed his hand to a scanner on the wall. It dinged, flashed green, and the door unlocked and allowed him to push his way inside.
He'd come into the building through a side entrance. Someone walking by in a fedora and trench coat did a double take when they saw him, then looked somewhat annoyed. "Agent Mothman, what are you doing here? No one wants to hear your rants this early in the morning. Also why is your nose covered in blood. That's so completely unsanitary."
"Oh, I specifically messed up my nose just to weird you out!" Bill said cheerfully. He waved the guy off. "Haha, not really! And if someone like, say, the police or something comes looking for me, I'll be down in the lobby!" He started off down the hall.
"The police? What did you do this time?" the guy asked from behind him.
"I stole a car and plowed it into a telephone pole!" Bill looked over his shoulder and flashed him a wide, toothy grin. Then he turned a corner and the agent was lost from his sight.
The headquarters of the Swollen Eyeball Network were mostly underground, with a hall lined with elevators that led from the surface floor down to the many basement levels. Bill walked up to one of the elevators and pressed the down button with his thumb, standing back while he waited.
About a minute passed with nothing happening and he clasped his hands behind his back, rocking back and forth from the balls of his feet to his heels. He smiled and hummed a few bars of one of the songs that had played in the car.
"That elevator's broken," another trench-coated agent said, emerging from a room at the end of the hall and looking over at him. "The 'Out of Order' sign just keeps disappearing."
Bill glanced up. "Oh, it's broken, huh? Broken how?"
The agent narrowed his eyes. "Broken as in, if you tried to go down that way there wouldn't be an elevator and you'd plummet down a fifty-foot elevator shaft."
"That sounds great!" Bill said, punching the button again. "So why won't the doors open?"
The agent shook his head and walked away. "Just take a different elevator."
The doors to this one obviously weren't going to yield for him, so he jumped to a different elevator at about a forty-five degree angle across the hall. He hit that button and waited, scratching at his forearm under the long sleeve of the kid's coat. Itchiness was a weird sensation. He scratched harder and his arm went from itching to stinging, and when he pulled his hand back out one of his fingernails drew a line of red down his skin. He pulled his sleeve back and studied the wound. Fingernails were weird, too!
Ding! The elevator finally arrived and Bill stepped inside, examining the buttons near the door. "Look at all these floors! Imagine all the damage I could do on any one of them!" He laughed, flexing his fingers. "For now I think I'll go with L, for lobby!"
He pressed the L button and leaned back against the elevator wall with his hands in his pockets. Maybe once he was done here he could go back over to that kid's house and try more of those syrup-covered hot peppers. Where was that kid, anyway? Bill closed his eyes and extended his mental influence over the mindscape, a task that required barely any energy expenditure whatsoever in his true form but was a more difficult feat while trapped in a fleshy meat body. He finally located the kid far away in that alien freak's underground house. "Hah! Well, that'll keep you busy for a while!" Bill said, opening his eyes again. He scuffed the heel of his boot on the wall behind him. "Man, these elevators like to take their time, don't they?"
The elevator shuddered to a stop on a floor several levels above the lobby and three people, all wearing the same outfits of fedoras and trench coats, filed inside. Bill gave them a relaxed little wave; noticing him, they all tried to back out, but the doors closed again too quickly. They settled for standing bunched up as far away from him as they could get in the small space.
"Hey! Want to know how many pounds of force we'd be hitting the ground with if the cables holding up this crate gave out right this second?" Bill asked.
The elevator stopped on the floor directly beneath the one they'd just come from and the three agents all hurried out into the hall. "Why don't you try that elevator?" Bill leaned out and pointed to the doors leading to the one he'd tried first. "The doors are stuck though so you'll have to open them yourselves! Have a great trip! See you next fall!" The elevator doors closed and it began to sink again.
After a second's thought, Bill jumped up in the air a little. There was a fluttery, split second feeling of weightlessness in his stomach, then his feet hit the floor again. Neat! With a laugh, he did it again, harder this time. He went a bit higher but landed oddly and lost his balance, toppling over and crashing into the wall. He caught hold of the metal railing running along the wall, his legs sprawled out over the ground, and snorted. "Pfffttt. Gravity."
Gravity was so ridiculous! The idea of giant clunky humans lumbering around and always being yanked back to the ground by a mysterious, invisible force was too hilarious of a mental image and he burst out laughing, still gripping the railing. Even better, without gravity there'd be humans tumbling all over the place, not to mention the repercussions that lack of gravity would have on Earth in general! But really, humans getting caught in trees, exploding in the thin atmosphere, hitting power lines and getting fried to a crisp. Floating humans. Bill wiped his eyes and steadied himself against the elevator walls. Ahh… nothing like a good joke to lighten up something as monotonous as a ten minute elevator ride.
At last the elevator stopped on the lobby floor and he left it, taking a sharp right and making his way into a wide room at the end of the hall. The room was empty save for a receptionist asleep at the desk with her cheek buried in one hand.
"Hey there, toots!" Bill said, standing on tip-toe to look over the edge of the desk at her. The lady started awake and stared down at him.
"Oh, hey, Agent Mothman," she greeted him, squinting. Her eyes widened and she choked. "What happened to your face?"
Bill tapped his nose. "To be honest, this was probably from falling down the stairs! I tripped about halfway down! Haha! So anyway I was wondering, have you gotten any calls from a dinky little town somewhere in Oregon called Gravity Falls?"
"Calls from Oregon?" Still looking dazed and half asleep, the receptionist thumbed through a thin stack of phone records until she found the one she was looking for. "…Um, yeah, there was one yesterday." She rubbed at her eyes and squinted at it. "Some kid wanted to know if we had any files on a mind demon named… Bill Cipher? I told him that we'd look and that he should call back tomorrow—well, that's today, I guess. We actually found some things, too. Apparently a lot of our documents somehow got sent to some paranormal store at the mall at one point, so we'll have to get those later." She put away the records and yawned. "Why d'you ask?"
"Oh, no reason in particular!" Bill said. The phone on the desk started ringing. "Wow, what weirdly impeccable timing! Mind if I get that?"
The woman reached for the phone and gave him a confused look. "What? You know our phone calls are confidential. If I let you answer I'd probably lose my job."
"Really? Seems to me like you just gave me all the details of what was supposed to be a confidential phone call, but okay! By the way, you know you look exhausted, right? Wouldn't you much rather ignore the phone and go back to sleep?"
Her face stretched in a huge yawn again. "Well, I have been pulling all-nighters to try to get these findings about psychic vegetables typed up, but I can't sleep on the job…"
"I won't tell if you don't!" Bill said. "Deal?" He stuck out his hand.
Numbly, the receptionist took it, saying, "Fine, whatever."
"Excellent! Nighty-night!" Bill let go of her hand and she collapsed in an unconscious heap on the desk. He reached up and pulled the ringing phone closer, taking the receiver and holding it to his ear. "Y'ello?"
"Oh, good, you picked up!" an excited kid on the other side said. "It's me again—Dipper Pines—from Oregon? I called here yesterday. Sorry it's so early but this was the only paranormal society I could find that might have the information I'm looking for—uh, don't ask where I even got your number—and I wanted to call as soon as there were people there." He paused. "Wait, did your voice change?"
Bill grinned. "I dunno, Pine Tree, you tell me!"
"Pine Tree? What—Bill?" There was a clunk over the line. The kid had dropped the phone. There were a few staticky scuffling noises and then Pine Tree's voice could be heard again. "I don't understand! How are you talking over the phone? And why are you at that Eyeball place?!"
"Funny story about that!" Bill said, switching the phone to his other ear and leaning against the desk. "There's a kid over here who's way too interested in the supernatural for his own good! You know, kinda like you! Anyway, turns out he was the only person with access to this building who'd ever be dumb enough to summon me!"
"You stole another body?!" Dipper gasped.
"Stole? Nah, kid, more like 'borrowed until further notice.' Who'd want to be human permanently?" Bill laughed. "Besides, I didn't steal anything! We made a fair deal!"
"Oh, yeah, right, I'm sure that kid totally agreed to be ripped out of his own body." Bill could practically see Pine Tree rolling his eyes. "Is he around there somewhere? HEY WHOEVER YOU ARE, YOU CAN TALK TO PEOPLE USING A PUPPET! TRUST ME ON THIS!"
Bill winced and held the phone away from his ear. "Yeesh your voice is grating. He's not here, anyway!"
"What did you do to him?!"
"Why do you assume I did anything?" Bill smiled, the teeth his his upper jaw protruding over his lip. "Anyway, we're getting off track! I have to say that it's too bad you called this place yesterday, Pine Tree, because now I've got to destroy everything here! It'll be fun, but, you know, there's other things I need to do, so I'm kind of on a schedule!"
"How'd you know I called there?" Dipper asked, a nervous edge to his voice.
Bill laughed again. "What, you think I'm not still keeping an eye on you all? That reminds me, how are Question Mark and that little girlfriend of his doing?"
"They're—um…"
"Great! Well, anyway, I'm pretty sure we both have places to be!" Bill interrupted. "Oh, and remember to keep an eye on that precious journal you've got. It may just disappear right out from under your nose one day! All right, later!"
"Wait, what? No! Nonono Bill don't—"
Bill hung up the phone and cut off Dipper's protest. Then he got down on the floor, took the phone cord with both hands, and yanked it out of the wall. It snapped with a fizz of sparks. The receptionist at the desk, still asleep, mumbled something about clairvoyant potatoes and started to snore.
"Well, that's done!" Bill dusted off his hands. "Now on to the next part!"
Man, this was gonna be cool.
A/N: Driving in my car *BEEP BEEP*
OBEYIN' THE LAW, sure is neat! hope no-one—wRECKS—intomeeeeeeee
oh wait a minute! herecomesacar, it'S MY luck-y day, plenty of time, to get, out of his way!
Driving in my car, *BEEP*-AAAAAAGGGHHH