The twins sighed, and Dipper pulled down on his cap. They exchanged a look. Grunkle Ford wasn't actually listening to them. He had an explanation for everything, but… he wasn't asking questions. He'd already made up his mind. It was like the thing with Grunkle Stan all over again, when they'd been talking to Grunkle Ford about it in the basement. He hadn't really been listening to them then, either. The only difference was, this time Grunkle Ford was actually telling them what he thought.
They weren't sure if Grunkle Ford was really right about Bill and Miz on this or not, but... he wasn't even thinking about what they were telling him, really, which meant they couldn't really talk to him about some of the stuff they'd seen. --Which was bad, because he really was wrong about Bill not caring about Miz -- because he really did care about her! -- and…
...they both realized right then and there, that there was no way their great uncle was ever going to change his mind about Bill, no matter what the demon said or did, whether he was lying or not. Because even if he saw something, he'd never actually believe it.
It worried Mabel more than Dipper, because she understood better what her Grunkle was trying to do. Dipper hadn't been in on either of those conversations, and they'd been so busy lately that she hadn't really gotten a chance to tell her brother about it -- she'd been confused by the first one, enough that she hadn't tried to share it with him.
--Grunkle Stan wasn't trying to change Bill, he was just trying to get Bill to change his own behavior. If they all treated him the same, no matter what he did, then Bill would just go ahead and do his worst, because it wouldn't matter! Because trying to be good would still get him treated like he was bad. --Bill wouldn't feel ashamed and keep trying; he'd think he had no reason to. (And trying to be good was hard for him. He really didn't know how to do it! They had to keep telling him stuff -- and Mabel had seen how confused and frustrated Bill got about some things before with Grunkle Stan. 'Being good' didn't 'make sense' to him, and the way Grunkle Stan had to explain it to Bill… just wasn't normal.)
But the same way Grunkle Stan was making it easy to stay at the Shack with food and things, Grunkle Stan was trying to show Bill that 'being good' didn't necessarily mean that Bill had to do a lot of things, or anything! Grunkle Stan was starting small, showing Bill that there were things that, if Bill didn't do them, then he'd get treated okay by people, just fine. And Grunkle Stan was also trying to show Bill that there were okay things that Bill could do that, if he did do them, then he'd get treated even better! (Grunkle Stan called it 'positive reinforcement'! ...Well, lots of people did -- Mabel had looked it up online, when Grunkle Stan had told her that he'd looked it up, too. He'd found a book on it online, or something. She hadn't found a book, but she'd found a bunch of articles and blogs instead, and they'd been really helpful!)
Neither she or Grunkle Stan had been trying to help make Bill and their other favorite great-uncle try and get along, of course, because that was stupid and nuts and just not gonna happen, duh! But this was… gonna be kind of a problem, if Grunkle Ford was going to keep pushing at Bill, even when Bill was trying (most days) not to push back. (Especially since most days wasn't ALL days, so when Grunkle Stan wasn't around to try and stop them...)
And then Mabel thought back to Miz's comment, 'You're a bully,' and frowned. Because Miz was right, kind of. (Well, in the way that Bill was usually 'right, kind-of' sometimes, anyway.) Even if Bill totally deserved it, and even if everything else was a lie, the way Grunkle Ford was treating Bill -- attacking Bill when he wasn't trying to do anything wrong -- was kind of like bullying. Maybe Bill really just deserved it for being a jerk to her Grunkle Ford for so long; Mabel didn't know about that. But what she DID know was that she didn't like how it was making her Grunkle Ford act, or feel! Grunkle Ford wasn't happy. He was really unhappy! And treating Bill like that just made her grunkle feel horrible about himself. --What had happened after the thing with the explosive bracelet things out on the porch… that just proved it! Grunkle Ford had been a mess after that.
Mabel had seen the way people had bullied Dipper all their lives. And now her own Grunkle Ford was acting just like them, almost. (He had a really good reason to do it! Bill was horrible, really all the time! But…) --And the way Miz had gotten angry… reminded Mabel a bit of how she'd get mad when the other kids sometimes decided to pick on Dipper. (Mabel had fought back at them sometimes if she'd had to, after giving them a chance to be friends with them instead, but she really didn't like violence. She'd rather just make new friends who would get along with her and Dipper, instead of trying to hurt them.)
"Grunkle Ford…" Mabel began. "Maybe you should stop pushing Bill." At the look she got from him, she said, "--I know, I know, he's a stupid-head demon-dorito chip, but it makes you feel horrible, and it isn't helping!" she told him.
"Mabel, sweetie, if I don't stand up to him--"
"--you're just making him angry, and making yourself feel hurt, and then sometimes he says stuff that hurts you, too," Mabel told her grunkle. "I'm not telling you to stop because I like him," Mabel said, because she knew where that shocked look her grunkle was giving her was coming from, "I'm telling you to stop because I love you!" she told him, hugging his side. "You're hurting yourself more than you're hurting him, and I don't like it!" she said, huffing out a breath and trying not to cry, as she buried her face in his side.
"...Mabel," she heard her grunkle say softly, and she felt him curl an arm in around her. "If I don't…"
"Then maybe he does something, and maybe he doesn't, but why does it have to be you?" Mabel asked him. "We can help! Grunkle Stan can help! And you're not standing up to him if he's not attacking you first! You're just giving him a reason to attack you back without breaking the agreement-thing Grunkle Stan made for us all, and that's stupid," she told him, smacking him in the arm, because her grunkle wasn't stupid, he was smart! And... "Grunkle Stan said Bill's allowed to defend himself! And if you attack first then he's allowed to hurt you back!"
"That's…" Ford huffed out a breath. "Mabel, I know this. That isn't the issue," he told her. "The issue is everyone simply letting Bill do whatever he wants without anyone trying to stand in his way. That cannot stand," he told her. "Someone has to try and stop him."
"Hey now," Stan said, as he walked his way over to them. "I'm not letting the kid do whatever he wants, Ford. You know that," Stan grunted, as he set down the pot lid full of pancakes in front of the three of them. "And stop him? From what? Playing the piano? Going fishing? Falling asleep on the picnic tables outside? I want him doing those things, Ford. Means he's not doin' something else, like starting a second Weirdmageddon or killin' people, instead."
Ford pulled in a breath, and let it out again. "It's all just a front, Stan. We talked about this."
"Yeah, we did," Stan told him, sitting down and passing out forks. "And I told you, I'm okay with him 'pretending' at me for three years at a stretch, with another punch in the eye in-between if I have to, until I get him all settled out."
"That's not what's going to happen, and you know it," Ford said darkly, as Stan speared himself a pancake.
"You don't know that's not what's going to happen, and neither does the kid," Stan told him right back, before he rolled his pancake up like a cigar and took a big bite out of it.
Ford opened his mouth to object, and Stan shot him a look. "--Eat your breakfast, Ford," Stan told him, as the kids took one look at each other, and tried the 'pancake roll' eating method their Grunkle Stan had just inadvertently shown off to them. Mabel slathered corn syrup on hers.
"We really should be trying to shift our schedule to the times in this dimension," Ford told him. It was early evening here, even if it was morning back in their home dimension. That only produced a shrug out of his brother, and a careless, "We're only gonna be here another day, Ford. Relax."
"...Assuming we trust Bill to get us all home and in one piece," Ford muttered, though he did spear a pancake of his own without needing another glare from his brother to prompt him.
Towards the end of their meal, the hatch opened up and the two demons climbed back out again, Bill first. Miz had changed her headband again; there was intricate embroidery in the cloth sections and etching across a metal plate that covered most of her forehead. She was still adjusting it as she came out. "Still think I like yellow better, but Ford would probably throw a fit…"
"Yellow doesn't blend well," Bill told her, "This isn't the Mindscape. You don't need to stand out in the same way, here. And you certainly don't need to be displaying 'attack colors' to the idiot while he's here, armed, and thinks he's dangerous," Bill shrugged off, waiting for her to get the rest of the way up and out, before closing the hatch behind them.
"'Here'?" Ford repeated slowly. Did Bill think he was going somewhere?
Bill barely spared him a glance. "What, you weren't thinking about running off and trying to 'fix' things for your counterpart here? Or should I say, 'keep things from breaking'," Bill said, as Miz rolled her eyes.
Ford sucked in a breath, hard. Stan froze in place.
"Oh, right, I'm talking to a Stanford," Bill said flatly. "What I really meant to say was: 'keep someone from breaking someth--'."
"--Stop talking. Now." Ford said angrily, rising to his feet. Bill turned his head to look at him, arms crossed, eyes hooded.
Miz sighed. "Brought this on himself for being an ass…" she muttered before stepping back to let Bill handle this.
"What, you don't think actions have consequences?" Bill said. "Oh, but don't worry," Bill added. "I know how this is all going to play out."
"What. did. you. do." Ford demanded, advancing on him.
"Oh, I didn't do anything," Bill said. "That's rather the point. --The lesson," Bill drawled out, glancing down at Stan, to meet his eyes. "Which, really, let's be honest here, is why I'm not going to be trying to make a portal tomorrow morning," Bill told them all. "It's going to be tomorrow evening, instead," Bill told all and sundry, arms still crossed. "Because when you are done trying to 'fix' things, Stanford," Bill said, lifting an arm up to point a finger at Ford's chest, "And breaking them even further, he," Bill pointed to Stan, "Will then do what he always does, and go ahead and then actually fix it!" And Bill was almost staring snake-eyes at Ford, who was practically shaking with rage.
"You seem… to have… your causality rather mixed up again, Bill…" Ford managed to get out without attempting to punch the demon into next week. (Mostly because he knew he couldn't. Not with that suit Bill was wearing; the tech in it would let gun blasts ricochet off of it, to say nothing of absorbing the impact of his fists.)
Miz was leaning against the railing. "I really want to tell them. The truth about what happened," she grumbled. Ford nearly turned on her then and there, but he halted when she held up a hand and, to Ford's horror, a modified version of Bill's suit flickered into view for a brief second on her, as well.
"Oh, they'll figure it all out soon enough," Bill told her, keeping his eyes on that Stanford. (He'd known about the suit; he'd helped her make it before heading back up to deck where that Stanford was. Just in case.) "Best not to spoil it! Besides," Bill added darkly at the end, "IT'S NOT LIKE THEY'D BELIEVE US IF WE TOLD THEM."
Miz whined, "I hate misunderstandings that aren't innocently funny."
"...Kid," Stan began slowly. But Bill just looked down at him and said, "You'll be able to fix it. If you want to. That Stanford's an idiot," Bill told him, "But you'll know EXACTLY what to do."
Stan not quite glowered at Bill. Meanwhile, Ford stalked past him. "---Where are you going?" Stan called after him.
"I'm going to keep watch on the house," Ford called back angrily. "To stop you from doing anything stupid. Again!" He reached the stern end of the boat and vaulted the railing.
Stan stared after him. He felt suddenly cold.
"Idiot," Bill said of that Stanford, watching him go.
"He really acts like he doesn't like you," Miz groaned. "Besides, the young twins are still spying on us from that rock…"
Stan pulled in a shaky breath.
"...Grunkle Stan?" Mabel asked him.
Stan let out that breath again. "Yeah, well… Ford's an idiot sometimes," Stan said. "But not that much of an idiot. Dinner's at six. They'll be gone soon. Ma would kill 'em… us… if we weren't back in time. So..." he shrugged.
"...you really love him." Miz noted. She had a pained expression on her face. "It's not fair."
Stan let out a long sigh. "I really screwed things up for him," Stan told them all, as he grabbed up the empty pot lid and other debris left over from the meal. "He's got a right to be mad about that."
"You didn't, though." Miz muttered. "He still got to go to college. He still got a huge fancy grant check to do whatever research he wanted…"
Bill let out a soft laugh. "Oh, Miz," he said, leaning back. "You're focusing on ENTIRELY the wrong things…"
"Stan was seventeen when he was kicked out." Miz complained. "He was a child! Thrown out and living all by himself! Ruin Ford's life? Heck, Ford's not the one who had to worry about getting enough to eat or staying warm or not dying."
Stan looked highly uncomfortable at what Miz had just said (...while Bill continued looking all kinds of amused). "I was fine," Stan told them, more to the niblings than to the two demons. "I had my car, I had my… our boat, and I had all the funds and food and junk I set aside for…" He looked around. "...this." Stan's shoulders slumped. 'Things just got harder later, because I was tryin' to find a way to get rich quick, to try and buy myself back into the family.' He didn't say that out loud, though.
"It's still not fair." Miz sniffled, wiping at her face. "You shouldn't have had to go through that. Especially when--" She stopped and turned away in frustration. Stan noted that. Bill had told her not to say anything and it looked like she was obeying her brother. Stan let out a breath and scratched at his cheek, before he looked over at Bill again.
"You're enjoying this," Stan said darkly to the demon.
"Oh, you have NO IDEA," Bill said, grinning. "I want to see the LOOK on YOUR FACE when you stop feeling bad about having gotten kicked out." Stan's eyes narrowed. Miz made another frustrated sound, clearly wanting to tell Stan whatever it was that Bill must have told her not to say.
Mabel and Dipper sat up at that. Miz was clearly struggling to keep the truth hidden, because she wanted to tell them whatever she knew about what had happened. And holding onto this information for Bill was clearly frustrating her. They exchanged a glance, thinking about what their Great-Uncle had said about the demons being liars, but also what they knew about how the two of them acted from what they'd seen themselves. --What was it that Miz wanted to say so badly, that Bill didn't want her to share with them all, about what had happened with their grunkles, that she thought they needed to know?
Bill lifted a finger and twirled it slightly, then side-eyed Miz and made a flicking motion.
Stan looked downright alarmed, glancing between them. "What did you just--??!" He hadn't thought the kid would attack his own sister, let alone raise a single finger against her!
"--It's just a little bit of help," Bill said. "A bit of a relaxant and a slight garble-words spell. Not very strong. She can shrug it off easily if she wants to, whenever she wants to. Nothing to keep her from doing it."
Miz sighed, feeling the guilty tension in her chest go away. "Oh… I hate keeping secrets…" She slid down to lay on the deck (which she had thoroughly and microscopically cleaned way back when they'd first gotten here, she wasn't going to lie down on something dirty) before groaning out, "Thanks, big brother."
"Mm," Bill hummed at her thanks. "You know, it's not a secret," Bill told her. "It's a surprise!"
"I don't like surprises," Stan told him flatly.
"Grunkle Stan…" Mabel said slowly, looking between him and Bill. (She sort of recognized that tone from some of the things she'd done with Bill at the spaceship, doing 'lab things' with him. Bill sounded a little… angrier maybe? But he was still…)
"--You're also a con-man, not an actor," Bill told Stanley. "But I'll tell you what," Bill said. "If you go through all of everything that's coming in, oh, the next 24? 36? hours or so, and you can't come up with a perfectly good 'fix' by just reacting to things as they come? Then I'll work out whatever nonlinear time loop we'll need to do to settle things out for you, just the way you want them to go, instead." Bill tilted his head at him.
("Mabel," Dipper said slowly, but Mabel wasn't sure… This didn't feel like the learning lessons that Bill had set up for her for science-things, or the way Bill had promised to keep things from going too bad, as long as she 'colored within the guidelines' close enough for Bill to fix things if she screwed them up with any of the chemistry stuff she sometimes liked to play with. To Mabel, this was starting to feel a lot more… mean, underneath it all.)
Miz was crawling over to grab a pancake. "Ugh… I still haven't gotten around to apologizing to Ford yet. Every time I think I can, he just does something else to make me too annoyed at him to be sincere about it." She stuffed a whole pancake in her mouth.
"I don't want to be playing games with you, kid, ruining two other kids' lives over this beef you have with Ford," Stan told the demon staunchly, talking over Miz's head.
"Who said this is a game?" Bill said. "A game implies a winner, a loser, and a prize. There's no prize here, and you can't lose."
("Oh no," said Dipper, having a bad feeling where this might be going, and Mabel didn't feel any better about it, either. Great-Uncle Ford had warned them about Bill and games...)
"Kid," Stan said angrily. "We've talked about the difference between not losing and winning."
"Yes. We have." Bill eyed him. "What makes you think I don't want you to win? Besides," Bill said, "If you decide to 'play', then no lives will be ruined by the end of it!"
Stan gritted his teeth. "What does my brother lose out of this?" Stan asked, because he'd better damn well know the stakes before he went any further.
"His pride, dignity, and any high-horse high ground he ever thought he had about that STUPID project of his, that he's built up to be so great," Bill told him promptly, with an edge to his tone. (Dipper and Mabel both exchanged a glance, Mabel wincing.)
"...You're really wanting to take my brother down a peg, aren't you," Stan said slowly. "And you were plannin' this even before this whole thing… on deck." Bill nodded once. (Stan didn't even have to ask what he'd be getting out of this; Bill had already told him: knowledge. Something the kid valued above all else. And Stan knew that if he devalued that...)
Stan gritted his teeth. "...Rules?" Stan asked.
"Grunkle Stan, no!" Dipper said, as Mabel chimed out a similar protest.
"Oh, it's very simple," Bill said. "You, and Pine Tree and Shooting Star and Miz and myself, don't discuss the science fair project -- or anything else that happened surrounding those events -- with anyone untilllll…" Bill stopped to think. "Hm. At least 8 o'clock tomorrow night. Unless and until I say otherwise," Bill added, and Stan recognized that last bit of wiggle room from the 'no dimensional talk' thing; Bill was leaving them all a little leeway on that one, but they'd have to go through him for it.
Miz lazily waved a hand. "Will do~" Bill smiled down at her.
"Thank you, Miz!" Bill said winningly. He looked up at Stan expectantly.
"...That's it?" Stan asked. Bill nodded. "And Ford does whatever the hell he wants in the meantime." Bill nodded. "What are you offering up as an incentive, yourself?" Stan asked next. If knowledge was something he'd get out of 'playing', not straight from the kid, then Stan wanted to know what the kid's own buy-in was for getting to watch how it all shook out.
"Any help out of me that you'd like in the meantime," Bill said promptly, and that left Stan blinking. "And in your 'fix' later, if that's what you want to do."
"You're serious," said Stan. Bill nodded. Shit. This was a recipe for disaster. The kid was positive that Ford was gonna fuck it all up somehow.
"Grunkle Stan, you know Bill makes bad deals…" Dipper said slowly, eyeing Bill. He didn't really get this whole thing. Bill really thought he and Mabel would agree to some weird terms for whatever this thing was that was going to hurt their Great-Uncle? "Why are you even talking about this with him?"
"This ain't a deal, Dipper," Stan said heavily, giving the kid a long look.
"--More of a promise, really!" Bill said brightly, which had both Mabel and Dipper frowning at him, because… a promise? Since when did Bill make promises to people? And how was that different than a Deal?
"Grunkle Stan, whatever you decide to do, it's okay," Mabel told him, getting up and walking over to touch his arm. "We'll help. Okay?" Because whatever Grunkle Stan wanted to do… she wanted to help. He knew Bill better than they did right now, and if Grunkle Stan thought this was important… she'd trust her grunkle.
Stan looked down at her and pulled in a breath. "Okay, sweetie," Stan told her. "I, uh, I gotta think about this some more first," Stan told her, which got him a bright smile and a hug from her before she ran off to the other side of the deck, where Miz was with the fish. Dipper gave Stan a long look, before getting up and walking over after Mabel himself.
"--Oh my gosh!" Mabel gasped when Miz unhooked a fish and swallowed it whole. She'd seen her do the same thing as a dragon, but seeing her do in in her 'human' form looked really weird. "How big of a thing can you swallow?" Mabel asked her.
Miz shrugged. "Haven't really tested."
"...Mabel," Dipper said, feeling a little nervous. He was still a little stuck on some of the things Great-Uncle Ford had said before, both with Bill and with Miz. And it wasn't the sort of thing he wanted to find out he was wrong about by being wrong about it...
"Like, how wide can you open your mouth?" Mabel asked Miz, undeterred.
Miz frowned. "I probably shouldn't try. Don't want to accidentally bite you. That would suck, I actually like you," she said matter of factly. "In fact, please don't put any body parts in my mouth. I'm fine if I'm well fed but I'm a little hungry right now so it might be dangerous." She grumbled under her breath about an idiot summoner who had wanted to get in her mouth.
"Don't go eating any of my Zodiac, Miz!" Bill called out, as he walked over from the other side of the deck, letting the reminder hang in the air before him. He tried not to complain about her eating habits -- she could just jump bodies when she needed to, so it shouldn't influence her that much if her stomach was breaking things down as far as she said it did, but still… couldn't she at least have some better standards? Jumping into gnomes, and eating random summoners, were both just...
Miz shrugged, entirely unrepentant at her gluttonous attitude. "I won't eat your Zodiac. Or any other person without consent."
"Define 'consent'," Bill muttered, then grimaced and waved it off, apologetic. He knew how serious she was about free will. Miz blinked. "Should I answer? Just so Stan and the kids know, at least?"
"If you want," Bill told her, glancing back at Stanley, who was thinking to himself, as he'd said he would. (Bill had thought to give him some physical space for it, since he'd seemed to need it.) Stanley always seemed interested in what he called 'triangle demon definitions' for things. Something about being a 'multilingual translator', apparently. It had been a bit confusing, but Bill was fairly certain he'd gotten the main point Stanley had been trying to make, at least.
Miz glanced at them. "For the eating thing, I don't like eating food that's still alive. So like, if I catch a moose for a snack, I check if it's capable of understanding words and reasoning. There's a difference between animals and people, sort of thing. If it's an animal, I kill it and eat it. If it's a person, I generally let them go. But there are some species that don't particularly care about being eaten, male Cyclopians are kinda biologically into that. The problem is that they want to mate before being a meal and I am not comfortable with that."
(The twins made disgusted faces, but… Bill had said it was like a praying mantis so they could sort of understand it a little, even if they both found it gross and more than a little messed up.)
"--and there was that time I got summoned by this idiot who's Deal was that he wanted to get in my mouth. I told him what would happen to him if he did such a thing but he insisted. Course, he was wearing a bomb and had his friends hidden behind some rocks, hoping to kill me from the inside by sacrificing this guy… and I'm getting off topic aren't I?" Miz frowned. "Sorry, that happens a lot with me."
Miz shook her head. "Anyway, I don't eat people unless they specifically tell me that I can. I need them to agree to it before I'm comfortable doing so."
The two young humans just stared at her with their mouths hanging open. Finally Dipper said (very clearly), "I do not want you to eat me." ("Same!" Mabel echoed, putting a hand up in the air.)
Miz nodded. "Ok. I won't anyway since you're Bill's and he doesn't want me to, but it's nice to know for sure! I promise I will not eat you, kill you, or harm you on purpose. --And I'm gonna try not to hurt you by accident either, but I can't promise accidents away. So I'm just going to tell you to not stick your hands in my mouth while I'm hungry."
"Why are you hungry anyway?" Mabel asked. "Can't you just weird-magic it away?"
Miz shrugged. "I think it's half mental and half the vessel I'm wearing. My vessel is physical, and has some needs. I enjoy fulfilling those needs and I like eating, so I don't mind. There's plenty of food here anyway." She took another fish and swallowed it.
Dipper thought about that a bit. "Wouldn't you feel better if you just didn't feel hungry at all?"
Miz tapped her chin in thought. "Sometimes, maybe. But I like being able to feel things. It makes me feel alive. Which I AM but part of me wants biological urges to really drive that point home."
It made her feel alive? Dipper wondered about that. He remembered what it had felt like when Bill had dragged him out of his body, and he'd been stuck in the Mindscape, unable to touch or feel anything. (He hadn't exactly felt 'alive' like that. Maybe…) He got a thoughtful frowning look.
Miz sighed and was looking over to the ocean again.
"You can go get more food. You don't need my permission to go get something to eat," Stan called out to her, looking over from his continuing mulling over what Bill had said (trying to figure out all the angles), having noticed when she finished off the last of the fish from before. Miz gave him a grateful smile, before turning back into her dragon form and slipping out into the ocean.
Bill leaned back against the railing to watch her, while Dipper and Mabel stood around somewhat anxiously for awhile, slowly drifting their grunkle's way… until they heard their Grunkle Stan let out a sigh and a grumble.
"Grunkle Stan… what do we do now?" Mabel asked her grunkle quietly, as she walked a little closer to him and hugged up against his side. "Do we just… let Grunkle Ford go off on his own?" She felt worried about everything, the longer they let things go.
Stan grunted and wrapped an arm around her side. "My brother can take care of himself," he told her. He looked away and let out a sigh, as he kept half an eye on watching Miz swim; she was staying within sight of the boat, just like he'd asked her before. (Stan wondered a little about that. She did seem to be trying pretty hard to listen to him, even without even a proper agreement in place with her. ...Was it really because her brother was part of it that she wanted to play nice? Or was something else going on?)
Well, she was easier to handle than the kid at least. More eager to try and make him happy with her as well. (...which was probably part of why the kid didn't trust the two of them alone. ...Heh, fair. He'd already gotten a bunch of info out of her that Bill hadn't been ready, or all that willing, to share.)
"But hey," Stan told the kids, "That doesn't mean we're gonna let the knucklehead run off and get into any more trouble without us." He looked over at Bill. "I'll play this 'game' of yours for now, but I pull the plug on it when I want. Understand?" he said, ignoring the gasp he heard from Dipper for now.
"I told you, it's not a game. It's more of a promise," Bill repeated, then he got an odd glint in his eye. "--No no, actually… it's more of a LESSON," Bill enthused out next with the start of a smile, and that sent a slight chill down Stan's spine. (Mabel frowned.) "Call it… something like a penalty, for trying to get information about me out of someone else other than me, instead of asking me directly."
Stan sighed. Yeah, he figured the kid wasn't happy about how Stan had talked to Miz about his family and his brother behind his back. But still… "You were planning on doing this before that," Stan pointed out. (He should've known the idea of him taking penalties for some things would come back to bite him soon enough.)
"Yes," said Bill. "But I might have let you talk me out of keeping things to myself before." Bill gave him a long look. "Now you get to see what it looks like when I keep things to MYSELF, instead. So you'll know the DIFFERENCE, for later." Bill's eyes flashed angrily. "Since you obviously CAN'T TELL the difference right now." The kid looked pretty angry with him. (Right. Because he hadn't really listened to the kid earlier, before they'd left, and had rushed him and practically told him to shut up, instead. Like being stuck for two days in another dimension away from home with his brother freaking out on him left and right wasn't enough of a problem as it was...)
"You don't just get out of lessons or penalties just because you don't like them," Stan noted, not wanting to set a bad precedent, here. "This isn't either of those. --I want to be able to call this thing off. My choice," Stan stressed. Bill nodded but continued to narrow his eyes at Stan.
"Oh yes," Bill said. "Your choice. Absolutely. But. Then I don't have to HELP you with any of it anymore, since there will be NOTHING more to help YOU with! And..." Bill paused for a moment, shifting weight from side-to-side, bobbing slightly in place (and looking like he was trying to build up some kind of argument to keep going, Stan had seen this out of the kid before…)
"But?" Stan prompted him.
Bill frowned slightly. "Most of you seem to think that one of my problems is, hm, OVERSHARING about certain things that then lead to a 'stop'?" Bill said lightly.
"--Not with me," Stan said quickly.
"But with others?" Bill asked. "Like Shooting Star and Pine Tree? Or 'your brother'?" Bill asked of him, leaving Stan grimacing. "--Well, we might as well try to 'calibrate' things a bit, and see if not saying anything at all is actually undersharing!" Bill grinned at him. "And I didn't say it's a 'penalty'. I said it's 'something like a penalty'."
Stan and Bill stared at each other for a long few moments, the tension building. Stan really didn't like this. (What he liked even less was that the kid was trying to get him to trust him, thinking that he knew Stan well enough to know what he could or couldn't do… and maybe help him after the fact if things went all to hell. This was practically turning the whole agreement on its head, upside down. Bill was trying to take the lead, here.)
The tension was broken when Miz slapped down a freaking MARLIN onto the deck. "I got a BIG one!" she cheered, wagging her tail like an excited puppy. ("Whoa!" Dipper backpedaled quickly out of the way, nearly getting hit with some of the splash, and almost hiding behind Grunkle Stan at the end of it.) She nudged it with her snout towards Stan. "How do we cook this?" She bounced in place, one clawed hand resting on the fish's side to keep it from flopping around. It twitched weakly, paralyzed from her stinging tendrils.
"Geez, it's huge! How…" Dipper stared at the blue fish. He'd never seen one of these up close before.
Mabel gasped. "That's enough to last us like… a week!"
"More like a day or two, with how much Miz usually eats," Stan put out there, grounding expectations. He glanced over at Bill again. Miz asking for help with the cooking reminded him of something Bill had said that had almost slipped by him. "Give me a minute, Miz," Stan said. "--Kid, you said you'd help me with whatever I want in the meantime, if I go along with this thing. Yeah?"
Miz was shrinking back into her human form, currently dressed in a one piece bathing suit. Probably since she was planning to go swimming some more later. Mabel noted that she had made it a soft green color, probably for their comfort by wearing less yellow.
Bill tilted his head at Stan. "Yes?" the kid said, not looking the least bit suspicious or held back about it. ...And that just turned everything on its head all over again for Stan and left him blinking, because the kid wasn't just trying to get Stan to maybe play by his rules on something, to his own tune and dance. --The kid was wanting to see how far Stan would go with this, too.
Hell, the kid hadn't laid out any limits except keeping one set of information out of the way for the next, what, day, day-and-a-half? He hadn't given any limits to Stan himself on what he could or couldn't ask out of Bill as 'help' in the meantime, and Stan was the one with the authority to call it off. --This wasn't just some game, here, and it wasn't just some 'getting even' session for the kid with Ford. This was a test. A damn big one. Kid really wanted to see what he'd do, and the kid was trying to balance it out with something just as big -- almost unconditional and unrestricted, unlimited help. Up to and including things like time travel, which even Ford didn't know how to do. Hell.
(...But the thing was, as much as Stan wanted to bite and try this out -- better sooner than later, when things could go really, really wrong back home -- Stan still wasn't sure why now and why like this. The kid must have been planning this since earlier, when he'd first said 'two days', but… hell. Ford had seriously pissed the kid off and now... Would Bill had even said anything to remind them all about this? Had the kid been planning on keeping them all distracted until the last minute before they were going to leave for home, instead of dangling 'fixing things' in front of them all, before Ford had pissed him off and gotten written off by the kid and… How had that changed things for them? Had it changed things for them? Would the kid have even offered to help him with it all at all before?)
(Ford had acted like Bill was trying to lie about ever having a brother. And Stan… hadn't said anything about it yet, other than to not kill Ford over it. That probably meant that the kid didn't know where he stood, on something he considered important, but… Stan didn't even know what the right question was, here. And now Bill was trying to test him, to figure something out; this whole thing wasn't just about 'not listening to him' -- that was just the window dressing, the surface, not the depth the kid was going for, here. Not by a longshot -- Stan got that. So what did the kid want to figure out about… him? That had to do with… Liam? And what the hell could how Stan up and decided to handle something with another set of twin-thems, have anything to do with any of that?)
"...What's your risk?" Stan asked the kid, finally, and as straightforwardly as he could -- because maybe this wasn't what the kid would call a 'game', but… "I recognize a gamble with a payoff when I see one," and he saw Bill's eyes darken slightly at the question.
"My risk," Bill said quietly, "Is that you'll figure something else out that I don't want you to know before we're back in your dimension again. And that would cause problems for me."
Stan blinked, then considered the kid carefully. (Okay, so that answered one question. With the way the kid had been trying to keep Miz from 'telling all' about things here, the kid probably would've just tried to get them to leave before, without getting into anything with the twins lives here. Not with the way he was talking about things now, and what he didn't want talked about.)
"...Me askin' you to do something crazy ain't a risk?" Stan asked of the demon next, who just blinked at him.
"Is it?" the kid asked him. ...Well, shit. That... was a LOT of 'trust', there.
Stan blew out a slow breath, then eyed Bill. "I could ask you to tell me what the thing is that you don't want me figuring out before we're back, right now," Stan put out there.
"Yes," said Bill. "But then I'd say that that was related to the science fair project closely enough to not answer it. And not give you the pass on it."
"But that… expires here, after I'm done fixing things, and we go home," Stan said. Bill nodded. Stan gave him a long look. 'Three days,' the kid had said to Miz before. …Aw hell. Maybe the kid was distracting him here with this, too. Maybe the thing he should be more worried about wasn't what was happening here; the real problem was gonna be something with himself, and Ford, once they got back, instead.
...which meant that everything that happened here was, what exactly, to the kid?
"Fine," Stan ground out, not real happy with the whole situation here at the moment, or the kid in general. "We'll do this. --Kids?" He turned to them, and Mabel nodded, but Dipper looked a little belligerent. "Dipper," Stan said with a sigh. "I need you to trust me…" Dipper looked away, tugging at his hat.
Miz was keeping herself busy descaling the fish, ignoring the conversation so she wouldn't be tempted to spill any secrets. She cleaned the fish, purged it of any and all parasites or harmful bacteria as she went.
"...If I tell you I want you to tell Bill that this 'game' thing is over, you'll do it?" Dipper asked of his Grunkle Stan finally. After what had happened to Great-Uncle Ford in the woods, and Grunkle Stan still not doing anything about it, Dipper wasn't exactly feeling the trust.
"Yeah, okay," Grunkle Stan said, kneeling down in front of him. "You two are the ones with the 'threads' looking out for Ford in the agreement, yeah? So if you're that worried about him…" Stan glanced between them both. He knew he could count on them for this, even if he got pissed off with his brother, no matter what else might happen. (Not like the science fair project wasn't still a sore spot for his brother, apparently. So if he lost it, too...) "If you and your sister agree that this thing should stop? I'll pull the plug on it right then for you. Okay?" Stan trusted the kids to be both their safety nets, to stop them before things got too bad.
(It wasn't like Stan didn't remember what had happened with the circle the first time. He'd listen to the kids this time. He would.)
Dipper exchanged a glance with Mabel, who nodded at him, looking almost as worried, but also willing to trust their grunkle... and Dipper let out a long sigh.
"I really hope you know what you're doing, Grunkle Stan…" Dipper said, looking at him and letting go of his hat.
Dipper didn't feel too much better after the unhappy smile his grunkle gave him, but at least he knew his Grunkle Stan was taking him seriously when he clapped a hand on his shoulder and said, "Yeah, kid. I know. ...I know."
Miz spoke up quietly, a certain topic crossing her mind again. "How does one apologize for existing?" She was still trying to figure out how to finally give Ford an apology. Stan looked over at her. He was dead-tired of this.
"You don't," Stan told Miz, dropping his hand from Dipper's shoulder and slowly standing back up. "You never apologize for existing. Somebody tells you otherwise, they're the one with a problem. Not you." Because fuck that noise, no matter who it came from. (Ford might be his brother, but he didn't have the right to make anybody feel that way. Nobody.)
"But that was what made Ford freak out. And I still haven't been able to apologize for making him freak out." Miz groaned. After all, the kids still wanted an apology from her to Ford, and she still didn't know how to do it.
"I told you," the kid said, and he sounded almost as stressed out and angry as Stan felt about what Miz had just said, though for a very different reason. "You existing is not the problem. It's that Stanford's fear, and stupid 'morality', and control issues, and decisions, and choices--" Shit, the kid was getting himself worked up.
"--Bill," Stan cut the kid off, and the kid looked irate. "Breathe." He wasn't trying to tell the kid to shut up, just trying to calm him down. "--Miz. Ford knows you're some kinda demon. He ain't freaking out about that now. Not anymore. Whatever the hell he's trying to work through ain't just you showing up on our doorstep."
Miz glanced over at Stan. "...So what do I do now?"
Stan sighed deeply and ran a hand over his face. "You think you could maybe find a boning knife down in the hold, in one of the other crates in the bottom of the ship?" he said to her, dropping his hand and going with completely changing the subject. (Hey, if it worked with the kid…) "I'm pretty sure it's in one of the ones with a lot of beans on top. --Bags, not cans."
Miz nodded and went off to search through the indicated crates. As she slipped down the hatch, Mabel turned to Stan with a wide eyed look. "Is… that what Miz thought she was supposed to apologize to Grunkle Ford for? For… ever being born?" Mabel asked him in rising tones, looking horrified. She remembered how Miz had said her existence was what upset Ford, but she hadn't thought Miz had meant it like THAT.
"Yeah," said Stan. "They told me what they said out in the woods to him, more or less. It was pretty much that, but… it's not just Miz being Miz and being alive," Stan told the twins. "Hell, Ford probably would've freaked out at least as bad, if he'd seen what's chasing after Miz instead." At the confused and startled looks he got from that, Stan realized that he'd never really explained that, and added, "The thing that's after Miz is half the reason she's been hanging around the Shack with Bill, right now."
"Okay, but…" Mabel frowned, still confused. "What is Grunkle Ford so afraid of?"
"Bill, mostly. And… other demons that are kind of like Bill." Stan shifted in place slightly. It wasn't really the best way to put it, but… he didn't exactly want to give away that they'd overhead the niblings and the demons, and knew that they knew about Miz being a 'Bill Cipher'. That said, if he brought things up this way... "Ford's problem is… it's more like… being afraid of spiders, but realizing that there's more than one spider anyplace-ever than the only one you ever saw before. Except, uh, worse. Worse than spiders." Stan winced, rubbing at the back of his neck.
Dipper looked down. Oh. So that's why Stan hadn't seemed like he'd done anything about what had happened in the woods. There was nothing he could have done, not really. He couldn't punish them for existing. (The only way to do that would be to, what, kill them both? Like trying to step on Bill Ciphers like they were spiders? How were they supposed to do that?) Dipper winced. Even more weirdly, Miz had thought she was supposed to feel bad for it? --She did feel bad for it. That made no sense. Dipper groaned and sat down. Why was life so complicated?
Then Dipper realized something and sat up. "Wait, what was the thing chasing Miz?" Because if there had been something chasing Miz that even she was afraid of... Dipper stared at Stan, who sighed.
"Yeah, well, turns out sometime when she was out playin' with her Doors and junk, she ran into... another Bill Cipher who ain't so nice as ours is," Stan said with a wince, going for the easiest route for them all to be able to talk about 'other Bill Ciphers' being a thing, without having to bring up Miz, or explain how it all came up in the first place. "She ain't stupid, so she ran the other way. She's hiding here because that other Bill can't open her Doors, and the kid double-locked ours against stuff that ain't her, so..."
Dipper's eyes were wide. "So, wait. There's another bad Bill Cipher out there who's trying to get into our world, too?" he gasped. So did his sister. "And Miz led him right to us?!"
"Well, it can't get in. But she can't get back out there, either. Not while it's roamin' around and the kid don't got a solution for taking the fight to it, yet. ...And, y'know, she and the kid did decide they're siblings, now. So that's why she's been staying with him at the Shack with us for awhile." Stan grunted. "Think she said something about the thing maybe getting bored and going away on its own eventually, so even if the kid don't figure something out right away..." Stan shrugged.
"And how long is that gonna take?!" Dipper gasped. How many Bill Ciphers were they going to have to deal with here?
Stan glanced over at Bill. He actually had a feeling that Bill didn't want his sister to leave yet, not when they were finally together and the kid had someone to care for and about. To his surprise, Bill looked… almost guilty.
"...Kid?" Stan asked, paying the demon a little more attention now, and Bill didn't quite wince.
What Bill did do was cross his arms and say, "I've been busy. ...I would have worked on it sooner, if she didn't have the emotion waves problem."
Mabel blinked slowly as she figured it out. "You don't want her to leave…" she trailed off. "You like having her here!" and wasn't that a surprising thought!
"I'll fix it!" Bill said. "I'll help her fix it. --Priorities!" Bill didn't quite blurt out. "I'm not trapping her here!"
"No one said anythin' about trapping nobody," Stan said slowly, glancing at Bill.
"--Right, Yes," Bill said quickly, looking away from all of them and hunching his shoulders slightly.
Huh. So, the kid really wanted her to stay but felt… guilty about it. ...Yeah, fair. The kid was trapped for the longest time and didn't want his kid sister to feel the same way. Stan could see that.
Mabel was grinning though. "You do care about her!" she said triumphantly. She'd been right about that!
Bill turned his head towards her and gave her a long, almost-frustrated looking stare. "OF COURSE I care about her, she's my SISTER!" he told Shooting Star. "What, did you forget about how siblings are supposed to work?" Bill asked of her almost sarcastically.
Mabel winced. "... Grunkle Ford said you were just pretending to care…" and now she felt bad for even thinking for a second that that might be true.
"Tch," said Bill, looking away from her again. "He lies."
Mabel frowned up at him. "But, if you know what it's like to care about siblings, then why did you hurt Dipper? Why did you try to kill us?" Mabel asked of him accusingly, standing up straight to stare him down.
Bill side-eyed her. "...When are we talking about here?" he asked.
Mabel huffed at him. "Taking over his body during the opera, and chasing us in the Fearamid!"
Bill raised an eyebrow. "I told you, Shooting Star. If I really wanted to kill you right then, I wouldn't have just chased you. I just would have killed you, not captured you. And I would have killed you together."
(Stan closed his eyes for a moment and tried to keep his breathing level. Right. Efficiency.)
"And I didn't hurt Pine Tree, I just took and used his body," Bill waved off.
"--We found your note!" Mabel said next, and Bill gave her a confused look.
"So?" said Bill. (Stan clenched his jaw and told himself to let the kids do whatever they were tryin' to do...)
"You were gonna throw his body off the w-water tower!" Mabel shuddered. "You were going to kill him!"
"No, I wasn't," Bill said, and both Mabel and Dipper looked up at him in disbelief.
"...You wrote a note laughing about how you were going to kill me, and didn't mean it," Dipper said, completely deadpan.
Bill looked at them for a moment, then seemed to get what they were saying. He grinned and let out a "HA!" while tilting his head back and slapping a hand across his eyes, much to his Zodiac's confusion. "You idiots," Bill said, almost sounding amused, as he lowered his hand and looked over them all. "I was going to break Pine Tree's body. I wasn't going to kill HIM!" He looked over at said ex-puppet. "What, were you not listening when I said 'like a ghost', and 'stuck in the Mindscape FOREVER?'"
Bill threw his arms out to the sides. "And I was gonna tell Shooting Star allllll about it, so that she'd want to do it too -- to make a Deal with me, to be able to see you again!" Bill let out a laugh. "And then you'd both be together anyway. It would've been GREAT!" Bill enthused, looking happy at the thought of both of them being stuck together in the Mindscape with him, as both of the kids looked ill by comparison at the thought.
"Yeah, no," said Stan, stepping in, because: "Enough of that. --You ever think of doing anything like that again, you talk it out with me first and you let the two of them--" Stan pointed at the kids, "--know exactly what's going on and what they'd be getting into before any of you go off doing anything." (Because Stan wasn't exactly trusting that the kids might not feel forced into a bad decision for Ford's sake at some point, if it came to that. With the way things were going right now...)
Stan glowered at Bill. "None of this 'pick a puppet' malarkey anymore, where somebody's getting tricked into something else. --I want them being able to make an actual, informed choice!" Because like hell did he ever want anything like that ever happening again! And if the kid didn't get that--
Bill shrugged. "Fine." It was clear that he didn't see what the problem was, though, for whatever reason. At Stan's glare he added, "--I'll tell you first, so you can 'veto' it or 'override' it or WHATEVER," the kid waved off. "Not like they ask enough of the right questions anyway," Bill muttered, leaning back and staring up at the sky. The sun was setting now as the people along the beach left in droves, trickling away along with the light, and the stars were just starting to become visible.
"Fine." Stan glared at the kid a bit more, to make sure he got the picture -- how important this really was to him -- then turned and meandered off to go handle the camp stove, for the fish. The thing and all the utensils that he'd used before all still needed cleaning, for a start. He sent a long glance the niblings way… but they looked pretty damn determined to see through whatever they were trying to get at the kid about. Hell. (Stan let out a sigh and left them to it. He figured they'd use a 'stop!' if it got too bad…)
Dipper felt Mabel grab for his hand and he wrapped his around her, squeezing to let her know he was there. She was trembling slightly but still standing strong, glaring at Bill. "You… really don't get it, do you?" Mabel finally said. But at least this cleared up her confusion. Maybe Bill DID know what it was like to love a sibling with the way he treated Miz, but he definitely didn't understand that not everyone thought the same things were okay or 'fun' or 'funny' that he did. ...Which, to be fair, they already knew.
At least Miz seemed a little more… 'normal'-ish in this regard. Mabel blinked. Actually… Mabel turned towards Bill, "If someone did the thing you were gonna do to Dipper, to Miz, how would you feel?"
"Mabel!" Dipper hissed.
Bill blinked at her. "Miz is in the Mindscape whenever she's not in a body." Like him, really. --Usually. (Stupid anchor, keeping him down.) "If someone kills her body, she just makes a new one." It would piss him off if somebody tried to kill her -- but even if they got her body, she'd be okay, and he would just kill them horribly outright, and everything would be fine!
Mabel sighed. "But what if she couldn't? And what if you couldn't get into the Mindscape to be with her?"
Bill rolled his eyes. He pulled a stone out of his pocket that had a bunch of marking scratched into it, and showed it to them. "This," he said, "Lets me see anything in the Mindscape that I want to be able to see, that could possibly cause me any trouble. I don't NEED to 'get into the Mindscape' to be able to see her," he told them as he pocketed it again. "And she's died before and… reformed after a thousand years." Bill didn't really like the idea of not talking to her for a thousand years, but... "She CAN'T DIE for good." Then Bill frowned furiously. "NOT EASILY," he added, slowly turning his head to look over at Stan, who tried not to wince as that carried over. (Guess that answered his question of whether Bill had gotten through 'reviewing' the part about the Zodiac being her permanent 'out'...)
Dipper's hands twitched; he really wanted to check out that magic rock but held himself back. He placed a hand on Mabel's shoulder. "I don't think he gets it." Heck, Bill hadn't even brought that up before, when he'd been talking about tricking Mabel into the Mindscape. (If Bill had offered to let Mabel see Dipper again, it could have been with that stone instead, not getting her stuck there, too! --But then, that probably wouldn't have been what Bill would have wanted, right? To only have one of them stuck there?)
Dipper glared at Bill. "He probably can't get it," Dipper said challengingly.
"Get what?" Bill said. "I can understand anything better than YOU can."
"That, even if Dipper and I would have been together in the Mindscape later, I still would have thought he was dead for a while. And that would have felt really, really awful," Mabel said quietly, wanting so much for Bill to just… understand. Maybe if he could, he'd be able to be a better person! …and …wasn't that what the problem was? Bill just… didn't have any empathy for any of them. (Maybe that was why Miz was nicer -- because she could understand? Because Miz had… had to feel what other people felt, all the time?)
Bill shifted in place slightly, eyes flicking to the side. "You'd just think he was dead because you were being stupid," Bill told her. "You talked to him with the sock puppet. He wasn't in his body then. He told you that." (Bill had looked back at things later, to know that, having wanted to See everything that he might have missed while he'd been busy down in Pine Tree's body.)
"Well maybe I AM stupid! But I'd still FEEL sad!" Mabel cried out.
Dipper winced. (So did Stan, who also clenched his jaw.) "You're not stupid, Mabel…" Dipper said quietly.
"Well he wouldn't be DEAD!" Bill yelled back at her. "And you'd see him again after A DAY!" (That had Stan wincing again where he was sitting. The kids had no idea what kind of a nerve they'd just hit. But maybe that meant that they were actually getting through to him. If they had Bill thinking of his own brother, here...)
"And that makes it OKAY?!" Mabel yelled back. "Making me think and FEEL like my brother was DEAD?!" She wiped at her eyes. "It would still HURT!"
Bill gritted his teeth. "So, what," Bill said, "I could tell you BEFORE I did it, and you still wouldn't believe me?!" Bill glared at her. "You could have Pine Tree in his sock puppet TALKING through it to you -- as you were, what, racing for that water tower, trying to stop me from jumping his body off of it -- and KNOW he was ACTUALLY right there next to you, right then, and you'd STILL feel 'hurt' because you thought he was dead?! --That's on YOU," Bill told her. "So you hurt YOURSELF because you can't wait a little while for EXACTLY what YOU want. Boo hoo," Bill said in sing-song tones of almost thorough disgust. "--HE WOULDN'T BE DEAD," Bill sneered out at her.
"It's not the same! My body… Mabel's-- our bodies… We're not like you, you crazy dorito! We can't just-- I'm not okay with--" Dipper shook in place, fists clenched at his sides. "I wasn't okay with losing my body like that! --And neither is Mabel!!" Dipper said angrily, knowing what he was talking about.
"YOU THINK I WANTED TO LOSE MINE?!?" Bill screamed out at him, looking thoroughly irate.
Dipper startled, and the rest of them froze.
Bill's breathing was off. His fists were clenched at his sides, too.
And the longer they all watched him, the more clear it was that Bill was struggling to try to control himself and calm down. And that maybe he hadn't meant to yell that out at all of them at all.
Mabel's eyes were wide. "Oh..." she said quietly.
"Bill, walk it off," Stan said. "Okay? Just turn around, and walk it off." Bill didn't move a muscle. Hell. "--Kids, I'm calling a stop, here. Understand?" Stan ended on, because he couldn't see things getting any better from here if they asked the kid any more questions.
To the last, Bill simply snarled and (finally) stalked off to the other side of the deck, on the complete opposite side of the ship from the rest of them, not looking at any of them as he went.
Mabel pulled at her sweater, then grabbed Dipper's hand and pulled him across the deck and over to sit down next to Grunkle Stan. She could really use some grunkle hugs just then.
"I'm… pretty sure he wasn't lying about that," Mabel said quietly, as she snuggled up against his side, and Stan stopped what he was doing to gather her up in a hug. "...Right, Grunkle Stan?" she added, when he didn't say anything right away. Stan let out a sigh and grimaced. Mabel reached out for Dipper, and tugged at his arm, wanting him to come a little closer in, too, to get his own hug. But Dipper was busy staring at Bill's back, mind racing through theories and snippets of information and all the questions that he really wanted to write down and-- darnit, why didn't he bring his journal?!
They all looked over as they heard the hatch pop open, and Miz poked her head out.
"--Found it!" she said happily, waving the boning knife around above her head, before hopping back out onto the deck. Then she stopped, looked around, and read the mood -- she couldn't feel it but she could still SEE it on everyone's faces. She let out an unhappy, "Ah…" Quick! Think of a distraction! "Do you two wanna watch an Anime with me while Stan prepares the fish?" she asked the twins awkwardly.
Dipper and Mabel both glanced at each other.
"Kid's gonna help me prepare the fish," Stan said, waving Miz over, to take the knife from her. "Maybe you two wanna go watch this thing below deck for a bit?"
The twins nodded. It would get them away from Bill, give him time to cool down… and give her and Dip-Dop time to hug some things out and feel better themselves. (...And, well, Mabel didn't mind hanging out with Miz, to help keep Miz from hurting Grunkle Ford. She was sort of nice most of the time, for a Bill Cipher, even if she was a little strange; she was definitely nicer than their own Bill, most of the time!) The kids all filed back down below deck. Mabel asked Miz what anime they were gonna watch as they started moving down the ladder, while Dipper kept sneaking glances at Bill until he couldn't see him anymore.
Miz's voice echoed up from below. "Well, since you two don't like violence and stuff, I can choose one that's cute and peaceful? There's some sad stuff, but there's this one show that's about how to feel better if you're sad, and why having people who love and support you is important…"
Mabel managed a smile as she descended. "That sounds nice. What's it called?"
"It's called Fruits Basket, I watched it back when I was a kid and it helped me feel better during my angsty phase…"
Their voices cut off when the hatch closed.
Stan sighed and got back to his feet, to walk over and check out the fish. ...Huh, Miz had cleaned off all the scales and stuff already. That was gonna make the whole thing a lot easier.
"Kid," Stan called out. No answer. "Bill." Still no answer, and the kid wasn't moving. "What, you giving up on the gamble already?" Stan told him. "I want your help with something."
...Well, that got him half a head-turn. Guess that was something.
"Come on over here, yeah?" Stan said, and the kid looked away from him again, but finally pushed himself off of the balcony and not quite stomped his way over.
"Sit down next to me, will ya?" Stan said. Bill sat. Stan let out a sigh.
...Ugh, this was actually kind of freaky, talkin' to the kid almost like normal, not having to watch what he said in case it came out sounding like a 'command' or something.
"Look," Stan said, "You don't want to talk about things from way back when," like your brother, or losing your body, hell, "You don't have to. I ain't gonna force you to." No response. Stan grimaced. "Kinda why I asked Miz instead, okay? I knew you didn't want to." Kid looked away from him. "I didn't want to push ya," Stan told him. "But some stuff? Kept comin' up." Like just now with the kids, hell. And what would have happened if the kids had asked another question after that? Or if he had? "I kind of needed to--"
"--No, you didn't," the kid said. Stan watched Bill pull in another breath then let it out again. "...Not yet," Bill said quietly.
Stan eyed him carefully. "You want to tell me the reason why you didn't want to tell me 'yet', at least?" Stan asked of the kid, as he pulled out a handkerchief and started wiping down the knife that Miz had retrieved for him. Bill sat there for awhile, but Stan knew that particular set of the kid's shoulders. So Stan waited, and he waited the kid out, because the next thing Bill said was, "I don't want anyone trying to stop me."
Stan blinked. And it took him a moment.
And then he damn near dropped the knife.
Shit. Stan forced himself to pull in a breath. "Kid…" he began slowly. "...Ford don't think you ever had a brother, right?" The kid didn't immediately go for his throat, so Stan kept going, slow and careful. Very, very careful. "So, right now… Ford don't think there's anything to stop." Stan swallowed hard. "So… it ain't as bad as it could be. Is it." ...Because Ford didn't believe him. "Because if Ford actually starts believing you…"
"--Why don't we just let the idiot continue to think that I'm evil incarnate without a soul and with nothing and no-one that I've ever cared about, hmm?" Bill said lightly, and holy hell, it was official. The only reason Bill Cipher hadn't killed Stan's brother on the spot was because Ford hadn't outright said that he was going to try to stop Bill from bringing his brother back. Shit.
"Don't think you have to worry about that one," Stan said roughly. "Pretty sure he's never gonna believe otherwise," and that was what got him an amused and almost delighted laugh out of the demon? Hell.
Stan let out a breath and set both the knife and the handkerchief down. Well, at least they could move past that, now.
"Y'know," Stan said, knowing he was pushing it. "You can talk about that junk with me if you want to." Putting it that way meant something different to the kid, and he figured he wanted his bases covered, just in case.
From the slow turn of head and long, odd look he got from the kid for that one, he knew the kid had finally connected that one to 'not, not-wanting him to talk.' (The 'don't have to's, for some reason, the kid always saw as almost an explicit 'I don't want you to' and sometimes an implicit 'I'm really not gonna force you to' -- not a 'you don't have to, but I'll listen if you do'. The kid always needed to hear it both ways.)
The kid turned his head away from him again.
"Do you want to talk about it with me right now?" Stan said, testing the waters again.
"No," said the kid, still not looking at him. ...But then he also said, "Not right now."
Okay. So, not a hard 'no'. Stan got it. "I hear ya." Stan let out another sigh as he looked down at the fish. "This thing actually dead yet?" Stan asked of the triangle kid, pointing to the fish. The kid nodded his head. (The fish had suffocated when the paralysis it'd been under caused its heart to stop, and the spell hadn't been removed soon enough.)
Stan looked the fish over, frowning. ...And then he got an idea.
He turned to the kid. "Hey," he said. "You know how people grill stuff like fish, right?" Bill seemed to hesitate, almost pause in place for a moment, then turned his head towards him and nodded. "With steaks about this big?" Stan sketched out the size of a good fish steak in mid-air. Bill tilted his head slightly. "How would you handle getting this thing from, y'know, like this, into being a bunch of fish steaks?" he asked the kid.
"Magic," the kid said, and Stan let out a sigh. "Okay, but how? --I mean, don't do it yet," Stan said. "Just… there any way you can show me, or something, before you do it? Like… maybe those pictures or video or whatever that Miz tossed up on the ceiling in the attic?"
Bill seemed to consider this. "I can do better than that," Bill said, and the kid turned towards the fish and… stopped moving briefly, for a moment of stillness.
Then Bill murmured something and the space in front of them almost exploded with light for a second. Stan blinked, and then he thought he was seeing double for a second, before he realized that it was like looking at stuff, but also a sort of see-through ghostly thing, at the same time.
He saw the 'ghostly'-fish (okay, not the actual fish, got it) seem to be raised up into the air, and a blanket off to the side -- the one Miz and the kid had slept on the night before -- also gained a ghostly copy that was pulled over underneath it. "Preparation," the kid said, as things seemed to move into place. "Cleaning spellwork," he said, and the 'blanket' and 'fish' seemed to flash for a moment. "Bone removal spell," Bill added, and the 'fish' seemed to almost burst open as white 'shards' flew out of it. "Skin and flesh removal spell," Bill said next, and the same kind of thing happened to the 'skin' -- it just seemed to roll off of the outer 'meat' in ribbons, to lie in curls underneath in a second section of the 'blanket', Stan realized; the first half of it was where all the 'bone shards' were lying.
After the skin of the 'ghostly'-fish was gone, the 'meat' seemed to grow lines, then start falling off of the 'fish' in chunks, to seem to be caught and float down slowly, to settle on another part of the 'blanket'. "Offal removal spell," Bill said, and the whole rest of the thing -- the leftover 'guts' and 'head' -- went up in blue flames. The see-through ash that slowly fell from it like snow drifted over into the final free corner of the 'blanket'.
Stan stared at all of this.
"...You think of this all on the spot?" he asked of the kid. He got a shake of the head. "You seen somebody else do something like this before?" A nod. "Huh."
Stan considered this. "This gonna tire you out if you do it instead of just showing me?" he asked the kid.
"Showing you was more 'tiring' than just doing it," was what the kid told him, and Stan let out a breath.
"You gonna eat any of this if we make it?" Bill shook his head 'no'. "You mind doin' it anyway?" That got him a look from the kid.
"...Was that a question?" Bill asked him.
"Yeah, kid," Stan said. "Not like you'd be getting much out of it yourself." Bill seemed to consider this.
"...You'll cook it, and Miz will eat it," Bill said, almost a question.
"Yeah, all of us will, whoever wants any. That's the plan," Stan told him. "That good enough for you?" Bill nodded. "Go ahead, then," Stan said, and leaned back as he watched Bill wave away the ghostly-images of whatever, and actually do the magic thing.
The magic thing took less than two seconds, start to finish. Stan almost couldn't follow it.
Stan stared. The kid had… actually slowed it down for him, when he'd been showing it off? He glanced over at Bill, who was tensing and relaxing his arms a bit, rolling his shoulders. The kid wasn't breathing too heavily, or sweating or nothing.
"You gonna tell me when you start hitting your limits?" Stan told the kid, and Bill glanced over at him.
"...Do you want me to?" was what the kid said, almost curious, and Stan rubbed his hand across his face.
"--Yes, Bill," Stan told the kid, as he slowly stood up, and the kid looked up at him, "I want you to tell me any time you start to get tired, or if I ask you to do anything that's gonna make you tired. Yeah?"
The kid looked away from him, down at the deck. And then he nodded.
"Okay, good," Stan said. And then Stan did his usual, "Thanks, kid," and put a hand on the kid's head, patting it, before pulling away to turn around and go get a clean pot lid from one of the crates, to put a couple of the steaks on for soon-to-be-grilling on the camp stove.
He missed Bill's look of complete and utter surprise.
----
Mabel and Miz were holding each other as they cried. Dipper stared. This show was… actually really pleasant. There was plenty of sad things but the girls were happy-crying as the main character told one of the male leads that she believed everyone had their own kindness inside, even if they couldn't see it for themselves. Dipper glanced over at his sister who was sobbing. "Yes! You're not a bad person, Yuki! You just show it differently!"
Dipper looked back up at the screen the anime episode was playing on. "This show's almost saccharine-sweet," he muttered. Onscreen, the boy (Yuki) gave the main character a true, happy smile. Nothing like the fake polite smiles he'd shown before this point. Dipper thought it was cheesy, how the show addressed the topics in such simple, straightforward ways...
…but it was all about learning to love yourself by finding the good parts of yourself that were worth loving. Miz definitely hadn't lied about what the show was all about.
"Do they end up together?" Mabel asked Miz, already shipping the guy and girl. "But, oh, Kyo likes her too right?" which made Dipper groan. Love triangles. Ugh. Why did girls like this sort of thing?
"You don't mind spoilers?" Miz asked. Mabel shook her head. "Tohru ends up with Kyo in the end."
Mabel gasped: "But what about Yuki?"
Dipper rolled his eyes, while Miz patted Mabel's shoulder and told her, "Don't worry. The anime ended before it got to that point, but in the manga -- um, the japanese comics! -- he meets a nice girl who manages to win his heart."
"I'm so bored…" Dipper groaned, knocking his head against the floorboards slightly. The gimmick of the characters turning into animals was kind of interesting, but there was no plot progression! Not that Dipper could see. It seemed to be nothing but a bunch of 'slice of life' moments, with the characters talking about their feelings.
A thump came from the hatch above them. Miz sat up and paused the anime. "I guess Dinner/Brunch is ready?" She stretched, groaning as her joints popped before she started climbing up the ladder. The twins glanced at each other. Well, hopefully Grunkle Stan had talked to Bill and he was feeling 'better'… or at least less-murdery. (It wasn't the first time they'd seen Grunkle Stan have to basically drag Bill off and distract him and… do whatever he did, until they saw the two of them next. And Bill had pretty much always seemed calmer at the next meal. This was the first time they'd been the ones to leave the 'room' first instead of Bill, though.)
They all got up and the twins climbed up slowly after Miz, blinking at the savory smell of the grilled fish. Miz was over at Grunkle Stan''s side in a flash, nibbling on a large fish steak within seconds.
"Mmm~ ish sho good~" Miz leaned over to nuzzle against Bill's side. "Thanks big brother."
"I didn't do much," Bill said, between bites of cracker from his previously-claimed cracker box from the last meal. (It usually took at least three or four meals for Bill to finish off a full box. He still wasn't eating all that much.)
"Nah, don't let him get away with that, Miz. Kid helped out a lot." Stan told her with a smug grin. The kid raised his shoulders slightly and looked away.
"Didn't," Bill muttered.
Miz raised an eyebrow. "You're not being Tsun-Tsun right now, are you?" she teased lightly.
"Eh?" Bill said, looking down at his sister, startled. It took him a moment. "--No!"
Mabel, knowing the term, snorted and muffled her laugh behind a sleeve.
"It wasn't hard," Bill said. "I didn't do anything by hand." He shoved another cracker into his mouth.
"You don't have to do something difficult, for me to appreciate it." Miz leaned against his side, relaxed and content. "The fact that you did it makes me happy."
"Nnm?" went Bill, blinking and feeling a little confused, but he wasn't going to contradict his little sister, if she was feeling happy because of something he did. (He wasn't about to make her feel less happy for no good reason; that would be stupid.)
Stan stared at Miz. Was she… Hot Belgium waffles! She was! Stan had to turn away from her to hide his grin. --Looks like he had a helper on the 'positive reinforcement' stuff. Huh. (Stan took it back: suggesting the little sister thing had definitely been one of his better ideas to do with the kid.)
"Figure we'll finish eating here, then get the rest put away for later in a cooler or something, and then bring Ford something to eat, too," Stan told them all. "Maybe bring some of the bedrolls and other stuff with." He glanced over at Bill. "You got any ideas for that, kid?"
Bill eyed him. "...What are you trying to do?" Bill asked neutrally.
"Pretty simple," Stan said, looking down and grabbing another bite of fish with his fork. "I figure Ford's got some rooftop from one of the places on one of the nearby streets all picked out, for sitting and watching the house." Stan sighed. "Figure we'll go and pay him a little visit, maybe spend the night over there with him." He looked over at Bill. "Ideas, kid?" Stan repeated, just to be clear.
Bill mulled over this. "Food supplies need to be handled, you want to bring some to that Stanford because you don't know if he's eaten, and you want the bedrolls because… you think we'll be there long enough that Pine Tree and Shooting Star will fall asleep." He looked up at Stanley. "It will get colder than that." He looked off to the side. "Temperature control spell, stasis spell for the food, invisibility spell that no-one else including the younger local versions of you can see through…" Bill paused. "More blankets and pillows?" Bill said, looking down to Miz.
"I can help. I've done plenty of spells for that when I go out to play with my friends on planets with a harsh environment." Miz assured them all.
"Pillows and blankets from the sand castle?" Bill asked. "Won't have to expend more energy. I can do the other spells more efficiently," Bill said. "It'll keep you from feeling so hungry, using that much energy, and needing to eat so much." Bill was fairly sure that Miz didn't consider the sensation of hunger itself to be a 'pleasant' one. He was pretty sure that she only enjoyed the sensation of satiating that hunger.
"Okay. I've got plenty of bedding in there," Miz nodded.
"You have wood planks that haven't been used below, yes?" Bill asked of Stanley, as he finished up with his crackers and closed the box. Stanley nodded. "I can take pieces of those for carving the etchings into?" Stanley gave him a nod and waved him towards the hatch. Bill let off a soft 'rrah!' noise, as he yanked it open and went down the ladder.
"...He's using more spells," Dipper noted of Bill.
"Yeah, well, the kid finds them easier than doin' stuff by hand," Grunkle Stan told him. "And he said he was helping with 'anything' for me, for this 'game' thing, so…" Dipper gave him a skeptical look.
"It's faster," Miz mumbled through the fish steak she was chewing on.
Dipper and Mabel glanced at each other, and it took both Dipper and Mabel a moment. "Wait..." said Mabel, looking over at her brother.
"He's just… doing stuff you tell him to do? Seriously?" Dipper asked, staring. They both knew how touchy Bill got when he thought he was being ordered around (let alone actually ordered around…. which only Great-Uncle Ford seemed to think he could do), not that Bill ever went along with any of it, no matter who tried to do it.
Stan shrugged. "That was part of the terms of this 'not-a-game' game-thing, remember?" At the look the kids gave him, Stan sighed (almost a chuckle) and added, "Look. I ain't asking him to do anything he's not okay with. I ask him if he's okay with it, first. I ain't actually ordering him around."
Both the niblings let out a sigh of relief, Dipper more than his sister. (He knew what Grunkle Stan could be like when he was giving out unreasonable orders.) "--Dipper, I'm pretty sure the kid knows how to stick up for and think for himself," Grunkle Stan said, with no small amusement. "It's trustin' other people that's the problem for him."
"...Right," Dipper said, sharing a glance with his sister.
Miz was on her third fish steak. "Fish is soooo goood~" she practically purred.
Stan let out a laugh. "Yeah," Stan agreed. "It kinda is, huh?"
Miz nodded. "My human dad cooked a lot of fish. He also made a lot of raw fish. He was a sushi chef… made the most beautiful looking things…" She looked a little nostalgic.
"Huh," said Stan. "The raw fish stuff? --Not really my thing, but hey, we've got plenty leftover if you want to do whatever with it," Stan told her.
Miz grinned. "I could try that."
Bill pushed the hatch up and came up with three bedrolls and a small cooler in-tow, inside a wooden crate. He floated the crate to the deck.
"Stanley, I--" the kid began, then stopped, and Stan's head came up immediately. Stan recognized that one.
"What do you want, kid?" Stan hadn't thought they'd backslid. What was up there?
Bill looked a little… frustrated-thinky for a bit, before he said, "There's a better way to move things than me floating them."
"What's the better way?" Stan said.
Bill made eye contact with him, then said, "My hat."
"Your hat?" Stan repeated, then gave the kid a long considering look. "Thought you didn't know where that was."
"I don't," the kid agreed. "But I could find it."
"...And?" Stan said. Sure, the kid had wanted to know where it was. The kid had complained about it incessantly, almost like clockwork daily. (Apparently, the kid had a lot of stuff stored in it that he was missing and really wanted back. ...Also, accessorizing was a Thing with the kid, with a very capital T.) But what was knowing that gonna do for the kid?
"And pull it here," Bill said next. "It's my hat."
Okay. That was a thing. Stan thought about this. "...There a reason you didn't try and pull this before?" he asked the kid.
"The spell I want to use is easier when the thing you want is in another dimension," is what the kid told him, which made no sense to Stan, but whatever. He gave the kid a long look, though, because 'easier' didn't mean the kid couldn't have pulled it off before. "And that Stanford isn't nearby," Bill said. "So I can grab it and he won't know unless you tell him."
"...You're really sure my brother stole your hat and is being petty about it," Stan said.
"YES," said Bill, and Stan let out a sigh. Kid had never really let up on that one, and he almost looked like he was standing on an anthill right now.
"Fine," Stan said. "Go ahead and do your thing."
Bill perked up immediately, grinning, and ran off to the other end of the deck, to quickly turn around and sit down cross-legged. Then the kid closed his eyes, to… do whatever he was gonna do, Stan guessed.
Miz walked over to sit down in front of him and watch him closely, eager to learn how Blue did stuff. Stan walked over too, but stayed standing. The twins settled down to watch as well, though they were more wary about it.
Bill sat there, slowly building up the spell inside his head. It was a bit complicated -- if he ran into issues, he'd rather have the spell fail safely than rebound halfway through and send his hat who-knew-where, potentially DAMAGING it. He tried to add in a few things that should work as workarounds for anything stupid that Stanford might have tried to pull -- miniature wormholes and similar more 'scientific' effects that a magical or mystical barrier wouldn't stop -- that would automatically try to move into position, depending on the parameters the remote-sensing parts of the spell would handle for him.
It was a bit step-by-step, but... in sequence, the spell as a whole would: create temporary 'listening' posts to zero in on (read: triangulate, HA!) the position of his hat -- which almost certainly HAD to be in the dimension they'd just come from -- then feed that information into the second part of the spell that would, in rapid, succession, try several different methods to retrieve it -- with 'sensing' portions attached to each of those, too, and a few sorts of 'test retrievals' that would go off first, so that the spell itself would select the path of least-resistance to send it to him.
Bill got it all set up, added the keywords he wanted to each mentally-held-in-place mandala image spell-matrix that was being imagined up inside his own mind... and then Bill started murmuring them off, one layer-set at a time -- bringing each to the forefront and letting it go with each word.
Miz stared at the way energy around Bill twisted. All the inputs and outputs stringing together into a long string of robust and rather simple effects. It really was a lot like programming, but without the numbers being actual numbers, more like the idea of numbers. Which, paradoxically, made it easier for her to understand.
Bill let the final set-piece go, and then held out his hands, waiting. He didn't really care WHERE that Stanford had been holding it, so long as he--
...a small piece of cloth fell into his hands.
Bill blinked, then stared down at it.
Bill muttered a half-interrogative in his clicking-chirping native tongue, and held it up. Then his eyes widened in utter disbelief.
Bill was holding an eyepatch from the end of one of two long pieces of string.
Miz winced. "Um…"
Bill started twitching in place.
And then Bill let out a string of very profane curses in Galactic Standard, as he pulled it towards his chest and looked it over, staring at it in utter disbelief.
Miz stared. Oh, she was DEFINITELY learning a few of these.
"---stupid JH'AkEkrll+$#-ian frilly know-it-all NOT EVEN FUNNY LIZARD!!!" Bill screamed out at the end of it, as both Stan's eyebrows went up.
"...he turned your hat into an eyepatch…" Miz tried to hide her mouth twitching.
"NOT FUNNY!!!" Bill shrieked out, as he made a twisting-tearing motion at the cloth, and the universe really didn't like that, but--
The eyepatch twisted up, and the universe more or less barfed it back as a two-dimensional very flat-looking top hat.
"HATE IT. HATE-HATE-HATE." Bill growled out. He looked up at the sky, as he 'jammed' his hat down on top of his head. "NOT! FUNNY!!!"
Miz tilted her head. "I didn't realize Ax had a sense of humor…"
"IT DOESN'T!" Bill shrieked out angrily. "BECAUSE IT'S STUPID!"
Stan considered this.
"...That was the eyepatch you were wearing out on the porch, wasn't it," Stan said, and Bill hiss-growled a bit at this, with a distorted ugly chittering-chatter underlying the sound of it.
Bill practically dug his fingers into his legs and shook with rage. His hat floated just an inch or so above his head.
"Gonna just… give you a minute, yeah?" Stan said easily, slowly pushing himself up and waving the kids off. "C'mon, let's give him a minute," Stan added, leaving the triangle some space to fume in relative peace.
----
After Bill was finished 'moping' (not that Stan would ever call it that out loud where the kid could hear him), they gathered up all the supplies they would need (Miz crawled inside her sand castle -- under Bill's watchful "supervision" -- and brought out multiple pillows, blankets and even some bean bag chairs), and they prepared to track down Stan's idiot brother.
"I am wearing it," Bill had announced, as he'd finally got up from where he'd been sitting (read: moping) and stomped over to the crate he'd grabbed from belowdecks earlier. "It is mine, that Stanford didn't have it, I don't have to hide it, I am wearing it," the kid had said authoritatively, as he'd all but ripped it off of his own head (out of position, where it had been floating), made a sort of flicking motion (which had the hat making an odd 'floof!'ing sort of noise as it expanded out to a three-dimensional… regular-looking tophat?)... and then, somehow, the kid had jammed his tophat over the crate top-to-bottom in a motion that had looked almost like it had come out of a cartoon.
And, somehow, this had worked, because before this, there had been a crate sitting there, and after this, the crate was no longer there, and the hat had been sitting there in the space on top of the deck where the crate had once been.
Bill had then picked up his hat and jammed it down on top of his head again (in a motion that stopped right where the hat stayed floating), let out a breath in a huff, and turned to the rest of them to (angrily) ask, "ANY QUESTIONS?"
Stan had wanted to laugh. (He'd managed not to, sure, but it had been a close thing.)
Instead, Stan had tossed a thumb back Miz's way and said, "Blankets?"
Miz had gotten excited about being able to use her castle for something, practically diving inside it to Bill's chittering half-dismay, and a hell of a lot of blankets, pillows, and bean bag chairs had all ended up in the hat shortly thereafter.
"How are you doing that?" Dipper couldn't help but ask Bill, as he finished up shoving the last of the pillows from Miz into the interior of his hat.
"I have a wormhole under my hat," Bill said tersely, as he jammed it back into position again above his head (post-supplies-add), without even looking at him.
"Why?" Mabel asked.
"It's useful," Bill said next.
"But… couldn't you make it a magical place full of rooms like Miz's sand castle?" Mabel asked next.
That had Bill glancing over at her. "It's not a pocket dimension of space," Bill told her. "I own the entire dimension that this is connected to." ('Own the entire dimension?' Dipper worried. Because… what did that even mean?) Bill stretched slightly in place, hands over his head, fingers intertwined. "I can move around the endpoint, but right now it's connected to a zero-g space that's effectively a bubble of static, dead time. Which reminds me--" Bill walked over to the fish and the camp stove "grill", and scooped all that up, too.
"That sounds useful." Miz was making mental notes. "And since it's time stopped, food doesn't go bad while it's in there." She had a Stasis-type effect on her pantry at home but hadn't thought of doing something like actually stopping time on a whole area, hers simply prevented progression of time to prevent things such as oxidation or bacterial growth.
"Yes," Bill said for Miz's benefit. "It's basically a natural stasis spell. Might piss off your Time Baby, though," he noted. "Might want to stick with doing it in dimensions only you own, on a small scale. ...At least until you figure out how to mask it," Bill told her.
Miz nodded. "Ok, big brother."
"Right. Well. --Let's go find Grunkle Ford!" Mabel raised her fist into the air with a determined look on her face.
Bill grimaced. "Yes," he said. "Let's go find your vagabond dimension-hopping-again idiot." At the look Stan gave him, Bill complained, "--What? I would've been happy to let him stay behind! He hates--" Bill stopped himself, closing his mouth on whatever he had been about to say next.
Stan looked around the mostly-empty deck at them all, then let out a long sigh. "Yeah, okay. Let's go."
----