-----
Miz hummed cheerfully as she skipped along beside Dipper and Mabel, looking around at all the people and activity along the boardwalk. "You think we can make some money off performing music for spare change?" she asked.
Mabel gasped, slapping her hands to her cheeks. "--I've always wanted to be a street performer!" she told Miz, going starry-eyed at the thought.
Dipper rolled his eyes. "We don't have permission. Don't we need to, like, rent the space?"
As Mabel kept Miz busy chatting about rented spaces and busking, Dipper kept glancing back at where Bill and his grunkle and great-uncle were. Now that they had finally convinced Miz that their great uncle Ford was NOT interesting in Bill in ANY way… and were not going to be discussing his possible taste in cryptids he hadn't already dated anymore (...which was a grand total of one of them that Mabel didn't really know enough about to talk about it with Miz, to keep her distracted from their great-uncles while they… uh...)
...What were Grunkle Stan and Great-Uncle Ford doing with Bill?
"Hey…" Dipper said to Miz. (He wasn't too worried about asking her things at this point -- she listened to 'stop's, she never seemed to get angry at him for asking her questions, and despite what Great-Uncle Ford had said, Dipper was pretty sure she wasn't lying to them all that much -- he was mostly just worried that the answer he might get from her would be horrible enough that he'd need to tell her to 'stop'.) "What was that all about?"
Miz was quiet for a bit, her energetic skipping slowed until she was walking slowly and then finally stopped. "If you were alone for years and years with no one who cared about you or wanted you…" she brought up quietly, "...then any sort of kindness would be enough to catch your interest." An awkward smile and a soft pillow, a cheerful grin and a stupid pun… "And if someone actually wants you?" A large white hand, a comforting rumble... "Then you'd do anything to try and keep them." She shrugged. "That's how I feel at least. And brother is similar. Though I think he's got some stuff about his Zodiac that I don't fully understand yet."
...'His Zodiac', meaning them. Bill's Zodiac. ('Their' Bill's Zodiac. ...So what was hers like, then?) Dipper stared at her.
"... It can't be that simple," Dipper deadpanned. Because why would Bill care if they wanted him or not? And then Miz turned to look at him and Dipper shuddered. Miz was grinning; it was terrifying.
"I decided I liked Mabel within the first hour of meeting her," Miz told him. She tilted her head to the side. "I gave her a freebie." She took at step closer to Dipper (who not quite stepped back to get farther away from her; he definitely leaned back, though). "And I wouldn't mind giving her more. As long as I could be friends with her."
Dipper shuddered.
"O-oh…" Mabel said, biting her lip, unsure how to feel about that. (She didn't think they were friends… and she felt a little bad that Miz seemed to think that maybe they were, or could be, with the way Miz felt about Grunkle Ford.)
Dipper pulled in a shaky breath…
And Great-Uncle Ford walked right up to them all, shoved an arm between Mabel and Miz, and kept on walking. It forced Miz to start quickly walking backwards, then turn around and keep going, to keep from running into him (or getting run into by him).
Dipper and Mabel exchanged a glance and scrambled to catch up.
"Rude!" Miz gasped, as Ford finally dropped his arm and slowed down his walking speed a bit.
"--Don't go scaring the niblings," Ford told her succinctly, as he continued walking along, and his tone of voice was odd.
"...Is everything okay, Grunkle Ford?" Mabel asked him, as she and Dipper caught up. Miz grumbled and brushed imaginary lint off her dress, as she continued walking along with them three.
"Oh, yes," Ford said, "Everything is just perfect. The sun is shining, the seagulls are sounding off, we're stuck in another dimension with two demons, and my brother just damned himself for all eternity. Everything is great!" he said with a borderline-nasty sort of artificial cheer, as he tried not to clench his fists at his sides, and kept on walking, leaving Bill and his brother behind. --Because apparently that was what Stanley wanted out of his life.
Stan had just gotten turned and turned around by Bill Cipher. Ford had warned him outright about that, about exactly what Cipher would do! And Stan had fallen for it anyway. And now, as far as he could see, Ford couldn't do a damn thing about it. (All he could do was wait for the fallout, after the inevitable crash when Bill was done using his brother, and try to help Stan pick up the pieces of himself that were left after that, if there was anything left of him after handing himself over willingly to that.)
"I don't see why you're so upset." Miz mumbled. "Stan said it, he said it on his own. He chose it." She stared at the back of Ford's head. "If you wanted it, you should have--"
"He doesn't know what he's doing," Ford said, feeling almost short of breath. He felt dizzy starbursts behind his eyes at the thought of wanting that--
"I think he DOES. More than you do," Miz pointed out. Ford shuddered hard, and swallowed hard, and swore he tasted bile.
"No, he doesn't, damn you," Ford said. "Stop lying."
"...Grunkle Ford?" Mabel asked, knowing he had to be extremely upset if he was cursing in front of them. "Maybe Grunkle Stan…"
"--He couldn't possibly," Ford told them all, not quite cutting Mabel off as he continued his earlier line of thought and rebutted her tentative thought, all in one go. "Because Stan's never actually seen what Bill is like for any extended period of time without that damn anchor holding him down."
(Both Mabel and Dipper winced and exchanged a glance at the second curse. --Make that REALLY extremely upset.)
"Yeah, well, brother being messed up in the head because of YOUR Deal with him probably didn't make him capable of being at his best, either."
Ford stopped in place and turned on her, barking out, "I knew him for nearly three years before that!" He pulled in a breath. "And he isn't at 'his best'. He's never at his best! He's always at HIS WORST." Ford was wide-eyed and looking wild.
"You were ACQUAINTED. Did you ever KNOW him?" Miz asked. The younger twins were watching this conversation carefully, ready to shout 'Stop!' at any moment.
"I knew him for three years, and I knew him for thirty years, and he never changes," Ford told her. "The damn stupid deal I made didn't matter. --He doesn't change, he never changes; he wasn't different, it was just an excuse at best for him to--!" Ford cut himself off, shaking.
"Did you ever try to talk to him, like a real person?" Miz asked quietly, actually curious now.
"Of course I did, he was my muse!" Ford said angrily. "I knew he was real! I knew that they weren't just dreams! I knew that he was--" Ford stopped again, then shakily, "Why am I even talking to you about this?" as he brought both hands up to his face, almost like he wanted to hide himself from her.
"--Where you both LISTENED to each other? Not just talk AT each other? And did you ever realize that he didn't understand what you meant?" Miz stepped closer, worried now.
"He was my muse, my partner, my research assistant. We worked together, I--" Ford was talking like it was being dragged out of him, his breathing was going unsteady, and the kids were starting to look really concerned. "He understood me, he always--"
"--and you put him on a pedestal? You never thought that maybe he didn't always think the same way you did? That he wasn't perfect?" Miz asked sadly.
"He was-- he was--" Ford all but whispered out, starting to bend inwards on himself, and he was shivering like he was out in the dead of winter with no coat on to help him keep in any warmth.
Mabel rushed forward to give him a hug, as Dipper turned to Miz and said, very clearly, "Stop."
Miz nodded and stepped back. "...I just wanted to understand," she whispered.
Dipper sighed. "Just don't ask anymore today. Okay?"
Miz nodded, keeping her mouth closed.
Dipper frowned as he watched Great-Uncle Ford kneel down shakily off-balance and get swept up in a hug by his sister.
"Look," Dipper said to Miz quietly, pulling down on his hat, and moving away a bit -- feeling tense as Miz followed him -- enough to give his Great-Uncle some space from the demon. "I think he needed to say it. That's why Mabel and I didn't say stop right away." He kept watching Great-Uncle Ford. "Great-Uncle Ford and Bill can't… talk to each other," Dipper told her. "They just yell past each other and… Great-Uncle Ford hasn't been talking, even though Mabel and I are really sure he needs to. But it hurts him a lot sometimes when he does. So… don't push him. Okay?" Maybe that was asking a lot from the demon who really didn't seem to like his great-uncle -- heck, maybe it was stupid of him for even asking it and hoping that maybe she'd even try not to hurt him that way… but Dipper had to try.
(And if she didn't back off, then Grunkle Stan would finally have a reason to maybe do something about the demon, finally. Dipper would make sure Stan did, this time. Because what had been happening here, and on the rooftop? Wasn't okay. Bill had been messing with both the grunkle and their great-uncle really badly. Dipper had almost asked Mabel to call off the 'bet' right then and there with him, with the whole 'losing him' thing Bill had done.)
Aaand Miz was just staring at him. "--You really need to not push him on this stuff," Dipper elaborated, not quite glaring at Miz. "Okay?"
Miz nodded. "Ok." She glanced up at where Ford had buried his face into Mabel's hair, arms wrapped around her like she was a life preserver. Dipper sort of shifted from foot to foot.
"...This is weird," Dipper said to Miz. "Just talking to you." Because it was. "I mean, you're a killer-demon hitman assassin or something. And an alien dragon. And Bill's sister." 'And crazy-dangerous and seriously messed-up,' though Dipper had enough sense not to say that thought out loud. (As far as Dipper was concerned, talking to her was a little like talking to Gideon, except with a different kind of having to look out for things. Neither Great-Uncle Ford or Grunkle Stan had told them even the broadstrokes of what they'd been talking to Miz about last night that Grunkle Stan -- and Bill -- hadn't wanted them to hear about that whole 'panicking' and lashing out thing; but what they had heard had sounded really messed-up, and she was really dangerous. Even worse, the parts where Gideon would be annoying, she was interesting instead; it was worse because it probably made her even more dangerous -- Great-Uncle Ford had warned him about how some of the worst cryptids could be like that, drawing you in, and then...)
Dipper steeled himself a bit. He wanted to be a great cryptid researcher when he grew up. If he couldn't handle a demonic dragon girl that would stop when he told her to (for at least a little while), then...
(Besides, Mabel was counting on him to distract her away from Great-Uncle Ford right now. He could definitely do that without panicking her. He was pretty good at talking with cryptids...)
"I never wanted to be a killer," Miz admitted. "All I wanted… back when everything began… was to help people… teach people…" Miz sighed. "But the only thing I seemed capable of doing… was hurting people. And they told me that if I was gonna do that anyway, I might as well do so for a reason… direct it to something productive." Miz rubbed her arm. "I just… wanted to be useful…"
DIpper stared at her, because what the heck? "But-- how could you not know not to listen to people like that?" Dipper said incredulously. He was only thirteen years old, and he'd known that one since halfway through the second grade! "I mean, you're 600 billion years old, right? In human-Earth years? --Our universe isn't even 14 billion years old. How can you not know that!" Dipper was having trouble even wrapping his head around that -- how long that was, and what it would be like to be that old. How could she not have figured that out by now? (...Was she lying?)
Miz gave him a miserable smile. "Well, I wasn't that old when they first approached me, now was I? And after a while, I had a different reason for doing my jobs."
"How old were you?" Dipper asked her bluntly, looking over at her. (He wasn't sure he wanted to ask about her other 'different' reason… he couldn't think of even one other reason that might be even a little bit good. And that meant probably needing to tell her to 'stop' if he asked. He didn't want to overdo using that if he didn't have to. If he started pushing things like that, asking a bunch of questions on purpose that he knew he might have to ask her to 'stop' to... Miz either might stop talking, or might stop 'stopping'. He and Mabel had talked about that, about Bill, about what might happen if they used it on him too much. And since Miz was a Bill...)
"I'm not sure. Time didn't exist in the way you're familiar with back in the 2nd dimension."
"Well, how long ago was it, then?" Dipper asked her. And then he realized. "How old were you when you died? When you were human? ...Or thought you were?"
"...I was ...it was a few weeks after my 27th birthday?" Miz shrugged. "It's hard to remember anymore." She looked down at herself. "But this was what I looked like."
That was weird, she looked like a kid. "Really? Twenty-seven?" Dipper said, frowning.
Miz shrugged. "I never seemed to grow up. It wasn't too much of a problem. Though mommy used to pull on my arms to try and make me taller."
Dipper winced at the 'pulling' comment. "But… didn't you know not to…" She'd been twenty-seven!
...Then Dipper thought of something really, really awful.
"Wait. You didn't use to kill people when you were human, did you?" Dipper sputtered out quickly, turning to face her. (He felt a little panic-y, and tried not to look like he wanted to run, but…)
"Of course not. I was an artist. Made handmade jewelry." she shook her head.
Dipper blinked at her, and began to relax, pulling in a breath unconsciously. "Huh? You made…" jewelry? "Really?" He looked at her in surprise.
Miz flicked her hands and a small pair of earrings appeared. Dipper recognized it as origami. Pandas. Panda earrings. She smiled softly. "It's silly isn't it?"
Dipper looked at it. (He was pretty well trained by his sister on the proper attentive response to give to somebody's arts and crafts, by this point.)
"It doesn't look silly," Dipper told her. Unless maybe they had silly grins on them, or something? (That would be the kind of thing Mabel would do.) He squinted at them. "...Are they supposed to?" Dipper held out his hands cupped together, so she could give them to him, so he could look over them more carefully. (He knew how to handle fragile stuff, Mabel tried out all sorts of crazy crafts sometimes.)
Miz handed them over. "Well, thinking that I went from artist to a demon god of chaos is silly," she told him.
Silly, right. "Mabel could probably give Bill a run for his money, if she had demon-weirdness powers," Dipper noted. And if what he'd seen Bill and Mabel do together was any indication, 'artist' was probably in the top five qualifications for being a demon, at least. As far as he'd been able to determine, Bill seemed to like artsy and magic stuff at least as much as science, and probably a lot more.
"Part of me knew that agreeing to kill people was wrong, but..." Miz told Dipper quietly, as he continued to look over the earrings. (She felt a little more comfortable explaining while he was at least a little distracted. Not staring at her, or frowning at her really judgmentally. It was easier when he was frowning at the earrings instead.) "I just...wanted him to like me. Just wanted anyone at all to tell me that I was needed."
"You did that because you were alone?" Dipper said. He was having a little trouble thinking hard about what she was saying and carefully looking over the earrings at the same time. (Mabel had trained him well.) He gently shifted the panda-shaped earrings around in his palm, so he could look at them from the other side; they really looked like they were made of paper. "What happens if they get wet?" he asked her.
"They're varnished. Unless you go swimming or take a shower with them, they're fine." Miz sighed. (And Dipper was about to ask about the varnish, how she did that without the paper collapsing on her, when Miz went back and answered his first question with--) "Well, I was alone for a really long time. Do you know how many millions, billions of years it takes for planets to form? For life to evolve to the point where they are PEOPLE that you can actually talk to? I had no one else except Time Baby and Ax." She looked pained. "Ax sleeps all the time and Time Baby hated me on principle because of what I was. Because he's already gotten the timeline planned out and I was Bill Cipher, he planned out what I was supposed to be, before I had even become that." (Dipper glanced over at Great-Uncle Ford. He wasn't listening, but…)
Dipper was about to complain at her to be more careful about talking about multiple Bills in front of him again, but then Dipper blinked. Dipper looked back at her again. "Wait. I thought you said you decided to call yourself…" Dipper glanced over at Great-Uncle Ford again "...you know," Dipper said quietly, as he frowned. Because that wasn't consistent, calling herself that and getting told she was that by Time Baby, instead. "And if you were all alone with them and there were no other people around, then who was Time Baby having you kill?" That didn't make sense. "And if Time Baby hated you, and you couldn't talk to the Axolotl because it was asleep, why didn't you just go through your Doors to other places, instead?" Why would she want to make friends with someone who hated her? (The closest thing Dipper could think of was that situation they'd had with Pacifica Northwest, but even Pacifica had never hated them hated them. It wasn't really the same situation at all.) "Or if you wanted to be around other people there, couldn't you just fall asleep like the Axolotl until they existed, too?" She'd fallen asleep in their yard. Maybe she could've done something so she wouldn't get hungry, and stayed asleep even longer? Like some kind of hibernation thing? (Man, he really wished he had his journal…)
"I call myself Bill because that is what I am," Miz told him. "What they needed me to be. It's kinda complicated. I was born as a triangle already knowing I would someday be Bill Cipher… and Ax called me that when we met so it was confirmed."
(So, wait. If she'd chosen to call herself that, then did that mean that she was or wasn't another Bill Cipher? Or… what did she mean, she was 'going to be' a Bill Cipher someday? Dipper shook his head, then glanced over at his great-uncle, feeling a little bit relieved. Because if Great-Uncle Ford heard her say that she was a 'Bill Cipher' now, Dipper knew he could just tell his great-uncle that, and Great-Uncle Ford should be okay. Dipper didn't think that a 'real' Bill Cipher would just let someone tell him (or her) who or what they were supposed to be, ever, and Dipper was pretty sure his great-uncle would agree with him on that...)
"Once people formed," Miz continued, "Time Baby summoned me, talked to me, told me he had something he wanted me to do for him, and I was just so happy that he was finally talking to me, for a while, I really wanted him to be my brother, my family… thought that if I did what he wanted, he would want me.... And I hadn't used my Doors until recently. Ax didn't want me to. Told me that if I met other... me's, they would hurt me. I tried to be good. I listened to him. And eventually I got too curious to stay away. And… well, here I am." She paused. "And then I met brother. You know, I couldn't sleep? I didn't know how. It was BROTHER who taught me how to sleep."
"Wait! You thought Time Baby was your brother!?" he asked her. Because… okay, maybe that would explain a lot? ...Or at least a lot more? He wouldn't be okay with killing people even if Mabel asked him to, but… if Mabel (...a Mabel like that anti-Mabel maybe?...) had wanted him to do something horrible like that, and told him that if he didn't then do it then she wouldn't love him anymore? That would be a LOT of pressure. And he wasn't a demon, but Miz was, and...
Miz sighed. "Not a BROTHER-brother, but, since Ax took me in like a dad, and with Time Baby being another Pillar like Ax and I are… I thought maybe he was like family too." Miz shook her head. "But he isn't. He decided he didn't want to be my brother, and it was stupid of me to think otherwise. Stupid of me to try and help him just because I wanted him to like me..." She sounded bitter about it.
"That sounds pretty messed up," Dipper muttered as he finally handed back the earrings, because it was. And Bill treating Miz -- another him -- like a sister was also pretty messed up, too, but… weirdly, it seemed less messed up to Dipper than the idea of a Time Baby being Miz's brother and wanting her to kill people for him, instead. (...Had Bill asked her to kill people, too? But Bill couldn't have, could he? Because Grunkle Stan wouldn't be okay with that, and… Grunkle Stan had been explaining the agreement to her a couple of days ago, trying to get her to follow it too, and Bill… seemed to want that too? Because some of the things Bill had said since then had been...)
Oh man, was this why Grunkle Stan seemed okay with her being Bill's sister? Because if she wasn't, then she'd want to be this other Time Baby's sister instead? And if she went back there where that other Time Baby was… (where Bill didn't want her to go, because Bill didn't want her to leave… because… he...?) The idea made Dipper feel really off-balance, and maybe a little sick. (Because, the idea that Bill might actually be being a better brother to somebody than anybody, at all, was just…)
Dipper pulled in a breath and looked down, thinking through the implications of that. Of Bill Cipher being a better choice of a brother to somebody that somebody else. And then something else occurred to him.
"Wait." Dipper looked up at her. "You couldn't sleep before until Bill taught you? Why not?"
"Yeah, turns out, the room with my Doors was my Dreamscape. But because I sealed it off, I couldn't sleep. Brother taught me that I could just create a false Dreamscape and sleep there." She frowned. "And I felt so stupid for not realizing it before." She was 'sleeping' right now, back in her own dimension. But she was also sleeping here. Wow, a dream within a dream? Ehehe Inception~
Dipper didn't know much about the Dreamscape. But the fact that Bill had had to have helped her out with that the first time she had shown up was… weird. --Then again, so was the sister thing, really. (Had Bill been planning on doing that from the start? That would be even weirder. ...And how did you get to be a 'dream demon', when you couldn't even sleep? Or was jumping into other people's dreams a thing that they'd done because that was the closest they'd been able to get to sleeping themselves? But she'd just said that Bill had taught her how...)
Dipper frowned. If he'd been Miz's friend -- actually her friend -- or if Mabel had, they would've tried to help her be able to sleep. Not being able to sounded horrible. And being able to would've let Miz sleep until other people were around for her to talk to. Right? ...So if Bill had helped her with that, practically first-thing after meeting her, then…
Miz frowned. "I suppose I could blame my awful life choices on the fact that I was lonely and sleep deprived for billions of years, but I don't think that's a proper excuse."
"Uh…" Dipper said. It practically felt like she'd just read his mind, just then. And… hold on, maybe he was just assuming that the sleep-deprived thing was a worse thing than maybe it actually was? "--Did you need to be able to sleep?" Dipper asked her. "Or was it... optional?" Because if she didn't, okay fine, but if she did, that would probably also help explain why she kind of acted completely insane sometimes, even thought she said she'd used to be human. (Would it help if she just… slept for a couple centuries straight, or something, for awhile? ...Should he ask?)
"Well, the fact that I HAD a Dreamscape means I'm supposed to be able to sleep. I mean, Time Baby and Ax can both sleep so…" She shook her head. "But it wasn't… I mean, I couldn't die from a lack of sleep. Immortal and all… and Ax did apologize when I asked him about why he didn't tell me about the Sleeping problem I had…"
Okay. Need a not-sealed-off Dreamscape to sleep. Got it. "Actually, humans can't actually die just from not sleeping, either," Dipper told her. "It's… getting in accidents and things from hallucinating and microsleeping in the middle of stuff that can get people killed," Dipper winced. He frowned at the Axolotl thing. The Axolotl had known she was having a problem and hadn't said anything? Wasn't it supposed to be good? Great-Uncle Ford had said, um… wait, did the Axolotl actually talk to her? And... hadn't she said it was her dad? Kind of? And that she'd talked about her dad out in the forest some to Great-Uncle Ford, too? ...Dipper had no idea how to even start unpacking this. (He really wished he had his journal with him. He was already losing track of things because he hadn't been able to write any of it down! And now...)
"Well I did get my vessel destroyed a lot back when I started. Then I got stronger and that wasn't an issue anymore. And… getting killed was the closest I'd come to being able to sleep for a while. Until alcohol was invented and I'd just drink until I couldn't think anymore and that was almost like sleeping."
Dipper winced at that, wanting to cover his ears and tell her to stop… and he was really relieved when Grunkle Stan walked up to them before he could, even though Grunkle Stan had Bill with him.
(Dipper was… kind of okay with being the one to have to distract Miz when somebody really needed to? Because Grunkle Stan was okay at handling Bill most of the time, and… Mabel was a lot better than he was at helping Great-Uncle Ford feel better. But that didn't mean Dipper felt comfortable talking with Miz by himself! It left him feeling kind of nervous the longer he talked with her -- like trying to talk with a cryptid version of a shark that could talk back to him. Except it might be hungry, or might be tired or bored, and he wouldn't know what to do if that happened because he didn't have any field notes to help him out yet -- he was having to write them right now himself.)
(Dipper didn't really like Miz, exactly, either. She could do cool things, and he was pretty sure she wasn't lying to him (or trying to) most of the time, but… she killed people, and didn't sound like she really cared all that much that that was wrong, and she was definitely insane. And she made really, really bad decisions. And she'd hurt Great-Uncle Ford on purpose once at dinner, saying and thinking horrible things about him, and then hurt him again even worse out in the woods when she said she hadn't even been trying to. And that one maybe wasn't her fault, or maybe it was, but either way Great-Uncle Ford had still gotten hurt. --He'd gotten driven crazy by her and Bill, and she hadn't even been trying! So Dipper knew how crazy it was for him to be trying to handle her by himself, okay? Especially without Mabel at his back!)
(Dipper let out a breath. If she'd known it was going to be a problem, then Miz could have said something to the rest of them about the being-a-Bill-Cipher thing to them, instead of to Great-Uncle Ford in the woods, though; they would have covered for her. She didn't even act anything like Bill most of the time, except maybe a little crazy sometimes -- and y'know, really crazy at others. Heck, she could've just kept not telling anybody she was a Bill Cipher, and it wouldn't even have had to be a problem! Except she had, and…)
(Miz wasn't like Gideon exactly. But she was kind of like him, too. Just a different kind of awful, to Great-Uncle Ford instead of Mabel. Dipper really didn't like it, and-- Dipper still didn't understand why Grunkle Stan kept refusing to do the circle with them over Bill, either; not when Bill kept on hurting Great-Uncle Ford, too. Grunkle Stan had never really explained that properly to him or to Mabel.)
Dipper looked up at Grunkle Stan, and Bill, and… Bill looked at least a little less insane than he had before he and Mabel and Miz had left their grunkle and great-uncle alone with the dream demon. (Okay, maybe a lot less crazy.) And Grunkle Stan looked okay, which was good. (Maybe a little distracted?)
"How's Ford doing?" was Grunkle Stan's first ask to Dipper. His second, after something like a double-take, was, "Are you and your sister okay?" and Dipper sighed and pulled down on the brim of his hat.
Miz tilted her head. "I think I made him cry? Sorry."
Grunkle Stan eyed her, with something like a scowl. "Ford, or Dipper?"
"Not me," Dipper said, glaring at Miz.
"...Yeah, okay," Grunkle Stan grunted out after giving Dipper a long look, before turning away to look over at Mabel and Great-Uncle Ford. "Y'know, Ford gets real loud when he does that, the whole 'crying' thing. You'd know for sure if he did," Stan said almost absently. And Bill…
...just kept standing at Grunkle Stan's side throughout all this; he didn't even let out a laugh at the idea of Great-Uncle Ford crying. (Not that Dipper was complaining, but…)
Dipper frowned at Bill, trying to figure out what was up with the dumb dorito now. And then Dipper frowned even more as he realized that Bill looked… relaxed. Really, really relaxed. Like he was… at ease? And kind of… happy?
Dipper looked up at his grunkle, feeling a little worried.
"You didn't say if you and your sister are 'okay', Pine Tree," was what Bill finally said to him, and-- Dipper had been expecting that kind of question from his Grunkle Stan (not the crazy dorito chip!), and Dipper looked over at Bill, feeling kind of shocked.
Dipper frowned at Bill furiously. "--Why do you want to know?" Dipper asked Bill defensively, gripping the front of his hat.
Grunkle Stan, who had walked over to Mabel and Great-Uncle Ford in the meantime, turned back towards him from where he was standing a couple yards away, almost next to Great-Uncle Ford. "Dipper?"
Dipper felt more than a little nervous, now, glancing around at them all. And then he almost panicked for a moment, because he felt… almost surrounded. Miz, Bill, and…
"...Grunkle Stan?" Dipper asked slowly, feeling the edges of panic and paranoia creeping up on him. Because somehow, it felt like… they were all in something together. "What did you do?"
"Talked with the kid," Grunkle Stan told him. "Things are gonna be a lot easier from now on. --Are you and your sister okay?" Grunkle Stan repeated, looking between him and Mabel both.
"I'm fine, Grunkle Stan," Mabel said, pulling away from Great-Uncle Ford just a bit, to look up at him.
"I-- I'm fine," Dipper said finally, and he winced when his hesitation got him a long look from his grunkle.
Grunkle Stan gave a grunt, as he crouched down heavily and put an arm around Great-Uncle Ford's shoulders. "Uh huh. Anything you can think of that'd help?" he asked back at Dipper... because of course he could tell that Dipper was lying and wasn't fine.
Dipper pulled in a breath, and let it out in a, "I really want my journal, I need to write a bunch of things down!" as he pulled at his cap. --He couldn't help himself; he'd been without one for an entire day!
Grunkle Stan looked at him, then looked at Bill. "Can you help him with that?" he asked Bill, who looked thoughtful.
Miz tilted her head. "I could summon it, could I do that or would it be blocked?"
"Might be blocked and bounced," Bill said, as he reached for his top hat. People would have been a definite block; objects, though... "Best not to risk it; it'd shred the thing if it went wrong," he added, as he pulled his hat off of the top of his head where it had been floating and reached inside it. He pulled out what looked like an entire ream of paper and held it out to Dipper.
Dipper stared.
Dipper thought back to when Miz mentioned 'freebies' and shuddered. Grunkle Stan had asked… and Bill had just DONE it. No questions asked. It hadn't even been this… this, on the boat when they'd been packing stuff up.
Dipper looked up at Bill.
"What," said Bill, raising his eyebrows in an amused smirk. "You don't want it?" the demon added, not quite waving the stack at him. Dipper glared at him and practically reached up and yanked the paper out of his hand. (Fine. So Bill was still a jerk. ...Why did that make him feel less freaked out about the whole thing?) Dipper started to move away, but stopped when Bill reached into his hat again, pulled out an old-looking ballpoint pen, and held that out to him, too.
Dipper only hesitated for a couple seconds this time, before snatching that away from him, too. "How do you even have this stuff in your hat?" Dipper practically complained at him, as he sat down on the sidewalk to start folding sets of the paper in half in small bundles, into sets of pages. (He didn't know what he was going to do for a binding yet, but…)
He hesitated as Bill squatted down on the concrete next to him, and he realized that Bill was holding a long, very sharp-looking needle and binding thread in his hand, held out to him. Miz knelt down beside Dipper as well. "Want me to help notebook-ify those for you?"
"I…" It took Dipper a moment to breath in, out, and then say to the demon who he knew did know how to do arts-and-crafts-y stuff now: "Can you bind these five sets together, while I finish folding the rest?" He held them out to her.
Miz nodded. "Sure." She took the papers and the needle from Bill to begin expertly stitching up the pages.
Meanwhile, Bill went from crouching next to him, to sitting next to him, and started actually looking like he was rummaging through his hat, instead.
After awhile, Bill frowned, stuck his whole arm in, and yanked out some weird-looking cloth.
"Best I can do on short notice," Bill muttered, setting it down on the sidewalk in front of him, before pulling his knife out of the back of his belt and putting his hat back on top of his head. "Haven't made a proper inventory in… forever," Bill seemed to realize, "I've never done a proper inventory," frowning. He let out a frustrated-sounding sigh, as he flipped open the knife, glanced over at the folds Dipper was making for a moment, measuring them with his eyes, and then turned back to the heavy cloth and started carving it up into a… book cover-sized pattern, with room for flaps at the end.
Miz hummed as she worked. She finished stitching up one stack and started on the next. She commented absently, "Sorry if I scared you. I'm not gonna hurt you or Mabel. I like her. And I like Soos too. And mister Stan," she told him before humming again.
Dipper paused, unsure if he should ask, before he caved and asked anyway, "...What about me?"
Miz shrugged. "Not sure how I feel about you yet." (Well, that was fair. He didn't really know completely how he felt about her, either; it kept changing. She was way too easy to talk to... most of the time.)
Dipper took a deep breath. "And Great Uncle Ford?" he asked next.
Miz sighed. "I don't hate him. But I can't say I like him." She really wanted to like him, she wanted to like all of them… except probably Gideon, if he was still a little shit like he was in the show...
"...Well, that's better than before," Dipper muttered. He was pretty sure she'd hated Great-Uncle Ford before.
Miz shrugged, tied off the ends of the stacks and snipped the binding thread with… her fingers by making a scissors motion.
Dipper handed her some more stacks to do as he finished folding them. Miz continued humming. It was almost peaceful. He could remember multiple occasions where he and Mabel would work on something like this. He watched Miz as she worked. Whenever she was busy doing normal people stuff, she seemed almost human.
As Miz finished another set of papers, she spoke up again. "I don't know if you'll believe me, but I really don't like killing innocent people." Dipper glanced over at her. "Not all of my jobs were for going after regular people. There were a couple of criminals in there too." She frowned. "I know killing is considered wrong no matter who you're killing, but soldiers kill in war all the time. And some criminals get Death penalties. And if someone is really horrible, and has no desire to get… not-horrible, it's…" She'd killed plenty of murderers or rapists or slavers. That wasn't bad, right? Killing bad people was good, right?
Dipper frowned. "I know," he said. "It's not like I don't know that! But when you say it, it feels like a justification," Dipper told her, feeling a great deal of frustration with her about this. "Because you kill, and it's like you're trying to say that what you're doing is okay because other people do it. It's like you're trying to say, 'I know it's wrong, but other people do this stuff, so it's okay for me to do this thing, too.'" He looked over at her. "It feels like you're making an excuse, and don't actually believe that it's wrong."
Miz sighed. "Well it makes me feel better to justify it. Otherwise I would just cry forever, and I'm not gonna do that." She frowned. "And at some point, I kinda got used to the idea that killing itself isn't wrong, just the reasons behind it." (Dipper grimaced at her.) "I've seen starving people kill for food, and they weren't bad people. I've seen rebels fighting and killing to escape a corrupt government, and they weren't bad people. Heck, I got a Deal from a refugee asking me to protect his children as they fled from blood purists who wanted to kill him and his children simply for being what species they were. And I did protect them. The attackers came at us with lethal force and I responded in kind."
She sighed. "And doesn't Ford want to kill my brother? And I'm pretty sure he wants me to die too." She paused. "And I want to stop killing for Time Baby. I could just pretend to do it. As long as his timeline goes how he wants, it shouldn't matter to him." She brushed some hair out her eyes. "My powers are strong enough now that I could probably do that."
(Dipper was about to say something, when Bill spoke up before he could.)
"The problem isn't killing, Miz. It's people staying dead," Bill said cooly, as he cut patterns and shapes into the cloth. (Dipper frowned over at him.) "That's the problem behind the problem," Bill continued. "Killing wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't permanent for everyone other than demons." Bill looked over at her. "Putting your Time Baby out of a job would be easier than trying to get along with him by giving him what he says he wants for the timeline to happen the way he wants."
Miz shrugged. "That too? But it'll take a lot of power to overthrow him." She paused. "I'm gonna work on my own autopilot for the time stream thing. That'll give me room to work."
"--But that doesn't solve anything, though!" Dipper said, feeling just that much more frustrated with the two demons, both. "You're still talking about people having to fight, and it'd still hurt to die, or see people you care about die!" Because when would it stop? He didn't trust Bill -- or Miz -- to do what was right, or to know when to stop. Neither of them actually cared about helping people, just… helping the people they wanted to help, maybe, at best!
Miz stared at him. "And how do you suggest I stop people from fighting and being in conflict with each other? People all have different ideas of what they want. And sometimes that 'want' is something like, 'I don't like that person and want to hurt them'."
"I don't know," Dipper muttered, pulling down on his hat. Because what kind of question was that, even? "If I knew something like that, don't you think me and my sister would try to do that, here?" If he knew that, then maybe he'd be able to stop Bill from wanting to hurt people!
Miz looked down. "Well, all I can do is help those in front of me."
"And I know enough to do more, so I can do more than that," Bill said casually, twirling his knife in the air before putting it away. "It's fine if it takes a while. I'll get there eventually."
"--And hurt a lot of people along the way!" Dipper told him with a glare.
And Dipper really wanted to haul off and punch Bill or something, when the next thing Bill did was just shrug at him and say, "It doesn't matter. I'll fix that, too." --The stupid, insane triangle! What was that even supposed to mean?! Hurting people, and then 'fixing' them(?!) wasn't okay!
Miz flipped through the pages absently. "You know I started up a bunch of refugee shelters and soup kitchens across my multiverse? It's not much, but it was something I thought might help."
"Doing good things doesn't cancel out bad things," Dipper said, frowning at her. And next to him, Bill stilled, and his eyes jittered from side to side.
"...Penalties don't cancel out other penalties," Bill said slowly, turning towards Dipper, "And fixing things cancels out problems from mistakes and accidents, so penalties aren't necessary," Bill said more normally. "...Uh, yeah?" said Dipper. Grunkle Stan had told Bill that, right?
"I have to believe that doing good would eventually make up for the bad that I've done. Especially if I stop doing the bad things." Miz commented quietly.
"I don't," said Bill, but before Dipper could tell him off, Bill said, "I'm going to fix everything."
Dipper frowned at him. Bill had said that before, on the roof, and heck, twice just now, but... "When?" Because it wasn't like Bill was trying to do that. Did the stupid dorito think that he was?
Bill blinked at him. "Time is dead. ...Eventually?" Bill added at Dipper's glare.
"Yeah? How're you going to fix what happened in the Fearamid?" Dipper said caustically, turning away from him, "Scaring me and my sister and my great-uncles by saying you were going to kill Mabel? Or wrecking the town?" Dipper gritted out, shoving a palm into the paper to flatten it out harder than necessary. He really wanted to hit Bill right now, but that wouldn't help anything. All he could do was try to hit him with words, instead. Because clearly Bill wasn't getting how he couldn't actually fix things like that, or anything like that!
"You're all fine. And the town isn't wrecked anymore," Bill told him.
"--No thanks to you!" Dipper said angrily. And how was that enough?!
Miz stared at Dipper. "You know, I don't think you quite know what you're asking for."
"What?" said Dipper. He felt a little weird as he saw Bill tilt his head at him.
"Yes, thanks to me," Bill said. "It rewound. I fixed it."
"You died," Dipper said flatly. Because really, he wasn't falling for it. "You didn't rewind anything."
"Dipper, brother made it so that things would be fixed." Miz deadpanned slowly, as if she thought Dipper was misunderstanding something, which he was.
Dipper narrowed his eyes at them. "He what?" Dipper said looking between them. "--What did you do, and when?" Dipper demanded out of Bill. Because there was no way--
"I put in a timestop when I escaped and got free," Bill told him. He didn't even look gleeful, just like he was stating facts. "I wanted to be able to undo things if I needed to. --I ALWAYS do that, when I can. And I could, once I was out. So I did. It was the first thing I did when I got out, after making a physical form for myself."
Dipper stared at him, confused. "What's a timestop do?" Dipper asked him, still frowning. Was this actually a thing?
"It makes it easier to rewind things later, to a particular point," Bill continued. "I set the point. Something goes wrong, it automatically rewinds the way I want it to, if I let something slip."
Miz rolled her eyes. "The whole reason the town got fixed, and why brother wasn't afraid of just having fun, was because he set it to all rewind and go back to the way it was."
"If and when I wanted it to!" Bill clarified brightly about the time stop that fixed the town.
In a quiet voice, Miz muttered after that, "He even made sure none of the humans would die during Weirdmageddon…"
Dipper glared at them both. (He hadn't actually heard what Miz had muttered under her breath that time.)
"--But it wasn't completely fixed," Dipper objected to them both, and Bill blinked at him. "The Shack was a mess, and there were fault lines in the forest, and all those huge eyebats from the Nightmare Realm are still around--"
"The eyebats were in Gravity Falls even before then." Miz pointed out.
Except Bill shook his head, then nodded and said, "They weren't, but they were. The ones in the 'Falls slipped through from the Nightmare Realm because they're so very small when they start out, and I made them very robust. They can make the transit, even when I couldn't!" Bill told her.
Miz blinked. "That's pretty cool." The Eyebats in her dimensional set were a real species of animal from PaciFire's homeplanet.
"--You ripped a hole in our dimension!" Dipper said, angry that he still wasn't getting through to them. "That wasn't okay! It was only going to get worse! And we had to fix all those smaller rips afterwards--"
But Dipper flinched and stopped when Bill sat up straight all of a sudden, looking alarmed.
"--WHAT RIPS?!" Bill demanded out of him, leaning in towards him across Miz, almost getting in his face.
Dipper shivered and scrambled backwards away from him quickly. "I--"
"Bill," Grunkle Stan said evenly from over where he was sitting next to Ford, and Bill swiveled towards him, wide-eyed and… looking strained, and Dipper couldn't understand it. Why did Bill look so-- "We sealed them up. It's fine."
"--It's not fine," Bill told Grunkle Stan, and Dipper was starting to wonder, 'does Bill think that we could use them to trap him in there, again?' "How did you seal them?!"
"That alien adhesive from the crashed UFO," Miz commented -- and that was why Dipper and the rest of them hadn't talked about doing that to Bill. Even if it was possible for them to get one of those permanently-glued shut repaired rips back open again, to toss Bill through? That would just mean that Bill would probably be able to get it back open again after that, too -- and then come right back again, madder than ever.
"That's NOT good enough!" Bill said, with a high-pitched strain underlying his tone. "Don't you idiots have ANY IDEA--" Bill gritted his teeth and cut himself off. "You can BURN THAT AWAY with something that's hot enough! ANYONE could get through with enough--" Bill cut himself off and shook his head. "And when the dimensional spaces DIVERGE enough, the FRICTION will--" Bill looked a little freaked out at the thought, and started doing that 'attacking the sides of his head with his hands' thing he did sometimes, when he got completely torqued off about stupid things that weren't actually a problem.
Miz blinked slowly. "Want me to help you seal them properly when we get back?"
"Yes. Maybe. Yes? --YES." Bill said. "Good practice, yes. --I will show you first. Don't screw it up!" Bill told her, rounding on her. "Do it right, or don't try. --My dimension. If you aren't SURE, I'll find you a DIFFERENT one to practice on," Bill told her, and… his breathing looked a little off. The heck?
"...Why are you acting so freaked out," Dipper said slowly. "You were trying to break our dimension."
"--Breaking isn't DESTABILIZING!" Bill snapped out at Dipper.
"You tore a freaking huge hole in space-time in the middle of the sky!" Dipper snapped right back at him. How did Bill not get how bad that was?! "It was going to expand and--"
"--it DIDN'T get any bigger!" Bill said angrily. "I was holding it STEADY! Timestop! Boundary stabilization! All of it! If I wasn't, it would've just KEPT GOING!" Bill told him. "Dimensions don't STOP destabilizing once they start! They only GET WORSE!"
"A controlled tear. Held in place and in size," Miz added. "So it could be fixed afterward."
"YES!" Bill said, leaning back where he was sitting and still looking a little freaked out.
Dipper was glancing between them, and... he was starting to realize part of the problem Bill was so worried about.
"You had a bunch of stuff in place that was supposed to not let the tear get any worse," Dipper said slowly. "But when you died and everything unraveled, the tear didn't completely go away; there were just a bunch of smaller tears still leftover from the bigger one afterwards," Dipper said. "Your time stop thing didn't work right. Not everything rolled back to..." Dipper shivered.
"Those weren't supposed to happen," Stan said slowly. "Were they." It wasn't really a question. (Great-Uncle Ford was slowly looking up, and now Mabel was looking over, too.)
"Tsst." Bill looked irritated. "I wasn't supposed to DIE," Bill complained. Miz was making mental notes to not let something like this happen in her own world if she ever wanted to start a Weirdmageddon, not that she would or anything...
"...What kinda timeframe are we talking here, kid," Grunkle Stan said, and Bill looked jittery, opening and closing his eyes. He raised a hand to his forehead, jittering in place slightly and looking irritated, then made a sort of chittery-snarling sound and made a sort of tossing gesture with his hands.
And then Bill was making all sorts of odd, complicated gestures in mid-air and… nothing was happening? But Bill kept looking back and forth at things that... weren't there... like they were?
Dipper glanced over and saw that Great-Uncle Ford was paying attention to what Bill was doing, tracking the motions...
"...Am I missing something?" Dipper muttered to the rest of them, leaning away from Bill slightly when a wider gesture came a little too close to his head for comfort. (Had Bill hidden whatever he was doing just from him?)
"Show me," Dipper heard Great-Uncle Ford say next. (Okay, maybe it wasn't just him, then…)
"--No," Bill snapped out. "Idiot, you're too stupid to help with this anyway," Bill said, not looking away from what he was doing at all. (Great-Uncle Ford practically bristled in place.)
"General timeframe, kid," Grunkle Stan said next. "Doesn't have to be exact. We talkin' years? Minutes? Days?"
Bill looked a little more stressed, and some of his motions got faster. And then they… slowed to a stop and his arms dropped slightly. Bill raised a hand to the right side of his head and rubbed it against it in that odd motion he always seemed to use. "Nn. Years. --Not many," Bill said.
"On the long end?" Grunkle Stan asked, and got:
"Less than a century," back. Bill didn't look happy as he seemed to wave away whatever he'd been seeing in front of him.
"This with the less-energy in the Nightmare Realm thing going on?" Stan asked him, as Dipper looked between them.
"Yes. And no. I ran both," Bill told him. "If it collapsed further in exactly the WRONG way, two years. No energy output and no collapse beyond what I Saw last? A century at most."
Grunkle Stan gave him a long look. "But we can pick when we get back, yeah?" he said slowly. Bill nodded. "Is going back a couple minutes after we left too late?" Grunkle Stan asked next, and that was the space-time thing he'd been asking about before, right?
"No," said Bill, "But it takes TIME to repair those things properly, and--" Bill looked frustrated, now.
"--Yeah, I hear ya," Grunkle Stan grimaced. "We'll talk details once we're back."
Miz nudged Bill's side lightly. "I can help," she told him. "You're not alone anymore." Bill nodded slightly.
"I'll fix it, once we're back," Great-Uncle Ford said, shoving himself up a bit more upright in place where he was kneeling. He was sending a long, distrustful look Bill's way.
"No, you didn't fix it the FIRST TIME," Bill practically sneered out at him. "I'll fix it PROPERLY." Bill let out a huff of breath. "Stanley can help; he actually FIXES things," Bill muttered out, rubbing his hand against the side of his head again, before dropping it, as he glanced over at Grunkle Stan.
"Stan doesn't have any idea how to--" Great-Uncle Ford began, and Bill practically hissed at him, cutting him off. (Dipper winced, glancing over at his sister.)
"He fixed the portal. Got you. And this was without ever having finished high school or gone to college." Miz drawled.
"--He didn't just 'fix the portal'; he had to run it in microsecond bursts, with connects and disconnects, to run that search protocol to find you," Bill told them all, looking a little tense as he… explained? (Dipper stared, because Bill was actually explaining--) "He didn't just open it up to the last place it was set to open to," Bill told Great-Uncle Ford. "He found the dimension you were actually in and followed you, kept tracking you from there, and targeted an opening to you, where you were, once it was ready to open a connection for a larger wider opening for a longer human-traversable period of time."
"...What?" Great-Uncle Ford said, blinking like he'd been staring into the sun for too long. He slowly turned towards Grunkle Stan. "You… got the portal stabilizer working?" He looked a little off-balance, at least to Dipper. ...But why?
Miz glared at Ford. "Stan didn't JUST fix the portal, while running the Shack to earn money to keep it going, he created a bioscanner to FIND Stanford Pines specifically, so that he could grab you WHEREVER you were and not some random demon or person."
"You…" Great-Uncle Ford looked stunned, but Grunkle Stan just shrugged and said:
"There were blueprints and junk. Wasn't hard to put it together."
"But the parts--" Great-Uncle Ford objected. "They weren't just ready to-- that wasn't just some patch job," the scientist told his brother, sounding a little off to Dipper. "That would have required actual precision machining and…"
"Because Stan ISN'T dumb. He's NEVER been dumb! But YOU were the smart one and he just didn't want to take that from YOU--" Miz complained, but stopped when Bill dropped a hand onto Miz's head, and he made that rainwater noise at her again.
"...Not everything a certain someone wrote was destroyed," Bill said, after he'd finished calming Miz down just a little. "That copy machine can make copies of inanimate objects just fine. --I didn't spend all my time just writing things down for you, you know," Bill said to Great-Uncle Ford with something that Dipper wouldn't quite call a smirk.
...Aaaaand now Great-Uncle Ford looked absolutely sick. And Grunkle Stan looked… mad.
"--You couldn't just copy the damn journals, too?!" Grunkle Stan demanded out of the demon.
Bill blinked at him. "The timeframe was off," he told Grunkle Stan. "The dimensions were too far apart. I wouldn't have been able to get through myself yet," he told Dipper's Grunkle, "--and you both would have shut it down IMMEDIATELY once he was through! --No portal, no rift. ...Not one big enough for me to use before it started tearing the rest of your dimension down! And then I'd just be STUCK in another DESTABILIZED DIMENSION again!"
(...The worst part of it was, Bill said it all out to them like he thought it was basic arithmetic. Dipper stared at him, because Bill…)
"And you needed Pine Tree and Shooting Star and everyone else, right?" Miz asked quietly.
"Causality is hard," Bill said enigmatically, which kind of made Dipper want to strangle him… and Dipper was pretty sure Great-Uncle Ford wanted to strangle him for that, too, from the look he had on his face.
Even Grunkle Stan still looked a little pissed. --And he even said it! "I ain't real pleased about this with you right now, kid," he told Bill straight-out.
Dipper watched as Bill looked over at Grunkle Stan and said, "If I'd shown up in your dreams back then, and even gotten you to take me seriously, would you have held up your end of any Deal or Bargain that we would have made, if I'd helped you get your brother to where you were that much sooner?" Bill's eyes narrowed. "Or would you have slammed the door shut on 'the demon who messed with your family' and left me there to ROT." And it was pretty clear that Bill knew that it would have totally been the second one, because Grunkle Stan wasn't stupid.
(...Bill had known. Ford shivered slightly in place as he realized... Bill had known that there was no way that they'd ever have willingly let him through. Which meant--)
Dipper glared at Bill, as Mabel frowned at Bill, too. Great-Uncle Ford pulled in a long breath, looking angry, and a little bit sick.
And Grunkle Stan clenched his jaw, and his fists.
For a second there, Dipper thought Grunkle Stan was finally going to tell Bill off. ...But all his grunkle said next was, "We're gonna talk about this later, kid."
And all they got back from the triangle demon from that pronouncement was a neutral-toned: "Fine."
Dipper let out a breath in annoyance. "All you do is get away with things," he muttered out angrily at Bill, turning away from him. He almost slapped Bill's hand away, when the demon reached for and picked up the needle and thread.
"That's penalty-talk voice, Pine Tree," said the demon. "I'm likely going to get a long 'learning' lecture AT BEST."
...Well, at least Bill didn't sound too happy about it. --It still wasn't enough, though! And Dipper sat there, steaming…
"It'll have to be," Dipper heard Bill mutter right next to him, as the demon kept working on whatever he was doing. "Because I can't think of any other way to have gotten myself out of there that WOULDN'T have involved 'messing with' Stanley's brother." (And Dipper glanced over and realized that Bill was frowning over this.)
Miz looked over at him and asked inquisitively, "Is that a problem, big brother?" Dipper glared at her.
Bill pulled a face. "Yes," he said. "Stanley wants me," Bill said next, "So if something like that happens again… he'll want me to do something different that won't be crossing his line, so that I won't break the agreement, so that he can keep me."
Dipper looked at Bill with a kind of horrified incredulous shock, because that was the reason why Bill might try not to…?!
Dipper looked away, feeling… feeling… he wasn't really sure what, at what Bill had just said. He was definitely feeling not-so-great, though.
...but he couldn't help but look over at what Bill was doing again after awhile, as Mabel and Grunkle Stan and Great-Uncle Ford talked together a little farther away, too quiet for him to hear from where he was sitting those couple of yards away…
...or for anyone else sitting that far away from them to hear…
…...like the two demons who he was sitting right next to…...
Dipper was suddenly reminded of exactly where he was, and how close he was sitting to the two demons, just then. It sent a chill down his spine. And when Dipper glanced over at Bill--
...The demon was stitching the cloth together in bunches, and then stitching together what looked like flaps. Dipper frowned at him. (Weird. What was the stupid dorito chip doing now?)
Then Dipper was distracted from Bill for a moment when Miz mumbled out, "Well, when I get a portal to my own 3rd dimension, I'm not gonna make any tears."
When Dipper stared at her in shock, she continued, "I just want to pet every species of cat on the planet. I possessed a few humans to try it… and that's why the Egyptians worship cats now…" That had been kind of funny, but also just weird, whenever she'd tried possessing a cat and had gotten taken in to one of the temples she wasn't sure how to feel.
"Cats are fun," Bill said. "They're much nicer to possess than gnomes." They were one of the few 'lower' species he'd tried possessing that he actually LIKED running around in. He hadn't really had time for that much 'careless fun' by the time his Zodiac came around, though. Cats were a little finicky. Making Deals with them was a bit… difficult. (Generally, he had to make a Deal with a human to possess them first, and then… well.) He looked over at Miz. "That happened with you, too? The cat-as-you-worship thing?"
Miz nodded. "It was super weird. But in a good way, because now people raise cats." Possessing cats was fun. Much better than being a fish. Though being a dinosaur was pretty dang cool.
"Hm. ...So you have more of them to pet?" Bill said, as he continued with his stitching. (Bill wasn't about to ask Miz if that was really the only thing she wanted to do in that dimension. He wasn't stupid; he knew that it wasn't.)
Miz nodded. "So many cute things! Soft and fluffy…" she sighed dreamily.
Dipper stared at them. "You both like…" He stared up at Bill, who basically had cat-eyes for eyes in his current body. "Right."
"Dogs are cute too." Miz nodded. "And alpacas. And other fluffy things. You know Earth has the most variety of fluffy things on one planet that I've ever seen?" Dipper's jaw dropped. He couldn't believe he was hearing this right now.
"Eh," said Bill. "Llamas are okay. Nature's natural warriors!" he enthused a bit with a smile. "I have one! She's part of my Zodiac," he told Miz, like that was some sort of secret and something to be proud of, and Dipper did a facepalm. Pacifica was not going to be happy about that one. (....She spent too much time using a broom on the gnomes at the Diner as it was.)
Miz giggled. "A true warrior." She handed Dipper the stitched papers. "Here."
"Rrah -- no!" said Bill. "Here! Give it here! He'll do it wrong," Bill said, making a grabby-hand gesture, then looked up at Dipper's frown. "Probably. --Quicker if I do it!" Bill said, but looked almost taken aback as Dipper glared at him, then reached down and snatched up the cloth-thing he'd been working on from off of the sidewalk. (Dipper had saw him finish with the last knots a couple seconds ago; now that it was done, Dipper actually recognized it for what it was finally.)
"The thing! With the flaps!" Bill said, sounding annoyed and, geez--
"Bill, I know how book covers work," Dipper told him, feeling just as annoyed as he got it laid out in front of him and told the demon, of whatever the heck Bill had thought he was making there out of cloth, or called it, "It's the same thing! You've got flaps, and you--"
"--Needs at LEAST five sheets on each side, or it won't be strong enough to stay together," Bill told him next, looking annoyed, and Dipper glared up at him and stuffed in ten each, seven that went all the way in, and three that he folded in half again first, to make them thicker and harder to yank out. He saw Bill blink at him and quiet down, looking less agitated as he made the folds and shoved it all in on one side, and then the other.
'--Yeah, I know what I'm doing,' Dipper wanted to say to him, but he just glared it up at Bill instead.
Miz face palmed. "Men," she muttered.
Bill looked over at her, frowning slightly. "Pine Tree's never done anything like that before." And Bill had no idea what that had to do with 'men'.
"I do craft stuff with Mabel all the time!" Dipper half-complained at him. "I know how to do stuff with paper, and cardboard, and construction paper; all of it. I know when to use what, and how to handle it!"
Dipper turned a glare back on Bill, expecting an argument, but instead he realized that Bill was giving him an almost-thoughtful look.
"Hm," said Bill. And he didn't say anything else.
Dipper's glare slowly turned into a frown. "I'm not stupid," Dipper muttered, pulling down on his cap and turning away from him, to pick up the handmade book and the pen and open it up to the first usable page.
"I know," he heard Bill say. "Ignorance isn't stupidity. I know the difference."
Dipper glanced over at Bill, not really sure how to take that. (Bill had still thought he didn't know what he was doing, or couldn't do it and was still going to try to do it anyway!) ...But Bill was looking out across the boardwalk, not at him. Dipper frowned at Bill because Bill was… scanning the boardwalk -- kind of like Great-Uncle Ford did in the woods sometimes, when they were searching for cryptids. And that made Dipper feel a little uneasy, seeing Bill doing the exact same thing, the same way that Great-Uncle Ford did it.
Miz looked around as well. "So, how are we gonna scam people out of money?" she asked innocently.
Dipper sighed. Grunkle Stan was a terrible influence. "You know scamming people isn't a good thing, right?"
That got him a blank look from the dragon. "But it doesn't hurt anyone? Stan's not gonna let us take enough to hurt anyone."
"We're not stealing anything or doing any scams; we're running a con," Stan told Dipper, as he shoved himself to his feet with a grunt. That got him a surprised look out of Ford, and disbelieving ones out of the niblings.
"What," Stan said to the lot of them. He could make money out on the streets without stealing. Last thing he was gonna give the kid more examples of was just taking shit from other people without their saying it was okay. Kid had trouble enough holding to deals and bargains and things as it was. (And 'pirating' the Stan o' War had been kind of borderline there, Stan knew.)
The agreement thing that he had going with the kid was an outlier… mostly because mutual non-aggression agreements required trust, and the last time the kid had tried doing one of those, shit had (according to the kid) apparently gone so bad (and pissed the kid off so hard) that it had left the triangle demon wanting the high-ground the next time he did one. (...information that he'd only just gotten out of the kid after telling him that he wanted him. --Apparently, that 'want' was a lot stronger than any deal, bargain, bet, or whatever-else the kid could possibly come up with, the way the kid thought of them; it covered every last one of those and went a lot farther than the best of them, and then some.)
Stan paused at the eager looks from the pair of demons at his announcement. They seemed way too excited at the prospect of watching him work his own brand of magic, for whatever reason. (That was usually a warning sign with the kid. Or at least it definitely had been, before this whole 'want' thing… Stan wasn't too sure yet how much stuff might've changed now, because of that.)
...Eh, well, guess it wouldn't hurt to let 'em learn. He was hoping to teach the kid all he could about how to deal with other people in non-lethal ways. Running cons right -- a proper con, to get the stuff you wanted without anybody getting hurt, or anybody walking away happy only to end up feeling jipped and unhappy about things later -- was part of that. Probably a good idea to teach the demon kid's sister too.
"Come on. We're wastin' daylight here." Stan grunted as he looked around for a good place to set up shop. Now that he had the kid on his side, he'd be able to… do almost anything he wanted. (Holy shit. The idea made his head spin to think about. ...Probably a bad idea to follow through on, though. Ford'd kill him. No gold statues made in Stan Pines' honor, or treasure chests full of pirate treasure for him. Damn. The things he did for his brother...) Instead, he looked to the kid, and asked, "That perception filter invisibility thing still up?" Kid shook his head. "Good." He'd thought the one the kid had done on the roof was mostly somethin' the kid had stuck in the boards, but he'd wanted to be sure.
Stan sighed, and the next thing he asked was, "Don't suppose either of ya think you could help me get a proper shirt or somethin'?" They were gettin' close to more people, and in order for Stan to be able to do his thing, they didn't just need to be able to be seen. To run a con, he would actually need to look half-presentable; he'd put his pants back on over his boxers this morning, but a half-stained wife-beater wasn't gonna cut it. Miz flicked her fingers (sort of a snap but not really) and Stan shivered as his clothes turned into his usual Mr. Mystery outfit -- without the fez, at least.
Stan let out a slow breath. That had felt weird, and kind of been overkill, but… "Thanks, kid," Stan told her. Miz seemed delighted at the gratitude, perking up with more of a bounce in her step. ...Goddamn, these kids. Had they never gotten any positive reinforcement in their lives from anyone other than their dead-and-gone siblings, a zillion years ago? (Stan took in another deep breath, and he shook it off.)
Speaking of presentable… Stan glanced over at the kid next, and up at his hat, and the kid not quite rolled his eyes and waved a hand slightly. To Stan's eyes, the kid went from wearing a floating top hat, to no hat at all, his hair darkened to fully black, and his eyes looked to have normal pupils as far as he could tell without getting up close and squinting. Bill turned away from him, and the illusion(?) seemed to fade away. ...Right. So the kid was making himself blend in a bit to everybody else. Not an invisibility filter, but a normality one? Huh.
As they walked down the boardwalk, a man at one of the booths spotted them, eyes zeroing in on Bill who seemed relaxed and not really paying attention. A lazy teenage girl. "Step right up folks!" the man called out. "--You, miss! Want to try your luck?" The man had three cups in front of him. "Only $1 per try to see if you can guess which cup the ball is under!" He gestured up at the small stuffed animals hanging around his booth. "Winners get their pick from these lovely prizes~"
Miz's eyes lit up. "Ooh! They have squids!!!" She bounced over (with Bill and Stan trailing behind her at a much more leisurely pace), then stared up at a particular green doll. It had a crooked eye, unlike its siblings, and she wanted it. Stan was starting to get the idea that Miz really liked dolls. Though, considering her vast collection from last night… did she really need any more?
Bill looked down at his sister and then stepped forward closer to the booth, wondering why Miz was so interested in the one doll she was staring at, when she could easily create a copy of it…
But when Bill got a good look at it, he stilled. He understood why his little sister wanted this particular one. --He would get this for her!
-----