Sarah's story had included- among many, many other things- a detailed physical description of the demon in question. Rob hadn't exactly been lucid for that, and he certainly wasn't entirely lucid now, so the information was locked behind two invisible mental walls that he wouldn't have been able to break even if he had known the information he needed was beyond them.
"I'm Rob," he said with trepidation.
"Rob, huh?" said the triangle. "I'm Bill."
"Bill?"
Rob's eye didn't meet Bill's directly, instead gazing absently at the demon's bow tie, then his hat... and then the mental walls crumbled in turn, first with a faint memory of the outfit Sarah had been wearing earlier and second with a surprisingly robust memory of a previously-forgotten section of the monologue for which he had zoned out. His retreat into memory was abruptly broken up by Bill snapping loudly in his face a few times.
"Sheesh! It takes a special kind of foggy head to zone out in the dreamscape, and I don't mean that as a compliment!"
"Bill Cipher?" Rob asked.
The demon's 'face' contorted for just a second into a red one of seething rage and confusion that faded just as quickly as it had arrived.
"So you know the name. I'm honored, really." He didn't sound honored. "How much else do you know, kid?"
"I know you're a demon."
"By some definitions! And?"
"And..."
The aid his newfound memory granted him quickly reached the end of its usefulness. Either Sarah hadn't brought up anything about Bill's personality or Rob had been so lost for that portion of it that he couldn't salvage the information.
"You're a demon, you show up in dreams, and you can be summoned. ...That's it."
"Excellent!" For the first time in the conversation, Bill sounded like he meant it. "Tell me, do you do a lot of traveling?"
"Why do you ask?"
"I haven't left my dimension in ages. Work-related concerns, and all that. I'm trying to live vicariously through you- is that so wrong?"
"Uh..."
"Let me tell you, the Nightmare Realm may be a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there!"
"The Nightmare Realm?"
"Either you're stupid or you're playing stupid," Bill sighed, "One's hilarious, the other not so much. C'mon, make me laugh, would you?"
They shared a tense gaze, and then Bill let out the world's least sincere laugh, giving Rob's the world's least sincere friendly shoulder pat by stretching out his arm.
"Lighten up, kid! I'm messing with you! You know, you're kind of a wet blanket. Squishy, full of water, and unresponsive when it comes to banter." As if to prove his point, Bill poked Rob in the cheek and discovered with a shiver that it was not, in fact, squishy. "Well, at least those last two."
"Oh, excuse me if I'm not suddenly chummy with you, okay? We just met for the first time one minute ago!"
"On the contrary!"
Bill's arm snapped back to its usual length and his body glowed with a series of rapid-fire images that Rob recognized from his dreams over the past week- the flashing colors of his hallucinatory episode after eating that mushroom, the nondescript classroom from his test nightmare, a few other half-remembered bursts of fantasy. Then, for a few seconds, before shifting back into its original yellow hue, it displayed the current scene in real-time from Bill's perspective, almost like looking into a mirror.
"I've been trying to get to you, kid! But every time I have an opening, you either stop dreaming or you wake up! If I didn't know any better-" his eye narrowed- "I'd think you were doing it on purpose."
"I wasn't doing it on purpose, man."
"Say what you want. Look, I'll drop the pretense. I'm gonna get into your mind one way or another, and then it won't matter if you play stupid, because I'll be able to see everything you aren't telling me."
"Aren't we in my mind right now?"
"Ha! We're in your dreams right now. The meat of your mind is elsewhere, both literally and metaphorically! This is basic stuff. Humans, am I right? Uh, 'scuse me, force of habit. Whatever-it-is-that-you are's, am I right?"
"Cyclopes."
"Cyclopes aren't made of untextured polygons and TV static, and they definitely don't dream. Those guys are dumber than a bag of teeth. Having one eye doesn't make you a cyclops, otherwise me, you, and the eye bats would all be on the same level!"
"Eye bats?"
"Point is, we're not on the same level, and you aren't a cyclops."
"I think I would know what I am."
"Trust me, I thought so, too. You're a real edge case."
"If you're so good with this stuff, what would you say I am if not a cyclops?"
"Hmmm."
Bill floated around him in a lazy circle, bringing to mind a pack of hungry wolves.
"Welp," said Bill, "I guess I'll find out when you're at your lowest! If you think I can't see through your game, it's gonna be all that much funnier when I get the upper hand!"
"My game? What on Earth are you talking about?"
"I'll be watching," snapped Bill, vanishing on a bitter note and taking the environment along with him.
"At least Sarah will be happy about this," Rob thought before his lucidity gave way to unconsciousness.
"WHAT?"
Sarah grabbed his shoulders and shook. Hard. When Rob had cheerfully broken the news to a drowsy Sarah, he had anticipated many possible reactions, this not among them.
"He visited YOU before ME? That's so not fair!"
She let go of him and flopped down onto an invisible fainting couch with a dramatic flourish and an even more dramatic sigh. Her eyes glimmered with an insincere sort of wetness, akin to the tears of a fairy tale princess upset about being simply too pretty and rich to relate to the common folk. Maybe she was happy in her own special way- she just didn't want Rob to know it.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm over it," she said without even a hint of the earlier negativity. "What did he say to you?"
"Just a bunch of cryptic stuff I couldn't make heads or tails of. I think he thought I was trying to manipulate him."
"And were you?"
"No!"
"It would have been really cool if you were."
"He caught me off-guard, alright?"
"Too late now. Okay, okay, so! Could you tell me everything you remember about what he said? We're gonna get to the bottom of this."
"I remember the first words out of his mouth- or, uh, his eye, I guess- were, 'who the heck are you'?"
"Interesting. Did it seem like a genuine who-are-you or an I-know-who-you-are who-are-you?"
"Genuine, I think."
"Interesting. Very interesting. He doesn't know who you are? That has some iiiinteresting implications."
"I told him my name- was I not supposed to do that?"
"First name or full name?"
"First name only."
Rob had gotten a surname for himself- Wrecker- a while back during a period of time he disliked thinking about. It was the only legal surname he'd ever had as far as he could remember (with the exception of the fake identity he'd invented to run for the school board), but it felt like a pseudonym even so. Perhaps, he thought, that was because his arch-nemesis had come up with it. If he had to pick his own evil moniker, what would it be? Would the word 'evil' with a few tweaks to the pronunciation really still cut it? Sure, he might stoop that low for someone else's name, but his own?
"I don't think he gets power over you if he has your name. That's fairies. But hey! There's a lot I don't know about him."
"I'm surprised there's anything you don't know about him."
"Well, two seasons can only tell you so much. That's why I'm here- to pick his mind and get some answers!"
"I don't think he seems like the sort of person who would be an open book about that kind of thing, but I guess you know him better than me."
"Oh, trust me, I have my ways of getting through to him. I'm like a therapist- I can get people to freak out and unintentionally say things that reveal their deepest, darkest secrets!"
"I don't think that's what therapists do."
"Well, it's what I do. Call it serapy."
"Like Sarah plus therapy?"
"Like stalking- I mean, supervision- plus therapy! Secrets beget more secrets. If they can't hide from you, they won't want to try and hide from you, and they'll tell you anything to get you to keep quiet! But Sarah plus therapy is good too."
"Sounds like blackmail."
"By some definitions."
"By all definitions!"
"Maybe so, maybe so. But blackmail makes it sound so serious!"
"Like how 'stalking' sounds so serious?"
"Don't tell me you've never done that to your nemeses."
"I spy on my nemeses. It's a villain thing- it's different. And less creepy."
"What's the difference?"
"The- the- the principle of the thing! The motivation! Hate is different from love. Have you ever hated anybody? Like really hated them?"
"I-"
"No, you haven't. I can tell from the innocence in your eyes."
"Innocence? Oh, trust me, there's no innocence here."
She leaned in with one eye to his and grinned like a serial killer in a horror movie, letting out her best creepy giggle- a laugh that sent chills down Rob's spine against his will.
"Point made. But-! it's still a different thing. You wouldn't understand."
"Whatever you say, Rich."
She patted him on the head. He didn't comment on that last thing- he was over that- he would not let it get to him- he knew better-
"It's Rob," he muttered.
"I know," she replied.
Against Rob's wishes, Sarah had gone and fetched more of the white mushrooms to roast them over the fire for breakfast. It took a few hours of Sarah swearing up and down that she wasn't hallucinating even a little bit before Rob finally decided eating one was worth the risk, and even then, he took small bites at twenty-minute intervals just in case. Their interactions were short, sweet, and heavy on the back-and-forth, and when one ended there would be a long period of peaceful silence before the next one started up. By the end of the day he had recounted his entire meeting with Bill to an inquisitive Sarah. Much to his appreciation (and annoyance), she was a much better listener than he was.
Rob's meeting with Bill had been heavily recontextualized by the information he learned. For one thing, Bill was a villain ('What?' he had asked. 'Why do you care? You're a villain too, aren't you?' she had replied), he lived in a decaying world called the Nightmare Realm that, much like the dimension Rob himself had once been trapped in, acted as a depository for forgotten things, he was a conman who made what Sarah called 'typical demony deals', he knew a lot of things (but not who Rob was, a fact that Sarah suspected bothered him), and he had a big and enthusiastic fanbase. That last one was less so useful info about Bill and moreso useful info about Sarah. It had also come up that eye bats were essentially eyeballs with wings (Sarah described them as 'the sort of demon that would appear on William's hypothetical shoulder if he needed to make a tough moral decision) and that Bill could see through images of his likeness and also trees- definitely birch trees, but, since there were no birch trees in the clearing, Sarah mentioned that she hoped his powers extended to other sorts of trees with holes as well. Rob plugged every tree hole in the clearing with dirt just in case. Sarah let him, but carved a little eye of providence into the bark of a nearby evergreen, apparently rendering his work irrelevant.
They discussed how one sasquatch could feed them for days, and then how to kill a sasquatch, and then how one giant ice cream cone could also feed them for days, and then the conversation topic shifted to if Rob was edible or not. He insisted he was no longer organic. She insisted they would have to try, to know for sure. Rob threatened her with the crowbar and said, 'You'll scream before I scream'. She laughed- hopefully at the quip and not because his failure to intimidate was funny.
Their final topic of the night was how that human had reacted to seeing Rob.
"It could just have been a weird little gag," said Sarah. "Somehow I doubt everybody you meet is gonna react the same way. That'd be boring, you know? But if you want to test it out I have an idea."
"An idea?"
"Yeah! I want you to go into town and try to steal a TV and a generator!"
"What, you wanna watch TV here?" Rob sat up, wide-eyed. He had been thinking about doing the exact same thing! He had wanted to determine if his own universe existed as fiction within this one. Could Sarah really have come to that same conclusion? "Why?"
"I have a DVD on me that could help us survive here."
"Like a wilderness survival show, or something?"
"Not exactly. I was honestly gonna keep it a secret, but now you know everything else and we're kind of living together like an old married couple, by which I mean we sort of hate each other but there's also love there-"
"No there's not."
"Friendship, then."
Rob sighed. Maybe there was friendship there. How long had it been since he had a friend? Was this really friendship if it was born of necessity? Did they need each other? He hd survived fine the first week on his own, save for that time with the mushrooms.
"I'll go into town tomorrow. We'll see if I can steal one for you."
"You are the best. Thanks so much."
"Don't thank me! I have secret ulterior motives."
"Oooh, tell me about them."
"They're a secret," he said, and then he closed his eye and pretended to be asleep.