---
Mabel had asked for a sleepover and invited Grenda, Candy, and Pacifica to come. That wasn't the problem, as Ford thought of it. The problem was that Mabel had also invited Miz to attend her sleepover, too.
Ford had been leery of the idea from the beginning -- given the presence of the two (supposedly both) dream demons (of a type) in the house, and the fact that the children who were coming over were planning on staying the night (thus, not the sort of temptation of non-Zodiac members that Ford felt Stan should be waving under either 'Bill Cipher's watchful eye). But Ford had gone from great reserve to immediately trying to veto the idea completely as soon as he heard of Mabel's plans to include Miz in said sleepover also.
But Stan (ever-unhelpful these days when it came to the demon) had pushed for it, rather than against it. "We'll both be here and Miz will go back up to sleep with her brother. She won't sleep in the same room as the girls."
...And then Stan had proceeded to help Mabel and Miz convince Bill not to be in the same room as the rest of the girls. (As if that made it any better, taking the one potentially maybe-stabilizing influence on the other demon out of the equation completely for the night. At this point, Ford had no idea at all what Stan must be thinking... if he was even thinking at all...)
---
Mabel was super-happy that things were going according to plan. It was going to be a girl's night tonight, so Miz actually got her brother to leave them alone for one night! "But you're a guy, not a girl," hadn't worked on him, since Dipper had been pulled into her sleepovers before, but Miz's "Unless you want to talk about squirmy feelings, boys, and listen to the lot of us screaming at decibels only dogs can hear?" and an eyebrow-raise at Bill had actually had the older demon grimacing at her and actually agreeing(!!) with a: "Fine. But if anything happens…"
And so Mabel and the girls shut themselves in the storage room where they'd had their movie marathon before (since Mabel didn't really want to push, or risk, what would happen if she tried to go with the whole letting-the-demons-into-their-bedroom thing for just the night, especially with the way she knew Dipper and Grunkle Ford felt about it), while Dipper and Ford sat outside the room eavesdropping.
Bill himself, who had planned on giving Miz at least a little more space than he was at present, was (instead of sitting in the living room chair with Stanley, or in the kitchen with a hot cup of terrible-tasting tea, watching Stanley to make sure said-Stanley really didn't end up going into that room where Miz was without HIM there as well) also seated in the hallway just a small distance away from the two of them, watching said Zodiac members like a hawk (or, rather, a very-protective no longer single-eyed older-brother of a triangular dream demon, with an almost-smoldering menace and no small annoyance at the fact that he couldn't just be sitting in the kitchen with his tea right now, oh no, instead he had to be sitting HERE and--).
---
Pacifica was going to spend the evening learning as much as she could about this new demon. She wasn't sure what to expect, but Grenda had immediately asked Miz for the scoop on what kind of boys she liked.
"Eh… well…" Miz pressed her hands to her cheeks and wiggled in place where she was sitting. "I have a thing for cute nerds…" she admitted.
Candy and Grenda "Oooooh~!"ed while Mabel twitched a little.
Pacifica noticed Mabel's slight tension and narrowed her eyes. While Grenda and Candy teased (interrogated) Miz about her tastes, Pacifica leaned over and whispered, "What?" To which Mabel seemed to sink in on herself, looking both embarrassed and a little disturbed.
"Miz kind of liked Grunkle Ford, the way he looks? But they're definitely not good for each other. Not even a little."
...And that made Pacifica wince. (Well, he was the hot uncle-grunkle, but...) Well. Putting this together with everything else she'd learned, if Miz had been inclined to like Dr. Pines (though Pacifica doubted it could have been anything serious at any point) and the man had essentially treated Miz like she wasn't a person… Well, that was just another reason for more anger from the demon to add to the list; probably just made it even worse for Dr. Pines when Miz finally lost her temper. ...Each time she lost her temper.
(Ugh. She didn't even want to know how Bill Cipher himself might have responded to that whole thing, if he'd heard about it. Not liking it would be bad enough; supporting it would have implications that got really bad really fast, knowing that both demons thought of themselves as 'Bill Cipher' and largely the same in many respects.)
"Let's not talk about my shit taste in men," Miz huffed out. (Pacifica suppressed a shudder and internally agreed.) "We can talk about your shit taste in men instead," she ribbed to the rest of the girls in the room with her.
Candy laughed. "Ah, terrible taste. Well, there was Gabe. But I gave up on him. He would never love anyone more than his own puppets." The Korean girl nodded to herself.
"Oh yeah, you dodged a bullet with that one," Mabel agreed.
"Sucks, since he's gorgeous," was Pacifica's contribution, looking down at her fingernails.
"It's always the hot ones you have to be careful with." Miz nodded sagely. "Speaking of, how're you and Marius doing?" she asked Grenda.
The larger girl laughed. "HE'S NOT BAD. VERY NEEDY, BUT HE'S SWEET! MY TASTE IS GOOD!" The girls all coo'ed at that.
"I'm happy for you." Miz said sincerely.
"SO LIKE," Grenda finally asked, "YOU'RE LIVING AT THE SHACK? WHY? ARE YOU SOME KIND OF FAMILY FRIEND?" she asked, since Mabel hadn't really told them much about this other girl at all, just that she'd been staying there lately.
Miz thought about it. "Not really… I'm Bill's sister. We decided that."
Grenda and Candy both seemed confused at this. "...Decided?" Candy asked. "How does one decide to be brother and sister? [This is not how sisterhood pacts work. They are not for boys.]" Candy added in Korean. (Pacifica was paying close attention to this. She also wanted to know how demons could just decide to have a sibling.)
Miz shrugged. "I lost my family a long time ago. I found some friends who are my family now, but part of me really missed having a sibling. And, well, my friends are like siblings too, but it's… different…" she frowned in thought. "Bill and I are…" she looked over at Mabel. "Am I allowed to talk about this?"
Pacifica side eyed Mabel. 'Allowed?' she wondered.
Mabel thought about it before shrugging. "Well, it's about stuff in this dimension, right?" Miz nodded. "Yeah, it should be fine. As long as it's not something awful."
"I don't think it's awful…" Miz clenched her hands. "But apparently the knowledge of what Bill and I are to each other hurt Ford…" Miz glanced over at the door, where she knew Ford probably was. "And… I don't know if anyone else might be hurt by it?"
That made Pacifica tense a little. What?
Mabel grimaced. She hadn't thought there was more to it than that, but if there was… "Then maybe you shouldn't talk about it, then. If you think somebody else might be hurt by it."
Candy and Grenda looked at each other in confusion, but then both shrugged it off. Pacifica, for her part, glanced between them, as she drawled out, "I, for one, don't mind knowing."
Miz sighed before leaning in to whisper quietly to Pacifica, "Well, Mabel knows some of it, you can just ask her or Dipper afterwards, somewhere that Ford can't hear you talk about it? I don't know if it would still break his brain now to hear about it." and Pacifica turned to glare lightly at Mabel. Seriously? The twins knew all about what this mysterious relationship thing was and neither of them had told her yet?! She waited until Miz sat back upright, then went back to looking bored as she casually pulled out her phone to text Dipper (who currently had Mabel's cellphone) immediately on the matter -- because she was sick and tired of being left in the dark!
She sent him a [I need to ask something that supposedly might hurt Dr. Pines if he reads about it, but I need to know about something RIGHT NOW.] After a few seconds, she got a text back -- [Hang on] -- and she waited for Dipper to (presumably) move out of eyeshot of Dr. Pines for the soon to occur next text conversation, while the topic of discussion with the girls in the room with her moved onto what sort of hobbies Miz had, as the other girls tried to get to know this other person that Mabel knew better.
"Well, I like cooking, singing… gardening," Miz listed off. "Exploring and learning new things. Meeting new people. Taking care of my children. Making deals, creating new planets…" (Pacifica stared. Miz wasn't even bragging or anything, she was just listing things off like one would list off their favorite clothing brands or something. And-- had she said 'her children'???) "...holding a concert, shapeshifting, bothering my dad, trying out new kinds of food, messing with DNA--" Miz barely managed to hold back on mentioning her slaughter of pedophile rapists or the way she liked to mess with Federation officers. Those were probably not topics she should be telling a bunch of thirteen year olds.
"You have weird hobbies," was Candy's input. "I LIKE IT!" was Grenda's. Miz shrugged (then blushed a bit at Grenda's additional assessment). In fact, Miz looked quite pleasantly happy at the positive words. Pacifica took note of this. Was… was the demon really so… easily swayed by simple compliments? No wait, more to the point--
Pacifica frowned. "I thought you and Bill are orphans." Was that a lie? And if this demon had extended family in the form of children... she hadn't thought of that as even a possibility before, they both seemed so… --How many people might they actually be taking on as they continued their defensive offensive against Bill?
"My birth parents are dead. But Ax took me in after that. And I kinda think of him as my dad." Miz rubbed her arm. "And I'm pretty sure he cares about me. At least a little. I don't think brother believes that though. But his Ax is nothing like mine. And why would Ax take me in if he didn't like me…" her voice got quiet towards the end. "He sings to me, sometimes."
Pacifica stared a bit. ...Well, she'd thought that at least one of the demons was insane before, but the idea of either of them considering a singing ax as a parent was… Had it been enchanted (with weirdness, or magic?) by the demon herself? How lonely had she been, to start talking to common implements as... Ugh. And she'd said that Bill had one of these axes as well--
"Ax?" Candy asked before Pacifica could. Miz nodded. "The AXOLOTL. He's a giant god-like salamander," she explained, as if that were obvious.
"...Right," Pacifica said. Enchanted singing lizard (ew) that the demons… what, worshipped like a god? Double-ew. That… that couldn't be right. Right? Those were those… pink things with those wavy head-gills, weren't they?
And that just brought out even more questions.
Pacifica frowned. Should she… get one of those axolotl-lizards imported? And maybe see if Dr. Pines could enchant it to talk? ...Or just get Mr. Pines to do some sort of ventriloquism thing on it? Would that actually work to--? But if it would, then why hadn't Dr. Pines already tried--
Mabel bit her lip and changed the subject. "Music's great, huh? I love singing! Especially when I can get Dipper and Grunkle Stan to sing with me." She semi-forcibly steered the conversation away to another topic. Pacifica frowned at that, but let it slide for now. They chatted about music for a bit. Miz even clarified some more about her concerts. "I've got another form called Jan, and I'm a space idol, I have a fan club and everything. It's great. I just can't let people know that I'm… me."
"Another form?" Candy said. "Is that your ultimate form, then? What do you do with your idolship and all the fans?" she added, thinking of a few music-based anime she'd sampled on the library computers lately. (Soos had gotten her hooked on a few things during Old Man McGucket's Weirdmageddon planning that her parents had never let her watch before. She'd been sneaking anime watching ever since.)
"Well… I guess I do have my pure energy form? It's pretty cool. And I use the money from my concerts to make donations to various charities around the multiverse to try and help out in a legal way. Apparently, just going out and giving starving people food is against the law or something, so throwing money at the soup kitchens works better." Miz grumbled. "I don't understand laws. They're so stupid."
"Well, if the food isn't actually available to be bought at any price for those people, soup kitchens would be the better option…" Pacifica said with a shrug. She had heard from people who went begging for food for some poor small drought-starved African villages, or something, before. They didn't actually come begging for money always; half the time, they came begging for the resources to get food to those people... and the food itself. Not money.
"I've got my other form, Xin, set up as a harvest god for a few planets dedicated to growing crops. One of the tenants I've given for my worshipers is to make sure that people get food. So they donate the extras from each harvest, generally the crops that don't look as nice, and therefore people normally wouldn't like to buy." Miz explained. "It's very roundabout and it took me eons to get it all set up."
"Sounds like what my parents do with the fish we can't sell from our mudflap factory," Pacifica noted. "It's a great tax writeoff. Fish we couldn't otherwise sell get salted and pickled in gigantic barrels, and donated overseas to people who don't care about what they look or smell like who would otherwise die without food; everybody wins."
Mabel was glancing back and forth between them. "I didn't know your parents donated stuff, Pacifica?" Mabel said uncertainly.
Pacifica grimaced, as she tucked her hair behind an ear. "Well, it may have taken a little convincing the first time…" And the second. And the third… Being good was hard. And her parents really didn't like giving handouts.
Miz raised an eyebrow. "That sucks." She sighed. "I'd like to do more for people. What's the point of having the power to restructure the physical world when I can't even do anything with it? But whenever I just give people stuff for free, they get all angry at me. So I just have to work around all the stupid Rules." Miz hissed. "Well, that's why brother just wants to rewrite the rules. I don't know if I could do that though, my dimension doesn't work like this one."
Pacifica huffed out a breath. That seemed overly complicated. "Buying enough politicians to the point of rewriting the laws is the hard way around," she told Miz, because that seemed completely unreasonable to her.
"Eh… I've been slowly working through some deals to manipulate the seats of the council for the Federation." Miz pointed out.
"Seriously, it's not worth it, believe me. My family would own half the government by now if it was," Pacifica told her with an eyeroll. "Just bribe a few local officials to look the other way while you do what you want wherever you want. Or…" Pacifica frowned. "You said you like messing with DNA, right?" Pacifica tried to confirm. "There are people in the Middle East here who are working on things like wheat that can grow in the desert. Why can't you do something like that?" Hadn't Dipper texted her about the plant stuff from the first time she'd been there? And if she was already scamming people into believing that she was some sort of self-styled 'harvest god', then...
"Yeah? I've done that. The people told me I 'cursed their lands' and burned the fields." Miz shrugged. "But when I pretended to be a dragon and boosted their crops, they started worshipping me. So… like… I kinda realized that I just had to lie and be what they would want to listen to."
"Wait, how'd they know it was you the first time?" Pacifica said.
"I was there in my triangle form, fixing up their dying crops, they'd had a drought." Miz blinked. "So I made it rain and revitalized the land. And they got mad at me."
"Well, there's your problem then," Pacifica told her, because yeah, getting proper credit for anything took effort, but if this demon cared more about getting the food out there than getting the credit for it -- and she might, if she was okay with pretending to be other people to get it done... "Just don't let anybody see you when you're doing stuff. Have a bunch of crops or whatever show up overnight, growing everyplace."
"I could…" Miz considered it. "I could go around and just… fix things without anyone knowing. Then there's no way Time Baby can complain to me about it!"
"Well, yes," Pacifica told her. "That's rather the point." She looked over her (glove-covered) fingernails. "It's getting good PR without actually doing anything helpful that takes skill. Just going out and doing work just takes… work."
"Aw, Pacifica," Mabel said, "You softie!"
"--What??" Pacifica sputtered, looking over at her, then let out a huff and waved it off, saying, "It's just from one good businesswoman to another, that's all!" Besides, if the demon listened to her on this, on what she considered good advice, she might listen to her on other matters, as well. She had to start somewhere with at least the less-crazy one of them!
Miz nodded, making mental notes. "Well the food is one thing, the slavery is another. How would one go about making people stop being mean to other people?" She paused. "Brother claims he can change the rules to make a world where everyone can be happy. I dunno how that'd work though."
Pacifica blinked at her for only a second. "Slavery isn't mean, it's bad business. Stagnates the economy. All those people don't get paid, so they don't have the money to be good little consumers."
"Pacificaaaaaa," Mabel complained. "I don't think that's the only reason that slavery is bad," Mabel frowned at her. "YEAH!!" Grenda agreed, as Candy nodded and said, "I agree as well; slavery is bad."
"Yes, well, if that logic worked on people, they'd stop doing it on their own," Pacifica said primly right back to her. "She's looking for solutions, not ways to 'magically' try and make people all 'moral' and such; like that ever works," she told her (still rather naive) out-of-town friend.
"The people owning them don't really care for that." Miz drawled. "They can sell the things they forced their slaves to make to other people elsewhere in the multiverse."
Pacifica frowned. "You could… disrupt the transportation of those goods and supplies?" She wasn't used to thinking of ideas for actively sabotaging other people's sales and supply chains. Maybe if her grandfather was still alive...
"That got me arrested." Miz sighed. "And apparently slavery was 'legal' and they were perfectly within the rights of the law for what they were doing."
"Buy all the slaves?" But Pacifica made a face at that. "Maybe… get those space idol fans of yours to boycott all products made by slave labor? Or protest? Fan-mobs can be pretty scary," Pacifica pointed out, ignoring the grimace that Mabel and the other two made at that. "Though that won't work if your fanbase isn't multiversal, really," Pacifica grimaced. After all, if they could just go sell their products to an entirely different dimension, then… "The only other thing you could do really would be to buy them all out and shut them down. But you'd have to do it all at once. And it'd drive up the price, once people realized that you would pay top dollar to try and get them that way. It might make the problem even worse; supply and demand." And they'd be supplying her demand, if the laws didn't change. Pacifica brought a hand to her chin in thought, frowning. Historically, the only other way beyond that to prevent any repeats of the same situation would be to kill the people involved as soon as she closed the deal, as a warning to others -- preferably by having the newly-freed slaves do the deed for her -- but… Pacifica rather disliked bloodshed. And it would set a bad precedent for future transactions.
Then Pacifica blinked and shook her head sharply. ...No. She was not going to be like her ancestors. She was better than that.
"I could try. I've just been making deals to help the slaves uprise and rebel. That was… kinda violent. I'm not really good at thinking things through when I get angry…" Miz winced. "And there's still the blatant racism and all sorts of other issues. And… I just… I know it's stupid because I can't fix everything I find wrong with the world, but part of me just gets so frustrated." Miz grimaced. "I asked brother about it, he says that all he would have to do is usurp Ax and change the Rules, but I don't know if it would work… he's not sure what happiness means for everyone."
"Look," Pacifica said, raising a hand to her brow and resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose. "Either you find some way to run anybody using slave labor out of business out of business, or people will keep on doing it. Here, we did that with the industrial revolution. Cheap machine labor," Pacifica told her. "Either you find a way to have all those slaves cost more to keep alive and doing their jobs than having something else doing it that isn't alive, or no-one's going to want to change."
"Pffth, there's still slavery here. It's just called something else now." Miz rolled her eyes. "The prisons in America have products created from inmate labor. It's the same thing. But now they're justifying it."
Pacifica and the others stared at her. "What are you talking about?" Pacifica said. "The inmates are all too busy on their rehabilitation exercises to get much done on any of the labor shifts. Those shifts are only there to give them something to punch or kick or hammer together when they need something physically constructive to do... aren't they?" she asked, looking up at the others around her. Had someone been lying to her?
"Well the ones in Gravity Falls are running around freely, so that's a weird point…" Miz twitched.
"Well, yes?" Pacifica said, assuming she was referring to Gideon's gang. "They're all rather largely reformed." For the most part...
"I'm pretty sure most of them passed their anger management therapy courses with flying colors," Mabel said. She'd received letters -- actual handwritten letters -- from Gideon over the school year. He'd added photocopies of those certificates as part of them, when Dipper had expressed his own doubts. (After which, Dipper had noted to her with a snort that Gideon's own certificate seemed to be pretty obviously absent from the whole pile.)
"...do you know what's happening in the rest of America? Outside of Gravity Falls?" Miz asked slowly. "There's a thing called the Penal Law which makes it legal to have slave labor only if it's being done by 'criminals'."
The four girls all exchanged looks. They didn't remember that from any of their civics lessons.
"...Maaaaybe she means an America in some other dimension?" Mabel offered up to them all. Then she blinked, "Oh! Unless Trembley made an extra secret 13'th amendment," she nodded. At the blank looks she got from two of her friends on that front (and the long flat look from Pacifica), she stifled a wince and thought quickly. "--Or did you mean Central America instead?" Mabel said. "Maybe that's why Grunkle Stan didn't like it there so much…"
"...ask about the laws sometime. Specifically, check out the 13th amendment of the US constitution." Miz sighed (as she made a new mental note to herself on just that, while also saying it out loud).
Pacifica raised an eyebrow, typed a few things on her phone, then turned it Miz's way and held it out for her to read. (She, like the others, thought that Miz had been talking to them, not herself.)
Candy was already ahead of her, reading out from her own phone, "'Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. If any work is deemed necessary during punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, it can only be for the purposes of reform or training of the individual for their future return to society, taken on at their own consent, with those convicted workers paid a fair wage in chocolate bonbons for such work. And it better only be used for that reform or training purposes stuff. Or else.'"
"Ooh~ they really meant that one," Mabel enthused. "--They added the 'or else' to the end of it and everything!"
"In other words, legalized slavery, again." Miz groaned. "And while some people say that it's what criminals deserve, most people are arrested for possession of marijuana and… that's not reason enough to fill the prisons with essentially free labor." She glared. "It's mean."
Miz got several confused looks from the rest of the girls on this, however.
"How is that slavery, if they don't have to do the work if they don't want to?" Pacifica said, raising an eyebrow. What part of 'needing to agree to the work' had Miz not been paying attention to? Sentences were based on reforment of the individual; the sentence length was more of a guideline than a hard-and-fast rule. They had assessments and reassessments of the prison population on a regular basis nationwide, in the hopes that they could let them out and stop having to pay for their everything as a drain on society, instead of a productive reformed member of it. (Which, unfortunately, did mean that the better con artists and scammers tended to treat prison more like a revolving door, because as long as they could convince someone in the system that they were 'really and truly reformed'...) She could maybe understand if Miz had been trying to use 'wage slavery' as an argument, but Miz wasn't doing that, and it wasn't exactly the industrial revolution anymore -- nobody found it useful to own entire towns that the industrial workers lived in. (Frankly, the upkeep was far too much, when compared to the necessary building standards -- and yes, her great-grandparents had looked into and run the numbers on it.)
Miz's eyes flickered. "Well, as of this moment, there are 1,274,700 convicted inmates in America." She'd been practicing using her Sight while under the unicorn barrier. It only worked for quick searches, but she got it working.
"Well, yes," Pacifica said. "Most of the younger male population this generation has a rage problem, for some reason." Dipper didn't seem to have that problem himself, which was one of the reasons Pacifica liked him, but... "There was a rash of mailbox smashings at the end of this school year. Some kind of stupid viral social media stunt," which had left a lot of those newly-graduated high schoolers in real adult prison for said summer, to learn their lesson, and a lot of them constructing new mailboxes as an apology to replace the ones that they'd gone and smashed there, for an early release. She barely kept back the sarcastic, 'So?'
Miz sighed. "I don't know how to explain it. There's a whole mess of factors in all sorts of things. Heck, if I can't even think up a way to fix America, how am I gonna fix the multiverse…"
"...I'm pretty sure there's not a 'whole mess of factors' in slavery, Miz," Mabel put out there, feeling uneasy at the idea of Miz wanting to 'fix' America because of… a problem that didn't exist? She was trying to use her 'Dipper brain' here, and she was pretty sure she was failing miserably. (It was hard to be all planny and serious for so long, okay? She was supposed to be the happy fun twin! Slavery wasn't either of those things! This was supposed to be a sleepover!) Mabel looked up at Pacifica with a pleading look, and Pacifica crossed her arms, rolled her eyes, and let out a sigh.
"Well, there was the fact that--"
"--Miz," Pacifica interrupted. "I don't think any of the others were expecting to get into a civics lesson or a debate on the correct way to read our U.S. Constitution tonight. Perhaps we can pick this up again another time? I don't mind talking about this with you, but Mabel's looking a bit..." Pacifica grimaced slightly at the big-eyed look Mabel was still giving her, "...sadly desperate right now."
Miz blinked and looked around. She winced. "Oh, sorry," she apologized. "This is supposed to be a fun night." She looked down at her lap. "Ok, what should we do instead?"
And then Grenda got an amazing idea. "LET'S PLAY TRUTH OR DARE OR DON'T!"
"Okay," Miz agreed easily.
There was a trio of yells and a thump from outside the room, then a few scuffling sounds and what sounded like a muffled… argument? The girls all looked over at the door.
Miz shrugged. "If it's something I don't wanna do, I can always 'don't'," she said loudly. "--Same!" Mabel called out.
The unintelligible talking sounds from the other side of the door cut off, and the scuffling sounds settled and stopped.
Miz rolled her eyes (and Mabel let out a breath). Damn that Stanford for his paranoia, and darn her big brother for being much the same. She didn't get what Dipper's problem had been, though. (Mabel did; Dipper hadn't liked any of what had happened with the whole bouncy castle wish and the getting-floated thing at all.) Still…
Miz turned to the other girls. "Don't ask me anything if you don't actually want to hear the answer to it. And no Dares that would harm anyone," she said loudly for everyone's hearing benefit. Also, Miz wondered what that Stanford had thought about the conversation she'd just had.
"That's fine," Mabel told her with a nod. They were all friends here! ...Well, sort of. --They wouldn't Dare each other to do anything awful, anyway -- that would be mean!
"Truth, dare, or don't?" Candy asked Miz. The other Asian girl grinned and said, "Truth."
And then Candy proceeded to drop a bombshell.
"What is something you have done that you feel super-guilty about?"
There was another set of shuffling sounds from outside the room, and Mabel winced. But Miz just groaned loudly and buried her face in her hands. "I used to work at a fast food place that served burgers and fries, and the fries were cooked in an oil that contained beef tallow-- which I only found out by chance when reading over some of the recipe stuff--" she slumped over and rolled around on the floor. "And management said I'm not allowed to tell people that unless they ask me first, specifically-- and I felt like a horrible monster every time I got a Hindu customer who orders the Black Bean or Turkey burger because they couldn't eat beef and then they get a side of fries and I wanted to tell them, I really did! But management got mad because that would lose them sales-- so I couldn't say anything and I felt like a horrible person!" Miz laid on the ground, arms and legs splayed out from her sides like she was waiting to be crucified, awaiting their judgment.
The girls all stared before Grenda loudly declared, "WOW THAT SUCKS! BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE YOU A TERRIBLE PERSON. THERE, THERE." She patted Miz's shoulder with a hand, and Miz sniffled. "Really?"
"Wait, what?" Pacifica wasn't sure she was hearing this right. "How is that something to feel 'super-guilty' about?"
Miz pouted. "Well even if I don't believe in their religion, doesn't mean I don't respect their decision to follow it, especially if they're not harming anyone. But… but…" She sat back up and waved her hands, "I did something terrible! And that was literal EONS ago and I still feel bad about it." (Pacifica frowned at this. Was this demon for real, here? She glanced over at Mabel in confusion.)
Mabel scooted over to also pat Miz on the back. "Well, at least you don't have to do that anymore?" she asked her.
Miz nodded. "I can't work in the service industry anymore, not as an employee at least. I'd probably end up exploding from stress. I'm my own boss now, with my Deals. It's more of a commission-based thing. The only time I have to get bossed around is when Time Baby is being huffy about something." Miz didn't look very happy. (Pacifica wondered who (or what) this 'Time Baby'(?) was. ...Another different lizard, maybe?) "But at least he doesn't call me up often. And it's still something I could technically turn down…" though she looked even more upset at this admission. "Brother and Stan say I should stop working with Time Baby. No matter the job benefits and pay."
Mabel twitched. "Uh… I think they're right in this case." Pacifica glanced over at her. She was missing the context for this. Again. ...Well, she'd just have to ask Dipper. Again. ...Speaking of Dipper, she glanced down at her phone, noting that he'd finally texted her back!
[So Miz and Bill say she's his dimensional counterpart. Like, a version of him from a parallel universe or something. But Great-Uncle Ford says she's delusional and that there can't be more than one Bill Cipher because of some demon name thing.]
Oh. Was that what Dr. Pines meant about them sharing the same name? Wait, so… if they were parallel counterparts, though… what exactly did that mean? What things were different between their dimensions? ...Besides apparently the thirteenth amendment?
Dipper's texts continued to pop up, as if Dipper had been typing out a huge message and the phone was sending them in pieces.
[Miz and Bill have this weird synchronicity thing going on, though. And Grunkle Stan says he can learn a bunch of stuff about Bill just from watching Miz, becaise they are similar. And Bill calls Miz a 'me who is also me'.] [But whether or not Miz really is a Bill Cipher or not isn't something we know for sure yet. And parallel world people can be either really similar or really really different, and so can the places they came from.] [Mabel met a whole bunch of other Mabels when she fell into one of those mini-rifts in the woods last summer. People can look the same, but be the exact opposite. And the earths they come from can be really different, too.] [But they can also look really different, but be almost exactly the same in what they're like, and in everything that happened where they came from. So uh, it doesn't mean as much as you might think until you actually know more about them.]
...great. Pacifica had to put down her phone and breathe. Okay. Well. At least that explained why Miz had latched onto Bill like she had. Probably. (Because if she trusted herself… and she considered Bill to be 'herself'... It was starting to really look like their own local demon wasn't the only completely-insane demon they had running around here.) Pacifica mentally shook her head at this, made a similarly mental note to ask for clarification later, and turned back to the conversation as it was happening in the room; the other girls had apparently moved on with the game.
"Truth, dare, or don't?" Miz asked Mabel next, who was sitting right next to her. Mabel opened her mouth, but paused when more shuffling sounds and a thump came from outside the room. "Don't," she ended up settling on, with a shrug. Miz didn't seem all that upset at this, nodding with an, "Alright. Well, your turn now."
Mabel asked Grenda next, who chose 'dare', and the tall girl was dared to speak in pig Latin until her next turn by Mabel. Grenda turned to Pacifica and grinned. "RUTHTAY AREDAY ORAY ONTDAY?"
Well, Pacifica wasn't going to risk anything here. No so early on into the night. "Don't." Pacifica ignored the way the other girls 'boo'ed her, flipping her hair as she usually did whenever they pulled such boorish stunts at her at their school, during the usual school year.
"Candy, truth, dare, or don't?" And so the game continued. When the turns went around and Pacifica got to ask again, she asked Miz this time around.
"Truth," Miz said easily. Pacifica took a breath, then said, "You mentioned your children earlier?"
Miz brightened. "Oh yes, well Ammy's my first born, I sorta created him by accident? Most things born from me don't have Souls but Ammy does and I'm so glad for it, he's a lovely young man. Pyrone and Pynelope aren't actually my kids, but I helped raise them. And Quacker's birth mother sold her to me as part of a Deal." Miz grimaced at that. "I was joking about accepting first borns as payment, but she actually took me up on it."
They all stared at her. "WHY WOULD YOU JOKE ABOUT THAT?" Grenda asked, for all of them. ('And how was that not the thing she felt 'super-guilty' over??' Pacifica wondered.)
Miz groaned. "I was expecting her to protest, put up a fight, offer me anything else-- I wanted her to try and offer me something else, to defend her children. But she decided that giving up one kid was worth it for the money she'd be able to make. And, I guess she did need the money to support the rest of her children, but she could have offered me anything else and she didn't--"
"Don't ever ask for anything you wouldn't want to put up with later! And--agrgraahammph!" the girls heard -- first muffled, then even more muffled with a following 'thud' -- emanating from outside the door.
"Everything's fine! Just keep going!" came Dipper's voice calling out next, and Pacifica had to fight to keep from giving herself any more wrinkles. She didn't bother to hold back the sigh, though.
"Brother! You're not supposed to be spying!" Miz complained rather loudly at the door. "This is a girls-only sleepover!" She knew they were all eavesdropping but couldn't they at LEAST try to pretend they weren't?
They all heard a rustling and an 'oof!' and "RAH!" before a: "--Tell that to Sixer! He's--!" and then a few more rustling-scuffling-bumping sounds from outside the door.
"Um…?" said Miz, unsure if she should actually repeat herself or not.
"Ugh, Bill--" More scuffling sounds. "--RAHH!" Another 'oof!' "Don't even think about--!" "DOUBLE PENALTY!!!" ""...What?""
And then there were the sounds of very much laughter.
The girls (and demon) all looked around at each other -- except for Mabel, who let out a huff of breath and stood up, with a bit of a steely-determined look in her eye. (Miz wondered for a moment if the grappling hook was going to make an appearance next.)
The grappling hook did not make an appearance. Mabel did, however, stand up straight, walk over to the bedroom door, and open it.
Pacifica caught a glimpse of the three of them -- Dipper and Stanford Pines and Bill Cipher -- Dipper and Dr. Pines were on the floor, with Bill practically straddling over them both…
...and both male Pines were laughing hysterically as Bill continued tickling them both mercilessly under him, cackling away with maniacal laughter over his (apparent success?) himself.
Mabel put her hands on her hips and waited a moment.
"HAHA! I WIN!" Bill called out after another few moments, while tossing his hands up into the air (giving the two Pines a slight reprieve in the process).
"Bill," said Mabel, and Pacifica watched him pause in place, then…
"Iiii mean… penalty completed?" they all heard Bill say next (and a soft "Ohboy" from Dipper). "Double penalty completed? Yes?" Bill said almost… hopefully? (Wait. Was that what playing innocent was supposed to look like on a demon's face? Because if it was, then Pacifica was going to have to contemplate actually feeling sorry for Miz...)
"You're not supposed to be giving out penalties, Bill," Mabel told him firmly.
"I can if I want to!" Bill declared, hannds on his hips, looking the downright picture of confidence from where he was kneeling down and looking up at her from the floor (while the other two Pines slowly resituated themselves, pulling away from underneath of him and sitting up a bit -- and readjusting their glasses back onto their face properly as they blinked owlishly at the rest of them, in one case).
Miz hid her head under a pillow, blushing with sheer embarrassment for her brother and fellow demon. Because...
Mabel let out another huff of breath, and walked her way out into the hallway, and closed the door behind her.
"Ummm…" they all heard from what sounded like Dipper.
"Uwu…" Miz echoed out sadly from under her pillow.
And then the rest of them heard a muffled but rather strong talking-to going on in that hallway, even through the door, from a rather serious and no-nonsense sounding Mabel for awhile, before hearing some half-protests here and there (largely overruled, it seemed), and then finally some creaking and rustling sounds, just before the sounds of three fading pairs of footsteps going down the hall.
Finally, the door opened up again and Mabel walked back into the bedroom, still in a bit of a huff.
"Boys…" Mabel said to them all, rolling her eyes.
"...Boys," Candy said consolingly herself, as Mabel dropped back down next to her again. "They are most annoying, even when they are older."
"I KNOW!" Grenda noted, in her usual deep tones. "MARIUS GETS SO CLINGY SOMETIMES. A GIRL NEEDS SOME SPACE SOMETIMES, TOO!"
"Here here!" was Miz's cheerful contribution.
"...Right," said Pacifica slowly, because... Had she really just seen the demon who'd made a chair of literal human suffering during an end of the world that he'd caused actually kneeling on the floor and tickling those two into submission, instead of torturing them instead? That didn't seem like--
But then Pacifica blinked, because… was tickle-torture actually connsidered 'torture' by demons??? (...What the heck?) That was-- that was just as crazy and messed up as… as...
...as watching him send a bunch of small flying machines around a room for Miz to harmlessly chase and pounce at like a cat? Or help cart around snacks for a movie night for other people to eat (and not get sick from eating) for his sister?
Was… was Bill Cipher toning things down for the moment for his sister? Because of his sister? Because she was here? --Because if he was, then...
"So!" Mabel said abruptly, clapping her hands together. "More Truth, Dare, or Don't? Or do we move on to another game?"
Pacifica blinked at the wording -- not what she was used to hearing out of Mabel -- as Grenda punched both hands up into the air and declared: "LETS DO EACH OTHER'S MAKE UP!!!"
Miz blinked. Pacifica twitched, terrified of what sort of mess the other girls were going to put on her face if that was what they settled on doing next.
"I'm not all that good at make up stuff…" Miz admitted. "It feels weird on my skin, or on my bricks."
'...BRICKS?' Grenda didn't really get what Miz was talking about, heck, she didn't get most of what the new girl was talking about, but that was fine. "DON'T WORRY! WE CAN TEACH YOU!"
And then there was a look on Miz's face that made Pacifica's breath catch in her throat. "You'll really teach me?" Miz asked, looking so blown away at the idea that... But then Miz frowned and bit her lip. "You won't get mad if I mess up?" She asked, almost timidly. Pacifica glanced over at Mabel in time to notice her flinch.
Candy took Miz's hand and smiled at her. "Why would we be mad? We are all learning anyway." And Miz's answering smile was so bright and hopeful it nearly broke Mabel's heart.
Pacifica wondered why Mabel patted Miz on the shoulder gently, and was still looking a little pale as she dove into a few drawers for… supplies, but… not was probably not the time to ask.
Grenda and Candy each took out their own make up supplies from their slumber party bags (apparently, they'd come tonight prepared), and began walking Miz through which was what and how they all worked. The dragon-demon was paying rapt attention, having never really learned about this sort of thing before, not really seeing the point (and having felt so embarrassed that one time she DID try it out), but knowledge was knowledge and she should still try to learn… to be honest… she'd always been a little against learning how to use make up, simply because everyone around her always insisted she should wear it. It made her upset that everyone wanted her to learn to wear something uncomfortable in order to be accepted into society… and after becoming a triangle, she didn't need it anymore and didn't have to bother… but here, right now, this wasn't learning make up to 'look acceptable' or 'be a proper woman'. She was going to be using make up to play with some girls (new friends?) and in this context, Miz wanted to learn, and she wanted to do well. She didn't want to let them down.
So Miz payed attention when Grenda loudly showed her which was the blush and which was the concealer. Which brushes or sponges to use with what… though… halfway through, Miz frowned. "Are you sure you're supposed to use that with that? I don't think…" Grenda opened her mouth to say it was definitely the right one, but Pacifica cleared her throat and spoke up.
"I've been doing my own make up since I was six, and I can say with certainty, you're not supposed to use this type of mascara brush with that mascara. They have different sizes and widths. You don't want to use something this thick with--" and Pacifica put it upon herself to teach Miz the correct way to use make up. The make up the other girls owned seemed to be a mishmash of supplies from different brands, many brushes not matching up with the implements that they were put with, and a similar mishmash of levels of technique with the limited accessories they'd apparently had at their disposal.
Frankly, the fact that Miz didn't know how to do this left Pacifica wondering about what exactly she did in getting ready for those 'space idol' music concerts of hers. ...If she hadn't been lying about that.
After a while, all of the girls were kneeling around a veritable pile of cosmetics, engrossed in selecting what they wanted for their impending work on each other (though Pacifica was going to insist on having her own make up used on herself and nobody else, thank you), when Miz commented, out of the blue, "I think it's awful what your parents did to you." And before Pacifica could do more than look up and start to process that statement, let alone figure out who exactly the demon was talking to, Miz continued with, "Child pageants are awful. I think they shouldn't have done that to you." The dragon had a hand curled around a container of lipstick, knuckles white. "They shouldn't have put that pressure on you to be perfect. They shouldn't have made you feel like you needed to be. They shouldn't have made you base your own self worth on that." Pacifica's mouth dropped open slightly. She wanted to speak up, but she couldn't quite decide on what to say.
"But…" Miz sighed, loosening her hold. "They're still your parents and you love them." She wasn't meeting Pacifica's eyes, staring down at the pile of cosmetics. "So I can promise you now, I won't mess with your parents. Because I actually kinda like you." Miz moved some of the cosmetics around, organizing it.
Pacifica's eyes narrowed slightly. (So this demon had been thinking about messing with them, then.) She forced herself not to take in a deep breath, just a normal one, before she asked, "And if you didn't like me? What would you do to them, then?" Because she'd rather know that now, than later.
"Well." Miz straightened up. "If I didn't like you, I wouldn't have gotten mad at what they did to you to begin with. Well, no more than just general dislike. But I wouldn't feel a need to do anything to them unless they were actively hurting you. Because at that point, if I see an adult hurting a child, I'd feel a need to stop that from happening." (Mabel looked uncomfortable at this, suddenly. Pacifica made a note of that too.)
"And why would you want to stop that from happening?" the blonde asked Miz. Frankly, she wasn't about to take anything for granted with her at this point.
The demon sighed. "Because children shouldn't be hurt by adults. It's mean. I don't like it." She bit her lip. "Discipline is one thing, but I've been told there's a limit." (Which implied that the demon hadn't thought there was a limit to 'discipline' at some point earlier than this, Pacifica noted rather coldly. And that made her wonder about the 'home life' of the demon's so-called children growing up...) "And…" Here, Miz glanced up at Mabel before looking down again. "I was told that apparently this applies to me too." (Pacifica's eyes narrowed further.) "Which, part of me still struggles to accept, but all I do understand is that if a kid is being hurt, I feel a need to do something about it." Miz grimaced. "And that has led to me doing some pretty awful stuff to people. And I hadn't actually thought about how the kid would feel until just a little while ago, so I realized that if you love your parents, even if I don't like them, you would still be hurt if I did anything to them." She rolled the lipstick tube around a little. "I realized that harming the parents would hurt the kid too when Stan got angry at the fact that I wanted to mess with Filbrick for disowning his son."
Mabel sucked in a breath, eyes wide. Pacifica made a note to ask about that too; who was this Filbrick character, that the idea of messing with him had made Stan Pines angry? In fact, she was casually typing it down for Dipper already -- looking down at her phone as she did so, rather than up at Miz as she talked. But she wasn't ignoring the demon; Pacifica gave her a nod. "Well, I for one am glad you won't mess with my parents. I would be rather angry with you if you tried to hurt them, let alone ever succeeded in doing so." She made eye contact with the demon at the last of this.
Miz nodded. "There's still a lot I need to learn, about all sorts of things. I raised four kids but I still don't know if I'm doing any of this right." She grimaced. "I'm starting to realize that some of the stuff I've done to my friends and kids might be kinda bad. And I want to learn to be better…"
"Why?" Pacifica couldn't help but ask (because wasn't it too late at this point?) even as her phone received a [Filbrick is our great-grandfather. He kicked Stan out of the house when he was 17. Mabel and I tried to go back in time to stop that from happening so our great-uncles would never split up and Bill would] [never get out of the Nightmare Realm but it didn't work, we ended up in that other dimension instead, you saw the pictures] from Dipper. What? ...Oh, so that was how they'd met the 'youngkles'. So Filbrick was Dr. and Mr. Pines' father. And… Miz had… gotten angry at that man for disowning his teenaged son? And Mr. Pines had been angry that Miz had wanted to hurt… his father. Okay. (Finally, some context for all this Pines family demonic and dimensional madness!)
"Because I feel guilty and awful otherwise…" Miz admitted. "For a while, I tried to stop feeling bad, I just had fun everyday and did whatever I wanted without caring what other people thought. But it didn't make me feel any better. I still hated myself. Even now I still hate myself." Miz was glad Mabel had chased the boys away, she wouldn't have been able to say any of this with them listening. She didn't want to upset her brother with things like this. "And I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm just naturally an awful person. And I don't really like that. So I want to learn to not be like that…"
Hm. Well, now the choice of that particular anime that Miz had all but demanded (through the Pines) that they all watch with her, with a message all about self improvement which she had seemed to greatly enjoy, made at least a little more sense to Pacifica now, in retrospect.
"Becoming a not-awful person does take a great deal of work," Pacifica said evenly, to which Miz nodded herself almost pensively. She'd wanted to change because-- well, for a lot of reasons. It had been Dipper that had made her question it all, all over again, though. She still felt that she owed him a lot, for that.
Almost hesitantly, Mabel asked, "Um, Miz... did you ever hit your kids?" Pacifica and the other girls turned to stare at Mabel in shock, because where had she gotten that idea from?! That wasn't like her at all! That was--
Miz immediately shook her head. "No. Never. I've never-- I would never--" She looked horrified at the idea (--really, just as horrified as the rest of them felt). "I yell sometimes, I know I've scared them before, and I turned Ammy into a penguin once, I changed him back! I did. It was only temporary and he knew that--" Miz winced. (The other girls exchanged glances, confused.)
"And…" Mabel paused before trudging on, because she had to know. She had to know, for sure. "And who hit you?"
Pacifica tried not to suck in a breath, even as her eyes went wide. She stilled in place, and glanced between them two of them.
"SOMEONE HIT YOU?" Grenda said, sounding shocked. "WHO? --I'LL PUNCH THEM FOR YOU!" she declared, making a fist and punching it into her other hand. "Yeah!" Candy agreed, looking angry herself.
"I…" Miz seemed to be having an internal argument with herself. Finally, quietly, she asked, "In which life?" which only made Mabel's frown worse (and the other three girls start glancing between the two of them even more, feeling rather worried).
"Miz, who was it?" Mabel repeated.
Miz wiggled in place. "As a human…" she looked down at her lap. "It… it wasn't her fault. She didn't want to. I was being bad. I was just being disciplined--" She defended whoever it was. (Pacifica's eyes narrowed at the word choice of 'discipline'...)
"Mabel, if she doesn't want to talk about it, you should not push her," Pacifica said rather forcefully, feeling rather up in arms about the whole thing, even though Miz was… an insane and crazy demon who she was likely going to have to kill if she was going to kill Bill Cipher herself… and-- (...Was this what Dr. Pines had been talking about? Forgetting to remember that they were demons? That they were the enemy that needed to be destroyed for them all to survive? Forgetting that they were… not human and didn't feel the same emotions as they did? But she'd just said that this was 'as a human'-- and Miz had claimed to have been human once, before she'd become a demon. That was what Dr. Pines had said that Miz had claimed to him before, and Miz wasn't a demon like Bill Cipher. She seemed to be at least a little human right now, still--)
(She wasn't-- she couldn't be… lying right now… could she?)
"But it wasn't right! Whoever 'she' was shouldn't have hit you, no matter what you did! It's not right!" Mabel insisted to her.
Miz winced. "I'm… still having trouble believing that. She wouldn't have… she didn't want to. She always cried afterwards! She hated doing it. I was the one who forced her to-- because I was bad!"
Pacifica let out a long, tired sigh. ...Well, that was more guilt than she'd ever gotten out of her parents for anything. And whether the demon was lying or not was something she could try and figure out later. As for right now... She shifted over a bit, and placed an arm around Miz's shoulders (...not entirely sure she was doing this right, but…).
"--and she stopped after Kei was born! She got a self-help parenting book and she was so happy to learn that she didn't have to do it! Since the book told her of better methods that didn't involve--" Miz insisted, as Pacifica circled her arm around her and squeezed ever so lightly, just being there for her. "A-and it didn't hurt a lot. Just stung a little. It wasn't like it really hurt me--"
"St-stop," Mabel said shakily, and Pacifica glanced over at her. She looked completely sick, sweater-covered hands pressed over her own mouth...
"You shouldn't have asked about something you didn't want to know," Pacifica noted rather lightly. They had rather been warned, at the start of the previous game, hadn't they? ...And now Pacifica knew why Dr. Pines might have objected so strongly to the 'truth' game before, and wanted to sit outside in the hallway in the first place. If hadn't just been physical attacks that he'd been worried about, it had been...
Miz covered her mouth, taking a few deep breaths. "She wasn't bad. She loved me. I know she did… she wasn't anything like Filbrick--"
"Counting hits is a waste of time we could be spending on happier things, like make up," Pacifica told her, forcibly changing the subject. "No-one is saying that anyone is bad or didn't love you. We just don't like that you were hit."
"Y-yeah," Mabel said shakily, trying for a smile. "Right, girls?" She got a pair of quick nods from Candy and Grenda.
"...but it's… normal… isn't it…" Miz whispered, unsure. And it was here that Pacifica remembered Miz had asked 'which life' when Mabel asked her question. So… she'd been physically abused in both her lives? ...Well, hopefully Mabel hadn't quite caught that earlier.
"SO… WHO AM I SUPPOSED TO PUNCH, AGAIN?" Grenda said, looking a little unsure as she rubbed the side of her arm.
"Nobody," Mabel said firmly. "We are doing a bunch of emergency hugging right now."
"Aha!" Candy said, looking more than a little relieved. "That, we can do!"
Miz blinked as they all promptly gathered around her for what she could only describe as a hug pile (which had Paicifica complaining almost immediately as the other three nearly bowled the two of them over at the start of the hugging, thus leading to the three of them backing off just a little bit with a few laughs and groans and more than a little teasing of her). Miz trembled a little before relaxing into it, feeling warm and… safe? This hug wasn't like brother's, they reminded her of Xanthar to be honest. It made her miss him all the more.
"It's not normal, just so you know. To be hit," Pacifica told Miz, speaking directly into her ear. "Not in this dimension, anyway."
Miz sniffled a little. "I wouldn't…" She looked guilty and miserable. "I never hurt my kids on purpose. But I have a terrible temper. I've scared them before, and there was one time…" Miz trailed off before a determined look came across her face. "I have a confession," she said simply, a bit louder, and more obviously addressing them all. "I once lost control of my powers and… hurt Quackers. And I'll never be able to fix that…" Miz told them. "I didn't do it on purpose. I was panicking. I didn't notice she was there."