NB: This work is part of an interconnected series/multichapter of one-shots. Context isn't required and these chapters can be read as standalone works but if you're curious, you can check out the end chapter which explains the premise and the A/Ns. If you're not interested, please enjoy the story freely and don't let me stop you!
Chapter Summary:
Bill Cipher unlocked the true potential of Weirdmageddon when he won the universe from the greasy hands of those gullible humans. With so much left to experience, lesser beings would've felt... overwhelmed.
But not Bill. Even when his loose ends find a way to intrude on paradise, he's on the go. And with this one—oh, Bill is primed to wrap it up in an iunforgettable/i experience.
···ɓuᴉɥʇʎɹǝʌǝ ɹǝqɯǝɯǝɹ ʇˌuɐɔ ǝɥ ···ɹǝʇʇɐɯ ʇˌusǝop ʎʅqɐqoɹd ʻɥⱯ ¡¿ʇɹɐʇs ʎʇɹɐd ǝɥʇ pᴉp ɹɐǝʎ ʇɐɥʍ ʻuoɯˌɔ ʻɥɓn ···ʇǝʎ puⱯ
Disclaimer: The story contains some depictions of mental instability. Read at your own discretion. Gravity Falls belongs to Alex Hirsch.
A/N:
EnneaQuote: "Seven is the part of us that's oriented towards freedom, experience, and positivity. On the deepest level, it's about just the joy of existence—the celebration of our being here; of our life. When people are Sevens, they have a gift for bringing ideas, possibilities, new horizons, but they also have a gift for bringing positivity and hope to people. Riso used to call them 'the spark plugs of the Enneagram'."—Russ Hudson
Author Commentary: It is the innate human desire to seek out new experiences—to adapt amidst changes. In our joy and strife during this adaptation, we come out stronger and wiser to the surrounding world—we brace each next challenge with more confidence. Through this conscious process is founded another experience as well—the 'experience of experiencing', per se, which grants us a personalised sensation unto itself.
Type Seven embodies the constant chase for this 'meta-sensation' and unfurling the potential of the self through life. Their endeavours towards cultivating wisdom is what can transform them into holistic individuals who are set on uncovering the vast mysteries life has to offer.
In that regard, Sevens can be profoundly exuberant, pleasant people who thrive on excitement. Their thirst for aiding others to the new horizons they discover is a byproduct of the curiosity they feel towards the wild nature of things. And in all they accomplish, they attain a gratefulness for each new step towards a fresh adventure. That gratefulness serves as a reminder of their worth and the worth of those around them.
The pitfall of any Seven would be a disconnect between the internalisation of their experiences and the methods they employ to tackle obstacles. This can cause Sevens to become scattered and unfocused, their knack for exploration coated not as a means of gaining new insight but coping with the lack of a clear direction. Hence, ignoring the long-lasting aspects of their actions can lead to interpreting life as this loosely tied series of fleeting joy and increasing fallout. At worst, even hysteria and loss of control can set in as the Seven feels unable to grasp the reason in their mind for why they do anything.
Because of all that, it's imperative that Sevens find their equilibrium of entropy—being the eternal adventurer while remembering to find the time for calm, introspection, and rest.
"Remember how it feels when the past doesn't stop to catch its breath?"
It was that rotten traitor of a machine. Of course. He must have put up this spectacle—a wretched, conniving irritant with an annoying semi-analogue, semi-digital sputter paraded as an excuse for a voice.
"Did you like what you saw?" he asked again.
"YOU!" Bill Cipher turned around as he let the jolt of shock—weakness—run over him and dissipate.
Amidst the mist which seeped through the tall, chipped walls of the house, Bill took to erasing this betrayal with a quick snap of his fingers.
Nothing happened.
"Not this too!" Bill squealed, trying again. "C'mon! C'mon!"
"Seems familiar?" the intruder asked, half-radio, half-TV head bobbed to the side. The pixelated mouth cut amidst the static in the latter half of the face grinned to the edge of the black-rimmed screen.
"How'd you get here, cross-eye? What's all this?!" Bill sensed his vision starting to drown in red once more—damn the exertion. His residual powers were beleaguered with inexplicable strain—organic sensations—yet his energy had remained infinite. Always. "You know getting on my bad side doesn't end well for you in any timeline, right? Remember who controls time itself!"
"Oh. Of course, I forgot about that." A mocking chuckle escaped the traitor as he adjusted the tie on his suit and narrowed his right eye—the radio speaker—in snide contempt. The many vertical neon stripes on his white linen suit stuck out in the crimson chroma dressing Bill's vision. "Wait, but, hmph… it seems you don't control time here? Shocking. I figured I would've been deleted from all timelines otherwise."
Bill directed sarcasm; he wasn't the actor. No more. The wrath of the dream demon grew to be more fearsome than the most wretched of eldritch abominations styling their might as anything close to 'godlike'. The remaining walls broke apart with the power of his punches, patches of pointy tinder tumbling down into the void; lasers shot from his body in a plethora of directions, effortlessly destroying the furniture and the tree inside the defunct room; bellows blew out the mist throughout the hallways as he lingered on the finite result of his fury: this off-beaten platform, a fragment of the house floating away into the vastness.
"How is this happening?" Bill questioned, seeing the unwanted guest had been untouched by the chaos. A barrier hit him as he tried to jump from the platform and clasp the door he'd entered from. How could there have been a barrier here? "Think this will stop me? I'll annoy you to death, you sycophant!"
"Takes one to know one, hm?" the intruder asked, walking to the other edge of the platform. The rest of the house was far away now. With a twist of his hands, he conjured an illusory image of the entire Nightmare Realm in all directions. "Oh, this dead spot is truly special indeed. Worth the search."
Bill translated his eye and limbs over to the other side of his body, huffing quietly.
The intruder clapped his metallic hands. "Well, thanks for your time, but I'll be forced to run soon. So I'll make this quick."
"Real wise guy, eh?" Bill crossed his arms, willing to steady the cacophony if it meant chiding away at an enemy. "Being cryptic's not gonna work on me, pal. I perfected that strat!"
"I've no doubt."
Bill wasn't a fan of the short, apt reply dripping with ridicule. "Just spit out your endgame," he said, shrugging. "I'm gonna find out, anyway."
"In the span of fifteen seconds, you've tried to annihilate me, 'annoy me' out of here, and now you wish for me to show my hand?"
"Counter, bozo: for all the time you had to plan this little scheme, this whole house has gotta be the lamest 'demon containment field' in the whole universe! You got nothing on me because unlike you, I can wait this out no matter what." Manipulation through bluffing was not only his strong suit but a honed skill. "You can do nothing and power down after however many years or millennia that battery inside you's got juice for. Or you can spare me the trouble since puny traitors like you don't have anything better to do with your pathetic lives, anyway!"
The machine paused for a moment before whirring a robotic laugh. A scoff followed as his focus remained locked on the Nightmare Realm.
Bill narrowed his eye, materialising his black cane and gripping it tightly.
"What do you know of keeping the mind in check, Bill?"
"What? Seriously throwing that curveball at me?"
"I've been vastly impartial to what's been happening in your cage. It's because I'm not part of your playbox. Not wholly, at least. And the other parts, hmph… now they're something you've been letting go." He spawned a cup of decaffeinated coffee, took a sip with his fake mouth, and threw it out. The cup and its liquid froze in the air. Disgusting on multiple fronts. "It's irritating me, Bill. Stagnation—I despise it. It hurts me."
"Stagnation?" Bill retorted. "I treat you the same as everyone else, you deluded moron! Now you think placing me in whatever elaborate idiot trap you made is gonna work? Guess again!" Bill cackled and twirled his cane. "After you lose—and you will—it's straight to Floor Zero with the rest of the ingrates, digi-brain!"
"Clinging to that still? Perhaps it wasn't stagnation after all…" The machine's left eye flickered with static for a moment. "Of course."
"Care to share your dumb epiphany?"
"All this time, I thought it was something so recent when it'd been far worse." The intruder shook his head. "She suspected as much, but I… I needed to see how it all played out to understand. Denial: about what happened back then and how it's spun again."
Bill's eye blazed through expressing surprise and anger as the one before him morphed into…
Once more, it was that thing which had haunted him so subtly for all times. Cordo—no, not that name… Bill had nearly disregarded it again. But how could the machine have known?
"The reality of who truly first left you; betrayed you; tricked you into—"
"You…" Bill felt words somehow lose him. For just a moment. He growled, snapping away from the new background—the distant, ugly replica of the Second Dimension infused with grey. "Stop that! O-Outta my sight!"
"You moved him from the memories over to me because he endangered the illusion." The machine shifted between himself and Bill's hatred incarnate as the landscape did between his two 'homes'. "You made yourself ignorant—remade him so small I almost didn't spot him. Oh, I don't hold it against you for doing that. As one half of your fractured rationale, it's in my interest to… forgive you."
"N-No."
"Surprised? Of course you'd be. She and I are the ones that make you anticipate such things." He crossed his arms. "I don't care what you make of this. My goal was to begin breaking the cycle. Now… I'll be going."
"Wait," Bill said, fidgeting with his fingers a bit before clenching his hand into a fist. He had to act fast to gain control again. He needed control. "You can't do that! It's not fair! I can't—"
"Fair?!" the intruder snapped, sustaining his original appearance for a moment to gaze back at Bill. He shut his makeshift eyes. "Huh. 'Fair'. I will not debate the markings of virtue with a shadow of what I once served. To take a page from your book, friend: unlike you, I'm okay with letting it all go." He gestured at the transmogrified vastness. "Including the illusion. Because I'll always survive. And after what you did to her… well, you don't exist without me."
Bill blinked, hovering in disbelief. Everything continued to spiral in and out of the past, the rapidness of change reaching a tipping point as unrecognisable visual clutter spread in all directions.
"And so it pauses, Cipher," a distorted voice proclaimed. "Until the time comes when your greatest foes are no longer the burdens which lie beneath this sea of impulses and vanity, then—then, I'll come back."
"No way!" Bill shouted, outstretching his hands towards the amorphous robot. "No, I'm not letting you leave, you sick, twisted—"
His entire body phased past the entity. He hit the front barrier on the platform only to see the façade collapsing upon surrender to entropy, a sea of red replacing all.
Bill turned around.
"Come BACK!" He tried to dilate his pupil—make it light with fire again. No use. "DON'T RUN. I… I'LL BECOME YOUR LIVING NIGHTMARE! I CAN DO IT! DON'T THINK I'M POWERLESS!"
Those threats fell on deaf ears, for in a fraction of a second, the traitor entirely vanished.
"How… Where ARE you?!" Bill was alone—not again. He clawed at his eye, screaming. "DNA NIAGA DNA NIAGA DNA! OT EVAH I FI EM HTIW NWOD UOY EKAT ll'I! EM ECAF! I—"
His raving ceased, fervour vanishing as though some irreparable hole had burnt through his triangular body. But it was fine. Bill could tell without looking. Cognition clocking at a standstill, at that moment, the only thing instinct let him do was look around—discover.
A glance to his right, another to his left, and a final one down. Nothing was abound.
Up wasn't like that.
There they were: two brown eyes, projecting a scene of normality while gazing back at their single, broken viewer.
And for the first time in eternity, Bill Cipher—overlord of the universe, the scourge of order, and enslaver of dreams—was scared.
Bill opened his eye.
That was a good nap.
Well, it'd been a good 'close one's eye(s) to simulate the monotone delirium that comes with organic neural and physical recuperation, leading to the perception of time passing' activity. Bill had both control of time and no need for sleep like flesh-bound mortals, yet only when one had infinite power did the seemingly mundane become a river streaming with vibrant energy.
Emulating organic behaviour was an especially prevalent 'fun-boring' distraction for Bill. Having realised that, one of Bill's favourite instruments—the Grand Unifying Spinning Wheel of True Random Universe Variety (or GUSWTRUV, a name chosen in delightful irony to poke fun at the delusions of an old polydactyly 'friend' of Bill's)—very coincidentally recalibrated itself on subsequent spins to output things like 'be a capybara for a day'. No paradox there.
Bill stretched his hands, lounging at the precipice of his crescent-shaped throne on the final level of The Spire. Unlike the seeming infinity resting above him, the view from across the enveloping silver-framed brambleglass pane was a used, disgustingly empty toybox. Sure, there wasn't anything wrong with a mix of spectral clouds, distant chaos storms that more or less appeared like blue fireworks exploding in a quiet blaze, and the hellish red and purple over the pandemonium, but he craved variety.
Bill moved his eye around the panorama, manifesting a more appropriate environment from his enormous glare.
"That's what I'm talking about!" he said, taking in the glory of the floating goat-lion heads chasing after bits of cheezebras.
He revelled in the power of his palace, this epicentre of weirdness. The Spire, as a relatively recent tower-like construct which sat above the centre of the Null Galaxy and the bounds of spacetime, was untethered from not only the order of the universe but also any rules in general. Only the vastness of the Ascendance Plane, the Axolotl's dominion, lingered over Bill's shoulders.
His fingers scratched over the body of his throne as he seated himself upright. Even with all his newfound power, he couldn't reach that pompous jerk. Having limits in that regard was… a mixed experience. Of course, one would have presumed that for a demon like Bill, having limits had to be a nightmare—a failure in all he'd striven towards. But that wasn't true. When a challenge like the Axolotl existed, 'limits' regularly transformed into avenues for scheming, and Bill couldn't turn that down.
Because he was in control.
As long as Bill was certain he'd succeed, the more time he allowed to pass, the greater ecstasy he would've felt upon seeing his plans come to fruition. Be it through performing the cosmic ritual which would unlock the barrier that impeded him, allowing him to dethrone the pretender and solidify his reach over the keys to total rule of the Multiverse; or be it through the less pleasurable alternative: forcing Frilly down to his level and unravelling true chaos upon this small playground. Yet that contingency—like others, it wasn't…
One step at a time.
Bill abated his pondering. Aligning his tophat, he left his seat of grandeur and trotted down the steps of The Spire's main staircase many times past the speed of light. He juggled past the chamber containing aforementioned wheel, the unused spagfetti room (who could've guessed confetti with spaghetti was a less than stellar combination), the Dousing Horribly Ugly Celebrities from Kon'Droll in Literal Nightmare Fuel game show floor requested by Pyronica, and various other attractions Bill had to keep the new party rolling.
He came to floor 618,618: the planet-turned-concert-stage. Bill entered through the opulent door and floated past the atmosphere, going backstage—the planet's southern hemisphere—where his crew of troublemakers loitered around. Similar to the lexicon of all the tongues in this universe when it came to having exact words to describe the sceneries Bill had the frequent misfortune of being subjected to, the situation in front of him appeared to be 'dire'.
8-Ball and Pyronica were caught in a game of trying to see how durable the former's eyes were in regards to the latter's flame. Kryptos, Keyhole, and Teeth conversed about the going-ons in their assigned sectors, leaving Zanthar to fiddle with something in the distance further away. As for the band of heat-resistant creatures with natural singing talent Bill had brought for the event, they squabbled in the dark, stuffy elevator stage under the main one (the 'elevator stage' was actually one of the slices cut out from the planet's crust and redesigned to be retractable while including a laminated floor).
"Good Reckoning, boss!" 8-Ball said, waving with a wholeheartedness one could've expected out of a Henchmaniac with magic eight-balls for eyes.
"Good Reckoning?!" Bill exclaimed. "How many times do I gotta tell you pea-brains: there's no 'Reckoning' anymore 'cause we're not back in that slimehole!"
"Oh, uh, right." 8-Ball scratched his head. "Sorry. Force'a habit."
"What didja want us to say when ya came up?" Pyronica asked with a dry undertone indicative of someone who probably knew the answer to their question already. "I forgot."
"Well, I vote for 'Great in-Spire-ing today!'," Teeth added.
Bill put his hands together, saying, "Two things. First, this isn't a democracy, Teeth!"
Teeth shrugged. "Eh. Mine was too on the nose, anyway."
"Yeah, thanks for noticing before you blurted it out," Bill chided, realigning his focus back to the group. "Second, and for the last time, the ol' 'Greetings, Overlord!' has a much better ring to it! Got it?"
"Loud and clear!" they all shouted.
"Alright." Bill took a few steps back and made a magnifying glass out of his hands. "Let's see what we've got here."
He steadied his pupil, analysing the orchestra to the finest details. And, well, it was entirely too mediocre. Perhaps prone to failure as well. His encore begged for spice—a newer approach than this.
"Okay, listen up!" Bill yelled. "If we wanna make this the best damn musical performance anyone's ever heard, we gotta change some things up! So I need"—he pouted, noticing another discrepancy—"Tsekovlombish, you literal walking sponge of carcasses, stop hiding behind that infinitely expanding marble pillar and get in here already! I want that stage light held up by you on my time, no buts!"
Tsekovlombish, despot of the Zenii Dimensional Quadrant and prominent nightmare trafficker, rumbled out a sound which indicated approval. Bill watched as Tsekovlombish went above the stage and reconfigured the misaligned projectors on the stage with his seventeen red tendrils.
"Now! Kryptos, not sure which idiot signed off on it, but I'm not having you on the beaver trumpet."
Bill stripped the instrument from Kryptos' hands, disassembled it, and twisted it around his finger.
Kryptos began, "I know I, uh, haven't practised with that one before, but—"
"Wait a second, is the beaver… taxidermied?!" Putting it through a makeshift (and pointless) particle accelerator in his eye, he remade the trumpet and flung it behind his pseudo-cousin. "No dice, cuz! You're switching with 8-Ball's skullcrophone after you get that dead animal's head kicking so hard again it could chew through the spacetime continuum!"
"Wait, boss"—Kryptos' dumb buck teeth were now fully sticking out—"I read about this trick in 'beaver-beats-got-com' and it's really good! If you just—"
"SWITCH. WITH 8-BALL." Bill sensed the exhilaration of rising ire cut through each line of his geometric form. "And get your lines right!"
"O-Okay," Kryptos conceded. "Noted! I'll, uh, kick myself to make sure I do it, too!"
"That's the spirit!" Bill pivoted to the quantum guitar which laid firm in certain small yet comparatively burly cyan hands. "Keyhole, the hell's going on with that entanglement over there?"
Keyhole looked down at their guitar and shouted, "OH! Oh man, I had no idea these strings were super-impositioned!"
"See, this is what I'm talking about! Forgetting the simplest details! It's like none'a you even—"
"Be right back!"
Bill would've punished Keyhole for the interruption had they not grabbed their nose, turned it upside down, and spawned a portal to their home dimension in which they ran off.
"Nevermind, who else do we have…" Bill stammered before a series of swooshes broke through the soundscape. He turned around.
"Schröpdingus Enterprises is a ripoff!"
"Back already?" Bill asked the newly reappeared Keyhole, still annoyed yet a bit amused. He threw a gaze to the Infinitum Watch he spawned on his wrist. "Five seconds."
"Had to go back to a guy who knows a guy and steal the actual strings off him," Keyhole ranted while fixing the guitar. "Turns out that was Schröpdingus' cyborg brother, so I decided to lock him in non-existence for a bit on the way out! Man, can't wait for the reunion between the two!"
Bill considered going ahead with scolding Keyhole but he realised he didn't care as long as the guitar was working.
The same couldn't have been said about the piano made of human colons which bore a concerning amount of purple spots on its exterior.
"Hey, Teeth!" Bill called. "That thing's so dirty it wouldn't fly any colonoscopy in the universe! I'm not blind, y'know!"
Teeth shot a thumbs up, cleaning up the spots on his instrument with the incredible remediable properties of his saliva (if one could've classified setting items aflame and retransforming their ashes into solid matter as 'remediable').
"Ugh… good enough," Bill murmured.
"Ya sure?" More saliva streamed down Teeth's mouth. "I can totally—"
"All right, partners!" Bill said, clapping and channelling the stew of thoughts and words he'd said into an outfit fit for the occasion. "Enough chit-chat. I've got an encore to get rolling and I don't want any more—"
"Uh, boss?" Kryptos piped up, his eye away from the script he'd received from 8-Ball.
"What?!"
Bill followed Kryptos' gaze, looking over to the lower half of his triangular form. He quickly reminded himself how some powers had their caveats.
"Of course you'd say something about my outfit callout!" Bill conjured another switch in his attire—from a red cowboy costume to a classic tuxedo (he made sure to focus his thoughts on classiness). "C'mon, let's do this! Ready?"
"Ready!" his Henchmaniacs shouted in tandem, flying, teleporting, and running into position.
A distant squeak followed from the many creatures who were below the stage while, out of his four massive legs, Zanthar somehow shot a thumbs up which stuck out above the giant camera that would stream the performance to the entirety of the universe.
Bill lifted his hands, the left one holding a conductor stick. "One, two, three—"
All lights except the ones on the stage went out. Bill, being Bill, threw the conductor stick and 'infused' himself into position.
And just like that, they were—
"Life: what's it really about?" Kryptos' low, melodic voice rang. "Is it the party? Is it the friends? Or just Dimension 89D's reallyyy good boomcakes?"
8-Ball drew a steady flow on the trumpet.
"If that's all there is, then I don't know how to go on anymore! I think I need someone—just… just someone—to show me the way!"
"Maybe there's a cute guy out there?" Pyronica sang, the hum of the chorus rising. "Someone to sing you a lullaby when you stop dancing?"
"Oh, no, no, dear—no lame-o's. Gimme your clickity-click thing over there—think I need to make a call…"
"What gall!" Pyronica grabbed a purple screamaphone from beneath her cape and threw it anyway.
"Don't fret"—Kryptos caught it—"for he's a friend of a friend. Oh, but forgot his scream frequency! It's all going downhill…"
Bill laughed under his fictitious breath. Now it was on.
"Better call Bill!" He emerged out of the phone's receiver as the planet—the entire floor of The Spire—propelled itself upwards. Bill winked at the camera. "And you thought this was gonna be some lame ballad!"
"Wait, what's a Bill?" Kryptos and Pyronica joined together.
"He's the powerful demon of ANY season—all on the showfloor seemingly without reason!" A suave tip of Bill's hat to all around him as he pointed towards the camera. "Say no to cylindrical schemes from shady wormfolk, Endorph-In-Brain corner stores on intersection ORN1, or any other bozos—check with me and see some real fun in the cosmos!"
"So you're a spooky scary space overlord?" Kryptos said.
"Labels upon labels, talented new customer—oh, you can call me anything but dicey!"
"That doesn't tell me how I'm gonna answer my life's question!"
"Should I mention my deal's so hot'n new it got FDR rolling in his grave thinking his one's a Great Regression?!"
"Sounds wonderful!" the chorus tailed the chipper tune from the piano and guitar.
"Can still see you're all too quick to say adieu—to the lady in purple, too—so let's check what the Cipher Henchmaniac Acquisition School can do for you!" The stage, having broken to the top level of The Spire, was now illuminated by a mix of neon lights and clusters of distant quasars. "Start with a call, sign an NDA—show us that glitter in your eyes provided you drink anything but stinkin' mango gatorade! Second's the trip down below: pass my trial of wit and grit like your life's as a ticking time bomb! And in the end, STILL be whole and TRANSFORM into your wonderful new form!"
"Psh, and become?" Pyronica asked.
"A Henchmaniac, you crone!"
"Hey, that wasn't in the script!"
Kryptos jumped in, "Well, bein' a Henchmaniac does sound kinda cool."
"So don't drool! Join in my entourage and find who you really are!" A clone of Bill morphed from Bill with whom the original Bill began to dance. "Go with polka or tango while spreading all kinds of malarkey! It's like France in 1793 all over again, baby!"
"We're startin' to really dig this guuuuy," the chorus followed through.
"WAIT!" Bill shouted, the orchestra turning slightly down in volume. "Look out, everyone! An outdated reference appealing to our demographic of brain-rotted children!"
He shot towards a tiny bean-shaped human in a red spacesuit with an oversized visor. It materialised into Bill. Again.
"Just kidding, it's me!" third Bill yelled.
"It's him!" the chorus exclaimed alongside Teeth who rolled back with the piano.
"Now again, in entirety!" the three Bills sang as pillars materalised from behind them. "Got a meaningless nine-to-five and wanna show your boss you CAN grow a spine?"
"Call Bill!" a sea of voices answered.
"Got yourself a pushover girl that's just a bit too dense?"
"Bill!"
"LITERAL SHEEP CARCASSES FLYING IN YOUR BASEMENT FLOOR?!"
"BILL!"
"This is great!" Kryptos raised his hands. "Can't wait to fix all the leaks around my—"
"Woah, woah! Not that good, pal!" the clones said, aggregating back to one Bill. He jumped off the stage, camera following him to a set mimicking the front gates of his incredible abode. "But look, if Bill's not your all-knowing triangle to hire, just check in at The Spire! 'Cause over here, there's always the thrill of domination!"
"Exhilaration?" Pyronica added.
"With a touch of ANNIHILATION!"
"But I heard it's pretty lax on indignation…" Kryptos mumbled.
"Don't think I can't arrange that," Bill said. "But just for youuuuu!"
"That's not what—"
"Oh, stop being a bore; there's four-eyed babies and spider hot-tubs galore!" Bill and Pyronica teleported inside said hot-tub. "You can even jump in your own virtual hellscape to explore!"
"Wow, certified fun circa Big Bang!" Kryptos read a sign out loud, blasting a small imp-like creature in his personal playground surrounded by fire and death.
The imp promptly exuded its rage by hurtling a giant rock towards Kryptos.
"Oh no… I didn't mean to—"
A swift solo from Keyhole overtook Kryptos' screams of anguish and the cackling of the singers.
"C'mon for the lead-in, everyone!" Bill panned the camera back to him just when Teeth and 8-Ball rejoined for the crescendo. "Vibes and crocodile tears! That's the way in The Spire!"
"Just don't forget to outrun the maze of fire!"
"And juggle avoiding the FNT buyers!"
"Or your skin and credit score are both gonna be dire!"
"Because through chaos and uncertainty is how we do it ALL in the good—"
"Old—"
"SPIRE!" a cacophony of voices screamed in unison as Bill waved the microphone around in the air.
"And don't forget to approve and concede to our channel!" Zanthar shouted, clicking a red button on the camera.
"Cut!" Bill slashed with his hand.
Instantly, the planet swooshed back to the floor it was meant to be on.
"Nice job, folks!" Bill said. "Kryptos, work on the high note! Went way overboard with the screech."
"I will!" Kryptos said. "P-Promise I won't disappoint ya next time, boss!"
"You'd better! Zanthar, great camera work! Could almost see the gloss in my eye!"
"Hey!" Keyhole called, climbing down a pillar alongside Teeth (who held his piano in his mouth, of all places). "We should have a gnome violin next time!"
"Yeah, right. I wouldn't give that instrument to my worst enemy!"
"Why not?"
"Because I said so." Bill wouldn't debate the uselessness of that horrid instrument. He loathed it, though he couldn't exactly formulate why.
"Oh, boss!" 8-Ball exclaimed. "What 'bout me, boss? How'd I do?"
"If I haven't mentioned you, I probably don't care," Bill declared. "Or you performed so badly I might just send you to the time-out corner. Now, scram!"
They did as instructed, quickly vanishing. Bill breathed a sigh of relief, poofing the tight tuxedo away.
"Ahem."
He looked towards the source of the sizzling harrumph. Of course, such a collage of mimicked respiratory sounds had to have come from Newsinance, long-time head administrator for all major sectors surrounding the far outskirts of The Spire and various pocket dimensions.
"Wonderful performance. Quite… dazzling to behold from the ice caps on this world."
"Ah, I was great, wasn't I?" Bill put a finger to his eye and threw it (literally) at Newsinance. "But your boring self's never one to hear others gloat, eh?"
"We have an issue."
"Oh, really?" Bill's finger came crawling back to him and he reattached it. "Well, gimme some applause for my wonderful clairvoyance—you never come for anything else! How'd the fourteenth overlord of some obscure dimension wrong you now, huh?"
"Obscurity never was a strong suit of Dimension 46'\."
Bill froze for a second.
"It's Earth. One of your cronies seems to have accidentally dug up the final packet of Time Beans."
"Time Beans?" Bill felt a slight strain in his voice as annoyance took over disbelief. "There?"
"As I said; and not knowing that inside said packet lay our favorite delusional baby's contingency plan, some idiot's left them rotting on the ground," Newsinance recited. Figures. "My informants have devised as much. I believe you know whom I suspect, yet I will leave the punishments to you."
"How in existence does any'a this happen?" Bill questioned, spite guiding a hand over his body.
"Do I look like an interdimensional archivist or something to you?" Newsinance scoffed. "Get an egghead from one of the scholar enclaves for these questions, not me. What matters is that those droll humans could get their hands on them if we don't act at once."
"God, fine!" Bill threw his hands. "About time I checked up on what you morons were doing down there. I want you to ring me if you hear anythin' new about who it was!"
He ascended back into the atmosphere and went past the door to the planet, leaving Newsinance alone. Once back at the stairway, Bill unraveled a giant red-white megaphone from behind his back and, preparing his wonderful voice, shouted these simple words to the denizens of all the floors in The Spire:
"Henchmaniacs: cleanup on aisle my whole house!"
A part of Bill wished to shrug away the concerns of Newsinance entirely. A part of him wished to indulge in striding across the halls of The Spire as he'd got in the habit of doing.
Well, those parts didn't keep him in power. Bill knew from experience that Time Beans, as the only source of the rare and elusive Time Trees with which individuals could shuffle and misconstrue timelines, were dangerous by themselves. Even as the ultimate authority on time, he knew he had to be… expeditious.
Nevertheless, Bill didn't want to wade through the entirety of space nor instantly teleport to his destination given how, well, dreadfully boring it'd have been to just pop in, fix the problem, and go back to The Spire. It felt too… routine to him. So with his desire to see some sights along the way, it was decided on a pleasant whim that floating towards the nearest shortcuts in the vicinity was a good compromise.
"Ugh, welcome back, cold nothingness of space," Bill said, speeding past the event horizon of the ultramassive black hole Z1. "Still as lame as last time, I see."
He debated hurtling more insults against the black hole had the giant, fundamental, life-defining question of why he even sought to initiate verbal discourse with a void in space not crossed him first.
Thereafter arose another fascinating question emboldened by coincidence: why was there a single discernible tone reaching him through the vibrations of his golden outline? Sound in space was not uncommon after he'd swept and rewritten the rules of the cosmos, but a lone hum wandering the centre of the physical universe and rapidly evolving into what Bill could best attribute to be an echo—that was something else.
As Bill moved and the echo flowed, the former swiftly clicked into what the latter was evolving towards. Mariage d'amour was never a favourite of Bill's, yet the contemporary piano solo piece had a whimsical ebb and flow he could appreciate. Perhaps its source was some derelict spacecraft having improbably stumbled upon a broadcast of this piece near Earth, forced in its scrambled state to carry the signal to the ends of everything.
Or someone was playing tricks on him…
It was inconsequential. Having something to keep chasing after—like this tedious but equally important errand—was the strange respite for Bill. It was why being on the run towards the worthwhile gave him the satisfaction that he was always becoming smarter—adapting to those who dared slight him. He never questioned why he'd thought that way, obviously. What was there to question? He was Bill Cipher, the only demon to have fought and claimed the right to infinite knowledge, strength, and wisdom from the chains of mortality. Although he forever wished to have been moulded into power so that patience wasn't a virtue he had to abide by for this long.
And yet… what if he was born into it and just couldn't—
He snapped back.
He was getting tired of the music now. When Bill became tired of things, they usually vanished from existence. The timing was perfect, given he'd reached one of many dimensional wormholes which, unlike regular wormholes, tunnelled between the fabric of entire dimensions. Recognising the swirling, multicoloured goop beyond as the emblematic corridors spread across the gargantuan space station Handralia of Dimension DT-99 (colloquial designation being the 'Finger dimension'), he leapt inside the vortex and was quickly on the other side.
Utter darkness stretched throughout nearly the entire maze of steel; only a single distant nebula on the outside cast a glimmer over Bill's form, filling the hall with yellow washing away against a subtle tincture of blue and purple. He'd expected a courteous welcome from Hand Monstrosity, but like a teacher to a class of ingrate children, he had expected far too much. Well, it wasn't as if his minion couldn't keep track of time. He had an unnecessary amount of fingers, even more now that he was granted power in a place where he was crowned god-emperor because of that fact!
Bill sighed. "And I was so keen on letting you stay as overseer here, old pal. Oh well! Guess royal welcomes truly are—"
A rumble cut him off. Bill dispelled the darkness, showering the vicinity in blood-red projector light emanating from his body.
"I-Is that…" a fickle yet deep voice murmured. "Bill?!"
"Wait a second. Fingroni?"
"Uh, almost didn't see ya there!" Hand Monstrosity's envoy—one of his detached fingers bearing an eye and a human mouth—wobbled over to Bill.
"Aw, you and your phalangeal limitations! What's the deal here? Did ol' Handy get your brothers tied up again?"
"Ah, you know how it is." A laugh. A nervous laugh. "Do you want to stay for a bit while I fetch your our reports, 'cause I'm sure they'll be of great—"
"No, none'a that today. I'm taking a shortcut."
"Of course, of course. T-To somewhere here, I presume?"
Bill narrowed his eye. "Dimension 46'\."
Fingroni gulped.
"Love the curiosity!" Bill clapped his hands. "Oh, you always were like that! But you should know I don't like walking in circles—being a triangle and all that!" He chuckled, towering over Fingroni. "So tell me: where's the whole crew, really?"
Fingroni froze for a second.
"Asking nicely just once, y'know!"
"I… I ain't sure what you mean, Bill." Fingroni blinked. "Everyone's fine. T-They're just away right now because there's really another problem at the core of why—"
Core.
"Good idea!" Bill said. "Let's check in there, then!"
Reverting his lustre from red back to a soft yellow, Bill went past Fingroni. He phased through the corridor, entering multiple rooms—storage compartments, loading bays, growth vats, the like. Each new room had its walls chiselled out of a different material and they were thicker than those in the previous one, yet a rising commotion became the common denominator. Deep inside the station where natural light and mechanical beings never set foot was Bill's stop, for the nexus of the station (or the 'palm') quelled all his suspicions.
Around the centre of the dome-like insides of the palm, near the generator of the station, Hand Monstrosity's rumbles and cries reverberated with an annoying magnitude of importance. Only two of his fingers weren't chained behind the sphere of a powerful neon seal, and he used them to swat away waves of many small creatures which tried to restrain him further in his cage (to no avail).
The creatures wardening the prisoner were… Enfires. Bill was aware Hand Monstrosity had brought slaves for the construction of his 'finger palace', but he didn't know they were Enfires. What a gullible display—no wonder this was how Bill had found him. These slaves—a sorry excuse for an entire species of humanoid fire elementals—didn't even deserve their place in the scholars' footnotes. He couldn't be bothered to even remember the last time he'd met one, as they'd only drawn his ire from the innate pompousness coming from their annoying voices.
"Hey, HM!" Bill yelled, having found motivation to intervene. "Lemme 'lend ya a hand' there!"
Bill clasped his tophat and thrust it high in the air. For two whole seconds, it twirled above the Enfires and then froze, its tip pointed against the ceiling. Many confused Enfires looked towards Bill before a massive volley of water erupted from his hat and went in all directions across the room, dousing the entire mass of tiny sentient beings into steam which escaped towards the vents of the room. Just like that, Bill had eradicated another 'endangered species' of the universe. How fun.
"Glad I took a stroll here, huh?" Bill asked, the hum of waterproof machinery dominating the ambience.
Hand Monstrosity roared.
"Calm down, yeesh." He readjusted his bowtie and pulled his hat back. "Y'know, these things need prep work. You all think I got a bag of tricks up my sleeve half the time or something stupid like that, but oh no. It's deliberate, precise, controlled, and—"
A monstrous punch from Bill's left fist shattered the barrier and caused a small explosion of pink and blue dust. It left the escapee unscathed and with tongue plastered out in satisfaction. Bill took that as gratitude.
"N-No!" a familiar fickle voice rang out from behind Bill.
Bill turned around, peering over to the small hoverpad above him.
"Years of planning for nothing!" Fingroni bent down. "Damnit, I can't go back because of dumb luck!"
"Oh, Fingroni," Bill said, in an instant blinking to the pitiful traitor, making him gracelessly fall from the hoverpad and onto the metal floor. "Didja really think that would go well?"
"You! You couldn't just stay in your dumb tower, t-thinking you're untouchable! I've been plotting against this tyrant here for longer than you can imagine." Fingroni rose up and stared down Bill. "Oh, your reckoning's gonna come soon, Cipher! It won't be me, but just you—"
Bill shut him up. Or, more accurately, he 'melted him up' into a puddle of beige liquid right then and there, courtesy of his Eye Beam. A bit of ash even floated and drifted away. Bill erupted in gleeful laughter at the delightful scene.
"You know how it is with traitors, Handstrosity!" Bill shouted, wiping a nonexistent tear of joy from his eye. "Name gets buried so deep in the mind, it practically ain't there!"
Hand Monstrosity formed into a fist and propelled himself slightly in the air, agreeing with Bill on that sentiment (plus the spontaneous portmanteau of his name).
"Ya gonna handle the rest of what's going on here? I'm letting you slide the first time 'cause you're an old pal, but start holding up some standards here! Want you on the dot; no excuses!"
Hand Monstrosity reformed into a thumbs up expression.
Bill rolled his eye and floated to his exit point above the generator: a portal. This one was both the station's primary method of power generation and power drainage. Much like Stanford's project, it could travel between a large range of dimensions. Yet it expanded upon that foundation by capturing big expulsions of raw energy generated from travel between dimensions with different, stricter definitions of 'energy' (Bill, having only half-rewritten the laws which governed the universe, was responsible for this discrepancy; but he didn't care).
For a lapse, Bill Cipher beheld this marvel of engineering operating in continuous bliss. It brought him back… Oh, but he hadn't time to think of the past anymore.
There was only the future.
Now, and forever.
He was in Dimension 46'\ once again.
Interestingly, Bill was plopped in this dimension closer to his final destination than he'd imagined. Way closer. This was highlighted by the subtle glow he could spot from the stars of Orion's Belt: Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Although as interesting as three clustered stars could be to Bill, they were good vantage points to light his way.
He reached Earth in ten seconds. Spontaneity crossed him as he stood in the atmosphere, and he decided to take a spin around this deformed shell of a planet like he'd usually done with interesting worlds.
A plethora of scars from his takeover marked the pale blue dot. Due to the effects of an accidental three-second Ice Age, the flaming smiley-face drawn over North America had since withered like a jack-o'-lantern left outside with no refrigeration for two weeks. Calibrating Europe and Africa to fit into a jigsaw puzzle and throwing away badly shaped peninsulas into space was interesting for the first year, but he got tired of fitting France with Congo, hence the two continents transformed into a supercontinent, with many of their former regions flowing in the oceans and causing constant tectonic shifts. As for the water masses, they remained largely untouched. That is, if one didn't count scaring humans by wearing the dead body of the infamous Kraken as a mask as an affront to the oceans (that was fun for a long time but decomposition took its toll and Bill forgot to reanimate it until it evaporated into nothingness).
He stopped spinning. By divine happenstance, he'd found himself high above the landscape of a despondent Gravity Falls where the water had turned from red to pure black, the mark of vegetation had been usurped by disease, and enormous monuments dedicated to Bill—big and small; of diamond and gold—lined up the land where old buildings from the hick town had once modestly risen. Although the giant ripple in the sky leading towards the Nightmare Realm had long collapsed in on itself, the main attraction in Gravity Falls still remained the levitating fortress he'd spawned after achieving his physical form: the Fearamid. Now governed by Prospector Rhea Factor—the closest thing this dirtball, its solar system, and the surrounding stars had to a demon of higher status—efficiency became second nature to the meatbag slaves forcefully kept alive here.
Unlike most of the demons under his command, Rhea was someone who rarely disappointed, given how she'd already sensed him and was hovering at the apex of the Fearamid in the comfort of a grand armchair made of living information.
"Rhea!" Bill shouted, raising his hands before putting him on the lower half of his body. "Man, you would not believe the total sitcom I saw in DT-99! Hand Monstrosity can keep his teeth all clean and breath smelling like fresh cement but he can't get his own underlings in check!"
Rhea did not react, instead monitoring a collage of info panels—reading and analysing data which came through the neural links and data centres planted in her sector.
"I can already see curiosity ain't missing ya this century! So, what's the word up in this hole?"
"Statistics here are as you'd expect," she finally said, the vibrating undertone in her voice empowering the authoritative and uncaring sheen of her words. "Substantial mineral output cascaded by a mediocre satisfaction index. There have been some revolts, but none serious. I suspect some may be red herrings—sparks of a larger fire—yet my evidence for that is insufficient."
Bill snorted. "Humans, am I right?"
"Truly." She was now looking at him directly. "I didn't think you'd have it out for a visit here, given your last one was when it was all our first. Did universe babysitting become a chore that fast?"
Bill huffed at the question. For someone made entirely of data, Rhea was more skilled with non-sequiturs than a politician. But unfortunately for her, two could play at that game.
"Just here to have a looksie at a tip I got from your brother. Said someone from my squad left Time Beans out here." Bill's pupil lit up with a stylised representation of the powerful seeds. "He's doing well, by the way! I know how much ya like to hear about 'im!"
Rhea put a gloved white finger to her white, symmetrical face. "Well, unless this is another attempt from my darling sibling to implicate me in a crime for his own gain, I can assure you I don't possess any Time Beans. I'd have already studied and thrown them to RoboDog."
"D'aw, you word your spite so well!" Bill clutched his hands. "Anyway, you know me: I don't throw folks I've faith in under the bus. So search your data banks and tell me what your pawns have been up to before you—"
Bill's senses superseded his words. A distant chime was pulsating—not humming like most loud sounds—through his body.
Now, his thoughts kept him aside. He recognised it was the piece he'd heard near Z1 again. Yet it felt… almost dissonant and wrong in spite of how strongly Bill experienced it. A persistent peripheral sound akin to a fly buzzing in one's ear(s), Bill concentrated on erasing it from the universe. He didn't need this now.
"Cipher? Can you hear me?"
"Huh?" Bill stammered, realising he was staring into the intricate labyrinthine pattern in the iris of Rhea's left eye. She was directly in front of him.
"I said I've found no record of what you ask. You'll be better off inquiring the slaves."
"Who's making all that noise?" Bill asked, going past Rhea and analysing the ant-sized humans from above. "Where's it…? Just thought I… I heard something."
"Are you certain your receptors are well?"
A chord stuck out in the harmony.
And Bill heard it: a violin starting to carry that restless chord as it evolved into something more intricate led by the same instrument. How, he wondered, was that possible from a source so far away? He tried to banish it, but focus eluded him.
"What kinda circus are you pulling here?" Bill snapped, annoyed at Rhea's unhelpfulness.
"What?"
"You know what: no prep work, no nothing—and I'm sure you felt me comin' by here! How am I supposed to get what I need from a couple'a meastacks?!"
Rhea pulled back, data lighting up through her body. "With all due respect, Cipher, unlike some of your other subordinates, I actually pull my weight wherever I go. And I did not sense you. If you have issues, I'll adapt, but I can't help you more than sending you to the humans and telling you—"
"Rhea. Are you testing me?"
"No!" She crossed her arms. "Never."
"Aight!" Bill twirled his finger, summoning a sleek space limo. "Timing you out 'till I say otherwise!"
"Excuse me?!" She looked between the vehicle and Bill. "I'll have to dismantle all my infrastructure a-and find new places to store it! Do you realize what that'll cost you, the sector, and—"
"Did CyberCore get so crowded already?" Bill asked in the same tone Rhea had chided him prior. "So I thought. Enjoy the sights for a bit, Rhea. I heard they brought back info-stimulants!"
She pouted. "I hope the humans are good jesters to you, Cipher."
"They will be. You can count on that!" Bill could almost see a level of relief guide her stoic expression. "Now, get goin'—I've missed this place!"
Without another word, she slowly scurried inside the limo and departed off Earth. Quietude graced him the moment she began circling around Earth's moon. Perhaps the piece did stop. Too low to tell. It didn't matter, as Rhea could've dampened his abilities somehow, whatever her intent might've been.
Bill chuckled, turning around to yell: "Paradise, welcome back your overlord!"
With a pointed finger at the sky, he launched a thunderbolt near the human settlement and flew down to make his official re-introduction.
The presence of sizeable tents and small metal shacks surrounding the Gravity Falls 'Homo Sapien Processing & Rhea-bilitation' facility weren't luxuries most would've expected to be offered to slaves—what with said facility being, in truth, only partially filled with humans—yet Bill had ordered for artificial freedoms to be set in place following the dismantling of the throne of human agony's second iteration. Humans were finicky creatures and through countless suffering, they needed to have particular delusions instilled in their heads to keep them obedient: in this case, the notion of one day breaking through the iron fist which kept them in check. Then again, being forced to behold the tarnished flag of one's initial resistance waving itself mockingly high on a flagpole in the former town square was a great way of reinforcing cognitive dissonance.
Unfortunately, Bill's methods didn't seem to embolden the humans enough, for the streets of Gravity Falls lay deserted.
Hide and seek it was.
Bill spawned six additional arms from the side of his body, moving along the town and propping many tents out from their pegs. Batches of humans huddled together was what Bill found beneath most. Several people from the holdings on the outskirts of the city tried to run, but Bill picked them back up and set them down in his palm with the rest, squeezing ever so tightly. Gideon, Ice Bag and the redheads, fatty Question Mark, Llama and her parents, and many more—the entire gang had nearly gathered in one bunch, screaming and everything!
All that was missing was his favourite family named after the dumbest tree in the universe.
"HELLO, EVERYONE!" Bill shouted, setting the large crowd down in the town square and shrinking himself to roughly their size. "Long time no see, eh?"
Before Bill could share his displeasure for the mass of horrified faces shot up towards him, a distracting commotion came out from Rhea's facility. Out of the huge florasteel doors came five people escorted by a band of Watchatron security units: the remnants of the fractured zodiac.
"Ho, ho, ho!" Bill rubbed his hands, speeding to the one 'leading' them. "Fordsy! Aw, not looking too chipper?"
"B-Bill!" The once determined old scientist recoiled back. "Where's Rhea?"
"Caught you at break time, did I?"
"I—I…"
"Man, a year hasn't done you any favors!" The group was pushed towards the crowd by the Watchatrons. "Y'know, I'm surprised your head's not on a spike after you handed me the equation to that stupid bubble ya knew about. I mean, I can't recall how you fell for that! Oldest trick in the book!"
That clearly did a number on Sixer's pride. Oh, what was he kidding—Sixer hadn't any pride left to hurt. The rest of his family and Fiddleford stood in a confused stupor.
"Don't worry! At least it's not your fault Stitches went bye-bye! In fact, you'd know a thing or two about zodiac-based insurance costs, wouldn'tcha?"
"Ey, cut it out, ya glorified pyramid!" Fez yelled. Bill had nearly forgotten about him—a proud Mary to the bitter end. "Want someone'a mess with? Right here, bucko!"
"Stanley, stop!"
"You two are so sweet. Of all demon AIs, I let you out to Rhea and you still can't stop bickering. Beautiful."
"Whatever you need from me, Cipher, take it and leave us alone!" Ford insisted, facing down Bill.
"Me? Need something from you?" Bill laughed. "Oh no, no. I'm looking for Glasses!"
A dishevelled McGucket's eyes widened.
"Yup!" Bill juggled his cane back into existence and transformed it into a femur. "The perfect segue to get into the bone of things!" He bumped Fiddleford with the 'cane'. "Say, old codger, ya seen any Time Beans 'round here recently?"
"T-Time Beans?" Glasses stammered. "I… I ain't got a lick'a sense what'cha referrin' to!"
"That so?" Bill poofed the cane away. "After everything, a guy like you oughta keep track'a weirdness more than Sir 'I was manipulated twice' over here. But I dunno, who am I to say?"
"I'm tellin' ya, I don't know. Even if I did, I ain't rememberin' it."
"Yeah, if only there was some way to make you talk…" Bill said in a long, drawn-out voice. "Oh, right! Trauma!"
Without hesitation, he picked up Glasses. Bill blinked twice and produced a copy of himself—an illusion—which only the one he last saw could bear witness to. Contorting wildly, it became the disfigured monster that had driven Fiddleford all those years ago into the craven tinkerer who hid in the metal of his machines.
The unrelenting screams appeared to motivate several people from the throng into running. They didn't escape, being brought back by Bill as he locked McGucket to the point of no return, making it replay in a continuous loop. The flailing, writhing, and sensation of blood running ever colder in one's body was exhilarating for Bill to experience.
"We did find them!" Sixer finally admitted after Bill dropped the fifth person trying to run back into the fold. "They're… they're close to where the shack used to be…"
"Thanks for the info!" Bill snapped his fingers to dispel the illusion and dropped Glasses in the arms of the Pines.
He bolted towards the forest, pausing as he brushed against a Watchatron.
"Sir?" the Watchatron asked.
Bill had a loose end.
"One more thing, though," he said, going back in front of the town's denizens. "I never did call any'a you five out." He pointed at Ford. "And you don't come outta your shell for nothing, especially with robo-friends lining you up."
Ford bit his lip. The rest of the townsfolk looked at each other nervously.
"L-Listen 'ere, trianglulus," Glasses stuttered, barely rising from the ground while supported by Fez. His resolve was… impressive. "You may be all-powerful, but yer wits got…" He clutched his head. "Got yer limits! We got called outside 'fer a checkup from a messenger in the D.I.A."
"D.I.A.?" Bill asked.
"Dove Intercommunication Agency. Or Dove IA. Er, take yer pick."
"McGucket's right!" Pine Tree shouted. As if on cue, a dove bearing Rhea's sigil on its beak arrived on his forearm. "See, that's the one! Has the message, too!"
Bill allowed the dove to hover on his hand. It felt… strange. Yet he brought out the parchment attached on its back and confirmed Pine Tree's claim. Yet his suspicions were not erased.
"Hey, buddy," Bill said, hailing the Watchatron which had sent him down this rabbit hole. "Why'd you bring the lowlifes out here?"
"Workforce X was found in direct vio—"
"Doing nothing!" Shooting Star interrupted with avid desperation in her voice.
"Mabel!" Fez and a few others exclaimed.
Bill flicked his hand. Duct tape superglued to everyone's mouths.
"Go on," he said.
"They were found in violation of protocol RFED-01: access to the restricted sections of the HSPR facilities is limited only to Prospector Rhea Factor and higher-ranking individuals."
"Really?" Bill squealed. "You troublemakers, you!"
Fidgeting was all the humans could do while Bill cut out the ceiling of the facility and took a peek from above at the hijacked room. One look at the dimension signatures and the schematics was enough to surmise their plan.
"So that's why you've all been playin' dumb!" Bill said, nearly unable to sustain his glee. "You've been trying to bring up THAT place?!" He shot a finger up at the sky—above the Fearamid—where the scar of his debut shone in pale red. "Man, you guys are even stupider than I ever gave ya credit for! Sixer, I'm surprised!"
No response.
"Oh, right." He allowed the humans to speak up again.
"It's not what you think it is!" Ford objected, throwing the duct tape to the ground.
"Sure looks like it, brainiac! What were you gonna do, honestly? Escape to that collapsing hellhole? Stabilize it?!" Bill clapped. "Man, do I love crushing carefully laid plans!"
"Don't!"
"Truth is, Fordsy: I would'a found you all there, anyway! But just for you, lemme show you"—Bill flew up—"how pointless it'll all be!"
Crossing both arms and striking with a motion which sent massive sonic waves down to Earth, Bill tore the same ripple in the sky leading to the Nightmare Realm. He could immediately tell it had around seventy human years until it fully collapsed. Oh, but he'd show those gullible haemoglobin vessels: there was no salvation to be found in the Nightmare Realm; there never would be.
Bill raised his right hand, transforming it into an infinitely large flamethrower of blue fire.
"Time to burn this place down"—Bill aimed—"for good!"
And he turned it on. The array of colours blossoming into his view until they bled to black—it was more than cathartic to be rid of that dump alongside all the lesser beings which had been left to wallow in its decadence. Creation and existence were not deserved rights to this former dimension nor whoever had made it; only annihilation had been their destinies. A gigantic, X-shaped void was soon all one could see from the new ripple, its shadow drowning the land in utter, permanent darkness.
As the last hope for humanity blew away like winds did the ashes of a fire, so did Bill disappear into the forest of Gravity Falls in his pursuit to break Time Baby's influence for all of eternity.
His surroundings were endowed with the traits of a silent, bitter wasteland.
For once, this was not Bill's fault (entirely), but rather a continued withering of the region—a withering which found its origin in his endeavours to inject fun in humankind. Mutated critters still bounced up from the ground and between broken tree branches, yet they hid in low bushes and deep holes once Bill passed them. Old and broken signs were bearing faded markers, tree houses were broken apart into nothing from violent storms, and treaded paths were void of the slightest trace of footsteps.
The scene was… mesmerising to witness. Far removed from the noise of The Spire and the bickering of minions, it allowed Bill to entrench himself in the moment of this being here—where he'd watched endlessly through the trees; where he'd been summoned a second time; where he'd played chess with all his foolish human pawns for years on end.
Bill relished the weightlessness of his travels until he encountered a thickness in the air bordering the trail he followed. At first, he believed it to be an atmospheric anomaly displaying its effects on the ecosystem. But as it began circling around him, its consistency was leaning more towards a heavy white mist, at its depth emanating a subtle cyan light.
Scurrying towards the light, Bill found himself in a clearing where the haze had little effect. Birch trees surrounded the vicinity, the eyes engraved on their barks instinctively aimed towards the centre where a wide crack in the ground acted as the beacon guiding him. It looked as if someone had planted something there. Bill had no recollection of what it could've been, but that question didn't beleaguer him for long, as on the spotty ground behind the crack lay a pair of blue beans enclosed in a protective seal of superbaby saliva.
Bill went forward. He reached down and burnt the seal, taking the two tiny beans left.
He stared at them, so brittle and small in the palm of his hand.
Holding them was enough to make him… happy.
Bill had lived in his own shape long enough to understand why: it was the giddy reminder that he could and would experience every sweet form of revenge through the grace of immortality. And he loved that. Good people, bad people; the just, the corrupt—with enough time, their struggles all faded away in a puff of meaninglessness. But memories? Of breaking through mediocrity to rise above his fallible kind? Of tricking those who stood in his way to have fun? Of finding these Time Beans and abating another distraction that kept him staring at *nothing* for ages upon ages, thinking how to best cause more chaos while inflicting harm to those who deemed themselves above him?
They didn't.
Bill squeezed the beans in his hand.
"Oh yeah, you hear that, universe?!" he yelled, gesticulating wildly at the dark sky above. "I did it all! Bill Cipher, who no one ever thought could get here! None'a you thought I was worth it, good enough, born right—but guess what, you pompous freaks? Chaos reigns supreme because'a you! You all made this 'three-sided madman' from the Second Dimension deserve an entire universe! I just tricked those idiots into lettin' me into their dimension to start! And now you'll still hear my name even when your spirits are sent over to Frilly's house! But that won't last, don't you worry, Frilly! I know you can hear me! I'll erase the decillions of worms you got over there just so you can know what it's like—tell you what revenge's good for and see how it feels to have nowhere'ta run anymore! Oh, the fuse is burning and it's burning FAST! HAHAHA!"
He laughed.
And laughed.
And laughed.
Until his fuse burnt out.
The violin came back. It was just that wretched instrument playing a foreign composition laden with the same chord which had cursed him earlier. But what unsettled him was that he could start discerning where the sounds were coming from.
Fury at his behest, he embraced the truth behind him.
What he saw was not of Dimension 46\'. While the sky and flora had fallen under the cloak of the mist, the tall, massive chunks of earth rising high above him—ignoring gravity's call in their midair suspension—remained easily discernible. The way back was no more, and Bill was at level zero.
Bill stored the beans in his eye. No running. Time to end this.
He began jumping and climbing up the patches of the former forest. He scaled four of them and, between the trees, observed many unknown, visceral landmarks: from paved roads filled with holes to floating pictures and broken windows. There wasn't time to look back on these oddities lest the repugnant melody continue to drone on. At around the ninth patch, the mist and ground beneath him became drenched in tinges of grey. It… it didn't matter. He could still see.
In a matter of minutes, Bill reached the summit of this floating madness—a plot of land as big as a tenth of the woods. About three-hundred feet away stood one identifiable construct he managed to lock his eye on. Even if the mist had shrouded the entire façade and not just the sides, there was no mistaking the silhouette of this building: the accursed weather vane, the obnoxious pointed arrows, and the stupid letter littering the ethereal ground filled with blossoming flowers.
Sixer's house was here.
This blight upon the land looked so close to the way Bill had remembered it. Still, the humans couldn't have rebuilt the entire thing, no… not even with Stanford's machinations. There was no way for Bill Cipher to be tricked into believing that what he was seeing was a tangible place in this backwards dimension. What if it was an illusion, like the ones he conjured? If he touched the walls and nothing happened, he was in the clear, for that would've meant—
He didn't phase through the wood.
But that left only one—
"No…" he muttered, incredulity breaking its way into his voice. "No, no, NO! WHAT IS IT DOING HERE?"
It couldn't have been what his mind connected the dots to. There was no reason why the shack would exist in this plane of dimensionality, even with its disgusting monochromatism. Did his eye not work? He rubbed it. No change.
Bill clawed at his tophat for a second before going past the opened door in a frenzy, inside what seemed to be the gift shop. The existence of this building was a paradox ready to be unfurled. Yes, he'd destroyed it, but he was certain answers were buried deep within the dust.
His eye erratically danced around the rooms. Behind tables and stools, inside merchandise, under floorboards, above bedroom closets; there had to be a clue somewhere—a tinge of colour his fingers could graze upon to disprove his theory and cleanse the doubts which were seeping in.
And that horrid symphony… he knew it came from one of the rooms, but everywhere he followed it, the source changed to a different part of the house.
Bill gripped his tophat and shut his eye, standing in the pale gleam of a triangular window in the upper bedroom and in the midst of the melody's grand flourish.
"LEAVE ME ALONE ALREADY!" He punched a wall, breaking through to more of the mist.
Why did he need to touch upon a memento of his unimportant past? Why did the inexplicable infest him with such meaningless questions? To what end was this blatant torture?
Cipher breathed in.
He couldn't give into despair. He levitated over to the one area he strayed from—the living room. The origin of the music remained static, and that reassured him for a lapse. But when Bill entered, he realised this room was very much unlike the place he knew from his puppets. A giant hole was present on the left wall, with two outliers fitting between the room's furnishings: a lone pine tree spread out from overflowing branches and a tall record player spinning a small white vinyl.
Bill dashed towards the record player, but heightened alertness diverted his attention to the sound of the dove which flew in from outside and landed on the lowest branch of the tree. He stared at the creature, unable to break his gaze while the chord repeated until the finale was nothing but that—a laborious sequence of the same notes. And no matter how much Bill tried to convince himself this random dove was not an anomaly either and simply a carrier from the humans' network, he couldn't have been more wrong, for its feathers were alight with a tender orange glow—a messenger with an ember heart arrived here to bring him news he couldn't understand.
A broken chord… and a dove.
Cordova.
Memories came bursting back like a string of a thousand stories told at once—an epistle of shattered oaths in the twilight of victory; a disregarded tale woven from a trust which ran too deep; a special remembrance crafted for the traitor of traitors.
"...to tell you this, because you've gone astray," had muttered to him this heir to the Enfires. "I can't do this anymore."
The meek mortal who had grown into power alongside his conquests in the Second Dimension: Bill couldn't believe why he was hearing this voice. Hadn't he eradicated all of his kind? Oh, but was he wrong? Enfires—always slippery, always plotting, especially—
Cordova, Cipher Betrayer.
"I'm sorry, Bill… but I have to contain you," had warned this forger of the Nightmare Realm. "Chaos is my destiny. It is our shared reality. But there's no place for you or the rest of us until we learn that we must create from the ashes we make."
He was the one. He'd trapped Bill there, left to rot for trillions of years. Bill's hatred of that prison—being forced to burn and contain its fractured state via cremation of stray demons and wandering creatures. It all made sense. Cruel irony without a vision? What purpose was gained from—
Cipher Betrayer.
"I will watch you until the time is right. We'll go back. Together. I promise you'll find a way to understand."
There it was: the anthem carried by the strings of fire in its rawest form. He always carried that damn violin to ward off foes in a literal blaze of glory. Bill seethed yet faced the record player. Never had it been possible for the piece to be a simple human composition—an opus too fluid for their ears to behold and too brilliant for their minds to conceive.
Cipher Betrayer.
"Now, friend," had uttered Cordova at the precipice of the portal, readying the bow upon the strings. "Sleep."
"TO HELL WITH YOU!" Bill screamed, blackness enveloping the core of his being. "I BANISH YOU, TRAITOR! I'LL DO ANYTHING, JUST MAKE HIM GO AWAY! PLEASE, I DON'T WANNA GO TO SLEEP AGAIN!"
The vinyl ceased its loop, vanishing the lullaby with it. Bill twitched his eye in confusion, shaking as colour refilled him, before the wall behind the pine collapsed into tiny pieces on the floor.
A mirage of his foregone chess board left Bill with only a view towards infinity.
The door creaked open behind him.
"Remember how it feels when the past doesn't stop to catch its breath?" Newsinance asked.
A/N:
22/12/2022:
Hello, everyone! A Christmas miracle! I uploaded another fic before the end of the year! In all seriousness, THANK YOU to anyone who's read up to here: I spent a super long time with this fic and tried really hard to get the complex character of Bill down with the Enneagram and his personality. It's been a treat to write this series, so thanks again. I'll try to get out Eight ASAP but there might be a similar timeframe to Seven, but I hope I make the wait worth it!
Thank you all again and happy holidays! Now, for an...
EnneaCipher
PVCURE'F TNZR UNF ERNPURQ VGF CBFGUHZBHF RAQ,
UVF BJA ZVAQ OVQQVAT GUVF FBYRZA SNERJRYY.
ABJ YRSG GB JNYYBJ VA FGNAYRL CVARF' FURYY,
JUNG QBRF BAR ZNXR NSGRE OERNXVAT GUR FCRYY?
LRG PBEQBIN'F YHYYNOL SBERIRE EVATF,
NAQ VA UVF FUNQBJ, N CVGL FBBA GB RLR SEVYYL.
GUHF, N ZBEGNY GB ERNJNXRA NTNVA:
N QVSSRERAG SBEZ, N QVSSRERAG GVZR.
"VG PBFGF SNERJRYY GRNEF SBE N JRYPBZR UBZR CNENQR"