Stan Pines had never cursed someone's existence as much as he had Cipher's, and never so colorfully.
Well, apart from those gangsters in Chicago, and the gamblers in New York, and those layabouts who'd stolen his old truck -
Okay, he'd cursed the existence a lot of people, but still, the isosceles jackass took the cake, and he didn't like his stuff being taken!
Grumbling to himself and occasionally spitting a foul word into the black-and-white world he now lived in, the former Mr. Mystery glared out at the world.
Being invisible sucked. He'd thought he'd gotten the basic gist of it before, when his dad paid all his attention to Ford and his genius inventions and good grades instead of his little screw-up, but somehow this was even worse. At least then people could actually see him, and just chose to ignore him. Now he was literally a $ &* ghost, drifting in and out of buildings and right through people, because to them, he simply didn't exist.
Oh, sure, they all knew about him, Stan Pines, town hero, but they sure as hell didn't know he was there, and it sucked!
So yeah. Here he was, cursing at Bill's very existence with every swear word he knew and some that he just made up on the spot, floating in the middle of the god-damn Mindscape.
What made it any worse, though, was that even his family couldn't tell he was there. Not his niblings, not his brother who he'd just barely made up with dammit, not even Corduroy and Soos! He was just floating there over them, and nobody could tell he was there, and it hurt to see his family hurting like this, and to know he couldn't be there for them, because he was stuck here, and turned to stone in the town square.
$&* # you, Bill.
The whole sneaking-into-dreams thing happened on accident. He'd known, obviously, that his dreams could influence other suckers', I mean, peoples' dreams, but it'd slipped his mind after that last glimpse of the world in color, before everything had gone monochrome. Because he wasn't asleep this time, dammit.
But then he'd seen a burst of color while floating above the town in a literal thundercloud of emotion (oh, yeah, that. Another reason he hated this place, he couldn't scam people if they could literally see his emotions!) and, with nothing better to do, he'd gone to snoop.
And found himself in someone's Mindscape, and hearing their thoughts.
He didn't know the sod, but if he were to hazard a guess, it might've been one of Corduroy's little brothers, considering that, when he walked through a door labeled "Memories" in the side of a massive log cabin, he caught a glimpse of a very familiar red-haired man wrestling with a fish almost as big as he was, in a boat, with several boys cheering him on.
It couldn't have been Manly Dan himself, though, considering that he was fairly sure the guy wasn't the sort to watch geeky fantasy shows.
It would take him several more trips in and out of people's personal Mindscapes before he got the hang of it. It would be even longer before he figured out he could influence their dreams on an even more conscious level than before.
And it would be even longer than that before he realized that there were holes everywhere in the Mindscape, camouflaged and difficult to see, but there, reaching into the beyond.
He poked at the border of the hole. He'd managed to pull aside whatever was hiding it, and now the gut-wrenching colors and weird drippy edges, with black blobs disappearing sideways into the gap, were exposed and looking very much like someone had torn open a hole in the world.
Torn open a rift. Oh hell no.
Was this another one of those interdimensional portal things, like the one that # $* had come through?!
Stan stepped back, glaring at the thing as it pulsed sinisterly in front of him. It looked like the portal, and it'd been hidden well enough that he doubted it was there by accident. Ford's journal had theorized that Bill came from someplace called the Nightmare Realm, right? Was this how he'd gotten into the Mindscape?
With a snarl, Stan grabbed the weird warpage on each side of the opening, and smashed it shut.
There was a shockwave. Not a tiny little oh, look, a ripple kind of shockwave, but a massive, tree-destroying, earth-smashing shockwave, like a bomb had been dropped.
When the gray dust had cleared, the opening was gone, and the rippling space that had given it away was smooth and flawless. When he aimed a shove at the spot, just to make sure, his hands passed right through the spot. There was none of the weird tingling sensation that had given it away, just thin air.
Good. One less problem to deal with.
Later, as he found other holes and closed them, it would dawn on him that for all he knew, these holes could bring Cipher back from wherever he'd been banished to, and he'd begin hunting these openings in earnest, because even if he couldn't be there for his family except as a statue or someone to talk to in dreams, the least he could do was make sure that the scourge of so many townsfolk's nightmares (and his family's, too) never came back to haunt them.
Let's just see you try to come back, demon. I dare you.