Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was the seventh day of the post-apocalypse, but to an outsider, it might have looked like the thirtieth day or even the seventh month.

A menagerie of floating, misshapen objects rolled against a TV static sky, and below that layer of miscellany was a layer of floating islands, cracked pieces of the world that had once been superimposed over the depressing parallel realm but was now indistinguishable from it. Towards what had once been the town center, the sounds of fisticuffs echoed outwards 24/7. People- well, the residents of this world, who called themselves people- smashed, burned, and fought each other because they could- this was the apocalypse, it was what any sensible society ought to do in the event of an apocalypse! It was their right.

Traditional currency had been ousted and replaced by gold, only for gold to be ousted two days later via mob vote and replaced by anything. Businesses that refused to accept trade deals faced the wraths of the townsfolk, and businesses that accepted trade deals also faced the wrath of the townsfolk. Wrath was difficult to avoid. The lonely dimension, which had seemed like a dark and cold place to the only one who remembered it from before the collapse, was now up in flames, some literal, some emotional.

On the fifth day of the apocalypse, the-one-who-remembered-it realized he was starting to get hungry.

The junkyard was far enough from the town center to ensure he could avoid the angry atmosphere. That was for the better. This hadn't even begun to blow over. If he were to confront his former students- no! his former classmates- now, surely there would be fresh wounds to deal with. It was tempting, more tempting than he wanted to admit, to put on a smug face, walk right into the middle of a riot at what used to be the middle school, and say, "I told you so." What would they do? What could they do? They couldn't get their precious lives back! They had squandered them! But they could beat him up, and in fact they did beat him up for much less only seven days earlier. And so he stayed in the warehouse in what was left of the junkyard and scraped the bottom of his last can of beans with a piece of metal that was almost spoon-shaped if he squinted. He didn't even like beans. He had bought them to feel like a real prepper the day he saw all this coming for the first time.

"Oh, well," he thought. "Here goes nothing, I guess."

He let out an angsty sigh, crushed the can beneath his foot- which was, to his momentary annoyance, a lot harder than it looked on TV- and got up, heading across the desolate landscape towards the distant scent of fire and chaos.

Somebody had vandalized the town's welcome sign, which now hung from just one of its tether points and read,

"Welcome to NO-more

Population EVERYBODY"

Had there been some sort of agreement to change the town's name from Elmore to No More while he was away, or was the change simply a stroke of genius by the one who had messed with the sign? Either way, he found himself almost- but not quite- smiling at it. It was the sort of reaction you would have to the fourth repost of a meme you liked a decent amount the first time. It wasn't funny enough to be funny, and yet part of him wanted to laugh.

He tossed a rock at the sign, trying to knock it to the ground in an act of rebellion fueled by aimless rage, but he rather anti-climactically missed. One short survey later to make sure nobody saw his shame, he turned on his heel and headed for the smoldering wreckage of the local shopping mall, where rock music blared and an announcer whose voice he recognized as the local news anchor- Kip something?- called out the hastily-conceived epithets of fighters as they entered the ring.

"Next up, it's, well, it's that guy-"

The blue triangular guy at the edge of the makeshift wrestling ring made a garbled noise that, unfortunately for the audience, had no subtitles. He seemed angry. For just a moment, the-one-who-remembered-it (it being the TV static dimension before it combined with Elmore proper, of course, though now that topic had come and gone) found himself mentally kicking himself for paying more attention to the fight than to his purpose here. His eye fell upon the audience, darting from one person to another until he caught sight of a green, blocky-looking man in a business suit and horned motorcycle helmet chewing on some sort of unfamiliar- but still mouthwatering- drumstick. He pushed aside a few people (which was probably fine in the apocalypse, right?) and stood next to him, trying to put up a pretense of watching the fight. A minute or so later of waiting for the triangle's opponent to show up, he turned to the man.

"Hey," he said in his first social interaction since everything he knew collapsed.

"Hmm? What?" replied the man over the cacophony.

The-one-who-remembered-it inhaled sharply.

"Hey, where'd you get that, uh-"

"This helmet? I glued the horns from a halloween headband to my-"

"No!" The-one-who- no, Rob, his name was Rob- snatched the drumstick away and brandished it in his face. "This! Where would I get one of these?"

"F-from me!" stuttered the green guy.

"WHERE DID YOU GET YOURS?"

"Give it back!"

"Tell me and I'll give it back, alright?"

"Parking garage, second floor, can't miss it," said the green guy as he grabbed his lunch back from a frustrated Rob.

"Thanks. Was that so hard?"

"Come again?"

"Never mind."

Rob let out a labored breath as he hopped over the gap between the island most of the mall was on and the island the car park was on. It was quieter out here and Rob's internal monologue no longer had to scream for him to hear himself think. Second floor, huh?

He noticed that one of the elevators was on fire and the other one had its doors stuck open on what looked like a sheer drop into darkness. Neither of them would do, and so he heeded the age old prophecy: "IN CASE OF FIRE, USE STAIRS". The stairs themselves were, as it turned out, crumbling behind a squeaky door, and he suspected that perhaps the structural instability wasn't even the fault of the apocalypse. Even so, he walked up under flickering fluorescent lights that must have been so dedicated to their jobs that they kept working without electricity and found himself on the second storey, overlooking abandoned cars and trucks alike, wondering for a moment whether he was missing the supposedly-unmissable. And then he saw it: a red van- no, the red van- illuminated poetically by the only light in the room that was still at full power! He ran to it like an old friend and the window of the driver's seat slid down, a pair of glowing eyes peering out.

"Good evening, young one. How may our humble shop assist-"

"Drop the act, dude! You got food in there, right?"

"...Yes. But it will cost you."

Right, there was no way he'd get anything for free.

"Okay, okay. How much?"

"That depends entirely on how much food you want."

"How much would, say, a drumstick cost?"

"We're all out. My apologies."

"All out. Can I see what it is you do have in there?"

There was a rustling noise and a shadowy hand held out something that looked like the cloven-hoofed leg of some unknown animal.

"This is all we have."

"I-"

Rob tried to think over the idea of eating that thing and found he liked the idea of starving considerably better at the moment.

"That'll be 50 bucks."

Rob choked on his own spit.

"No way that thing is worth 50 bucks, old man!"

"We also accept trade deals. And gold!"

"C'mon," said Rob, clasping his hands together and speaking in the best friendly tone he could muster. "You and I go way back. Couldn't you do a guy a solid? It's the end of the world."

"You think we're friends? You stole from me when we first met!"

"I could not let that thing into the wrong hands!"

"YOUR hands were the wrong hands, considering you destroyed our merchandise without paying for it."

"Oh, you have no idea." Rob chuckled, rage boiling just behind his attempt at being amiable. The shadowy shopkeeper raised an eyebrow.

"Your plan didn't work, I gather?"

"No. They didn't listen to me."

"I warned you of the dangers of hubris when you bought those machines."

"It wasn't even my hubris, was it? It was theirs!"

"I never said whose hubris it was going to be."

Rob made an exasperated noise.

"If you want the machines back, they're over at the school in one of the admin offices," Rob offered, hoping that the office in question hadn't caved in yet. "Take 'em back and we'll be even, considering the seventy thirty-five I paid. Then you could use the extra money to give me a free whatever-that-is."

"Do you genuinely want this thing?" asked the shopkeeper with a wave of the mystery meat.

"No. Well, not right now, but one of these days I'm going to get really hungry. Cyclopes eat people," he added, as if trying to psych the shopkeeper out. "Who knows what I might resort to?"

"No offense, but, young man, you seem like the sort of guy who wouldn't eat a grilled fish if it had the head still on."

Rob huffed and turned around, hands on his hips, unable to deny the accusation without falling into the bad graces of his one current shot at getting a meal. After several calming breaths he faced back to the shopkeeper, was immediately met with the urge to throttle him, and took a step back to prevent the unfortunate altercation from coming to pass.

"I'll give you a bear trap and a crowbar in exchange for that leg thing."

"Two bear traps."

"I- I don't have two bear traps!"

"No deal, then."

"AUGH-! Let me in there! I want to take a look at your cheaper merchandise!"

The van doors slid open and Rob found himself in the familiar, unsettling atmosphere of the curio shop on wheels once again. He looked over a glowing skull with gemstones for eyes, an issue of a magazine called "TIME of your death", a washing machine that looked deceptively normal, a pedestal that held an impossible triangle.

"Five minutes 'til closing time," said the driver.

"Since when does this place have a closing time?"

"Since we started having to go stock and restock food."

"Oh, that makes-"

Rob's eye widened. The word 'sense' never left his mouth, because he realized it didn't make sense. Where could the driver possibly be going? Where was the food he was selling coming from? Where did any of his artifacts come from? Well, that last question wasn't as important at the moment.

"That makes?"

"Where exactly do you find this food?"

The driver grumbled.

"Far from here."

"Be less vague or I'll kill you again!"

He reached into his backpack and moments later brandished his crowbar in the shopkeeper's face with shaky hands.

"Again?"

"No, no, don't worry about that. We were talking about where you get your food."

"Far from-"

Rob swung and missed, the shopkeeper darting out of the way just in time.

"No! No more cryptic answers! Tell me where!"

He almost saw a bead of sweat run down the shadow man's face. Was it just a trick of the light, or had Rob actually managed to intimidate him? Of course he had, he thought! He was an intimidating guy. Rob found himself full of new confidence and would have pumped his fists if he wasn't in a tense stare-off with the mysterious pair of eyes in front of him.

"Fine, kid, from other universes."

"Like the real world?"

"No, no, I don't go to the real world all willy-nilly. That's something I would only ever do for a hefty sum. Other fake universes."

Rob lowered the crowbar.

"Take me with you," he said. "I'll never bother you ever again. You can leave me in another universe. Just- please, man. Please, I can't stay here!"

"Twenty bucks," deadpanned the shopkeeper with a biting glare.

"Fifteen bucks and a bear trap."

"Fifteen bucks and two bear traps."

"Fifteen bucks, a bear trap, and a crowbar."

"Is it a cursed crowbar?"

Rob almost considered lying and saying yes, but he shook his head, forlorn, the seed of a new idea growing in his head.

"No deal, young man. If you'll excuse me, it's closing time."

Rob sighed and smiled and stepped out of the van.

"Thanks anyways."

"For what?"

"For giving me the time of day."

"Don't mention it."

The van doors closed. Rob's face was placid, and as far as the shopkeeper was concerned his spirit was broken. Why else would anyone accept their fate so calmly? He had pepper spray at the ready in case the boy had put up a fight, but he hated the idea of using it on someone who could be a paying customer (albeit not a well-paying one, right now, in this economy). It was all the better that he had gone willingly and, presumably, thought to himself, 'it was worth a try'. That was why he was smiling, right? If the boy had some sort of other plan, it wasn't immediately obvious to him what that could be, and so he put the idea out of his head, setting his GPS to a coordinate elsewhere in the multiverse and starting the engines.

As far as Rob was concerned, he was about to do the opposite of accepting his fate. In fact, he would cheat it yet again. That was his specialty.

The van wasn't even moving fast yet! It would be a cinch! This time he could get a good grip!

As it started to pull away, he cracked his knuckles and took one last look out the car park window at the static sky. He stuck out his tongue at no one in particular. If the universe could see him, it would surely be seething.

"Goodbye," he said to the same no-one-in-particular, and then he ran and he clung to life for the second time.

Chapter Text

His first two thoughts on the back of the red van were wordless, pure emotional bursts that he couldn't have described eloquently with a million years to think about it. Anyone trying to simplify those feelings must first acknowledge that no set of words can ever be exactly equivalent to those sorts of unfiltered emotions, and approach the task with that in mind.

The first one was roughly, "Heh heh, pretty clever of me, huh?"

The second one was roughly, "OUCH!"

The universe tore up around him, he hung on for dear life, and his knuckles went white with exertion at about the same time his vision went white from overstimulation. It had been a few seconds- or a few hours, or a few millennia- when he realized how tight his grip was, how much his fingers ached, and how much longer he could hold on- only a few seconds. Hoping desperately that the stillness around him was real stillness and not the product of his fragile polygonal brain shutting down in the face of incomprehensible speeds, he let go and tumbled down onto what felt almost like asphalt, but more alive. He opened his eye. There was another eye staring back at him from the ground.

"Agh-!"

He stood up involuntarily on shaky legs, wringing his hands, adjusting to the feeling of being on solid ground once again. It was solid ground! And the sky wasn't TV static! It was... reddish-pink in some parts and orange, like the color of fire, in others. Another universe, surely, and one where the ground had a heartbeat. Or had that been his own heartbeat playing loudly in his head? He reached down and felt the warm blacktop beneath him. No, it really was pulsating- besides, he hadn't had a heartbeat since the day of his disfigurement. Was this place alive? That explained the eye. That also explained the small mouth he now noticed a couple of feet from him, and the pair of noses growing from the ground several feet beyond that. This place had a lot of orifices, and though he knew it wasn't too different from the faces that adorned many of Elmore's objects, he still found himself averting his gaze.

He turned his attention away from the ground and the sky to check out what was in between them and found a sight both familiar and unsettling: a gas station! Its name: Gas Giant. Its logo: A star with a big red X through it. The exterior was almost fleshy. Everything here was either almost fleshy or entirely fleshy. No way could he stay here, but that was alright, all he had to do was hang on again when the shopkeeper left. All he had to do was go through that vertigo-inducing nightmare of an experience a third time. "Toughen up, stupid, you're almost to safety," said the little demon version of himself on his right shoulder. "Maybe you should run for the hills and stay in this dimension," said the other little demon on his left shoulder, who really should have been an angel, right? Why were both of them demons? Because he was evil? What did that say about his mental state? Oh, well, it was just a creative visualization of his subconscious, and that meant he could reach up with both hands and crush them into dust. He took great pleasure in doing so a few seconds later.

A grotesque, four-armed monster with an eye where its mouth should have been left the convenience store portion of the station with a shopping bag in his telekinetic grasp. It was followed by a more humanoid armless being who glowed white and had an electrical socket-shaped face. In other words, nothing too out of the ordinary. It was much more concerning for Rob to see the shopkeeper, who stood taller than he imagined and wore a black hood that made him look like a cultist, leaving the store with a party-sized bag of chips and a gaze that could fall on him any moment! He ducked behind the van, mind racing. This was bad. He couldn't be found out, not now! Not so close to salvation, to starting over. What had his plan been? How had this ever seemed foolproof? He scouted out a path away from the van and realized to his horror that there was a sheer drop on the horizon. This was a floating island. It was far too large to see what exactly was beneath, but he also had no time to run to the edge and find out. There was nowhere to hide.

Rob steeled himself and decided not to try.

He stood next to the van, looked down at an invisible watch, leaned one elbow on the hood of the van all cool-like, and glanced up for just a second to meet the left eye of the shopkeeper as he returned from his snack run- meeting both eyes had always been a challenge for him, of course.

"Hey there, man," said Rob, voice faltering ever so slightly. For a long while, it seemed like he wasn't going to get a reaction.

Before he received any kind of verbal response, his arm was grabbed, the door was opened, and he was painfully yanked into the shadowy store within once again. The shopkeeper's shoulders slumped and he let out a loud, vulnerable sigh as his silhouette faded into the darkness.

"How did you follow me? Did you steal something back there when you tried to attack me? A portal replicator, perhaps, or one of those keychains that links your soul to the first person you inflict pain upon?"

"No! No. I just held onto the back."

"You-"

The shopkeeper slapped his knee, or at least that's what it sounded like. He laughed! Hard. And then he glared disapprovingly.

"You've got to be messing with me," he said, sounding defeated. "It was really that simple? I'll have to remember to install barbed wire on the back door."

"You were about to leave me in that crumbling static wasteland. You would have done the same if it had been you out there!"

"Why would I have hung onto the back of my own van?"

"I don't- I mean- It's a hypothetical, okay?"

The shopkeeper ate some chips sorrowfully. There was a loud crunching noise, and Rob pondered his lack of a visible mouth, but decided it would be rude to ask his potential ticket out of here about the details of his strange shadow man anatomy. Finally, the crunching slowed, the van- which had been slowly moving- came to a halt, and the shopkeeper opened the doors again.

"No, no, no, wait! Please! Don't leave me here-"

"Go fill up the tank."

Rob gulped, wondering whether this was the mercy it appeared to be.

"Is this- is this goodbye? After I'm done, are you just gonna-"

"Come back after you've filled the van up and we can talk."

He nodded wordlessly and made his way to the pump. The hose also felt alive, but he pretended it was just the diesel coursing through and the idea calmed his nerves a little. As the tank filled up, his emotional state changed, but he found that he couldn't tell whether he was getting more anxious or less, much to his discontent. The machine beeped, the flow stopped (though the pulsating of the hose didn't), and a gaping maw opened up in the fueling station where a card reader might have been. A shadowy hand tapped him on the shoulder and passed him a small velvet sachet that he quickly emptied into the hole, flinching and stepping back when he realized the bag was full of teeth.

"Will the place we're going be as freaky as this place? For that matter, what is this place?" Rob asked, head in his hands, sitting on the floor of the van a few moments later.

"A dimension with no rules and cheap fuels," said the shopkeeper in response. He shrugged. "And, no. Where we're going-"

"Where we're going? So that means I'm coming with you, then! Why didn't you say so earlier? I was so worried, and surely you could have seen that!"

"Don't test my patience, young man. I'm taking you along on a one-way trip, free of charge, out of the kindness of my heart."

"And where was the kindness of your heart back when-"

"I said not to test my patience!"

"Fine, fine. Tell me about where we're headed."

The van pulled out. It was far easier to stomach the feeling when you were inside of it rather than hanging onto the back for dear life, Rob found. How different would his new home- he had taken to thinking of it as a home already- be from his original home? Would there be buses there to ride? Coffee to drink? It seemed like the shopkeeper wasn't about to answer for several long moments, but he piped up with perhaps the least helpful piece of information possible.

"It's a place where you never have to pump your own gas."

"So, are we talking some sort of sci-fi future dimension, or...?"

"No, no, they've just got attendants! It's not the future."

"Does this place we're going have a name? Would I have even heard of it?"

"Perhaps. Well, if I'm being honest, definitely. It's called Oregon."

"Huh? But- I thought you said we were going to another dimension."

"We are."

The all-too-familiar feeling of the universe tearing up erupted around them for just a moment and then, though it wasn't visible from the store, a road stretched out before the driver, and the first vestiges of daylight spilled up over the silhouette of a dark forest into a starry night sky.

Chapter Text

The red van's engines died down somewhere in the woods, half a mile or so from the outskirts of a little town that had barely acknowledged it passing through. A trail of flattened greenery laid in its wake. Thankfully it had avoided felling any trees- oh, wait, scratch that, it had felled one or two trees, but they were hardly big enough to count towards any sort of property destruction charge, the driver told himself. The day was still new. It couldn't have been any later than 7 in the morning when the doors opened up and Rob took a deep, nervous breath and took a look at 'home' for the first time.

"Wow," he said with equal parts awe and apprehension. "It's, I mean, it's flat!"

Indeed, the world in front of him had its objects sharply delineated by outlines, and the colors and textures were somehow more solid. It was not a new sight for Rob- even back home, many of the objects and most of the people had similar features- but, looking down at his own rendered body, he found himself uncomfortably out of his element nonetheless. Would the beings of this world be able to even comprehend that he looked different? Did everyone in the multiverse have the medium awareness he had grown with in a mixed-media society like Elmore? Were there even other beings here? There had to be. This was parallel Oregon. It had also been named by people, surely. There were no stories to be told in a universe of only trees. The shopkeeper also wouldn't knowingly leave him to rot in a world of danger, would he?

"A few warnings," said the shopkeeper from behind him, and he gulped. "One- this is a world of danger."

"How did you do that?" Rob glared at him.

"Do what?"

"Forget it. Danger, you said? What kind of danger are we talking, here, exactly?"

"Monsters, mostly, around here. Good luck."

The van door started to close, but Rob stuck his hand in out of desperation, eliciting a loud sigh from the shopkeeper.

"Hey, man! You can't just leave after giving me a vague warning like that!"

"On the contrary, vague warnings are part of my job description."

It was difficult to argue with that, but Rob still didn't pull his hand out. He realized that the door could perhaps close on his wrist and amputate his hand, but thought about maybe getting a cool hook afterwards- no! There's no way the guy would just do something like that! Rob had never done anything to him. Except steal and destroy his merchandise. And kill him that one time... but he digressed.

"Just tell me what kind of hellscape you've dropped me into."

"Hellscape? Your idea of a hellscape must be very strange if this is worse than where the gas station was."

"At least that place was up-front with its scariness. You're telling me I have to rough it in the woods with monsters stalking me? I'm-I'm just a kid!"

Rob considered himself a kid when it gave him sympathy points and an adult when it gave him responsibility points. Since nobody aged back home, it was basically the same thing- at least, that's what he told himself. The shopkeeper rolled his eyes.

"Had you been a food person, maybe I would have left you in a world of food people. Had you been a human, maybe I would have left you in a more mundane world. But you- you are a cyclops. A monster."

"Hey! Who are you calling a monster?"

"Well, you-"

"I know it's me! I'm saying I'm no monster. A freak, maybe, but, but, the thing is! Freaks are pitied. Monsters are feared."

"Don't you want to be feared, young man?"

Rob was about to snap back with a retort, but realized to a growing sense of discomfort that he didn't know the answer. Feared by his nemeses, maybe, or by the populace of the town that had abandoned him. Feared, though, by everyone, not because of his villainous ambition but because of who he was? Did he want that? Of course he didn't... or did he? How could he know whether he wanted it or not if he had never experienced anything close? Maybe it would be nice to have people run screaming from him. Maybe this was another potential means to an end. Maybe his dreams of being a supervillain could be salvaged, brought back even stronger, with this sudden change to his role in the world. He realized after a few moments that he was grinning.

"Good point," he said, something stirring inside of him. As a new sense of confidence wormed its way into his soul, he placed his hands on his hips and chuckled sinisterly to himself.

"Alright, well, I oughta head out and fetch some food. This is farewell. Don't worry, us Elmore folk are hard to kill."

"Hard to kill? Hold on, does that mean there are things here that are gonna try to- wait!"

The van was making a speedy U-turn before he knew it, and as it vanished from view, Rob was reduced to what he felt like on the inside- a 13-year-old boy lost in an unfamiliar, dangerous forest in an unfamiliar, dangerous world.

"It's okay," thought Rob, "I've faced worse."

"No I haven't," thought Rob's subconscious.

DAY 1: BEARINGS

If the boy had walked west he would have come across a building, and then another, and then another, and he would have felt a wave of relief wash over him as he realized he was close to civilization from the start. He didn't walk west. He walked east, and therefore he had no such realization and felt no such relief. The forest grew thicker and the sunlight that reached him grew thinner.

He decided his best option for a first step was to check his vitals, something he only vaguely knew how to do. He checked his pulse- absent, as usual. That was good. He did a few breathing exercises. He confirmed that he had not been even more disfigured when the van left Elmore (No More?) for wherever the gas station was. His backpack contained exactly what he had left in it: a crowbar, a bear trap, and fifteen Elmore dollars, which he doubted were legal tender in this world. Did monsters even use money, or did they just duke it out for what they wanted? No way could be take a monster in a fight.

"You are a cyclops. A monster," came the voice of the shopkeeper in his head. Maybe if he was a 15-foot cannibal with big 'ol fangs he'd have a shot at winning a few battles for food, but right now all being a cyclops gave him was awful depth perception. Besides, he was never really sure if cyclops was the name of his species or just a descriptor for anybody with one eye and no other real defining characteristics. If he really was the same sort as those in Greek mythology, he didn't look it before, and he certainly didn't look it now.

There was a pillow-shaped rock in this clearing. It didn't feel like an actual pillow, but hey, at least it looked the part. The birdsong and a faint, cool breeze made disregarding the warning about monsters easy. He hadn't meant to fall asleep, but after a few moments of promising himself just a few moments more of rest, he did it anyways and, rather unfortunately for anyone looking in, dreamt of nothing at all.

DAY 2: NIGHT?

Was it the morning of the next day, or was it the night of the first day? Did it matter? The forest was dark and Rob could only see himself by the faint glow of the static on his arms and legs. Sleeping on a rock would have given him a headache had he not been used to sleeping on a concrete block in the junkyard. 'Another victory for me,' he thought, not dwelling too long on the nature of victory.

In Elmore, Rob had a network of people to steal money from and the familiarity he needed to avoid getting caught. Here he had none of that, and if there were stores here he had not yet seen any. It was so dark, he considered, that he could be walking through a food truck festival and he wouldn't even know it! He'd need to find a food source. Foraging sounded exciting. Getting food poisoning sounded not so exciting. Trapping prey sounded exciting. Setting up a trap also sounded exciting, except that he knew nothing about the sorts of animals that lived around here, their habits, or their weaknesses. And he had no supplies. And there was no guarantee that eating the animals here wouldn't also give him food poisoning! Darn it.

He set to work on a pit trap to give his hands something to do, using his crowbar as the world's least effective shovel. Pit traps were simple. Effective. Rather unoriginal. It wasn't as if a deer or whatever could really appreciate a creative capture method (or any subsequent quips), though, so it didn't matter. His heart yearned for more intelligent prey that he could monologue to. Not too intelligent, though. There was hardly anything to monologue about with a pit trap regardless.

He realized he needed to start thinking about his situation as a matter of survival rather than a simple pursuit.

He put his mind to it and forgot about having a nemesis, about making elaborate plans for the sake of elaborate plans, about the warning he had been given concerning monsters in the woods. That last one was unintentional. It wouldn't stay forgotten, though, as the ground shook with a tremor that made his bones buzz- and then another, even stronger, and then yet another! He dove behind a rock and clutched his head until the tremors trailed off and became tiny little vibrations in the dirt. When he squinted into the dust cloud that had formed in the wake of the quake, he saw a trail of giant footprints that he was perfectly happy not to follow.

The rest of his day was spent reconstituting the pit trap, which had been dwarfed by the giant footprint that now surrounded it.

DAY 3: FORAGING

Us Elmore folk are hard to kill. What had that meant? The close encounter of the previous day had made Rob feel very easy to kill, if he was being honest.

It could have been a meaningless platitude. Yes, that sounded plausible. He would choose to leave it at that and go back to worrying about more important things.

He made a point of going the opposite direction to the giant footprints and came across a small bush with what looked like blackberries after only a few minutes. It could have been a monster disguised as a blackberry bush, he thought, but decided that if so it was an ineffective method of evading the notice of predators. The blackberries were bitter and their thorns painful on the inside of his mouth, but life was pain, wasn't it? No pain, no gain. Rob just wished he could feel the 'gain' part of this and not just the 'pain' part. The human body could go without food for 2 weeks, according to a fact he had read on a gum wrapper long ago, so (assuming his body was close enough to human to count) he could just put off the issue of food until real hunger set in. That would leave him with nothing to do but explore, run around, accidentally provoke a monster and get his head munched off- no. No, he had to occupy himself some other way.

On the bright side, eating wild berries with his hands had made him feel intrepid- adventurous. Like a real survivalist. It gave him a tiny boost to the ol' self-esteem. When he returned to the pillow(-shaped rock) that night, that tiny boost let him ignore the distant roaring he heard and fall asleep in a matter of minutes. Oh, yes, and the exhaustion helped too.

DAY 4: LATE

He slung open his classroom door with so much force that the books in his other hand dropped to the floor, prompting him to reach down and scoop them up haphazardly. He couldn't seem to get them in order! The big test was today and he had five minutes to study! Moreover, Prom was tonight, and he was only going to be allowed to run for Prom Emperor if he passed this test. College- was this college?- whatever it was, it was hard.

The words seemed to lurch and tumble on the page. They evaded his gaze at every turn, no matter how many times he blinked and rubbed his eye. The clock's hands stopped ticking and started sliding smoothly forward, which meant time was moving faster because of his anxiety. He finally managed to get through the first paragraph, a vaguely-written blur about which part of your throat a proper evil laugh should come from. This was easy! Just as he was about to move on, the bell- a giant bell, mounted on the ceiling- rang, and there was a yellow glow from something behind him, something that he never got to turn around and look at because of the sudden loud whistling noise that stirred him from his slumber and forced his eye open.

DAY 4: FOR REAL THIS TIME

There was a tiny, chihuahua-esque creature in front of him with a snout that resembled the spout of a teapot and a tail that curved into its body, resembling a handle.

"Oh," Rob said, reaching out with one hand, still half-asleep. "C'mere, little guy."

The thing shook violently and opened its mouth, letting out a sizzling hot jet of steam and the same shrill whistling noise that had woken him up previously. This time he was really awake, and it was a rude awakening, too!

"C'mere," he said forcefully, wondering whether the thing's resemblance to a kettle meant its meat had an aromatic taste. Before he could lunge forward and find out, it scuttled into the bushes, narrowly avoiding his leaf-covered pit trap, and the sound of intermittent whistling got further and further away. It was good to know this place's monsters came in sizes other than 'extra extra extra large'.

The rest of the day was spent building more traps. With the craft of crowbar digging down pat, he managed to set up two and a half before nightfall, and he put out the bear trap with some berries in it for good measure.

DAY 5: MUSHROOMS

The way he saw it, wild mushrooms had three types: one would do nothing to you, one would kill you, and one would make you hallucinate. Maybe some of them would do both of those last two. Survival experts could probably identify which ones did which on sight. Rob was not a survival expert.

He thought it reasonable that, by eating a tiny little piece of each mushroom variety he came across, he could determine which ones did what and also avoid death by poisoning. It was research, so it couldn't be crazy! Oh, who was he kidding? There was no guarantee he'd have a future in store for him here if he survived, so it didn't matter. Plus there was the warning about Elmore folk being hard to kill... he ripped off little chunks from some itty-bitty white ones, some yellowish frilly ones on a tree, some faintly-glowing pink ones on a log. He almost took a chunk off of a red and white one, but as soon as he reached for it, the red spots blinked and it burrowed into the ground like a drill to avoid his grasp. He wasn't sure going after it was worth the effort.

On what he thought was the way back to his camp, he stumbled across a small, rocky hill where a tiny cascading waterfall spilled over a little cave and flowed back into what looked like a tiny underground lake. The water tasted like stone and dirt, but it was drinkable. Then again, any liquid could be drinkable... once. He sat by the dinky waterfall and popped the white mushroom piece into his mouth. Bland and earthy. Now to wait and either puke or hallucinate- or both, or (Rob was crossing his fingers and hoping for this one) neither. Sure enough, hours passed with no incident, and so Rob, with crossed fingers once again, ate the yellowish piece.

Five minutes later, he shivered in the fetal position on the ground, head spinning, lost in a shifting world of amorphous colors, skin clammy, guts practically on fire. "Never again," he mumbled to himself, managing to toss the pink mushroom piece into the lake before collapsing on the ground and passing out.

DAY 6: HEADACHE

He couldn't have been sure the yellowish mushroom caused that reaction. Maybe it was a delayed effect from the white one! There wasn't a single fungus in this forest that he knew to be safe, and, still seeing the vestiges of swirling nightmares at the edges of his vision, it was a miracle he made it back to camp the next day without falling into one of his own still-empty traps. Maybe he had made that mistake too many times in the past to ever make it again. That sort of cocky thinking would put egg on his face if he ended up falling into one in the coming days, though, so he didn't let it make him confident.

Sitting on his rock with his head in his hands, Rob found his gaze drifting and landing upon a rabbit that had wandered to the edge of his clearing. A rabbit with horns... wait, was that part of the hallucination? No! It did have horns! It was a rabbit, but easier to grab! He made eye contact with its left eye and it inched closer. Suddenly, a familiar red mushroom burst from the ground behind it and it spooked, darting forward and- to Rob's amazement- into one of his pit traps! Mushrooms could be helpful after all!

The red and white one made a hissing sound, darted to the edge of the pit on tiny legs- was this even a mushroom?- and then, not wanting to risk the fall, walked away. As he put together a fire pit, Rob wondered what jackalope would taste like. Rabbit? Venison? Both?

DAY 7: BOTH

The coals were still warm, and Rob was feeling both fuller than he had in days and a little guiltier than he had in days.

He made his way to the waterfall to wash off a layer of dirt he noticed accumulating on him. On the bottom of the water, the chunk of pink mushroom had apparently regenerated and spawned about two dozen identical mushrooms. He drank from the waterfall instead of the pond this time.

Sometimes, cool guys on TV would sit under waterfalls and meditate. He wasn't sure what that did, but it was so common that it seemed to him it had to do something. He tried for about half an hour to get comfortable and found he was unable to, but maybe finding inner peace through the discomfort was the whole idea? Those waterfalls on TV, come to think of it, were always the super heavy rushing types, whereas this one was more like a trickle. Tomorrow he would return and sit by the waterfall and wait under it for something to fall into one of the traps. For now, he laid on the ground and let the sun dry him off.

DAY 8: INTERRUPTION

"I'm at peace with the universe. I am at peace with the universe," he repeated to himself, starting to feel a bit silly. Was this even what he was supposed to do while meditating?

The cave behind the waterfall was tiny, and nothing was in there, as he had discovered earlier while looking around. Just a pile of muddy boulders dislodged from the cave wall in some tremor at a much earlier point in time.

"I am at p-p-p-"

A freezing cold, solid, purposeful hand clamped down on his shoulder from the darkness and a shadow fell in front of him. His eye shot open. He got up, wrenched himself free, let out a blood-curdling scream, and ran... east.

Chapter Text

His legs carried him out of the forest, working on a different wavelength than his brain, expertly dodging rocks and zig-zagging eastward. Somewhere along the line he had stopped screaming and started breathing hard and fast. He did not know what he was running towards, but in time he found out as he cleared the edge of the forest and tumbled out near a road- a real, paved road! Wait, they had those here? And buildings! Buildings, too! Indignation burned in his heart, directed at the shopkeeper for not telling him, at himself for not realizing sooner, at the people of what he assumed must have been a tiny backwater for leaving no signs of their existence just half a mile from their dwellings. If there had been hiking trails, campsites- if there had been anything at all- he wouldn't have needed to go on an impromptu survivalist retreat. He kicked a rock in frustration. It didn't budge. It felt more like he was kicking himself.

Taking a second to let the rage brew inside him, he looked up and met the eyes of a human, a rather nondescript man, standing about 25 feet away like a deer in the headlights. Rob felt immediately self-conscious, righting himself, getting rid of the angsty scowl on his face, and scratching the back of his head right above where his neck used to be. The resident didn't move an inch. His pupils shook like coins after being flipped.

Rob raised his hand to wave awkwardly.

The guy twitched in an involuntary spasm and collapsed jerkily onto the ground, a look of terror still plastered on his face.

Sheesh, what the heck?

He turned for a moment just to check that nothing was behind him for the guy to have reacted to. Sure enough, there was nothing, at least nothing immediately obvious to him. Whatever had touched him in that cave had not yet reached him. Then why had the man-

Rob's eye fell on his own lower body. His wireframe foot, the static that gently scintillated all over his legs and arms, his mismatched hands, the hole straight through his torso. He had felt self-conscious before, sure, but now the feeling had magnified tenfold. With trepidation, he approached the guy and gave him a gentle poke. One of his eyes blinked frenetically and then closed again. Alive. That was good. Just a little shell-shocked...

"I'm a monster," Rob mumble-whispered to himself, a reminder of his place in this strange new world.

But, then again, there were monsters in the woods. Surely the people of this town saw them regularly. Even so, just the sight of him had caused this- this grown man- to keel over in shock! What kind of power was that? Had Rob's appearance been so freaky, so unexpected, so incomprehensible that any previous familiarity with monsters hadn't even been able to protect his fragile, fleshy brain from shorting out? Could that really be what was going on here? Was it a fluke, or- or-

"I'M A MONSTER!" he cackled, forgetting about his encounter in the woods and gently pushing the man over with one foot as a display of power. So this was how it felt to be feared! He hoped desperately that this reaction wasn't going to be a one-time thing, because he found, only partially to his surprise, that he relished it. There were so many possibilities. Could he walk into a bank, drop the teller with finger guns alone, and walk out with one of those giant sacks of cash with a dollar sign on it? Could he step into a diner (this thought was prompted by him catching sight of a diner not too far from where he was), announce his presence, and eat everything off of the unconscious patrons' plates? Could he walk into a bar and make some kind of quip about it?

Would the FBI be after him if he did either of those things? Were they after him right now? Would it even be the FBI, or was there a secret organization that just did paranormal stuff? He was paranormal stuff. What a rush! It was sometimes fun to be a regular criminal, but it was super fun to be a supernatural criminal, thought the boy with five minutes of experience as a supernatural criminal. Was making somebody pass out even a crime? He hoped so.

He laughed boisterously, unwilling to let anything ruin this moment, and reached up for the crowbar in his backpack, only for the moment to be ruined anyway against his will when he noticed it wasn't there. In the woods! He must have dropped it in the woods!

The woods... where that thing was after him.

He turned, gulped, and prepared to return for it, armed with only his knowledge of the way back to civilization. And then he heard humming- not animalistic humming, either, but a rendition of some slightly familiar song in a slightly familiar voice- and he saw a silhouette moving towards him through the trees. it- she- it couldn't have been her, but she stepped out into the sun, twirling the crowbar (his crowbar!) like a baton, still humming that same tune.

"Did you know you could totally be a metal singer? No, I'm serious, you screamed so loud stalactites fell! I'm thinking it could be a good career path for you if you ever decide being a monster isn't working out. No offense- is that offensive? If it is, I am so sorry, oh my gosh. But also-" she winked and whispered- "consider it."

Sarah G. Lato held out the crowbar to him and gave him a bright smile.

"You dropped this thing while you were running from me like you thought I was some kinda mo-"

"How?" He snatched it back.

"It was sort of just hanging out of your backpack, so I think gravity kicked in and you flailing around did the rest of the work."

"No! I mean, how are you here?"

"Oh!" she laughed heartily. "Yeah, that makes much more sense. I got a ride from this guy in a spoooooky van! It was only twenty bucks, and as luck would have it I just won twenty bucks in the ring, so I thought, why the heck not, y'know? I wouldn't have pegged you as the type to watch cartoons, Rob."

"The ring? Cartoons? Wait... you know my name?"

"Sure I know your name! I know lots of things," said Sarah, winking. Rob wasn't sure what the joke was. She clarified, "The enemy of my crush is my, uh, somebody I know about. No, wait, that doesn't sound right. The crush of my enemy is my friend! No. The person I know about of my friend is my- hold on. Okay, basically, what I'm trying to say is I know who you are because you're Gumball's nemesis! So cool. He talks about you all the time. Did you ever have a crush on him? Ah~ No, don't tell me, your face speaks louder than your mouth ever could."

For one thing, Rob thought, his mouth was on his face, and for another thing he was making a pretty neutral shocked-type expression. Whatever Sarah had in mind, convincing her against it seemed fruitless, though, so he just nodded. His eye met her right eye, because her left eye was covered. What was up with that eye patch? Now that he thought about it, she had never worn a hat before, either.

"What's with the getup?"

"Oh! You noticed, you sly dog." It was difficult not to notice. "I'm cosplaying!"

"Hm. Uh, cooool," Rob lied, "As who?"

Sarah let out the kind of laugh you'd give if somebody complimented your drawing of a whale as a kid when you were actually trying to draw a dolphin.

"As who? What, don't tell me you don't recognize it. It's iconic, Rob."

"Mr. Peanut? Doesn't he have a monocle and not an eye patch?"

She scoffed, gestured madly, and then sighed.

"Bill! I'm Bill."

"Bill from what?"

"From what?" She sputtered incoherently. "R-Rob, tell me you didn't just ask the guy to drop you off in some random dimension. Tell me you didn't just come here with no idea where here was."

"Look, could you stop being vague and just tell me what you're trying to get at, please?"

"Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls," said Sarah. "Any of that ring any bells for you?"

He had heard at least one of those names somewhere before, probably. Maybe.

"That's a cartoon, right...?" He hoped it was a cartoon after all so he didn't look even more idiotic than he felt.

"Uh, yeah."

She stared at him and gestured again. He shook his head, tilting it to one side. Suddenly, Sarah burst out laughing and wiped a tear from her eye.

"Oh, gosh," she chuckled, "You are seriously out of your depth, y'know that? I think it's endearing, don't worry. But-"

She placed a hand on his shoulder and he flinched at her cold, cold, touch. Ice cream. Of course.

"-from now on, you're listening to me, 'cause I am an expert. And together we're gonna make the most of it. Oh! Opposites attract, I love that! Love it. C'mon, Ron."

She grabbed his wrist and wrenched him back into the woods.

"It's Rob," he croaked.

"I know," Sarah said, "I've just always wanted to say that!"

He could have protested, but she wouldn't have listened, so he didn't.

Chapter Text

1987- FIRST DAY ON THE JOB

Somewhere in the desert, a lonely exit branched from the interstate into a landscape of shifting sand, saguaros, and open skies. It trailed on for miles past barbed-wire fences and manned security gates and 'NO TRESPASSING' signs and 'NO, REALLY, THIS MEANS YOU' signs. Most people would not make it past the first checkpoint, but the driver of the white van was ushered through one, and then the next, and then the next, flashing his shiny new ID card to the sometimes-skeptical guards, feeling rather important. He was important! He now worked for the SPF- the Supernatural Protection Foundation, unrelated to sunscreen, though his parents had assumed he was traveling to work for some skincare company in the desert when he let them know about it. He had neither the heart nor the clearance to tell them the truth.

The sun reached its peak in the sky and cast the plate metal roof of the sprawling compound in front of him ablaze for a moment. A trick of the light. Pulling into the parking lot, he saw two men in hazmat suits wrangling what looked like a giant, bellowing spider-crab made of black ooze and eyeballs towards a hangar door. It gave him pause about doing this job, but what had he expected? To work at a world-renowned top-secret anomaly containment agency and never see any anomalies? Besides, it looked like the guys had that thing under control-

A jet of orange sludge spat from one of the thing's pupils, burning a deep gash into the parking lot.

He covered his head and ran into the lobby, smacking his ID card against the reader like a marathon runner getting a high five mid-sprint. There was air conditioning, and more importantly, there was no spider-thing spitting acid and shrieking in the language of the dammed, so he took a deep breath and slumped down on one of the couches to regain his bearings. There were no lifestyle magazines on the coffee table. Instead, there were dossiers on anomalous phenomena. This place didn't exactly have the lock-and-key atmosphere he had imagined.

The receptionist, a manilla folder woman holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a romance novel in the other, stepped out of an employee break room and sat down at the front desk. He approached her.

"You the new janitor?" She asked, flipping to the next page of her book.

He handed over his ID with a nod.

"Head to the boss's office. He's gonna wanna see you, sonny."

She gestured dismissively at a map of the compound that stood in the lobby. He nodded again and made his way over to look at it, then started down the third hallway to the left towards the executive wing. This place was like a maze, but it was at least a cool maze, both in temperature and in architectural style.

He arrived in front of a flimsy door beyond which he could hear an argument between two loud and frustrated men.

"Tell them they work for me!" yelled the higher of the two.

"They say no can do-" came a quieter, deeper voice.

"Tell them they'll never get paid for anything ever again if they can't get their sorry selves out here to pick me up! I've got a vacation in Tijuana on the line!"

"I- I'll tell them, sir."

"Yeah, I thought so!"

There were a few beeps from some sort of unfamiliar communications device.

"Sir, they've responded to the message."

"Already? What's it say?"

"It s-says, uh, it says, 'No.'..."

"GET OUT OF MY OFFICE! I'll chew them out about this myself."

The door swung open and sharply nailed the man waiting outside in the head. He groaned and crumpled to the floor as the one to whom the higher voice belonged- an angry toon-shaded unicorn in a suit- pushed the one to whom the lower voice belonged- a frowny purple man of indeterminate species- down the hallway.

"And don't come back unless it's to say the jet folks are on their way!" called the unicorn- the boss?- before turning to the man in a heap on the floor. "Who are you and why were you in the way of my door?"

"I'm- urk, that stings! I'm the new janitor."

The anger never left the boss's eyes, but his mouth smiled unconvincingly.

"Go and clean up the office, then. I'm heading to lunch. Pleasure to have you here with the SPF."

He didn't have any cleaning supplies. He didn't have any instructions. He didn't have the willpower to argue. He trudged into the office and found papers all over the floor, thrown haphazardly from a stack on the table during the fight. At least that was the extent of the damage.

When the boss returned, the brand new janitor stood outside the door and opened it like a butler. He received a more genuine smile this time.

"Finally, somebody who doesn't think he can walk all over me! You'll do just fine here, I think. Oh! Now go clean the containment center- they had a real bad spill, so you'd better get moving if you don't wanna lose your job, capiche?"

The boss took a look at the spotless room and raised his eyebrows in satisfaction, but ultimately didn't say anything before the door was slammed and the janitor was trudging back to the map.

It turned out that the containment center had a separate entrance from the administrative building, so he needed to leave his chilly refuge for the sweltering heat of the surrounding desert. Did the containment center also have air-con? He hoped it did, he desperately hoped it did. Before he left, he took a moment to listen through the door for any unearthly bellowing or acid sizzling. Nothing. The coast was clear, assuming that the thing had no silent mode. He peeked out. Many more gashes lined the lot, some of them deeper than others, one of them cutting right across-

His van! Half of his van was gone! It had melted into a boiling puddle of ooze, a perfect cross-section that laid bare his boxes of personal stuff in the back and a smoking half-engine in the front.

Well, he was supposed to be a live-in janitor, anyway...

2 WEEKS ON THE JOB

The containment center was a lot larger than its exterior gave it credit for. Staring down at a map guide list of the 200 departments that included such colorful names as 'Department of Haunted Carnival Rides' and 'Department of Mental Disorder-Inducing Household Appliances', he wondered if he'd keel over and die before getting the chance to see all of them. So far it had mostly been a few routine spills from the infinite (and infinitely unstable) coffee cup in the Department of Objects With Volumes Larger Than Their Exteriors Would Suggest, a strange concept considering that the entire center was already one of those. He had also cleaned up after several more heated debates in his boss's office.

Today he noticed that there were two work orders in the DOOWVLTTEWS instead of just the usual daily one, and, after clearing the floor of coffee and setting the cup back upright to slowly start filling again, he trundled further into the annals of the department to visit the chamber where his second mess was. The scene in front of him could pass for the world's most depressing car show. In the middle of a grungy cell, lit only by a flickering spotlight that swung from the roof by three wires- only one connected- was a beat-up old red van with a puddle of oil slowly forming under the engine. Anomalous items were almost never name-brand- he considered that if one were to start a business selling them it would probably come off as a bootlegging operation- and this van was no exception, though it bore an uncanny resemblance to the very van he was still mourning.

He cleaned up the oil and moved on.

The next day, he had two work orders again in the exact same two rooms.

2.5 WEEKS ON THE JOB

"A gasket? What on earth could you possibly want a gasket for?"

"I looked under the hood of that van that keeps leaking, and the thing has rusted to heaven and back. If I could replace it-"

"We aren't paying you 500 bucks an hour to look under the hood."

"You aren't paying me 500 bucks an hour at all! I'm barely making above minimum wage!"

The boss tapped his chin with one candy-colored hoof and leaned back in his chair.

"Fine," he said condescendingly, "We'll dock your pay to minimum wage since you'll have less work to do and use the extra dough to buy that gasket."

He couldn't complain. Not to his boss's face, at least.

3 WEEKS ON THE JOB

"Can you believe it? He must have forgotten- that's the only explanation. You think a place like this can't ship in a gasket on command?"

There was no response from the van, but in his head, he felt like it agreed with him about the indignity of the whole situation.

"Yesterday I had to clean the cell of the spider-crab, and it turns out it isn't just their vomit that's acidic. Those hazmat suits are a lot dirtier than they look..."

3.5 WEEKS ON THE JOB

"There you go," he said, slamming the hood closed. "All better."

The van wasn't sentient, or at least it didn't have a face (who knew where the line between sentience and inanimate-ness was, really?), but it had come to be a shoulder he could lean on, even though it didn't have any shoulders either. It was just about his only friend. The boss disliked him, the boss's assistant always moped away before he could get a word in edgewise, the secretary at the front desk wouldn't give him the time of day, and his other coworkers (there weren't many) were always busy. It was his job to enter rooms after they left, not to work alongside them. The van, though, was becoming a passion project for him, and he had it looking quite a bit less decrepit now.

He had always pictured agencies like the SPF as infallible, grandiose companies capable of throwing money and influence around to solve even their most minor problems, but if the condition of quality of life at the base was any indication, that had been a misconception. The food in the cafeteria was cheap. A few containment cell windows were cracked ("We don't pay you to worry about glass that's not on the floor," his boss had said). Half of the lights in any given department were always out. The faucets in the barracks were leaky. Where was all the money going? He wasn't worried, not really, just curious. But he wasn't getting paid to be curious either, so he let the feeling slip away.

4 WEEKS ON THE JOB

That morning, the Persistent Blob in the Department of Annoying But Not Very Intelligent Monsters had broken containment again and was now being held back by several wooden planks where its (shattered) glass was the previous day. The janitor had taken care to do an extra good job of vacuuming up the ooze and disposing of the shards, but that also meant he was about an hour late for lunch, and when he walked in, rather than the usual crowd (no one), he saw a considerable crowd (one person). The crowd was his boss's assistant who he had mentally assigned the moniker, 'purple sad guy'. This could be a chance to figure out what was going on! Sure, he had snuck peeks at documents in the office when he was sent in to clean up, but all of that legalese went over his head.

"Hi, you," he said, trying to make it sound like an affectionate nickname instead of a substitute for calling him Purple Sad Guy to his face.

"Oh, hello there... you."

Purple Sad Guy apparently didn't know his name, either. That was good.

"Ever noticed how the portions are getting smaller lately?"

"They've been small," PSG sighed, "s-since the incident."

The janitor hadn't even probed and he already had an intriguing piece of information to work with!

"Incident? Elaborate."

"I don't think the b-boss wants me talking about it."

The janitor slipped him five bucks.

"We call it the Elmore case," said PSG. "Five months ago, our operatives brought in a haunted mirror from there that showed people's hearts instead of their bodies. Y'know, a good person would see a heart of gold, a b-bad person would see a heart of coal, uh, that kind of thing."

"Department of Morality Detection and Measurement Devices, I presume?"

"Right."

"And there was an incident with this thing?"

"He sued us."

"Who sued us?"

PSG groaned and looked away.

"The mirror."

"You mean you took in a sentient mirror?"

"All mirrors are sentient! Some of them just don't know it yet! But this one, he knew already, and he m-made a big fuss about it, and he sued us for everything we had 'cause we'd falsely detained him, and he got a bunch of other anomalies in on it too. And he won the case. And that's why this company's falling apart."

"Doesn't this place have government funding?"

"That's the other part of this. The court demanded guidelines be put in place about what's an anomaly and what's not for us to get our funding back."

"Yeah?"

"We a-argue about them every other day, but we haven't made any progress. We're running off of saved money. Sooner or later, if we don't come up with the surefire difference between something weird- like a haunted floppy disk- and something normal- like a unicorn in a suit- we're gonna go bankrupt and this whole place will turn into a ghost town."

"What about all the dangerous stuff we got here? What, are we just letting the Persistent Blobs of the world ooze across the desert and destroy civilization?"

"The b-boss has some ideas, but that stuff's classified."

The janitor reached for another five dollars, but he had no other cash on him, so he tried to take back the money he had slipped over minutes earlier so he could 'give' it to PSG again. It didn't work, probably because he was attempting it in plain sight. He cleared his throat, pulled his hands back, and tried to pretend he hadn't done anything- either way, PSG got up and headed for the door without so much as a goodbye.

5 WEEKS ON THE JOB

The office had cracks on the walls, now, and a hole suspiciously shaped like a horn, and after the last few meetings there had been coffee on the floor. The janitor had been able to get the infinite mug to stay upright by propping it up with some putty and the old gasket from the red van, but now he had a new source of spillage to clean up after on an every-other-day basis. He had just finished cleaning up the worst meeting yet when his boss strode in wearing that same old angry look.

"You're fired!" he said in equal parts glee and exasperation. "Show's over! Everybody's fired! This whole place is fired!"

The janitor feigned surprise. He wasn't supposed to know about their financial situation- not that the condition of the place didn't make it obvious. Something came to mind, though.

"How am I s'posed to get home? My van got busted on the first day."

"Huh? What? Oh," the boss made a shooing gesture. "Just take one of the SPFcopters."

The SPFcopters were the Foundation's personal fleet of helicopters. 'Hmm, that sounds fun', thought the janitor, followed shortly by 'Oh wait, I don't know how to fly a helicopter'.

"Why are you staring at me like that?"

"Oh. Just thinking. Specifically, I was thinking, hmm, that sounds fun, and then I was thinking, oh, wait, I don't know how to fly a helicopter."

"Hah! Of course you don't. Of course."

"Do you?"

The boss didn't answer. He focused hard, face turning from a shade of creamy pink to a bright red in exertion, and his horn made a party popper noise as he vanished in a puff of confetti that the janitor quickly went to clean up. Lunchtime had come and gone, but having been released from his responsibilities, he made his way back to the cafeteria and found it in a veritable frenzy. There were a whole seven people there, and five of them were talking at once! He could make out a few words. 'Fired', was one. That made sense. 'Fire'- just another tense. 'Burn'. Burn? Was that a new synonym for letting someone go that he didn't know about?

"I guess you heard about it," said PSG with a smile on his face. The nickname didn't really fit anymore.

"Everybody's fired, eh?"

"Well, that and they're burning the building down at the end of the week," said PSG, walking off with a spring in his step as he was wont to do after delivering an important revelation.

The janitor stood there, mind racing, thinking of the van that he had become so close to. And then the coffee cup he had cleaned up after so many times. And then the Persistent Blob, and then the toaster that could print out pictures of your most cherished memories, and then the clock with human hands instead of clock hands, and then the fridge for emotions, and then the talking ventriloquist dummy, and then the sarcophagus that glowed in the presence of evil. And then every single other anomalous item he had so much glanced at for a second during these five terrible, wonderful weeks. He pictured them all going up in flames.

Six nights later, everyone but the fire crew left. They had set explosives up all around the perimeters of each floor.

It wasn't an issue, though. The janitor's job was to come in after everybody had left and clean up after them. He cleaned the whole place, and he made sure each cell was perfectly spotless and also perfectly empty. He saw each of the 200 departments for himself. That night, when midnight struck, an explosion rattled the desert and fire illuminated the sand for miles around. Nobody saw a little red van- a little red van that was much bigger on the inside, mind you- leaving, and as far as the Supernatural Protection Foundation was concerned, every single piece of anomalous miscellany in the center went up in flames. They never even considered that some of the items might have been burn resistant, and they never would consider that due to the clean ashen landscape that was left behind after the demo crew did their work.

The Foundation's name was quickly forgotten.

FIRST DAY ON THE (NEW) JOB

Elmore was an oddly temperate town for one so close to the desert. The red van pulled up to a shady motel and its driver stepped into the front office.

"I want a room for the night."

"35 bucks," said the proprietor, and the shadowy visitor pulled out a gold bar instead and handed it over.

"Sorry, could you trade this in for cash-"

Just as the proprietor finished his statement, he dropped the gold bar to the floor.

"My whole life," he sniffled, "I've been consumed by greed. I can't believe I never saw it before! Touching that thing touched my heart, my very soul! Tell me, good sir, how can I repay you?"

The shadow man shrugged.

"Gimme a room... and 35 bucks," he said, pushing his luck. The proprietor fiddled with the register and gave him the money, which would have made him feel guilty if he didn't also feel so good. He took the keys to his room. For the last time, he leaned on the hood of the van and spoke to it.

"You and I," he said, "We're business partners now."

The van didn't respond, but it seemed appreciative- something about the way the moonlight reflected in its windshield, probably. That was okay. Maybe it would be able to talk to him someday, but if it didn't, that was alright too. He had a lot of work to do. For now, though, he needed some sleep.

Chapter Text

"Cosplaying him didn't work, or at least it hasn't yet," Sarah mused. "I was gonna go and try to fall asleep by the instructions for summoning him, but it turns out I've only ever seen here and never actually been here and I don't know my way around at all. Embarrassing, right? I just fell asleep in a random cave and hoped that would work."

Rob blinked absently.

"Thing is, I dunno when we are. Like, has he already been summoned? If I did it first, would that lead to some kind of freaky paradox? Would I be on the wrong side of time law? I guess I also want him to come to me because that's more satisfying than just brute-forcing it and making him show up, but is that too selfish of me, or is it just the right level of selfish?"

"Uh-"

"Besides! Imagine I summon him and he asks why, and I say, oh! I dunno. I just wanted to talk! That would make me seem so desperate! Ugh, but maybe desperation can be cool in sort of a yandere type of way? Is that how I want him to see me? As some- some- fangirl? Well, maybe I am, but not for him! This is purely a narrative thing! Ugh! How the heck do I get him to notice me without making it seem like I want him to notice me? Rob, any ideas?"

Rob scrunched his eye closed. He felt like a web browser with 52 tabs open. Minutes earlier, Sarah had led him back to camp, sat him down, and promised to explain everything. She had asked him where to start, he had said, 'wherever you think is best', and she had replied, 'okay, I'll start in the middle'.

"Uh, you want me to tell you how to meet a demon?"

"Not just any demon. We're talking about-"

"I know, you've said Bill like fifteen times! I have no clue who he even is or why you wanna meet him so bad. We're done with the middle and the end- start at the beginning. Can you do that?"

"The beginning. Okay, okay, sure, I can do that. I'm more of an in medias res type of girl, myself, but linear storytelling has its benefits-"

"Get to the point."

"Chill out! I'm getting there! Okay, okay, so! Our story begins in 2012."

"Maybe start a little closer to the present."

"No can do. You want the whole story, right? Besides, 2012 is the present right now, at least probably. The timeline hasn't been confirmed- whatever."

Rob almost scoffed, but found himself nodding and burying his chin in his palm.

"Okay, so, the year is 2012, and the media landscape is a pretty great place for a company called- wait. No, no, let me start from the veeeeery beginning. The year is 1901. Flora and Elias Disney are in Chicago, Illinois, about to bring their fourth child into the world..."

The shadows grew longer, and Sarah's story meandered every which way, and at one point she retrieved a flashlight from who-knows-where and held it under her chin despite the lack of anything spooky in her ramblings. When she finished, the first stars of the night had appeared in the evening sky above the clearing. Rob found himself staring at them instead of paying attention.

"Anyways," said Sarah, taking a breath so deep she momentarily turned inside out (had she not been breathing for the hours it took her to tell the story?) "Gravity Falls. That's where we are."

He sat up, rubbed his eye, and thought for a moment, 'what a waste of time'. And then, as if by a truck, he felt the weight all of the information his subconscious brain had picked up on while he zoned out.

"Wait," he said, holding his hands up. "You're telling me this place where we are exists in the form of a fictional cartoon back home? We are inside a story you've already seen? Right now?"

He knew this place was also a work of fiction to the real world, but he had never once considered that it might be fiction to his world as well. What did that mean? Surely that had really huge implications hovering just outside of his cognitive reach! Hindsight was 20/20! And now, for better or worse, he was no longer the capable one. Upstaged. By a fangirl, no less. Typical. Hold on, he wondered, what if this went both ways? What if somebody recognized him as a fictional character? That would be bad for his whole monster shtick that he had been fantasizing about on the down-low since his encounter with that human guy. He'd need to know for sure! Sarah was nodding.

"Do you know if there's an internet in this universe?" Rob asked. His phone had been dead since long before he left Elmore, what with the lack of a usable power grid.

"Sure there is! After all, in season 2, episode 2-" Sarah paused, noticing Rob's dead, empty gaze, and got to the point quickly. "Yes, the internet exists here. Why? Oh, don't tell me..."

Sarah was blushing and squishing her cheeks now and Rob felt it was best for his peace of mind to not think about why. He had in his grasp a chance at thriving in this new world, armed with someone knowledgable about it, and he could not jeopardize that by giving the poor girl an existential crisis over her own nonexistence. He had come to think of himself as the solemn guardian of forbidden knowledge- a man (or, when it counted, kid) burdened with the truth and the responsibility associated with that truth. That had been the ethos behind his convoluted rescue plan for the people of Elmore Junior High. Well, that and it seemed like the kind of plan a professional supervillain ought to make, and, provided there were a lack of supervillains in the real world, he wanted his rather spotted career to go out with a real bang.

"Sarah, I just wanted to ask- no hard feelings, right?"

"Hard feelings? About you not listening to me? Oh, trust me, I get that all the time."

"No! I meant about the whole Superintendent Evil thing!"

"That? That was a long time ago."

"It was two weeks ago."

"Two weeks is a long time in the apocalypse. Look, don't worry about it, okay? Human AUs are totally classic! I was just thinking, hmmm- if this Evil guy is actually evil, Gumball and Darwin will take care of him in about 11 minutes."

That comment might as well have been an arrow through Rob's nonexistent heart.

"Would it cheer you up if you got to say, 'I told you so'?"

He had wanted to say that before, but now there was very little fight left in him.

"I told you so," Rob replied in a weak little voice...

...That grew stronger as something bubbled up inside of him.

"I told you so! I TOLD YOU SO!" He got to his feet, gesturing wildly, as his pent-up rage came to the surface. "Nobody listened, and we could be in the real world, but instead I'm stuck here with a crazy weirdo girl who's trying to summon a demon! On purpose! And we have no food, no internet, no way home, heck, no home to return to. It's your fault. It's all of your faults! The one time I try and do something good, fate comes along and slaps me in the face for it! UUUGH!"

He smacked his head on a nearby tree and fell backwards into the dirt, clutching it in pain and glitching out for a second. Why was it that every time he tried to lash out in anger he ended up hurting himself? ...Well, in this specific instance, he wasn't sure what he thought would happen.

"What did you think would happen?" Sarah asked, peering over him.

"Shut up," he mumbled, rolling over to lay face-down in the dirt.

"Do you need ice?"

"I know that if I say yes, you're gonna-"

She flopped down next to him on her back so that they were cheek-to-cheek, her iciness soothing his headache a little. He reluctantly let it happen. He hadn't meant to fall asleep, but something about the whole situation lulled him away from the waking world and into an uneasy dream.

It was the forest, yes, just as it had been before he fell asleep, only Sarah was absent and so were the stars above. He noticed moments later that the floor underfoot was the familiar- if heavily cracked- tile floor of Elmore Junior High, covered in the dirt that lined the forest floor in the waking world, with a familiar hole several feet from him leading down into the void. It wasn't growing. A moment from his memory forever frozen in time. Something drew him towards the hole and he discovered first that its surface rippled like water and second that he could see his reflection in it.

The reflection shifted and changed with the surface of the liquid static. It melted into his cute (he liked to think so) look from long before he had been chewed up and spit out, and then into how he'd looked right before hitching a ride out of the void the first time, and then into Superintendent Evil's visage, and then into an odd human form he didn't recognize- and then into a yellow, strangely-shaped form he definitely didn't recognize.

It blinked.

Five seconds later, Rob processed what exactly was wrong with that, and six seconds later, one of the reflection's black hands reached past the static surface and latched onto the edge of the hole, pulling its entire triangular body out and into the air right in front of Rob's face. The thing put its hands on what passed for its hips, ascended further into the sky, and turned a gaze with an undercurrent of frustration to Rob, who blinked and suddenly righted himself in confusion. Something stirred in the back of his mind, something that would have helped clarify the situation had he been more lucid.

"Hey, kid! Want a once-in-ten-billion-lifetimes opportunity?" came a shrill voice from everywhere, though Rob gathered the thing was the one speaking by how its body flashed. "You're about to hear me say something I have never said before! Listen up- I'll only say it once- this is the kind of thing you're gonna remember for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not!"

Happiness, maybe? Annoyance? Anger? It was hard to tell. Either way, Rob found his words at the exact same time that the yellow thing did, and as it turned out, they were the exact same words.

"Who the heck are you?"

Chapter Text

Sarah's story had included- among many, many other things- a detailed physical description of the demon in question. Rob hadn't exactly been lucid for that, and he certainly wasn't entirely lucid now, so the information was locked behind two invisible mental walls that he wouldn't have been able to break even if he had known the information he needed was beyond them.

"I'm Rob," he said with trepidation.

"Rob, huh?" said the triangle. "I'm Bill."

"Bill?"

Rob's eye didn't meet Bill's directly, instead gazing absently at the demon's bow tie, then his hat... and then the mental walls crumbled in turn, first with a faint memory of the outfit Sarah had been wearing earlier and second with a surprisingly robust memory of a previously-forgotten section of the monologue for which he had zoned out. His retreat into memory was abruptly broken up by Bill snapping loudly in his face a few times.

"Sheesh! It takes a special kind of foggy head to zone out in the dreamscape, and I don't mean that as a compliment!"

"Bill Cipher?" Rob asked.

The demon's 'face' contorted for just a second into a red one of seething rage and confusion that faded just as quickly as it had arrived.

"So you know the name. I'm honored, really." He didn't sound honored. "How much else do you know, kid?"

"I know you're a demon."

"By some definitions! And?"

"And..."

The aid his newfound memory granted him quickly reached the end of its usefulness. Either Sarah hadn't brought up anything about Bill's personality or Rob had been so lost for that portion of it that he couldn't salvage the information.

"You're a demon, you show up in dreams, and you can be summoned. ...That's it."

"Excellent!" For the first time in the conversation, Bill sounded like he meant it. "Tell me, do you do a lot of traveling?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I haven't left my dimension in ages. Work-related concerns, and all that. I'm trying to live vicariously through you- is that so wrong?"

"Uh..."

"Let me tell you, the Nightmare Realm may be a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there!"

"The Nightmare Realm?"

"Either you're stupid or you're playing stupid," Bill sighed, "One's hilarious, the other not so much. C'mon, make me laugh, would you?"

They shared a tense gaze, and then Bill let out the world's least sincere laugh, giving Rob's the world's least sincere friendly shoulder pat by stretching out his arm.

"Lighten up, kid! I'm messing with you! You know, you're kind of a wet blanket. Squishy, full of water, and unresponsive when it comes to banter." As if to prove his point, Bill poked Rob in the cheek and discovered with a shiver that it was not, in fact, squishy. "Well, at least those last two."

"Oh, excuse me if I'm not suddenly chummy with you, okay? We just met for the first time one minute ago!"

"On the contrary!"

Bill's arm snapped back to its usual length and his body glowed with a series of rapid-fire images that Rob recognized from his dreams over the past week- the flashing colors of his hallucinatory episode after eating that mushroom, the nondescript classroom from his test nightmare, a few other half-remembered bursts of fantasy. Then, for a few seconds, before shifting back into its original yellow hue, it displayed the current scene in real-time from Bill's perspective, almost like looking into a mirror.

"I've been trying to get to you, kid! But every time I have an opening, you either stop dreaming or you wake up! If I didn't know any better-" his eye narrowed- "I'd think you were doing it on purpose."

"I wasn't doing it on purpose, man."

"Say what you want. Look, I'll drop the pretense. I'm gonna get into your mind one way or another, and then it won't matter if you play stupid, because I'll be able to see everything you aren't telling me."

"Aren't we in my mind right now?"

"Ha! We're in your dreams right now. The meat of your mind is elsewhere, both literally and metaphorically! This is basic stuff. Humans, am I right? Uh, 'scuse me, force of habit. Whatever-it-is-that-you are's, am I right?"

"Cyclopes."

"Cyclopes aren't made of untextured polygons and TV static, and they definitely don't dream. Those guys are dumber than a bag of teeth. Having one eye doesn't make you a cyclops, otherwise me, you, and the eye bats would all be on the same level!"

"Eye bats?"

"Point is, we're not on the same level, and you aren't a cyclops."

"I think I would know what I am."

"Trust me, I thought so, too. You're a real edge case."

"If you're so good with this stuff, what would you say I am if not a cyclops?"

"Hmmm."

Bill floated around him in a lazy circle, bringing to mind a pack of hungry wolves.

"Welp," said Bill, "I guess I'll find out when you're at your lowest! If you think I can't see through your game, it's gonna be all that much funnier when I get the upper hand!"

"My game? What on Earth are you talking about?"

"I'll be watching," snapped Bill, vanishing on a bitter note and taking the environment along with him.

"At least Sarah will be happy about this," Rob thought before his lucidity gave way to unconsciousness.

"WHAT?"

Sarah grabbed his shoulders and shook. Hard. When Rob had cheerfully broken the news to a drowsy Sarah, he had anticipated many possible reactions, this not among them.

"He visited YOU before ME? That's so not fair!"

She let go of him and flopped down onto an invisible fainting couch with a dramatic flourish and an even more dramatic sigh. Her eyes glimmered with an insincere sort of wetness, akin to the tears of a fairy tale princess upset about being simply too pretty and rich to relate to the common folk. Maybe she was happy in her own special way- she just didn't want Rob to know it.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm over it," she said without even a hint of the earlier negativity. "What did he say to you?"

"Just a bunch of cryptic stuff I couldn't make heads or tails of. I think he thought I was trying to manipulate him."

"And were you?"

"No!"

"It would have been really cool if you were."

"He caught me off-guard, alright?"

"Too late now. Okay, okay, so! Could you tell me everything you remember about what he said? We're gonna get to the bottom of this."

"I remember the first words out of his mouth- or, uh, his eye, I guess- were, 'who the heck are you'?"

"Interesting. Did it seem like a genuine who-are-you or an I-know-who-you-are who-are-you?"

"Genuine, I think."

"Interesting. Very interesting. He doesn't know who you are? That has some iiiinteresting implications."

"I told him my name- was I not supposed to do that?"

"First name or full name?"

"First name only."

Rob had gotten a surname for himself- Wrecker- a while back during a period of time he disliked thinking about. It was the only legal surname he'd ever had as far as he could remember (with the exception of the fake identity he'd invented to run for the school board), but it felt like a pseudonym even so. Perhaps, he thought, that was because his arch-nemesis had come up with it. If he had to pick his own evil moniker, what would it be? Would the word 'evil' with a few tweaks to the pronunciation really still cut it? Sure, he might stoop that low for someone else's name, but his own?

"I don't think he gets power over you if he has your name. That's fairies. But hey! There's a lot I don't know about him."

"I'm surprised there's anything you don't know about him."

"Well, two seasons can only tell you so much. That's why I'm here- to pick his mind and get some answers!"

"I don't think he seems like the sort of person who would be an open book about that kind of thing, but I guess you know him better than me."

"Oh, trust me, I have my ways of getting through to him. I'm like a therapist- I can get people to freak out and unintentionally say things that reveal their deepest, darkest secrets!"

"I don't think that's what therapists do."

"Well, it's what I do. Call it serapy."

"Like Sarah plus therapy?"

"Like stalking- I mean, supervision- plus therapy! Secrets beget more secrets. If they can't hide from you, they won't want to try and hide from you, and they'll tell you anything to get you to keep quiet! But Sarah plus therapy is good too."

"Sounds like blackmail."

"By some definitions."

"By all definitions!"

"Maybe so, maybe so. But blackmail makes it sound so serious!"

"Like how 'stalking' sounds so serious?"

"Don't tell me you've never done that to your nemeses."

"I spy on my nemeses. It's a villain thing- it's different. And less creepy."

"What's the difference?"

"The- the- the principle of the thing! The motivation! Hate is different from love. Have you ever hated anybody? Like really hated them?"

"I-"

"No, you haven't. I can tell from the innocence in your eyes."

"Innocence? Oh, trust me, there's no innocence here."

She leaned in with one eye to his and grinned like a serial killer in a horror movie, letting out her best creepy giggle- a laugh that sent chills down Rob's spine against his will.

"Point made. But-! it's still a different thing. You wouldn't understand."

"Whatever you say, Rich."

She patted him on the head. He didn't comment on that last thing- he was over that- he would not let it get to him- he knew better-

"It's Rob," he muttered.

"I know," she replied.

Against Rob's wishes, Sarah had gone and fetched more of the white mushrooms to roast them over the fire for breakfast. It took a few hours of Sarah swearing up and down that she wasn't hallucinating even a little bit before Rob finally decided eating one was worth the risk, and even then, he took small bites at twenty-minute intervals just in case. Their interactions were short, sweet, and heavy on the back-and-forth, and when one ended there would be a long period of peaceful silence before the next one started up. By the end of the day he had recounted his entire meeting with Bill to an inquisitive Sarah. Much to his appreciation (and annoyance), she was a much better listener than he was.

Rob's meeting with Bill had been heavily recontextualized by the information he learned. For one thing, Bill was a villain ('What?' he had asked. 'Why do you care? You're a villain too, aren't you?' she had replied), he lived in a decaying world called the Nightmare Realm that, much like the dimension Rob himself had once been trapped in, acted as a depository for forgotten things, he was a conman who made what Sarah called 'typical demony deals', he knew a lot of things (but not who Rob was, a fact that Sarah suspected bothered him), and he had a big and enthusiastic fanbase. That last one was less so useful info about Bill and moreso useful info about Sarah. It had also come up that eye bats were essentially eyeballs with wings (Sarah described them as 'the sort of demon that would appear on William's hypothetical shoulder if he needed to make a tough moral decision) and that Bill could see through images of his likeness and also trees- definitely birch trees, but, since there were no birch trees in the clearing, Sarah mentioned that she hoped his powers extended to other sorts of trees with holes as well. Rob plugged every tree hole in the clearing with dirt just in case. Sarah let him, but carved a little eye of providence into the bark of a nearby evergreen, apparently rendering his work irrelevant.

They discussed how one sasquatch could feed them for days, and then how to kill a sasquatch, and then how one giant ice cream cone could also feed them for days, and then the conversation topic shifted to if Rob was edible or not. He insisted he was no longer organic. She insisted they would have to try, to know for sure. Rob threatened her with the crowbar and said, 'You'll scream before I scream'. She laughed- hopefully at the quip and not because his failure to intimidate was funny.

Their final topic of the night was how that human had reacted to seeing Rob.

"It could just have been a weird little gag," said Sarah. "Somehow I doubt everybody you meet is gonna react the same way. That'd be boring, you know? But if you want to test it out I have an idea."

"An idea?"

"Yeah! I want you to go into town and try to steal a TV and a generator!"

"What, you wanna watch TV here?" Rob sat up, wide-eyed. He had been thinking about doing the exact same thing! He had wanted to determine if his own universe existed as fiction within this one. Could Sarah really have come to that same conclusion? "Why?"

"I have a DVD on me that could help us survive here."

"Like a wilderness survival show, or something?"

"Not exactly. I was honestly gonna keep it a secret, but now you know everything else and we're kind of living together like an old married couple, by which I mean we sort of hate each other but there's also love there-"

"No there's not."

"Friendship, then."

Rob sighed. Maybe there was friendship there. How long had it been since he had a friend? Was this really friendship if it was born of necessity? Did they need each other? He had survived fine the first week on his own, save for that time with the mushrooms.

"I'll go into town tomorrow. We'll see if I can steal one for you."

"You are the best. Thanks so much."

"Don't thank me! I have secret ulterior motives."

"Oooh, tell me about them."

"They're a secret," he said, and then he closed his eye and pretended to be asleep.

Chapter Text

She gleefully brought the chair down on the back of the bear boy's neck with a sickening crack. His knees buckled and he collapsed onto the ground in a heap.

"It's looking like he's down for the count," called the announcer, drowning out the voice of newly-christened referee Mike, who was slamming his hand into his palm and calling out each number from one to ten in a cadence more befitting of a news report. "That's victory, folks! Yet another victory for- ahem- Sarah "The Incinerator" G. Lato! As stipulated, she will receive twenty dollars in the currency of the Before-Times! Thank you for watching Mall Brawl. The bloodbath will return after a word from our sponsors."

Sarah dropped her chair and left the stage to make way for the 'sponsors'- a revolutionary group that, despite being formed only the previous day, already had plans to dominate Elmore- and was greeted warmly by the waiting throng that surrounded the ring, a veritable sea of punk headgear and alternative fashion. The cultural zeitgeist had changed so quickly! Sarah had taken to wearing an eye patch for the grittiness factor, along with one of those bracelets with the spikes and a flame-patterned leather jacket. That was where the inspiration for he nickname had come from. Maybe she would have to actually incinerate somebody one of these days to really seal the deal. Now, though, she left the mall and claimed her prize from one of the burly guards near the commentators' nest.

Why, even with the new anything-goes currency system, had Sarah not changed her preferred prize to something cooler? That was simple: one of the only businesses in town that accepted paper money at reasonable rates (provided she haggled) was also her new one-stop shop for food, entertainment, and amenities. It was very apocalypse-esque to do your shopping out of the back of a van! The sketchier, the better! She had been taking on tougher opponents over the past few days and had discovered the untold moneymaking potential of her internal rage. Stress relief, catharsis, and income, all in one easy pastime. The only problem was that fighting made her hungry, and now she planned to put the earnings from the fight into a vault at home and use the previous day's earnings to go all-out on something to eat.

Ten minutes later, she approached the window of the van in question.

"Goood morning! Or afternoon! Or night. Time's messed up now, am I right?" she chortled and the shopkeeper let out a tiny sigh.

"What may my mystical shop of wonders sell you today?"

"You have any new food in stock?"

"As a matter of fact, we do. We restocked only two days ago... no, three. No- I'm not entirely sure. Either way, we have a good amount of food left."

"Can I get, uh... a burger, some fries, and a drink?"

"How specific. You're in luck, however, we actually do have all of those in stock."

"Cool! How much?"

"85 bucks."

"85 bucks?" She raised an eyebrow. "Okay, okay. What do you say I give you 25 bucks and this infinite-dollar bill I handcrafted?"

The bill in question looked surprisingly authentic, except that the president on it had anime eyes.

"Deal," said the shopkeeper, accepting both the real money and the fake money. He fumbled around in the back of the van for a short moment and produced a burger, fries, and a can of Pitt Cola. Sarah dug into the food almost immediately, but opened her mouth mid-bite and stared with an odd near-reverence at the beverage can.

"Where'd you get this?" she asked.

"Erm, I stole it from a restaurant."

"A restaurant here?"

"Well, I-" the shopkeeper's eyes darted nervously from side to side. Suddenly, Sarah reached up and seized him by his shadowy collar.

"C'mon," she said in a sharp whisper, "How much would I have to pay you to take me to the place where you got this cola?"

"T-twenty dollars," he said. When his behind met the seat again, he sighed in relief.

Sarah only smiled disarmingly and reached for the money she had just won.

Chapter Text

"So, you said it's a small town, right?"

Rob stared up at the clouds from his vantage point on the ground. Last night, he had woken up screaming after several consecutive night terrors. Sarah was enthusiastic about the chance that he was being haunted after she was awoken by the first scream, but the second and third were more frustrating to her than anything. Eventually, Rob had managed to lift his pillow-shaped rock and had taken it to the small waterfall not too far from camp so that he wouldn't be able to accidentally wake her up anymore. Sarah didn't have the heart to tell him that he was so loud he had done so a few more times anyways.

The repeated bouts of laying awake in the darkness had given both of them plenty of time to come up with their own game plans for the day.

"Right," replied Sarah, nodding.

"But you said there's a shopping mall here."

"To be fair, it's not a super huge one."

"Who builds a shopping mall in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere?"

"Look, the show didn't get into the history of local real estate development, okay?"

He let out a sigh and rolled over onto his side. Despite the sunlight, sleep seemed ready to claim him at any moment, but every time his eyelid started to fall, an image from one of the nightmares popped into his head, and suddenly he was wide awake and energetic again.

"I guess we'll have the rest of our lives to figure it out," he said.

"The rest of our lives? What's that supposed to mean?"

Rob's mind was racing, and not just because of the sleep deprivation. Did she not realize that-

"We're not going back to Elmore," he said.

She sat up and turned to him- he wasn't looking, but he could tell by the sound effects and ominous music cue. She laughed nervously.

"Sure we are!"

"Oh yeah? Well, tell me how you plan to get us back, then." He crossed his arms and curled his knees up to his chest.

"Via the Awesome Store."

"What, do you have his number?"

"No, but if he comes back-"

"If he comes back, there's no way he's gonna stumble on us by chance! Besides, why on earth would he even look for us?"

"I think there's at least one reason," Sarah said, and then promptly changed the subject. "Anyways, you have an electronics store to rob, Rob! Have you ever robbed anyone before? 'Cause, you know, your name, and all?"

"Rob's a common name."

"I know! But if this is your first time robbing someone-"

"It's not."

"Oh. All the better! As I was saying, you have an electronics store to- ahem- steal from. Thankfully, there's a whole TV display in the front window, so it shouldn't be an issue. No need to even go inside! Just, wham!" she mimed smashing a plane of glass with a crowbar- "Break in, get it, get out."

"You said I also need a generator. And something to put the DVD into."

"Oh yeah. Well, hopefully once you break in everybody inside will either run screaming or pass out and then you don't have to worry about dealing with them."

"What if they call the cops?"

"They probably won't because you're so freaky-looking, and if they do, you could take those guys with one hand behind your back. As long as you're immune to getting tased."

"...I'm not!"

"No?"

"What gave you the idea I was?"

"Hmm. That's a good question, actually. I guess I just figured you were some sort of cyborg."

"A cyborg? I don't even look anything like a-" he groaned- "Never mind. So you're saying the cops will tase me? Why can't you come help me do this? You're sort of throwing me to the wolves here!"

"They're not wolves, they're people. We're literally in the middle of the forest right now. I bet there are wolves everywhere! One could be behind you and you wouldn't even know it! Maybe even mutant wolves, or wolves that have their heads on backwards and speak in code, or- you get the idea. Any one of those could be behind you."

Rob scoffed dismissively but rolled onto his back nonetheless.

"If you get arrested," Sarah continued, "you can just dig your way out with a spoon."

"Where am I getting a spoon from?"

"Good point."

After a long and awkward stretch of silence, Rob said 'welp', slapped his knee, flinched at the pain, mentally beat himself up for flinching at his own slap, flinched at the pain from mentally beating himself up, and stormed out of the forest in a huff when he realized he had to take action to avoid an infinite loop. Sarah followed him to the edge of the trees to hand him his crowbar like a concerned mother whose son forgot his lunch box on the first day of school. He didn't thank her. Five minutes into town, he realized he never got an answer to the question of why Sarah was making him do this alone, but it was too late to go back. Not really- he had all day- but it was the principle of the thing. Had he dwelled on that thought for longer, maybe he would have realized it didn't make any sense, but he was too occupied with finding the shopping mall to do that. It couldn't be too hard; after all, this was a small town!

Sarah read through the back cover of her DVD yet again. It was significantly less fun than rewatching the show.

Just a few minutes south of Rob's campsite was another clearing where the mud was soft and a big stick was propped against a rock; Sarah had made this place her canvas. The apocalypse had allowed her to tap into her destructive instincts, which she had discovered were almost as potent as her creative ones and just as enjoyable to use, but that didn't mean she could go a day without at least doodling something or having an elaborate daydream. The thing about drawing in the dirt with a stick was that the final product never quite looked good enough.

She drew a little heart on the ground with her finger and put an S in it, for Sarah. Just as she was about to complete it with two more initials, she glanced over at the dozen or so other identical hearts she had drawn recently, and wondered for a moment if she was perhaps getting in a rut. What if the van never returned and she was stuck here and she never got to see their faces ever again and she forgot what they looked like? On one hand, that could totally be a setup for, like, a heartbreaking reunion plot. On the other, it could be the end, assuming this was a tragedy. Was it even possible to forget them? She remembered every detail... right now. But brains were fallible. Would love protect her, or would it be a moral about how love never truly protects anyone from the inevitable marching forth of time? She sighed. Sarah was used to sighing for theatrical purposes, but now there was nobody to fool except herself. 'I am just that committed', she thought, and that cheered her up a bit- so much so that she never even considered that the negative emotions behind the sigh could have been real.

Part of her felt guilty for wasting time. She hadn't come here for the trees and occasional monsters, she had come here for the people, and also demons. Mostly demons- actually, mostly demon, singular. But that didn't mean the idea of interacting with some of the others didn't excite her. She couldn't just barge into their lives, though! She wasn't human! That had never ever mattered before.

'At least it won't matter once I'm back in Elmore', she thought.

'We're not going back to Elmore', said Rob in her head.

"Oh, Rob," she said, rolling her eyes, smiling half-heartedly, and speaking out loud to someone who wasn't there. Nobody answered. There weren't even any monsters listening in? C'mon.

Sarah leaned back, closed her eyes, and counted sheep versions of her friends and classmates until the world fell away and she began to dream.

By what was either a normal consequence of life in a small town or some arcane miracle, Rob had arrived in front of the television display without seeing hide or hair of a single local human. That said, he had been looking down at his feet for most of the walk there, so maybe there had been some around.

Standing in front of the display case with the TVs made everything feel so real. Rob knew that it wasn't, of course, and yet some days that seemed like a distant, irrelevant fact. This was one of those days. He knew that bashing the glass in was his purpose at the moment, and yet it was so peaceful that doing so seemed a shame, even though reality was nothing more than a simulacrum created for the amusement of a media-hungry modern audience and none of it really mattered anyway because the heat death of the universe would someday render fiction entirely irrelevant. When that day came, would he die, or would he not even know that it happened? Sheesh...

He blinked and found that his head had slumped forward against the glass in the time that it took for him to think all of that. Boy, was he tired. He could lay down right here and- no!

He gave the glass a hard whack with the crowbar before he had the mental presence to stop himself. It bounced off with a clang that rang out like a tuning fork. Oh no- he'd need to do it again? He did it again, weaker this time, and the glass still didn't break. This was more difficult than anticipated. If someone saw this, they would laugh at him... no, wait, they'd probably call the cops. And then he'd get tased-

With a frustrated grunt, he swung harder and the glass splintered.

All it took was a light additional tap for the fruits of his mission to be fully exposed, and then he reached through the hole in the glass to grab one and three facts immediately set in, stymieing the evil, triumphant laugh in his throat before it could come out of his mouth:

1. The TVs were heavy,

2. He still needed to fetch a DVD player, a remote, and a generator,

3. There were people in the store-

4. And those people were looking at him!

As he took one frozen step back, he met the left eye of the silent, awed clerk behind the counter and thought, 'they're more scared of me than I am of them'. He had to believe that for this to work. He had to. With all the confidence he could muster, he shoved his anxiety deep down inside, stepped through the broken glass, maneuvered around the stack of TVs, left the display case, and put up finger guns at the clerk as if he was robbing a bank.

"This is a hold-up," he said, and it sounded cooler in his head. The clerk's hands went up. "Everybody on the floor!"

The two other customers in the store cowered behind a rack of phone chargers, one of them slumping down. The clerk promptly passed out. Either way, everybody was on the floor. Then, to Rob's horror, one of the customers- the one who hadn't slumped over- produced a cell phone from his pocket. Rob stepped towards him and aimed his 'guns' in the terrified man's face. The phone came on, and...

"Oh no, my battery's dead!" said the man as a red 'charge' symbol appeared on the screen.

Rob sighed in relief- and then both he and the man noticed the rack of phone chargers. Rob stepped forward, prepared to take the phone and crush it if need be, when the man's face fell once again.

"Wait, looks like they don't have anything that fits my old model."

Rob shook his head, feeling less like an intimidating bank robber and more like the world's luckiest petty thief.

"Uh, I suggest you pass out, man," Rob said, rubbing his own arm.

The guy obliged. Well, he tried to look like he was passed out, at least, but that was good enough.

It only took a few minutes to get a TV, an emergency generator (from the back), and a DVD player, load them onto a wheeled storage cart, and get out of Dodge with time to spare before the two genuinely-unconscious people woke up. That had been surprisingly easy! An unsettling feeling that he was being watched crept over him as he made his away from the electronics store, but it dissipated after just a few minutes of walking. Surely just another effect of the sleep deprivation. How many effects did sleep deprivation have, anyway?

Sarah took a sip of her milkshake. It didn't taste like anything, but that was fine since this was a dream. It was a dream, right? Okay, yeah, there was some sort of sky whale floating nearby and she was sitting on a giant toadstool in the middle of the mall. It was definitely a dream. But not a nightmare- not the sort of dream that would be thrust upon you as a punishment by a malevolent entity with an ulterior motive. This was the sort of dream she had most nights.

"He's not here," she mused, looking up into the eyes of her date, who looked at different moments like different boys she knew, most often two of them in particular.

"But I'm here, sweetie," he said, and tried to lean in for a kiss, but he turned to soapy water and spilled all over the floor before he could make contact with her. That was slightly weird, but not 'wake up screaming' weird. She got up and wandered through the dreamscape, feeling like a paper doll in a pool full of molasses as her legs refused to move any faster than slow motion.

"Hello?" she called. "You there? You know who you are."

No response. Sarah balled up her fists, puffed out her cheeks, and pinched herself hard on the arm, waking up in her art clearing with a disappointed sigh. It was then that she heard the sound of footsteps and the squeaking of wheels and decided that either this was Rob or some kind of half-wagon half-humanoid monster. Either way, she had to see for herself!

When the generator was running and the TV on, Sarah moved a rock in front of the eye of providence she had carved into the tree trunk. Rob found that strange. Whatever this DVD was, Sarah didn't want Bill to see it, which seemed rather counter-intuitive considering her entire goal here.

The two of them had dug a little ditch to sit in for ease of viewing. Sarah reached for the DVD enthusiastically, but her smile dropped off her face when she saw Rob, asleep, sprawled over in the ditch. She reached for his shoulder. He screamed so loud that she fell backwards.

"Another nightmare?" she asked.

"Yeah. This one had lots of stabbing." He let out a noise that sounded somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "Thanks for w-w-waking me up! I think I would have s-shh-screamed in my sleep and kept on going if you hadn't."

His voice had a new wavering quality to it, not quite a stutter but something close.

"Okay, you don't seem ready for a 17-hour binge session..."

He suddenly seemed awake. "17 hours? What the heck is on this DVD of yours?"

Sarah held up the box. Her usual cheery demeanor had mostly faded. Rob read aloud.

"Gravity Falls, the complete series," he said, and then did a double-take. "Gravity Falls the complete series? You have this? Where'd you get it?"

"The Awesome Store."

"Yeah, that sounds about right," said Rob, recalling the VHS tape he had once purchased from the forsaken red van. "But why didn't you tell me? Why would you want to keep this information to yourself? That's-! that's-!"

"Calm down! It's because- ergh. This is gonna sound super skeevy, but it's because I know that after you see what's on there, you're gonna say something like-"

"You're telling me you want to mess with that guy? On purpose? That you think of this as some g-game?"

Rob's blood boiled. He wiped his eye, which was wet, probably from the 17 hours of television (interspersed with the occasional bad dream). It didn't help that he had gotten emotional once or twice.

"WHAT ON EARTH IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"

Before Sarah could respond, he had stumbled backwards and fallen unconscious once again.

Chapter Text

The dream had begun in the forest. Most of them began in Elmore, some of them in scenes he recognized, others in generic locations that he had visited and revisited many times, but not this one. He let the familiar sight of his camp lull him into a false sense of security. In his mind, Sarah was sleeping, and he was awake- unbeknownst to him, the opposite was true. Perhaps a guiding hand could have made him lucid by pointing out all the things that didn't add up; he was oddly well-rested despite getting mere minutes of sleep since his meeting with Bill, his traps were gone, the TV and 'conversation pit' were absent, the triangle carved into the bark of a tree had been uncovered, and the fire pit, which had been snuffed for a while, was now gently flickering blue. All of these things escaped his conscious notice. He was at rest. He was so at rest, in fact, that he made the mistake of trying to rest within his rest, sitting down against a tree. And then the bark burned.

He leaped forward with a yelp as the forest around him erupted into a cyan inferno- one that he had caused. Guilt wracked him. Had he learned nothing from Smokey Bear? It wasn't logical- the fire pit was nowhere near the tree that had just gone up in flames- but his dream-addled mind didn't care, and it internally screamed that the pain he felt on his back was his fault, as was the destruction he saw around him. Sarah was right in its path and she was already melting away. He reached out for her. She crumbled cone-first into ash- just then, the fire took to the dirt of the clearing and came rushing towards him. He stomped to snuff it out and his leg was the first thing to burst. Then came a tearing sensation, half-familiar, that spread up his body as the rest of him glitched and then shattered into five million agonizing pieces, overcome by a crackling, all-consuming blaze that burnt holes into his skin, blacked out his vision, and drew forth a scream that plummeted with the rest of him into nothingness and then through it into the waking world. It felt like a punch to the gut when he woke up, both literally and metaphorically. He yelled something that must have been gibberish and then took a deep breath of the real (well, real-er) night air.

Sarah looked even more sleep-deprived than he did. Her half-lidded eyes lethargically fell on him. She yawned, and he yawned in turn.

"Yeah, you're getting haunted," she mumbled. "You need to ask him for help."

"Uh, like heck I will," he slurred, "I'd rather die."

"You might die of sleep deprivation?"

"Is that a thing?" He blinked as a loading wheel almost appeared above his head. "Oh, gosh. Maybe I will. But! But, the guy from the place said I-I'm hard to kill!"

She patted him on the shoulder condescendingly. "You're getting a little delirious."

"A little? No! No, I'm incredibly delirious! Isn't that obvious to you?" He gestured to the bag under his eye and buried his face in his hands.

"You need to ask Bill like he wanted you to!"

"YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME TO ASK HIM BEFORE YOU SHOWED ME WHAT HE'S CAPABLE OF!"

"Okay, okay, I should have! I should have. But it's just your mind!"

"Just my mind? My mind is- my mind is- my mind is my mind! What do you mean, just my mind? My mind is the only part of my body that isn't broken beyond repair!"

"All I'm saying is he's not gonna be able to rearrange your-"

"Even if he did, I only have two. No, that's not what I'm worried about. I'm more worried about DYING OF SLEEP DEPRIVATION! And about him rooting through my memories and using my worst fears against me."

"What are your worst fears, anyways?"

Rob looked around in a panic as if to catch someone listening in, but nobody was there. He sighed in relief.

"What, you think I'm gonna tell you? I don't trust you with that kind of info."

"Fair enough, fair enough. But that just means I'm never gonna tell you that my worst fear is abandonment by all those that I love! Whoops." Her tone sounded deliberate, and she winked at him to confirm it.

"That's not gonna get me to share mine, you know."

"Aw, it was worth a try."

He slumped backwards. Images flashed by in his mind too fast for him to catch any of them. Sarah plopped down next to him and looked where he was looking, not that the direction had any significance beyond that it was where his pupil had happened to land.

"I have a plan," she said with a tiny, near-imperceptible spark in her eye. "It'll be a win-win."

"Oh no," he replied.

Two hours of covering up the carving real good, begging, pleading, shaking Rob awake before he could doze off, making stick-in-dirt schematic drawings, setting up traps, and giving long-winded repeated explanations later, Rob had been convinced Sarah's plan could maybe work without backfiring spectacularly. Maybe. And so he laid his head down on the rock-shaped pillow- no, the pillow-shaped rock- and closed his eye. Just before he could start breathing rhythmically to help himself fall asleep, his body bypassed NREM entirely and sent him straight into the deepest part of his subconscious, where he floated in darkness for a good few minutes before the next dream began.

He found himself in a nondescript middle school classroom that bore a superficial resemblance to his own. None of the classmates were recognizable- all were mirrored versions of him, similar polygonal cyclopean people who might have passed for his siblings if he had any. 'BIG TEST' was written on the blackboard in large chalk letters. That's funny. It was almost familiar. It was almost like-

"You're dreaaaaming," came a feminine voice from outside his mind, and it was as if his third eye (or second eye) snapped wide open. His lucidity returned in an instant and his anxiety about the vaguely-defined big test evaporated. He smacked two of his classmates' heads together for good measure, then got up and strode to the front of the classroom, standing where the teacher ought to have been and putting on a brave face.

"I know you're here," he said. "Show yourself! I'm broken, okay? I'm so tired of having nightmares. You can help! You can help, can't you? You have power over dreams. I need your help!"

Accompanied by an angelic chorus and a light so warm it hardly passed for anything benevolent, the egotistical, smug king of nightmares himself materialized from a geometry poster on the wall and melted the classroom away into blue sparkles.

"Of course I can help! That's my thing," he said, coming to stand on one of the tables, the only thing not dissolving with the rest of the room. "Your mind's pretty unstable. I should be able to go in and fix it up if you'll let me."

"Unstable?"

"Your aura, kid! You're broken! Your own mind is tormenting you-"

"Drop the act!"

"Woah, woah, woah, buddy! Act? What act?"

"Seriously? Are you seriously serious?" Rob's fingers flexed like he wanted to throttle somebody. "Those nightmares aren't my fault, they're yours!"

"You think I have time to go around and give random nightmares out? I'm a busy guy. Why would I-"

"Because of my game. You know, what you mentioned last time."

Bill cackled, fell forward, and slammed a fist on the desk. He looked up with all the feigned benevolence and concern gone from his expression.

"Fine! Fine. You're sharp, I'll give you that! Listen up: the nightmares don't stop until you let me in, alright? Yes, I'm the visionary behind them. Well, most of them."

"Most of them?"

"The one you had right before this one, with the forest on fire. That was all you! I didn't even have to lift a finger! If you were a dream demon I might be out of a job. Nah, maybe I wouldn't go that far, but, hey, Take what praise you can get."

That dream had resembled- no, no, he didn't want to think directly about it in case Bill could see his frontmost thoughts.

"Okay. Let's make a deal," Rob said, bringing to mind Sarah's script from earlier. He deviated from her flowery phrasing but stuck to the general idea. "You stop the nightmares, I let you possess me."

Bill suddenly squinted.

"Who said anything about possessing anybody?"

"Isn't that what you-"

"I'm not complaining! I'm just surprised you brought that up unprompted! It's almost like you know more than you're letting on, you- agh, you little scamp!"

Bill pinched his cheek, careful to warp it to be squishy this time around. It almost seemed like his fingers would burn straight through out of internal fury. He was equal parts angry at this audacious mystery guy, elated at the possibility of having a new vessel to get around with, and skeptical that this was going to work out for him.

"You got me there. I, uh, drew up this contract," said Rob. "It has the terms to our deal."

This had been a key part of Sarah's plan A, and so he thought hard and built a contract into the mindscape using the mnemonic she had designed. Of course, if this failed, there was always plan B.

"A contract? What are you, some kind of kid lawyer extraordinaire? No need to be so formal about it."

"On the contrary, I think it'd be better for both of us if the terms of our agreement were firmly laid out."

Bill almost backed out of the mindscape and left Rob to rot in a nightmare, but his curiosity, driven by the uncomfortable void in his all-seeing knowledge, kept him there to look over the stack of papers. he tore it apart and split into 12 versions of himself. Each one read one page, and when they were done they coalesced rather morbidly into the larger triangle of moments ago. Nothing was up with the phrasing, but surely this kid wanted to trick him, right? He read over it again and again. The only thing to raise an eyebrow at was the 'this or that' clause, which stipulated that Bill would only look at Rob's memories from either before or after his arrival in town. Before was obviously the better option! Why was that clause even there?

"What's this one about, huh?"

"It's just a trust thing. If you break that term, the deal's off- it's just to make sure you won't go behind my back."

There was no way that was the real explanation. But what was? Why on earth would anyone give another access to any of their memories, but only half of them at once? What if this was like a chess game and Rob had given him the question specifically to bait him into picking the 'before' memories when the 'after' memories were more valuable? Should he pick the 'before' memories as his odd version of common sense dictated or should he do the opposite because that was what Rob was probably least expecting?

"Oh! One question."

The demon crossed his arms and gestured for Rob to go on.

"When am I gonna die?"

"Huhh? Really? That's your question? That's kinda sudden! Geez... okay, let's see."

Bill looked forward into the future just as he had many times before. Seeing his own actions was always a little bit of a headache for him, but seeing others'? Easy peasy. He looked forward and forward and then his mind slammed into a wall and his eye snapped wide open.

"...Is it a really shocking way? Do I get hit by an asteroid or something?" Rob raised his eyebrow.

"You're gonna be murdered by a gunman at the age of 67," said Bill, the ever-experienced liar, in a well-disguised panic over what just happened. "but what surprised me was that the gunman is gonna be wearing a really weird- oooops! No spoilers! Wouldn't it be a shame if you managed to avoid it because of me?"

Against all odds, Rob didn't beg him to elaborate. Bill promptly forgot about that odd wall in his future sight, decided that interacting with this kid was the most frustrating thing he had done in eons, and held out his hand for a handshake to bring the interaction to a welcome close. The mindscape fell away as Rob reciprocated and Bill was relieved, especially when his legs- much longer than he was used to- and his head- much more separate from his body than he was used to- and his everything- much more physical than he was used to- filled up with sensation. He sat up with his eye wide open (no depth perception to adjust to, which was a plus) and found himself staring into the cheerful, mildly deranged face of... a large ice cream cone? No, that couldn't have been right. The grin fell off of Bill's newly-acquired face and he tried to reach up to push her away.

It was then he realized with a start that his hands were tied behind his back.

Chapter Text

It was as if the layers of sleep deprivation and bodily fatigue were stripped away from him all at once. No, that wasn't right- he was being stripped away from them, not the other way around. First came relief, and then came the realization that he hadn't for one moment been fully awake since he arrived on the first morning. Looking down at his body, which was thrashing around violently and baring its gums at the behest of its temporary occupant, he thought, 'geez, I look awful' (not that he looked much different from usual.) It was quite the hit to his self esteem (not that his self esteem had too many hit points.)

"Who the heck are you?" said Bill in his own voice, and then he backtracked and realized that he had promised he'd only ever say that once in ten billion lifetimes. "...I think I must have hit my head, 'cause I don't remember jack! Woah! I'm suddenly getting the urge to stab a hot poker into my eye! Heh heh, weird. Untie my hands so I can go and do that, would you?"

Sarah kept smiling that same unsettling smile. Rob wondered if anyone would have untied him after hearing that request, and considered for a moment if Bill was playing inscrutable 5D chess or if he truly was floundering for the right words and saying whatever came to mind. Just then, Bill turned his head at an unsettling angle and looked right up at Rob.

"So you think you're pretty clever, huh?"

He pretended not to hear him.

"You forgot I'm not stuck here! I can go whenever I want!" he yelled (or said- his volume was always an issue).

"And void the contract?" Sarah asked, leaning uncomfortably close to Bill's face.

"Huh?" He raised an eyebrow. "What do you know about the contract?"

"I know lots of things," she replied with an audible satisfaction in her voice. That was- no, impossible, Bill thought. Could that seriously have been some kind of coincidence? Who was this? He had to look at Rob's memories, and he had to do it now. But the 'before' memories or the 'after' memories? He was great at chess, he was, but they were playing checkers. He was good at checkers, too, mind you, but they had the checkers pieces on the chess board even though tournament rules should forbid them from bringing in pieces for other games- ah, this metaphor was tearing at the seams! Why couldn't it be as simple as them being his pawns? In his mind, the metaphorical chessboard grew orifices and them turned inside out and digested itself.

"I'll find another pawn," he said to Rob, referring partially to the metaphorical situation. "You think you're valuable? Needed? Don't make me laugh! Ahahaha! Too late, i'm already laughing!"

Sarah kept on smiling down.

"Do you have a twin?" she asked.

"W-what? Uh, like I said, I'm kind of an amnesiac right now! And having hallucinations- hey, uh, what's my name?"

He narrowed his eye, dreading the answer that was about to come out of her mouth. She would say Rob, right? It would be so much simpler if she said-

"What's your name? Do you mean your name or his name? Oh, sorry, I mean, do you want me to say Rob's name or your name? Rob's name is Rob."

"I-"

"Your name is Bill! Isn't it?"

He yelled in frustration and Rob thought that, even if for just a moment, Bill passed perfectly for him, a deeply unsettling realization.

"Okay, I'm taking that as a yes."

She passed a hand over her face and switched effortlessly into a scowl, leaning over him like this was some sort of bizarre horizontal police interrogation.

"Alright, slick," she said in a gruff tone, "You better get talking. Did you ever have any siblings? What were your parents like? Were you ever a baby or did you pop out fully grown? And did you have the hat and tie when you were born or did you get them later?"

This situation would have been hilarious if he wasn't one of the people involved.

"...Wouldn't it be silly if I broke your friend's wrists to get out of these ropes?" he said through an insincere, face-splitting smile.

That shut them up! Finally, some fear! Priceless. All he had to do was get rid of those pesky human inhibitions and yank real hard, now! But, wait, how would he break into the Mystery Shack with no hands? How would he try and pour something spicy into his eye with no hands? How would he do anything at all with no hands? On the bright side, neither of them had treated that like a bluff. That was good. Maybe he would just break Rob's wrists and leave the body for the look on their faces alone. There were other pawns- this had all been one big detour in his plan, to begin with. He had to focus on getting out of the-

Oh, right. Oh, right. The Nightmare Realm. The one that this kid had gotten into and then out of into the third dimension. The whole reason he had even taken interest in Rob and his many mysteries. It was time to take a look- and he knew this was the right choice- it was time to take a look at Rob's memories from before he arrived here. Unknowingly casting aside the chance at knowledge of his eventual defeat and how to avoid it, he made his choice and closed his eye.

"Wait, no! Don't put me back!" said Rob's mindscape form as he was pulled towards the body, a first in all of Bill's many centuries of interacting with humans. His pleas were ineffective and Bill brought both of them into a dreamless sleep, where he cracked his knuckles and prepared for the gargantuan task of sorting through the cyclops' memories. What would the boy's mind look like? A quaint childhood home? A lawless desert island? Some sort of polygonal Picasso dimension?

He saw all three, sort of. In front of him was TV static as far as the eye could see, surrounded by black borders above and below, marred with floating islands that held fully-intact buildings- houses. A mall. A school. A junkyard. A forest (though the entrance to that one had a sign reading 'NO BILL ALLOWED', which meant it had to have been Rob's post-arrival memories.) Hovering in the top left corner of his field of vision regardless of where he turned was a pause symbol, as if he was looking not at a dreamscape but at a television screen containing one.

There was a wall of light in the distance beyond which all of the islands looked unfinished, like storyboard drawings. Past those were simple sticky notes and then nothingness- the furthest extent of Rob's memories, no doubt. Dreamscapes were never linear or easy to navigate, but with time he could definitely piece together an understandable story. It was just a matter of picking a starting place. And where better to start than the nearest building to him- a mall?

The mall was dark and cold. Gone was the crowd that had been a constant presence since the first day of the apocalypse, gone was the frenetic atmosphere. No one was here. Maybe the fighters had been sent through the ceiling and all of the spectators had followed them out to wherever they had landed? Sure, maybe. Either way, hoping that this was temporary, he took up his usual spot in the car park and waited for business that took several hours to arrive. The sound of footsteps approaching was such a relief that he forgot about his mystery man act entirely for a moment.

"Oh, Harold," he said. "Ah! I mean, what may my establishment do for you?"

"You will refer to me as Mayor Wilson."

"...Since when does this place have a mayor?"

"Since the Order Order reestablished order in Eastmore."

"The what? I've been gone for five hours, how much could have changed?"

"Well, I'm glad you asked-"

"Actually, I'd rather not know."

He cleared his throat and began to answer anyways.

"The unruly atmosphere needed to be quashed lest this town tear itself apart. I and several like-minded colleagues put together a new order for order, the Order Order, in opposition to the Chaos Order, which currently occupies the territory of-" he shuddered- "Westmore."

"Westmore?"

'Mayor Wilson' stood at one of the broken car park windows and the van reluctantly followed. Sure enough, there was now a fence with plenty of police tape at the parallel edges of a few floating islands, beyond which almost every building was on fire and distant figures yelled and screamed near-profanities.

"Oh," said the driver. "So you're preventing this town from being torn apart... by dividing it in half?"

"Precisely! Ah, and if you intend to do business in Eastmore, you need to know we've reestablished a stable currency around here. No more 'anything goes'."

"How'd you convince people to adopt one?"

"With money," he said, proudly putting his hands on his hips and then quietly, quickly speaking under his breath, "andthethreatofviolence."

"Sorry?"

"Ahem! Nothing, nothing, my friend. Now, the new currency is Pogs. They told me my collection would never be valuable, but look at who's laughing now! Oh ho, it's me. I'll take one can of caviar." He emptied three wallets full of the aforementioned things through the window and onto the driver's lap before he could even protest.

"I don't have any caviar in stock."

"...Hm. Well, then, give me the closest thing you have, and by royal decree, you shall fetch some next time you stock up."

"Royal decree? You're a mayor!"

"A mayor whose territory you are parked in. I have supreme authority to boot your vehicle, sir, and all the Pogs I need to get it done!"

"I'm going to Westmore," said the driver, revving up and plunging through the window, but not before he grabbed a few food items from the back and knocked Harold down like a bowling pin with a well-placed breakfast burrito to the face.

The mall was full of light. The windows betrayed no signs of the TV static world outside, though the clouds in the sky were frozen in place and the pause symbol loomed where it has been from the start. There were beings here, also frozen- blob people, food people, shape people (who Bill found oddly familiar). All of their faces were missing, covered up by dripping static ooze. One figure, being dragged into a static door in the center of the hall, was entirely obscured by the ooze- why just him? Bill thought the figure might have been Rob himself, but after a while he noticed that there was a Rob here, too, not too far from the door, also perfectly frozen. This was a snapshot of a memory.

Entering an unmanned video store, he encountered more obscured figures and flipped through the DVDs on sale, each one a memory that popped up on the TV behind the counter as soon as he opened the case. They all seemed to be of various sorts of traps, but none of them went past one still frame. Weird- were this guy's memories really so bad that they were just still pictures? Or-

Bill glanced up at the pause button in the corner, narrowed his eye, and left the video store to look for the nearest TV remote, which he found without much fanfare in memory-Rob's frozen hand. Sure enough, the world sprung to life after a single press! But things were still perfectly silent. Before Bill could adjust the volume, memory-Rob chucked the remote into the static door, which he promptly closed. He would have found a way to follow it in if a wall of credits hadn't suddenly started rolling. Unable to access the rest of the memories in the mall, he decided he'd return later and popped right back out into the dreamscape proper, making a mental note that Rob had a lot of traps in his repertoire. That told him absolutely nothing important.

Next up was the school.

The student body painted just as chaotic an image of the boy's home dimension as the mall patrons had. It seemed at first that Rob wasn't actually present in any of the various school-centered memories until Bill noticed the consistent presence of a grotesque (in his rather hypocritical opinion) blue-skinned monocular student in a near-identical outfit. It occurred to him that maybe something happened to change the kid's appearance, but what? He had no frame of reference, no glimpses into this guy's life to guide him through the dreamscape. He was supposed to be in control, and yet here he was, blindly looking for something of consequence in a sea of apparent irrelevance. Just then the school shifted and distorted around him. The students vanished. The floor caved in. Every door in the hallway fell away- all but one. The superintendent's office?

The superintendent's office was still intact, and so were the machines! It had been a perilous path around several unstable 'potholes' (read: holes in the floor that led down into the abyss) and through at least one crowd of pitchfork-wielding war paint-wearing children, but he was here, and he could reclaim- and hopefully resell- his wares. While he loaded them back into the van, he checked the tires for any signs that one of the kids had been stupid enough to stand in his way, and thankfully found nothing. Not that getting run over would have killed most of them. Most of them had survived worse.

The driver wandered around the sales floor and checked inventory. None of the contained items had breached their cases, there were no mysterious liquids on the floor, everything was-

His eyes grew wide as his gaze fell upon his media shelf, where one of the DVDs for sale was conspicuously missing.

The superintendent's office had four tall cages in it and nothing else. They were covered by dark cloths like museum exhibits yet to be unveiled. The room was silent. When he yanked down the coverings, he found that there were four frozen figures, one in each cage- three versions of Rob and one older human man in a suit. Was this a memory? What kind of weird life had Rob lived?

A few moments later, when nothing happened, Bill turned to leave, only to be interrupted by a voice from the second cage.

"Let us out!" said memory-Rob #2. "Don't just float there! What's wrong with you?"

He turned around, unsure what exactly was going on.

"We can hang out! Maybe talk about friend stuff," suggested memory-Rob #1.

"Friend stuff? How naive. None of us are friends here. We have disavowed friendship," said memory-Rob #3 in a deep, English-accented voice. "You ought to let me out and keep the others imprisoned-"

"NO!" yelled #2.

"That really sucks of you to suggest!" yelled #1. "Seriously, man?"

"Calm down, calm down. Who, uh, who are you guys? And who's that?" Bill pointed to the human, whose gaze was silent and intense.

"I'm Rob," said memory-Robs #1 and #2 at the same time in happy and angsty tones, respectively.

"I'm Dr. Wrecker," said memory-Rob #3.

"No, he's Rob too," said the human, finally. "We all are."

"What, you're also a Rob?" Bill crossed his arms.

"It's a rather long story."

"I'll find out one way or another. Are you guys, what, alternate personalities?"

"We're all just parts of the mind," offered Rob #3. "I know full well that I've moved on from this identity, and yet it lingers within me, as me. Try not to think too hard about it."

The others nodded.

"We can still be friends!" said #1. Bill promptly pulled the cloth back over his cage and he went silent like a canary, but none of the others protested.

"What would happen if I bent the bars and let you out?"

"How should we know, man?" said #2.

"You're the master of the mind. You tell us," said #3- Wrecker?

"Doing something so reckless would earn you detention- I mean, excuse me, interfere with the natural functioning of my mind," said human-memory-Rob. " Regardless of the immature prattling of-"

"Who are you calling immature?"

"You're a child-"

"You're also a child! We're all a child!"

"I like to think of myself as an adult," offered Wrecker, and he earned death stares from #2 and the human one.

"Uh, do you guys want me to-"

Before Bill could finish his sentence, both of the non-Wrecker Robs nodded, and Bill took that as a sign to cover Wrecker's cage.

"You being in my head makes me uncomfortable," said #2.

"Tough luck. You let me in."

"Fair enough," said #2, pulling the cloth into his cage and covering himself up. Bill and the human were left in the office, staring at each other with mutual contempt.

"You have overstayed your welcome. I suggest you leave my office this instant."

"Your office? You're the superintendent? How old is Rob, anyways?"

"That's a matter of how you count."

"What's that supposed to-"

"13," said Superintendent Rob. "not that I would admit it."

"13 and he's looked like you before?"

"How would you like to have two eyes?" said Superintendent Rob, raising an eyebrow and speaking in a sinister tone.

Bill left the room before he could even wonder about what that threat meant.

Glimpses of silent memories stored in the junkyard and assorted houses made one thing clear: there was something that was, even here in his target's mind, being kept from him. Nearly ever memory featured at least one figure whose features were obscured by static. Sometimes more. This figure was the target of Rob's ire more often than not, but it was difficult to figure out what was happening with no sound, and so far none of the memories had contained any TV remotes for Bill to use. As he approached the wall beyond which things looked unfinished, he entered one final house, recounting everything he could now say he knew about Rob.

The boy was a career criminal with hijacking, kidnapping, and destruction of property on his rap sheet. He was good at making traps, but perhaps not good at using them. Much of his time- in fact, the vast majority of his time- was spent plotting to destroy and/or trying to destroy a mysterious figure whose form had been scrubbed from memory, save for a short period of time during which he had been trying to kill a banana or two instead. His surroundings were modern. He was 13 years old. Something had changed to make him look slightly less freaky, but what exactly caused that change was unclear as of yet. There were shape people in the kid's home dimension who Bill knew from somewhere, maybe, or maybe most other triangles just looked the same.

None of that felt very useful. Sure, maybe he could use the criminal thing for blackmail, but this was in a whole different universe, and besides, this guy didn't seem like the type to be ashamed of himself. Embarrassing him also seemed like a dead end; he had been embarrassed so many times and kept getting right back up. He was the sort of person to fail 563 times in a row and not take even the slightest hit to his self-esteem. That was probably because it was already at rock bottom. The kid's ego was there, but he wasn't naive enough to make it easy to stroke. All in all: he was the furthest thing from an ideal target.

The last house was currently bare, save for a basement door that sat wide open.

"Sweetie, use your fingers. That's where all the grip strength is." She put her hands around his, repositioning them around the handle of the nailbat and guiding his arms in a swing. "Okay, now, go get 'em!"

He closed his eyes, gulped, and swung blindly, hitting the hastily-drawn wooden cutout of a cyborg in leather and sending it to the ground with a massive dent in its face.

"Ah!" He opened his eyes. "I did it! I didn't even hit myself with the recoil that time! YES! What do you say, Darwin, could I totally take on an army of radioactive monsters, or what? Oh, no need to answer, I know I could- AH!"

He spun the bat in celebration and smacked himself in the face with it, keeling over backwards. Meanwhile, the small rabbit in the back of the room erased the 'STREAK: 1' on the recently-established family training whiteboard and replaced it with 'STREAK: 0'.

"I don't know about you guys, but I think that was good enough to count towards my streak," said Gumball from his position on the floor. "I didn't even give myself a black eye that time! You gotta give a guy credit where credit is due."

Darwin sighed and put a gold star sticker reading 'ALMOST FINE' on his sweater.

"What, you don't even have any that say 'GREAT JOB'?"

"We're out of 'GREAT JOB'. Soon enough we're gonna have to break into the 'NOT THE WORST EVER' stickers."

"This is an emergency," he said, sitting up. "We gotta go out there!"

He scrambled for the basement stairs, but Nicole blocked his way, brandishing the nailbat.

"No family of mine is stepping out of that door until each of us can take down twenty cardboard cutouts in a row with perfect form," she growled, holding out the bat. "Now, remember-" her tone suddenly became encouraging- "the key to grip strength is using your fingers."

The memories in this house were fragmented and out of order. Bill moved from room to room, usually unable to see anything but the static-covered figures, who spent so much time here that it might have been their house. Was Rob related to them, or did he live here for some other reason?

Just when he thought he might complete his tour in silent mode, another TV remote, this time in the hands of one of the hidden figures, appeared in one of the glimpses of the past. He rushed forward and turned on the sound. There was very little of significance to hear, except maybe that Rob's voice was a lot deeper in this memory. Because of the remote? Was that something he could be affected by? That had a practical application. Took him long enough to find one. The static guys' voices were garbled and unintelligble.

Bill left the house the second it emptied of memories and floated before the odd wall. His attempt to simply pass through it, strangely, didn't work. He hit it like a pane of glass. After several more failures that he was glad nobody was around to see, he noticed a thin seam, stuck his hands into it, and wrenched a hole open. Was that doing damage to the kid's mind? Eh, whatever.

Before Bill could go beyond the wall, a van burst through the hole, skidded to a stop, and then pulled away, dissolving a few feet from the barrier. It was followed shortly by yet another memory-Rob. This one was freshly glitching and looking to be in pain. It got up, expressed some palpable anger, and stormed off, dissolving just as the van had; the memory was a shorter loop than most of the others. When it restarted, Bill floated through the hole and saw, to his great satisfaction, a decidedly un-glitchy Rob in the distance.

"Guys! Guys, wait for me!"

For once, he didn't need dialogue to understand what was happening. The boy had clung to the back of the van and been crunched between two sheets of the fabric of reality. Bill didn't know something like that could happen, but it held endless potential for amusement.

The area beyond the wall was sketchy and incomplete. This would have been his early childhood- the one piece of his life missing from the rest of his dreamscape- and yet there were holes here, holes where his childhood home, his parents, his entire pre-adolescence should have been. It was as if there had never been any memories here, only gaps. Why was he so bored? Why was this so cumbersome? Why did he not want to go back through all the memories with sound this time? Somewhere along the line he had missed the memory of how Rob traveled to- and then out of- the Nightmare Realm, but that could have been absolutely anywhere.

His last order of business was wandering to the forest island and floating in front of the 'NO BILL ALLOWED' sign for a good 10 dream-minutes. He would come back here. He had to. But he didn't want to spend another second in this miserable place! Not when he could be making some progress on his original plan, which was so close to fruition that he could nearly see time dying already.

He wasn't frustrated, he told himself, he was calm. He was the master of this place, and he did not get upset so easily- he thought back to the recent time he got upset pretty easily during an in-mind confrontation and then tried to stop thinking about it for the sake of his own confidence. Maybe he was frustrated! Maybe he was-

With a scream that could have passed for a human affected by a night terror, he sat up in the physical world, seething, and the real Rob was ejected once again.

Chapter Text

"For the l-last time, man, you'll l-lose," said the little rectangle, standing at the edge of the ring, knees buckled, voice quaking. "Do you see h-how big t-th-that guy is? He'll have you for lunch, Ed!"

"⬟●●⬧㉤...❖!" responded Ed, which meant, 'I shall live by my code of honor or die in a blaze of glory while attempting to defend it, you cowardly quadrilateral!' The towering theropod at the other end of the ring, whose head almost touched the ceiling, blinked one massive eye and made half the crowd cower.

"I don't wanna lose you."

"▲◐▣◐." That meant, 'then join me and we shall live or die by one another's sides.'

The rectangle sniffed back a tear and then darted off into the crowd to stand alongside a waiting pentagon, one who shared, to its relief, in the gloomy atmosphere.

"Tell me how to convince him," said the rectangle.

"I remember when honor used to mean something to you."

"Don't give me that!"

As the commentator returned from his break, the rectangle reassured itself that there would be plenty of shapes left even without Ed.

The salesguy 250 or so years back had claimed it was 'fermented suffering'. The method of extracting and liquefying suffering was beyond Bill, and he secretly suspected that description was phony- suffering would have more of a crystal-ish texture if made solid- but, either way, he didn't want to hinder his enjoyment by finding out what the stuff really was, especially with the chance that it was really something much less appetizing. He only ever busted the bottle out on special occasions seeing as the salesguy had fallen into a dimensional acid cloud and disintegrated shortly after handing it over.

Just as he poured out a shot, the door above him, which he had forgotten was there due to lack of use, swung open, and his hand tremored just enough to send the liquid pouring out of the bottle and up (screwed-up Escherian gravity had its downsides) directly into the center of his eye.

"▛◢◐▞▟☠☠☠!!! "

Pyronica (though he couldn't see her with his current predicament) poked her head out of the door. Her facial expression was 10% 'sorry' and 90% 'that was hilarious'.

"What's that mean?" she asked.

"Ha," he said in the furthest tone from an actual laugh. "Uh, don't you worry about it."

Chapter Text

"What is it you've always wanted? I can give it to you!"

Sarah only smiled down at him.

"What I've always wanted?" she asked.

"I just need to get into town and, shall we say, take care of some personal business- don'tcha worry, no hot pokers involved... that you'll have to see! If you free me, when all that happens, hey! I'll owe you one. Think big! Do you want a guy you like to like you back? Do you want a pool full of money to swim in? Do you want to rule your own kingdom? Small potatoes!"

He would have been holding a hand out for a handshake out of instinct, only something was still keeping his arms behind his back. Sarah rubbed her chin, really drawing out the whole 'thinking hard' shtick, and then nodded her head. So she did want something-

"I want you to tell me about your past," said Sarah, and Bill groaned with a deep-seated sort of fury.

"If I do that, you'll free me?"

"Sure, sure."

"I need a real promise, here. If you backstab me, I'm melting you down the millisecond I get into the third dimension for real!"

"I promise."

She patted his head and he screamed so loud the glass of the TV in the clearing rattled. It was like a train wreck in that it was very difficult for Rob to look away, but even now that he had turned the other direction, he could still hear their loud back-and-forth. Most of the 'loud' was coming from Bill.

"Did you have any siblings?"

"No!"

"An actual answer! Ooh, that's a start, that's a start. Now, tell me what your parents were like..."

As Rob left the campsite and hovered into the forest, he could almost feel Bill's gaze burning a hole into his back, but he really needed to be able to hear himself think. Thinking this clearly would be out of his reach the moment he was back in his sleep-deprived body- and he had a lot to think about. Order of thought business 1: the past! The past that, as now occurred to him, he was currently in.

Which was weird. Sarah had already seen the whole series before Elmore collapsed, so logically, upon coming here, he should have come out after Weirdmageddon, right? And yet all signs pointed to that not being true. Bill was in the Nightmare Realm, not dead and/or a statue, at least that was what he had said. He had also mentioned getting into the third dimension for real. Hey! Why was this place called the third dimension? Rob, now he was a bona-fide 3D guy. This place was flat. It gave him a little rush to think that he could perceive something that even Bill seemingly couldn't, and then he remembered that forbidden knowledge was never thrilling for very long. Eventually it just ate you up inside... just like everything else did. He let out an angsty sigh that nobody could hear and committed point 1 to memory.

"My old man got angry a lot. Never at me, no, never at me- well, except for when I..." Bill glanced off into the distance for a second, smile faltering- "...point is, he got angry at everybody and everything else! He was the sort of guy to imagine somebody bumping into him on the street and start yelling at thin air." Sarah couldn't tell if his facial expression had gotten a little more genuine or if it was a trick of the light- or perhaps of the exhausted facial muscles. She nodded intently.

"This is all honest, right? Not just a lie because your real past is too personal or something?"

"Me? Lie? No! Psssh, no! No way. Kid, what do you take me for? A-ny-ways. My mom- ha! Now there was a firebrand..."

If the red van could transcend channels, perhaps it had simply arrived here in the middle of a rerun. In that case, Rob wondered, did that logic still apply? Assuming they hadn't interfered with the timeline, Weirdmageddon could still come on schedule. Afterwards, would time reset back to episode 1, like it had apparently been doing over and over since the show finished airing, assuming the rerun theory was correct? Maybe not. His own show surely had reruns as well and yet he had lasted a week beyond what he thought had to have been the series finale. Maybe they'd just keep going. Their own private sequel season- but Rob didn't want to spend his time here stalking the Pines twins back to California if the opportunity indeed presented itself. Sarah, though, would definitely do that, wouldn't she? Maybe he could tag along. Maybe he could split from her and go see what kind of town this world had where Elmore was supposed to be. It wasn't as if they could just hop on a bus, though. There was no easy way to get home- no, not home-

Home!

Home had been so far away for what felt like so long now, and the stressors of life in this unfamiliar environment had driven it to the back of his conscious mind. He had been so focused on the present that he had neglected both his past and his future. If he ever got the chance to head back to Elmore, would he pick up right where he left off, or would he land somewhere in his past? Then there would be two of him. Maybe he could change things. With twice the Rob, there might be twice the chance at a successful exodus! But, then again, that might cause a time paradox and erase him, which he refused to knowingly go through again. Why was he even entertaining the possibility of returning? The van was never coming back. He had to accept that. He thought he had accepted that. He was not the type to be swayed by the naive dreams of others. Not now, not ever.

Either way, Rob had survived the void for what felt like months, so he assured himself that, whatever came afterwards, a few days of the apocalypse would be a piece of cake.

"...but back home, biology and geometry were the same class. When I found out that third-dimensional kids had to have both of 'em separately, I was all, man! What a bummer. If I was human I'd just skip out on the whole school thing. Heck, I wish I had the foresight to do that when I actually was in school, 'cause ultimately they taught me absolutely jack about useful stuff like how to pull the wool over people's eyes! Now that's an idea for a class. If I had my own school I'd make Swindling 101 a core subject, but, get this, I'd give the kids incorrect advice as a joke..."

It seemed pretty uncharacteristic of Bill to just jump straight into possession. Part of Rob thought that maybe he had somehow unintentionally schmoozed the demon into doing it- this part was very proud of himself. The other part of Rob thought that Bill probably had a plan beyond what was immediately obvious to either of the Elmoreans- this part was very nervous about the prospect. There was a lot that didn't add up about his actions, and that all came back to the question of when exactly the two of them were. Maybe he just hadn't been summoned properly yet? Was there some kind of time limit on summoning? It boggled the mind- not that it was a particularly complex question, but it was one that nobody could give the answers to except for-

"...and you have no idea how long that took for me to get down! I was practicing my opening speech to this asteroid for days on end and still, still messing up! All I'm saying is, yes, I have plenty of regrets. Plenty of lines I only ever came up with after losing the chance to use 'em. You can manufacture another chance, but it's not the same! It's the spontaneity of it, kid, you don't get it! It's the organic reactions, it's the look on the other guy's face- ack! My throat hurts! Curse these vocal chords for putting a limiter on my genius."

Sarah laid a cool hand on Rob's body's torso right where his neck would have been. Her posture had changed- she was sitting cross-legged and upright on a nearby rock, nodding attentively as Bill found himself spilling his feelings all over the place.

"When you think about your home," she asked in a measured tone, "how do you feel?"

"Huh? Where did that question- happy," he responded hoarsely, driven by instinct alone. Sarah gently shook her head in response. "Angry. Regretful. Sad... hey! Why am I telling you all this?"

"Durapy."

"That's, what, something plus therapy?"

"Duress plus therapy."

"Ah ha ha! You'll go places, kid."

"I like to think so. So, which of those emotions you mentioned would you say is dominant?"

"It's like a regret sundae with anger sauce and sadness sprinkles. See, I don't have a heart, but I do have this mostly-flat organ that looks kind of like a heart if you look at it from a certain angle, and when I think about home, it kind of aches, but on a different subject- you're okay with me changing the subject, right?- it also aches when I think about this time Kryptos fell into this magma cloud as we spent a few hundred years putting his molecules back together. That meant I had to miss out on the start of the Bronze age, which, I mean, what a shame, 'cause..."

The way back to camp was quiet and uneventful. More and more things weren't adding up, and this was one of them. There were so many monsters living around this area, and yet he had hardly encountered any of them since he arrived! Why was it that the forest seemed so empty? Maybe he and Sarah had established territory that the others were afraid to encroach on, an idea that made him feel like a wild animal. It was a confusing feeling. And why hadn't Sarah melted, seeing as it was summer (or at least that's what he had assumed) and it was hot out? And where on her person had she hidden that rope and that DVD? Maybe he didn't want to know the answer to that last one.

Thinking hard about the questions had only given him more questions. There were no answers, and of course there weren't, because he didn't care to look for answers. He had bigger things to worry about. But now these questions were his biggest things to worry about- well, them and the demon who was currently in his body. It was actually easy to forget about that, but he could hear Bill's indistinct voice through the trees as he approached. He didn't seem hesitant anymore. He was... rambling.

"...and that's how I got my powers. That was exclusive, you hear? You're trustworthy, right? You wouldn't tell anybody, right? You wouldn't want to get turned inside out, right?"

"I won't tell a soul."

"You better not! And I have turned people inside out before. That reminds me of this time when- oh, hey, Rob's back!"

Sarah turned her head 360 degrees.

"Where is he?"

"How about you untie my hands and I'll point for you?"

Sarah reached down and undid the rope around one of Bill's hands, and soon enough Rob had an accusatory finger in his invisible face. Within a few moments, Sarah was my his side, a little too close so that their bodies were slightly overlapping, but the sentiment was there, at least.

"One more thing before I let you go-"

"Don't let him go!" said Rob, but nobody could hear him.

"-Did you ever have a thing for Stanford?"

Bill's eye- or rather Rob's eye- widened. Mental-Rob's eye widened, too.

"Hey, what do you know about-"

"Ah... no need to continue. Your face has told me everything I need to know~" said Sarah, almost surely misinterpreting a few facial cues and untying the other wrist. In an instant, Rob's body lurched forward like Frankenstein's monster coming to life on the operating table and let out a maniacal cackle that put all of Rob's own evil laughs to absolute shame. Maybe he could ask for technique tips... no, no, this wasn't the time!

"Wait! I have some questions for you as well!"

"Tough luck, kid, that wasn't part of our deal."

"You can't just-"

"Hasta la vista!" said Bill, and scrambled out of the clearing with all the bodily coordination of a marionette being puppeteered by a third grader.

"Hasta la vista?" mused Sarah. "Does that mean he's gonna come back at some point?"

Rob hoped he didn't come back with four broken limbs and a hot poker burn mark in his eye. Hey, wait, he could follow Bill! It wasn't as if he had a way to communicate with Sarah, anyway; she had thought of making a sock puppet for him to use during the planning phase, but as it turned out, neither of them wore socks, so that was a tall order. He noticed mid-thought that she was turning on the TV.

"I'm hoping this will work..." she spoke in response to a question he hadn't asked. "Maybe you can make like that girl from Ringu and mess with this DVD? Wouldn't that be cool? Plus, you're, like, a TV guy, aren't you?"

"...I'm a cyclops."

She couldn't hear him. Throwing the fear of disappointment to the wind, he approached the TV and stuck his hand through the screen. It startled him and amused Sarah when a burst of static momentarily replaced the DVD menu and distortion spread from the intersection point of his arm and the video!

"Ah!" he yelped, and his voice was joined by a clip of Dipper making a similar noise that suddenly appeared on the screen. Wait...

"Was that you, Rob?"

"It- was-" came two clips in short succession, playing without an episode being selected on the main menu. "It's- me- rob-"

Saying his name had been a test, but as it turned out, the word 'rob'- the verb- had been used in place of it. Okay, that would do, but what about-

"Earth to Sarah," he said. The first two words got through fine, but the third one was replaced with another burst of static. Come to think of it, wasn't static a signal thing? What business did it have on a DVD? Wasn't this TV too modern to have that kind of interference? Whatever.

"Earth to you," he clarified. It was like listening to a live YTP and all these acronyms were getting to his head now.

"So, what did you think of our conversation earlier? Do you think Bill was full of it, or was he just opening up? Either way, the stuff he said has so much potential! My heart is leaping out of my chest, you have no idea. I am so going to use this. But enough about me, let's talk about you! How cool is it being a ghost? Or a mindscape apparition, or whatever?"

"It's- ok," the TV said, "I- wasn't- listening- to- Bill- I- was- off- thinking."

"Whaaaat? But he said so much juicy stuff! Oh, well, I guess that means it's all a secret between me and him! You know what? That totally has appeal. Thinking, you say? About what?"

"Stuff-"

"Don't give me that."

He paused for a long moment.

"Well- first- thing's- first- we- might- be- in- a- time- loop."

"A time loop? Where'd you get that idea?"

"This- is- a-" there was another burst of static as Rob tried and failed to convey the word 'rerun'.

"It's a what?"

"I'll- tell- you- about- it- and- the- rest- when- I- get- my- body- back."

"Oh yeah! Your body! We should follow Bill for only that reason, and definitely not for any other reason!"

"Whatever."

"I'm gonna sneak out of the woods," she said, sticking a handful of wood chips to her face in an effort to camouflage herself and standing on all fours like some sort of creepypasta monster. "Don't worry, you won't see me."

"Wait-" the TV said. "How- am- I- supposed- to- follow- you- if- I can't- see-"

She had already scuttled out of sight. Rob sat up, pulled his arm out of the screen, and headed in the direction he had seen Bill go earlier, wondering with every new rustle of the foliage around him whether Sarah was nearby, watching, out of sight. The idea unsettled him more than the idea of Bill watching him. That didn't bode well for their friendship. No! This wasn't a friendship! It was...

Well, he didn't really know what it was.

"Sir, would you classify your vehicle as a time machine?"

"I would classify it as a... van."

"But if you've used it to travel through time-"

"I haven't. I'm simply traveling between dimensions that measure time differently, which I'm sure is perfectly legal, and I am also planning to drive away before you have the chance to tell me it isn't."

"You're under- hey! Come back here!"

Chapter Text

Rob arrived opposite the Mystery Shack by pure, blind luck after only fifteen minutes and discovered absolutely nothing of significance happening after a cursory glance through the wall (an action that felt somehow illicit). That didn't bode well. Surely the presence of a giant ice cream cone and/or a freaky cyclops would cause a panic, right? Either the 'problem' had been swiftly dealt with or neither Bill nor Sarah had actually come here, which, well, if they weren't here, where on Earth could they be? Had he misread her intentions? Why oh why hadn't he asked her for clarification on the plan? Oh, right- she had left before he could even finish his sentence! Being a ghost kind of sucked. Then again, she probably would have done the same thing if he wasn't a ghost, too. Why couldn't he have gotten stuck with somebody more sensible?

With a bitter sigh and a hung head that felt more self-loathing than anything, he turned away and headed into town to face the crippling fear of seeing new people that he found out he had apparently developed. Great.

Bill stumbled aimlessly around. He still had that grimace-looking grin on his face, but after tailing him through town, sneaking behind lampposts, slipping into shadowy patches, and blending in with the occasional yellow or orange object, Sarah thought he might not actually know the way to where he wanted to go. Part of her wanted to step out and give him directions, but- and this only occurred to her after she had already put one foot into the light- she didn't really know her way around either.

He turned around at the noise of her footstep and she quickly darted behind the corner of a building. When he followed, she was 'gone', or rather she had quickly scrambled onto the roof of the building and was now peering over the edge at him. To him, she might as well have been gone, though, and so he turned to the sign above the door, a sign that indicated this was-

He laughed loudly to himself and ran into the general store, smacking into the door hands-free so hard it opened up for him.

Sarah flinched and shook her head as if to say, 'oh, eldritch demons puppeteering physical bodies- you gotta love them'. She wondered whether it was intentional or an accident. Bill's next action was to smack abruptly into several merchandise stands and draw the attention of a few shoppers, which didn't help answer that question.

She hid at the edge of the doorway as he pulled a hoodie reading 'KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON... COMPLIMENTING ME ON MY HOODIE!' from a rack with other kitschy clothing. The chest was a bit too large on Rob's skinny frame and the hood was a bit too small for his massive head to fit comfortably, but after a moment of rather painful squeezing he managed to get it on and even pull it down over his eye. That and a pair of pink exercise sweatpants made it hard to tell he wasn't just a gaunt human with no fashion sense and a taste for outdated slogans (or, since this was probably 2012, perfectly popular slogans). Rob had a bit of (Elmore) money in his backpack, but Bill didn't realize that. Heck, he might not have even realized the thing on Rob's back was a backpack at all. Instead, he opted to make a mad dash for the door. The clerk hurried from behind his counter and put a hand on Bill's shoulder and then Rob's head spun 360 degrees with a loud snap.

"Woah," whispered Sarah to herself, "Rob can do that?"

"Woah," said Rob, watching in horror from about 15 feet away, having arrived moments earlier, "I can do that?"

A sinking feeling in his chest told him that maybe the snap meant he couldn't do that. And here Bill was, a glutton for pain with a total disregard for his capabilities, doing it anyway. At least he wasn't dead. Wait, he didn't have a neck- what snapped? Would it hurt when he got the body back? Agh.

"S-sir," the clerk stuttered, quaking in his boots, "You can't just knock out half our customers, steal our merchandise, and leave! You need to at least pay for those clothes!"

"Hey, hey! I didn't knock anybody out-" Bill glanced over and saw that two of the five or so other shoppers were on the ground- "on purpose."

"Are you even human? 'Cause, I could have sworn-"

Bill reached up and flicked him in the eye.

"I'm Rob, and I'm robbing you!" he said in a very un-Rob way. As soon as the clerk reached for his phone, Bill grabbed it out of his hand and tossed it on the floor, shattering it into a menagerie of electronic bits and pieces. He was gone before he could hear that a customer was calling 911. If he realized at all that his odd outfit made him an easy criminal to describe, it didn't concern him. Now, he just had to get to the-

He, just like Rob and Sarah, didn't know which direction it was in. And then Rob tapped him on the shoulder.

"Are you looking for the Mystery Shack, dude?"

"That's none of your-"

"It's that way," Rob said, pointing down the road. "I went there when I was looking for you."

Bill turned around, went all, 'why are you being so nice to me?' for a moment, and then ran off in the direction of Rob's outstretched finger, giving a little nod as thanks, something he was entirely unaccustomed to doing. Rob's mindscape arm fell limp at his side once again. Just then, Sarah's eyes blinked on the wall next to him, startling him, and she stepped out of the shadow of an awning with a pack of socks.

"Rob! Wherever you are! Look what I got!" she whisper-shouted, backing into the shadow again when a few patrons left the general store looking fearful. He waited for her to elaborate and eventually she did. "Even the drabbest sock can be a puppet with a little bit of imagination, right? Oh, I hope this works."

With that she tossed the sock into the road. He reached for it, tried to slide his hand into it, and found that it went right through. Sarah's hope faded with every passing moment.

"Wait right here. I'll go steal a phone!"

He would have done a spittake if he had anything in his mouth, but he ended up just dropping his jaw as Sarah once again slid out of sight. She returned a few short moments later with a flip phone and a proud little grin.

"I used to do this all the time when I needed to stalk 'somebody's' messages, if you know what I mean," Sarah chuckled, doing air quotes. "The hard part was getting into the house."

Rob, who had squatted in 'somebody's' house for upwards of several months and stolen plenty of things from his family, was more concerned by her words than he had any right to be, but he shook his head and reached for the phone and put it to his nonexistent ear. "Testing, testing," he said, and Sarah grinned sleazily in response.

"Coming through loud and clear! By which I mean, be a little quieter."

Before he could process those instructions, she grabbed the phone out of midair with his arm still attached and pulled him indirectly into a shady spot behind a dumpster.

"What was your plan with sending him on his way? Trying to expedite the plot? What if this makes some sort of time paradox happen? You know, that's actually cool with me, because it's like, you know, canon divergence- I'm gonna have to keep a close eye on how everything plays out from here, and I'm gonna have to make a mental note of everything. Ha ha, whoops, did I just get a little intense there?"

Rob's voice came through the receiver on the phone.

"A little."

"We should go to the Shack and see what he does. And then help him out! Or would it be better to stop him?"

"He-"

"Imagine being his allies, Rob! Wouldn't that be so cool? We've been off to a rocky start, but, like, he likes freaks and one-eyed people, right? I just assume so considering- well, that's not important. Anyway, you're both of those things, but I mean the first one as a compliment, or at least a neutral type deal..."

"-HE'S NOT GOING TO THE SHACK!"

"What?"

"I pointed him in the wrong direction! What, you think I want to help him?"

"You did kinda sorta give up your body."

"That was your plan! I was running on fifteen minutes of sleep back there! This whole thing is insane- if it was up to me I'd have stayed far away from all of this, but no, you had to- to meddle with the plot!"

"To be fair, Bill did visit you in your dreams before I even did anything."

"..."

"Rob? You there?"

He sighed theatrically and then turned the phone off, signaling an end to the conversation. This whole thing was messing with Rob's head.

This whole thing was messing with Bill's head, too, and that was no small feat.

No matter how many permutations he ran, no matter how much of his vast knowledge he racked for answers that would have his predicament suddenly make sense, he came up empty, like a late prospector panning for gold thirty years after the end of the Gold Rush. Moreover, as he saw the treeline approaching, he realized that either the kid had pulled a fast one on him or he had veered so far off course with these inhumanly long legs that he was no longer headed for his intended destination. Both of them made his blood boil (if this body had any- which he was beginning to doubt).

Every time he resolved to just abandon these two creeps and their annoying holier-than-thou attitude for the safe predictability of his original plans, part of him said, 'it'd be so satisfying to find a cheap and easy way out', which was true. It would also be satisfying to finally get the upper hand in the little game he was so sure those two were playing with him! If only he could figure out what sort of game it was! Could he really be overthinking all this? Was he digging himself into a pit? No, it couldn't be. They were mortals, albeit annoying mortals, and he had no reason to fear them and their bizarre nonchalant attitude and their weird biology and their uncomfortable personal knowledge about him and his future plans- no reason to fear them! No reason to fear them! No, this wasn't fear, it was confusion! Confusion that somehow felt worse than fear. He couldn't get tired because he was a being of pure energy, and yet somehow his old mortal foibles were coming back to haunt him. Unbeknownst to him, though, this body was also getting tired. His leg was dragging and his coordination was getting worse with every passing sleepless moment.

This wasn't the way to the portal. But then which way was it?

His vision flashed red. If he left the mind now he was never ever getting another chance to find out about Rob's escape method. He had one choice and one choice only.

He stumbled to the edge of the treeline, fell over onto his back, and slept. Rob reentered the body at 75 miles per hour. Thankfully, it wasn't in the state to wake up even as its foremost occupant changed.

'Why, oh why won't somebody hand me the answers?' Bill thought, and then he was in the dreamscape again like this was his much-loathed office job and he had a paycheck to work towards. He did- he did. His paycheck was his party a billion years in the making. He just had to work for it... work smarter, not harder. He was a smart guy. he had to do this in a smart way. One well-placed teleport later, he found himself in a familiar room.

"Do you guys want out of those cages?" he asked.

"No," said memory-Rob #1.

"Nuh-uh," said memory-Rob #2.

"We aren't about to help you with your plan," said Superintendent Rob. "Do you take us for fools?"

All five eyes in the room turned to memory-Rob #3, who conveniently avoided all four gazes.

"I want out," he said.

With a snap of Bill's fingers, three cloth coverings were back on and the bars of the fourth cage were rendered soft and pliable.

"Am I your apprentice? Could you teach me tips for how to laugh like you?" Wrecker- it was a much catchier name than memory-Rob #3- asked, pushing the bars apart and looking up at Bill with a sparkling pupil. "Not to be too clingy, of course. It doesn't need to be an apprenticeship! It could be a leader/henchman sort of thing! I don't normally fancy myself a henchman, but for you I could certainly make an exception."

Geez, was this guy seriously still part of present-day Rob? If he could bring this side of the kid out in the waking world he could definitely use it to his advantage.

"...Can I call you 'boss'?" Wrecker asked. This was all moving too fast.

"Uh, call me what you want. I have a very important job for you."

"Ah! A job! What kind of job, boss?"

"We're going to divide and conquer. You take, say, everything west of this office, I take everything east. You scour this dreamscape and try to find the memory of how the kid got out of his dimension. I'll do the same. And- tell you what- if this all works out, I'll give you a little something in return when I copy his methods and get out myself! How does a physical body sound?"

"We have a physical body already, boss."

"No, I mean one just for you. You're special, kid, and I like that. I'm offering to turn you into a separate person from the sad sack in charge! I'll make you, uh, an enforcer for me. And I'll give you your own wrecking ball and free reign to destroy anything you'd like."

"Do you think of me as some wanton force of destruction? Let it be known that Dr. Wrrrecker is a coordinated force of destruction with his own goals-"

"Just to be clear, you're talking about yourself?"

"I would have thought that was obvious. Anyways, as I was saying, I don't destroy for the purpose of destruction, no, I destroy for the purpose of ruining my nemesis and the things he loves... and sometimes for my personal benefit, but that's neither here nor there- ahem! I don't want your wrecking ball. No, no, scratch that, I do want it. But I want it to be plated in gold! And I want room and board! And I want you to help make my nemesis suffer for his wrongs!"

"Your nemesis, huh? Who is that?"

"He-"

Wrecker hummed absently to himself, tapped his chin, and walked in a small circle.

"Ah, you know, it'll come to me by the time weirdmageddon begins, I'm sure. Let's start the job! It's a pleasure working with you!"

The eager young evildoer rushed off before Bill could ask him where he learned the 'W' word. Hey, if that personality had main-Rob's memories, why couldn't Bill just ask him-

"Hey! Hey, I have a better idea! And an easier one, too!"

Wrecker turned around.

"Just let me know how Rob- I mean you- I mean- you know what I mean! Why don'tcha tell me how he made it to and from the nightmare realm?"

"To? Let me think- ah, that's easy. On the back of a van."

"...Huh? Uh, did I hear you right, just now?"

"It was a red van," Wrecker clarified, as if that helped.

"And from? How did he get from the nightmare realm into the third dimension?"

"If I tell you that, the deal will be off."

"Of course, of course. What a laugh! One more thing. Where'd you learn the word weirdmageddon, huh? Nobody has even said it yet."

"Telling you that also means the deal will be off... boss."

Bill dug his fingers into what passed for his forehead and turned red-hot without even thinking about it.

"...Uh, are you okay?"

"I'M JUST-" he pulled himself together- "CONSIdering my choices, here. You get it."

"Don't worry, I'm no stranger to anger issues, boss-"

"I DO NOT HAVE ANGER ISSUES!" Bill was red again, and Wrecker was defensively raising his hands. "IF YOU HAD TO DEAL WITH YOURSELF, YOU'D BE ANGRY TOO!"

"I'm dealing with myself every second of every day."

"THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEAN AND YOU KNOW IT! I CAN ONLY IMAGINE WHAT SORTS OF OPPORTUNITIES I'M LOSING OUT ON BECAUSE I'M HERE SPEAKING TO YOU!"

"Then why don't you just leave?"

Bill shrunk back down into unassuming yellow.

"You and I agree on one thing, at least. You know what? I'm leaving. I'm ending this right here, right now... no. No, I have a much better idea!"

"Excellent. What's the idea, boss?"

"Don't call me boss, you worthless irregular disaster!"

"I- okay. What's the-"

"You'll find out." Bill let out a spine-chilling laugh. "YOU'LL FIND OUT! CIAO!"

"Alright, I won't push the topic," said Wrecker as the dreamscape dissolved. That last echoing declaration on Bill's part had rung out across the cyclops' consciousness and was the last thing in present-day Rob's head as he watched his body get up off the ground and scan the sky around him. All hesitation was gone from his face. Rob's stomach churned at the thought of this 'much better idea', and it only got worse when Bill noticed- and started towards- the water tower poking above the trees. It only took a few minutes on a path through the woods to get there. At the foot of the structure, Bill leaned up against one of the support poles and turned to Rob, who had forgotten for a moment that Bill could see him.

"Remember how I said you're gonna die at 67?"

"Yeah. Don't tell me-"

"Let's change fate. You're all about defying fate, aren't you, pal?"

"Wait! Please, don't kill me, man, I barely even did anything with my life!"

"Bodies are just limiters on the true power of the mind! I'm not killing you- I'm giving your mind the chance to live for the rest of eternity. It's called generosity, kid, ever heard of it?"

"You think I want this? You're insane!"

"S-"

"Your next line is, 'sure I am, what's your point?'"

"...N-No it wasn't. It was, uh, gonna be something else..."

"What? What, pray tell, was it gonna be?"

"Uh, uh- that doesn't matter! I won't give you the satisfaction of hearing my comeback! From now on it's plan A and only Plan A, and Plan A doesn't involve you or your ice cream girlfriend. All I have to do is get you out of my way!"

"She's not my girlfriend!"

"I couldn't care less if I had an eternity to try, kid! From here on out, as my own boss, I'm making an executive decision to ignore you!"

With that, he slowly began to summit the tower, and Rob's begging fell on deaf (and nonexistent) ears.

Sarah wasn't looking skyward. Even if she had been, the far side of the water tower would have been out of view from her vantage point, but that hardly mattered, because right now she was more concerned with making sure Rob knew he was wanted by the police. Earlier she had heard someone near the station mention something about a 'manhunt', which she worried was a sign of an impending search for her incredibly conspicuous and not-so-stealth-minded camping buddy. She slunk around, occasionally sticking her phone out like a dowsing rod and swinging it in a slow arc. No sign of any interference. 'Not to worry', she thought to herself, 'even if they do find him, I could probably take them'

... as long as she could find him before they did.

The van pulled onto the highway and out of a transient portal, wheels screeching against the asphalt, engines roaring, its driver's mind racing faster than his body. He would get his money from that thieving shoplifter girl and then be back to safety...

...as long as he found her before the time police found him.

"You thought you could pull the wool over my eye? Outplay a master manipulator on his own turf? Get the last laugh? You're nobody!"

"I never thought any of that. This is all one big misunderstanding, I swear. Please, please, don't do this."

"Hearing you beg almost makes this whole thing worthwhile, you know that? Say goodbye."

The drop was enormous. As Rob looked down, he thought, 'I've only ever been this high up once before', and then he thought, 'wait a minute, I've been this high up once before!'

His pleading caught in his throat.

"...Bye. It's been good knowing you," Rob said with a sudden tiny smirk that gave Bill pause.

"Looks like you accepted your fate, is that it?"

"I accepted my fate, alright. Just- I'm curious- how many of my memories did you look through?"

"Most of 'em."

Rob said nothing more.

"I like your style. No need for a big climax! Let's end this like an art film- without much fanfare, and with a pit in your stomach afterwards that'll last a long, long time!"

Bill stepped to the edge of the tower with that same psychotic grin and Rob looked away. There was silence for several too-long seconds and then a loud crunch. Bill opened his eye- no, Rob's eye. Why was he still in Rob's body?

He peeled himself up from the dirt and wriggled his fingers. Not dead. NOT DEAD?! He could- he could try something else! He could use a bear trap, or shoot himself, or use a chainsaw- but what if none of those worked? What if he ended up wasting even more time than he already had and making a fool of himself? Where was he even gonna get a gun or a chainsaw if he couldn't find his way around one tiny town? It wasn't fair! Nothing was ever fair for him!

"WHAT ARE YOU?"

"I'm a cartoon character," said Rob, crossing his arms.

"'Scuse me?"

"Knock yourself out, man!" Rob floated down to him and leaned right into his face, striking a dramatic pose as if his nonexistent self-esteem had suddenly regenerated in full. "I've been blown up! Battered! Squeezed through the universe's ringer! Erased from existence- twice! There is nothing you can do to me, dude, so face it."

There was just a little bit of Wrecker coming through- but not the part that would help Bill. He had all of the confidence and none of the naïveté.

"I'll break your arms."

"Oh, they'll get better."

"You're not even gonna protest?"

"You want me to protest! I'm not doing what you want anymore! I'm doing what I want! Me! It's my life! From now on this story is about me!"

"...I don't want you to punch yourself in the face."

"Nice try. I don't want to punch myself in the face, either."

"Worth a shot. You'll see me again when doomsday comes, and then I'll make you punch yourself in the face over and over again for the rest of eternity. Who's really getting the last laugh? Chew on that one!"

Rob thought, 'joke's on you, doomsday's only gonna last a few days', and then thought, 'actually, a few days of punching myself in the face over and over will still be pretty bad'. He said neither thing out loud as Bill headed for the main road with a visible limp and slightly-tempered smile.

"The cars are gonna see you and stop before they hit you, you know."

"You're overestimating human drivers and underestimating tight corners! See, I'm gonna hide behind this rock and dive in the way of the first automobile that passes by!"

"I'm gonna... float away and leave you to it."

"Stick around and watch me. What are you, chicken?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah?"

"I'm in tune with my own limitations. Can you say the same?"

"I have no limitations!"

Rob was already either out of earshot or pretending to be out of earshot. Bill was, as he had done many times before, setting up a future of pain and suffering for an unlucky mark of his, so why did it feel like he was the loser this time? As he put his plan into action he swore that he would never think about any of this again the moment it was over. His reaction speeds were too slow, or the driver's reaction speed was too fast- the van swerved to a stop just inches from his face and a shadowy figure popped its head out of the window. A bold choice, in broad daylight.

"Rob!" said the driver, and Bill recalled something like this in one or two of the memories he had seen. Hey, wait a minute, this was a red van...

"Have you met up with Sarah, at all? I have a pressing matter I need to speak to her about."

"I'm not Rob," Bill responded.

"You aren't? Could have fooled me. Then who-"

"Do you want infinite wealth? Infinite power? Infinite fame?" Bill's voice was hoarse. "Lemme tell you, it's your lucky day. I have a friend who would give you aaaall of that in exchange for a tiny favor. You'd just need to head back to the Nightmare Realm and pick him up! Think you can manage?"

"Maybe. What's the Nightmare Realm?"

Bill smacked his head on the hood of the van so hard it left a tiny dent.

"I thought you were the one who took him to that forsaken place! Whaddaya mean, 'what's the nightmare realm'?"

"Who's 'him?"

"..."

"Are you alright?"

"...I hate you. I hate you and Rob and Sarah and whatever backwards dimension you folks clawed your way out of! I can't believe I've been wasting so much time on your pointless little companions! This isn't over! THIS ISN'T OVER!"

And in that moment, it was over. The body was vacated. Rob felt a searing pain in his, well, everything. Just then, driven by some contrivance of fate, Sarah appeared in the distance.

"Bill! Rob! There's something I have to tell you!"

"Bill's not here," mumbled Rob, and then passed out yet again, leaving Sarah to approach the van.

"You came back!" She giggled. "How much for that DVD?"

"Thirty bucks."

"I don't have thirty bucks. See, if I had, I would have totally paid for it-"

"Neither of you are leaving this place until you earn me my money."

"Rob has 15 bucks!"

"Rob didn't steal from me-" The shopkeeper then remembered that Rob had, in fact, stolen from him on at least one occasion- "...this time."

"30 bucks! I have my ways! I'll have them in to you by, say, the end of the night?"

"No stealing."

Sarah's face fell.

"Uh, no stealing...?"

"My purchases come with moral lessons. I'm trying to teach you that stealing is wrong- no stealing the money you're going to use to pay for the DVD."

"How will you tell? And- and- isn't most of the stuff you sell pretty much illegal?"

"Most of the stuff I sell has no laws on the books about it yet."

"So why do you care if I steal?"

"It's the principle of the thing! Moral lessons are my whole deal!"

"Fine, fine, I'll get you your money. You said nobody's leaving? Does that include you?"

"Oh, no. I'm leaving. I'll be back tonight. I'm kind of on the run from the time police a little bit."

"Hwuh?"

"Thirty bucks! Tonight!" said the shopkeeper, and the van darted nimbly around Rob's collapsed body, vanishing in a cloud of exhaust.

Chapter Text

"Our sleep schedule is kinda messed up, if you think about it. You've been conking out constantly But one time I spent 5 hours working on a rarepair doujin for this event thing, even though it was a school night, so is it really that messed up? Ehehe!"

Rob was unconscious and unresponsive. His chest rose and fell gently; he was alive, and that made him a good enough conversation partner for Sarah.

"No way am I getting the money by tonight! When he comes back, I'm gonna try to cut him a deal. And then I'm gonna try and get us a job! I have this whole plan, but I don't know if you can hear me, so I won't waste my breath. Aaah! I'm so excited!"

She squished her cheeks.

"I can't wait for you to tell me more about the whole time loop thing when you wake up, because if it's real, I am gonna milk it, you have no idea. I have so many things I want to try! Like- let me tell you about all my plans. And- and- I also have plans for if the time loop thing isn't real, because of course I do, you know? I'm the obsessive one! Not to toot my own horn."

"...and none of it makes ANY sense! Does any of it make any sense to any of you? Not a rhetorical question, guys, I want to see hands up. Raise your hands if this makes any sense to you, and those of you with no hands, raise... something, whatever, just raise something. Nobody? That's what I thought. And that's what drives me so mad about it! Beliiiiieve me, I like nonsensical stuff as much as the next guy, but ∆⎔▰▰⊜!"

A few vacant stares were directed at Bill- and the majority of them were coming from Amorphous Shape's many eyes. Many more vacant stares were directed elsewhere.

"Not to question you, man, but you said a few hours ago that you'd never bring them up again after you finished talking," offered Kryptos.

"Hey, smart guy, did it ever occur to you that I'm NOT DONE TALKING?"

There was no verbal response. In fact, the room was silent, and nothing was ever silent around here. The next noise anyone heard was Bill resuming his rant.

"The $% ! audacity of them! I know what you're thinking- how am I letting them get to me? And the answer is, I am not! They aren't getting to me, okay? So don't say they are! I know nobody said anything, but you were all thinking it, and I can say that even without reading your minds. They aren't getting to me, which is exactly why I have to make that perfectly clear. So let me go over the situation again from the top..."

"Order of business one: I want to see if we can get jobs at the Mystery Shack. As exhibits, I mean. But wait, you ask!"

Rob didn't ask anything, mostly because he was asleep.

"Doesn't us being bona-fide supernatural creatures make that impossible since, according to the show, people here only like fake stuff? Well, it does, until you remember that hiring us would also be child labor, so it cancels out and makes it likely to work. Basic narrative math. And if that fails I can superglue a zipper onto your back so you look like a guy in a suit."

She prepared for a rebuttal along the lines of, 'why not superglue a zipper onto your own back if you want to do this so bad?' but none came. Silly me, she thought.

"...And if that fails we can find jobs on Craigslist."

The twenty-cutout threshold had been reduced to 10 after a week, then 5, and then two- and it had just been, in a moment of hopelessness and frustration, reduced to one. Gumball had failed a dozen times in a row to get that one successful hit.

"I'm lowering it to zero," deadpanned Nicole.

"No! No, I can do this."

"Sweetie, if you've made one thing clear, it's that you can't do this."

"Shut up and let me make you proud of meee!"

With sloppy form, he took down one of the cutouts, which had already faced a hundred different beatings at the hands of the other members of the family. Tensions were at an all-time high, and the family owed that partially to the fact that, at lunchtime in a few hours, they would be forced to share the final remaining can of baked beans in the pantry. It was expired (and has been since 2003), mostly because none of them liked baked beans very much, but the only other food in the house was a fruitcake so stale that a fork had turned to dust against it days earlier.

"Cardboard cutouts are really nothing like the real thing, anyways. If we want to survive out there we have to get some practical practice! Isn't that right, everyone?"

There was mass nodding.

"Then it's settled! 4 to 1! We're going to the surface. Get your bats- things are about to get messy."

For the first time since the void swept in and claimed their surroundings, the Wattersons' basement door slowly creaked open.

"Do you think you would have a shot with anybody here, Rob? I mean romantically. If you think about it, this whole thing is like a self-insert story, only instead of stand-in characters who are like the us we wish we could be, it's just us! Isn't this crazy? I mean, if you really think about it?"

She gently lifted his chin and opened and closed his jaw, and thankfully he was too far gone to wake up and protest. "Why dontcha try 'n romance one of the locals if yer so passionate about it, huh?" she spoke as him, adding an accent by accident that he didn't have.

"Oh, you know I have a reservation back home," she said as herself. "Besides! I've been expanding my horizons. Why include myself in all my ships when other people have so much chemistry with each other? Like- imagine this. Are you imagining it? I know you are."

Rob was in a dreamless sleep.

"If you cleaned up a bit you could have a chance with Mabel I think. But that's kind of easy pickings, right? And besides, your personalities, I dunno. I think it'd have to be a slow burn, which is not her style. You know, I thought what might be fun is you and Dipper. Hear me out, okay? He's into the supernatural. But not like that, you say? Well, that's where we sort of have to stretch our interpretation. You two are the same age, you're cool and confident... uh, sometimes, and you're also totally freaky looking, no offense. He'd be all over the chance to study you... maybe. We'd have to set things up, but I think I could totally do that. I'm an expert matchmaker, by which I mean I make imaginary matches between my friends and acquaintances! How much harder could it be to do in real life? Or, I guess this isn't really real life, huh? All the better."

The artist's rendition of the suspect on the wanted poster looked as if it had been drawn in crayon by a 7-year-old. Dipper turned it around, held it at arm's length, pored over it for a few long moments, and then set it down and put one tense hand on his forehead. And then picked it up and started the whole process over again.

"Find any new details, Dip-dop? You've been looking at that thing for like an hour."

He made a small noise of surprise and set down the poster on the table.

"Take a look at this." He pointed to the face of the drawing. "They forgot to add one of his eyes. That's gotta mean something, right?"

"Maaaybe he only has one eye. And he's coming for yours! Rob, the master eye thief!"

"Don't joke about that! What if you jinx it into being the truth?"

"We can just give him one of those eyeball jawbreakers in the jar on the counter, and everybody will be happy."

"Jawbreakers? I always figured those were real eyeballs."

"Well, even better!"

He folded up the paper as if to put it away, then, as if driven by instinct, opened it up again and continued to look it over.

"Do you think he became a robber because his name is Rob, or that he goes by Rob because he's a robber?" Dipper asked, looking down at the perp's name as if to somehow glean new information from it.

"Do you think Robbie is gonna get angry about his position as the town's most important Robert-adjacent dude being stolen? Heh, stolen."

"...What do you think about going on a manhunt? Or a cyclopshunt?"

"You're kind of getting ahead of yourself with this whole cyclops idea. On the other hand, I am on the hunt for a man!"

"That's, uh, not what a manhunt is."

"With love we make our own definitions, brobro."

"If we wanted to really mess things up we could leave the DVD where the twins could find it. If you found out your whole life was a TV show created by people in a whole 'nother universe, that would be pretty messed up, huh? I don't even want to think about it."

Sarah shivered and her whole body momentarily wobbled like jelly. Rob, who had been through that exact experience, was not available for comment.

"We could just erase everybody's memories afterwards, easy peasy. And if the memories came back, they'd just basically feel like two of the same memory, probably, so there wouldn't be too many alarm bells. That or they'd have lifelong psychological trauma. Maybe this is actually not such a good idea, especially if there's no time loop! Wouldn't it be messed up if there was a time loop but then we started noticing the things we did in one loop having effects in the next?"

She puppeteered his mouth and said, "Oh, definitely, that would be so messed up."

"You feeling alright, mate? You've been looking a little overworked lately."

"Aw, no! It's just hot in here. Don't tell me you aren't feeling that."

"Are you lads feeling that?" Several shaken heads (or bodies, or celestial bodies) resulted. "I think it's just you."

"Maybe I'm coming down with something."

"You should get that checked out."

"By who?"

"Good point."

"Mars, care to get a little closer and take a look at this spot in North America that itches?"

"Love to, but I'm currently away. Orbits and all that."

"Quite alright. I'll see you when you come back around."

"Sure hope I don't catch whatever you have, Earth!"

"You know what could be cool? If we became, like, universe hoppers. We experienced the apocalypse back home and we're probably gonna experience it here. So, I was thinking, we could convince the van guy- do you know his name? I feel kinda awkward just calling him the van guy."

Rob didn't know his name, not that he could have told her either way.

"Whatever. We could convince him to take us around and maybe we could visit some more apocalypses. Be folk heroes or something! Wouldn't that be cool? It would have to be after we've gotten our 40 dollars' worth out of this place, though."

It may have been worth 40 dollars in fares for the both of them, but in reality all they had collectively paid for their rides was 20 dollars.

"We could commandeer his vehicle. It'd be two versus one. And I have been known to be pretty convincing," she said, pummeling one palm with the other fist.

Something stirred inside Wrecker's cage and his eye gently fluttered open. Normally, the darkness of the blanket was enough to put him indefinitely to sleep in this little corner of Rob's subconscious, but someone was speaking unintelligibly from on high- that, and the ground was shaking. He made his way out through the hole Bill had bent some time before and meekly opened the door out of the office onto an entirely unfamiliar scene.

Every one of the memory islands beyond the school was in the process of crumbling. Even the TV static backdrop was losing its scintillation in favor of a painfully static- that is to say, still- pattern of gray and white squares, like a transparency layer. His heart jumped into his throat and before long he found himself dashing back into the office and unveiling his three companions.

"You guys," he said in an uncharacteristically fearful tone, "you've got to see this."

"See what? Is it something good?" asked Memory-Rob #1.

"No! It's something very bad!"

Wrecker tried to no avail to bend the bars of the other cages. Just then, a brilliant, half-familiar seam of light split the floor into a crevasse right where he stood, and he only narrowly jumped out of the way as a chunk of the ceiling sizzled into nothingness above him. Memory-Robs #1 and #2 were frightened, pushing at the bars. Superintendent-Rob was looking up with a look of anger and resignation.

"Does anyone here know what's happening?" Wrecker asked, and the others shook their heads.

The ground beneath the cage cracked and splintered.

Debris fell down, down, and then blinked out of existence as it hit some invisible floor.

Memory-Rob #2 made the mistake of standing in the corner of his cage... and then the whole thing plummeted. There was a chilling scream that came to an even more chilling abrupt end.

"Go," said Superintendent-Rob. "See what you can do. No use in staying here and dooming yourself."

Judging by his face, Memory-Rob #1 wanted to protest, but he said nothing, and so Wrecker turned and ran away from the checkered tide just as the school fell into nothingness. The dreamscape was malleable enough for him to leap successfully to the next island, and then the next one, eventually settling on the edge of a nature island where a rusty 'NO BILL ALLOWED' sign guarded a dark forest. This place was stable! All of the other islands had been quaking. He sighed in relief- and then he looked up and saw himself, or rather another Memory-Rob. He wasn't aware that any more existed. No, wait, this wasn't necessarily a memory- could this be his main consciousness?

"What's going on?" asked Wrecker again.

"What do you mean, what's going on?"

"Your memories are crumbling!" Wrecker gestured angrily to the dreamscape in disarray around them.

"It's a good thing I'm safe here, then," said present-Rob(?) with a little smile on his face, one that Wrecker wanted to wipe off. "Who are you?"

"Who- you're asking who I am?"

"Sure I am, dude, I just asked you that."

Wrecker tried to answer, but found that he couldn't. It was both of their minds crumbling.

"I don't know," said Wrecker, "but that's bad."

"Bad?"

For just a second, present-Rob's face flashed with concern, but it faded.

"Yes! Can't you see that something is clearly wrong here?"

"I don't see anything wrong."

Wrecker tried to hold on, he really did. But- even though this island should have been safe- his voice was abruptly cut off as his consciousness, just one part of a larger consciousness, was taken by the encroaching nothingness, leaving a lone Rob staring and wondering who exactly he was just speaking to.

Convinced that this was all just a surreal dream, Present-Rob turned on his heel and walked back into the forest with a content smile. REM sleep was coming to an end, and truth be told this whole thing had made him rather well-rested. The feeling that he was forgetting something occurred to him for a split second and then it was gone.

Chapter Text

A storm had been raging in Rob's mind for as long as he could once remember. In the early days it was driven by simple rejection, but persistent doubts that his friends were not his friends; later, it swelled when he swore revenge, when he learned the truth of his universe's nonexistence, when he tried and tried and failed and failed over and over again to achieve something, anything. Moments of calm were rare. When he had to, he played parts, building personas with little pieces of himself plus personality traits made out of whole cloth, and brought them into control until it was time for the storm to supersede them again. Time after time these personas faltered and so he locked them away.

His anger and bitterness hadn't started with his banishment. It had always been there. He liked to blame his discontent on others, and yet for a long time he had been battling with a tiny part of himself that told him he, or his nature, was to blame. Maybe it was more complicated. Regardless, he never had time to sit and think, and every time he did have a quiet moment, his mind would inevitably wander to his next revenge plan or his next mark (when it came to stealing money). A defense mechanism.

When he opened his eye to see starlight peeking through the forest canopy above him, he noticed- but did not dwell on- the fact that his inner space was quiet, desolate, and bright like a peaceful sunny day. It wasn't his pragmatic side that drove those thoughts away but Sarah's face poking abruptly into his field of view.

"You're awaaake! Are you feeling okay?"

He considered the question.

"Yeah!" he said, smiling with an uncharacteristic warmness. "I'm- I'm better than ever."

She cocked her head.

"...Bill?" she asked.

"No! No. It's me! Why would you assume it's Bill?"

"I just expected you to be all, 'Auuugh! I'm in pain!' or at least, all, 'Auuugh! I'm in emotional pain!'"

Now that she mentioned it, he was hurting all over, but physical pain would pass, and it hardly held a candle to the brilliant peace that echoed through his headspace. He was alive, and there were no intruders in his mind anymore, and there was something else that was different, too... but he quickly realized that trying to figure out what that was might compromise the happiness, and so he decided to put the subject aside. Sarah seemed on edge. Rob wasn't sure why.

"On a scale of 1 to 10, how much of the stuff I said when you were asleep did you hear?" she asked.

"You were talking while I was asleep?"

"I guess that's a 0."

"Hey, maybe my subconscious assimilated some of it."

"Long story short, you're wanted by the police, the red van guy is wanted by the time police, and we have to earn money to pay him back for some stuff I stole."

Wanted by the police? Huh? Oh, yeah, Bill had stolen some clothes... clothes he was still wearing! He tore off the hoodie and tossed it aside, where it triggered one of the pit traps. He then remembered he had also stolen some stuff as himself. Not good.

"What did you steal? And why?" he asked.

"Just a DVD... and- can this be our little secret?- also some rope, and a few other things."

"You should be ashamed of yourself!"

"You're one to talk!"

"What do you mean, I'm one to talk?"

Sarah seemed even more on edge now.

"I said, what do you mean I'm one to-"

"Don't worry about it! It's fiiine, it's fine."

"Name a time when I've ever stolen anything."

She wondered if he had hit his head, but didn't say that, scrambling to change the subject instead. "I don't really know the specifics! Look, if you want to turn over a new leaf that's fine with me! I can be the bad girl in our relationship. I mean friendship, by that, of course!"

He chuckled.

"Turn over a new leaf? I'm not that bad."

"S-sure you are! You're, like, the villain type!"

"I resent that remark."

"No, but you're the one who gave yourself that title... you know what? Never mind. You're clearly a little out of it-" she swirled her pointer finger next to her head- "-so I'll let you relax. You slept for like a whole day!"

"I appreciate your concern, but I don't need to relax. I feel like getting up and going for a walk, enjoying the scenery, hoping I don't run into danger, you know?"

"You aren't sounding like you."

"Oh, really? And what's that supposed to mean, huh? I didn't realize you were the world's foremost expert on me!"

"Calm down-"

"You're right." He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry. I got a bit angry just then. I hope I wasn't too abrasive."

Sarah found herself unable to keep up that bright smile of hers and stared blankly at him.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing! So, Rick, what's your first order of business?"

"I'm gonna drink from the waterfall, probably. I'm thirsty! Oh, and, it's no big deal, but it's Rob. Was that a slip of the tongue, or...?"

"...Yeah, something like that. I'll, uh, keep watch!"

"Great!"

With that, he was off, and Sarah's stomach sank so hard that it felt like a bottomless pit. It was either very good timing or very bad timing when a familiar red van burst through a portal just shy of the sleeping rock and swerved to an Akira-style stop parallel to the campsite

"Do you have my money, kid?" spoke the shopkeeper, glaring out of the window.

"About that..."

"No? That's what I thought. Look, I've done some thinking, and I realized this whole "telling a teenage ice cream cone to earn legitimate money with only a few hours' notice" thing was sort of short-sighted of me. I also realized that if you don't pay me back there isn't much I can do to retaliate, since leaving you here was my plan in the first place. Then I thought about releasing the acid spider-crab onto your campsite, and in the interest of honesty I feel like I should tell you I did consider it but ultimately decided against it because I wouldn't like the criminal charges that kind of thing might bring. By the way, do you know if gnomes have enough legal personhood that running over one is a crime?"

"You ran over a gnome? Wait, the acid what now?"

"Nothing. My point is this: If you want to return- you mentioned a desire to on the ride here, if I remember correctly- I will- oh, Rob, I was wondering where you were."

Sure enough, Rob had reappeared at the campsite with that uncanny easygoing demeanor from earlier, and if his face (or rather, his eyes) were any indication, the shopkeeper had noticed. Sarah was glad she wasn't just delusional, but scared at the prospect her friend (or at the very least her acquaintance) being, potentially, an amnesiac. At least he still remembered both his name and her name.

"Listen up," spoke the shopkeeper. "In order to aid your moneymaking efforts, I've decided I'm going to let you use the humanizers."

"The humanizers?" asked Rob, an odd question considering he had been their original buyer.

"You'll essentially be given access to human suits as generated by the machines. I've recalibrated them for this universe's version of humanity, and provided you remove the suits at regular intervals you should face no adverse effects from wearing them."

"Will you also give us fake IDs?" asked Sarah.

"Never satisfied, are you?"

"Fair enough."

"Sarah stole more than just the DVD from you!" Rob suddenly cut in, and Sarah's jaw dropped onto the floor. "I couldn't let it stand, sir, I have a moral compass."

He raised a brow and looked to her with rage seething behind his eyes.

"Is this true-"

"Just a rope. And a top hat. And a bow tie."

"A rope? You don't mean you took the Lasso of Forthcoming?"

"The- you mean that rope was magical? Woah! So Bill was definitely telling the truth!"

"No, no, it's the lasso of forthcoming, not truth. I keep my truth lassoes under lock and key on the third floor. it just makes it hard to stop talking once you've started!"

"Oh..."

"You know what? I've decided I'm not going to help you out!"

"Wait, wait, wait," said Rob. "Why not help me out? It's not like I did anything to you, and I'm planning on staying here and building a new life for myself. Could you lend me a human suit?"

The shopkeeper could have responded with, 'what do you mean you didn't do anything' or 'you got your human suit destroyed last time you had one', but instead, he saw an opportunity to deliver a moral lesson and/or be petty. He was not a petty person most of the time, but this opportunity simply seemed far too good to pass up! And so...

"Absolutely, young man," replied the shopkeeper. "The humanizers are in the back. You know the ins and outs of using them already."

Rob opened his mouth- perhaps to respond that he didn't know how to use them- but shut it and went around to open the side doors, vanishing into the van and leaving Sarah and the shopkeeper in a staring contest.

"Do you- this is awkward- do you, like, have a name? Because I've just been calling you 'the van guy' in my head."

"I have a name, yes."

"Cooool! What is it?"

"I never said I would tell you."

"That's fair. So, van guy it is, then?"

"...Van guy it is."

The van shook and sputtered as something jiggled around in the back to the sound of mechanical clanking and clunking. Silence followed... and then footsteps. When the van doors slid open once again, a cloud of gray smoke swirled out and dissolved into the late-night air, temporarily obscuring Rob's figure as he made his exit- it was only smoke from the machine, presumably, and yet it had made everything seem almost like a magic trick. A transformation magic trick. Standing in the thinning haze was a figure that bore only a slight resemblance to Rob, mainly in the clothing department; he wore a yellow T-shirt and red shorts with racing stripes. Everything other than that resembled a townie. A human.

He turned to her and blinked one eye and then the other. She gave him an awkward thumbs up. He gave her an awkward smile.

"I'm gonna go get some water," he said, and he was off.

"...If I do somehow make 30 bucks, will you come back to get me?"

"I'm never coming back to this dimension."

"That's- I mean- take me with you! Take me back home! You're going there, right?"

"Don't think about hanging onto the back. I've electrified the doors."

"I wasn't planning on that. Wait, are the top hat and bow tie magical like the rope?"

"No, those are mine. I haven't worn them in a long while, though, mostly because the hat is too tall to fit when I'm sitting in the driver's seat."

"Oh."

"I should get going."

"Yeah. I'll find another way home, I guess."

"Good luck with that," he replied derisively. "Ah, and tell Rob that if he forgets who he is the suit will become permanent."

"Huh-WHAT?" Sarah said, choking on her own spit. "Uh, uh, just a hypothetical- what if he's already forgotten who he is?"

"If he's already forgotten? Are you saying-"

"I'm just saying he's been acting really weird today! And he wasn't reacting to anything like normal! And that was not a hypothetical!"

"...That's very bad."

"Do you have anything for it?"

He paused and rubbed his chin for a long, tense moment, then let out a sigh as his generosity creeped back into his voice.

"One thing. Come inside."

The humanizer machine was still smoking a little when she obliged. Maybe, she thought, she could use it and also make a life for herself here, but then again it was a bad idea to get on the bad side of the van guy now.

"Are you familiar with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice?" asked the van guy's voice from somewhere past a curtain.

"Uh, Orpheus? Like the Matrix?"

"...No. How about Lot's wife?"

"I..."

"Forget it, I was trying to make this next thing poetic. Basically, I'm going to give you a series of VHS tapes that will restore his memories. You are to give him the tapes to watch, but under no circumstances are you allowed to look back on them yourself- you must leave the campsite and not return until he is finished. The tapes will take approximately two days to watch back-to-back. I recommend giving him five days to get through them. "

"I won't look at them. But what'll happen if, say, I do?"

"You mustn't."

"I get it, but what if I-"

"You mustn't. That is the point of me giving you these."

She gulped.

"Got it."

With that, he handed her what looked like a magical, gem-encrusted chest, only rather than mystic chalices and golden coins it held about twelve VHS tapes labeled in numerical order. Their labels had long been scrubbed off. On closer inspection, the chest was much lighter than one would expect for something of its quality, almost like it was a stage prop rather than the genuine article. She hugged it close to herself and stepped out into the night.

"No looking back," he warned. She nodded. Then, with very little showmanship involved, a cloud of smoke surrounded her as the van pulled off and vanished into the forest.

Chapter Text

Spinning the last vestiges of wet beach sand from its tires, the van, its ground floor interior loaded with fries, donuts, ice cream sandwiches, and pizza, pulled onto a Westmore island just west of the increasingly-reinforced border between the settlements. The ground around the border itself had been done up in amateurish graffiti like a grade school play setpiece version of the Berlin Wall. Customer gossip had given the shopkeeper a detailed understanding of the ins and outs of post-apocalypse politics, all against his will, of course, and as a crowd of relieved townsfolk made their way towards him he wondered if perhaps he was squandering his identity as a mysterious and shady dark market type in favor of the perils of friendship and community.

People used to approach him with darting eyes, nervous faces, shaky hands. It was the same as when he'd sell mystical (or just shoddy) items to unsuspecting passerby. They'd ask if they were in the right place to buy food and then there would be visible relief when he confirmed that, yes, he was the guy they were looking for, though he sensed that many of them had naturally not been able to get over their (admittedly accurate) preconceptions about buying items from an anonymous van driver. With familiarity came more to-the-point greetings; people began to ask for food right off the bat, which he found a lot easier to keep up with than the more theatrical variants of his shtick, much to his surprise- he had become entirely accustomed to that mysticism, and shedding it was not the difficult task he had always assumed it would be. Things stayed terse and cordial... and then they moved past that.

"Look who's here!" came the dainty, enthusiastic, mostly-muffled voice of a paper girl in a gas mask and full-body hazmat suit.

"Hey, meals-on-wheels is back, boys!" said Elmore's former chief of police, who had recently (and unsuccessfully) been trying to rebrand himself as a gang leader by the name of Big Frosting. The gang itself had originally just been the former police department, but had grown to accommodate anybody who asked the boss nicely enough, especially those kicked over the border wall by Eastmore's Mayoral Royal Guard. The shopkeeper felt like slamming his head against the dashboard for knowing all of that.

A cacophony of supportive, joyful voices surrounded the van in turn. They greeted him, some concerned for his wellbeing, others conveying gratefulness. Some called him 'buddy' or 'man' or 'that guy'. Only two minutes after his entrance, a veritable mob of Westmoreans was clustered on the island he had chosen to park on, accompanied by a small volunteer task force of flying people put together to fetch anybody who fell off the edge. Westmore was lawless, yes, but it also had a definitive human warmth to it- and not just from the fact that every building was near-constantly on fire!

"Stand back, everybody, one at a time," the shopkeeper said, and the chaotic mixed-media mass of people immediately arranged itself into a messy single-file line. He had to make sure he hadn't activated some sort of mind control artifact by accident. To his horror, he determined that the horde was obeying him out of its own free will... but now he had other things to think about. Every new food order was bigger than the last. Every new food order served a greater number of people and carried a greater risk. Dumpster diving no longer sufficed, and he had taken to straight-up robbery- as long as he didn't revisit the universes where he was wanted, he'd be fine, he told himself.

Several short conversations later, he crossed into yet another unfamiliar frontier when a baggily-dressed woman carrying a stack of papers tall enough to hide her face approached.

"Excuse me, sir," she asked, "would you happen to have a copier in there? These are the residential records for my apartment building, and rumor has it those are going to be important soon because there's an invasion being planned, so I want to have spares just in case."

He did have one. It was on the second floor and made 100 copies no matter what number you entered for it to print. It wasn't cursed, just shot- he had gotten around the problem by only putting in a few sheets of printing paper at once, not that he'd needed to use the thing in years.

"No," he lied, and then thought better of it. "Actually, yes. But it's broken."

"That's a shame. Did you hear about Larry?"

The little demon on the shopkeeper's shoulder- who looked like the shopkeeper with little horns- told him to ask her to cut to the chase and buy some food, but the demon on the other side- wait, wasn't one of them supposed to be an angel?- told him to engage in idle gossip with her. He would have asked about the missing angel but did not want to confuse a potential customer by speaking out loud with his subconscious (assuming they were indeed his subconscious and not actual miniature spectres he had picked up somewhere along the line). Thinking about this choice was strenuous, and so he decided not to think for once, and-

"No, I don't think so. What happened with him?"

Drat. That was what happened when his vocal chords moved ahead of his mind. Now he was trapped in a conversational prison of his own device.

"I don't know the details, but he went to deliver a message to some guy's wife in Eastmore and they kidnapped him! And he was the only guy who had access to a copier! Back when all this started, he had his own faction, y'know, a little cult of personality, and they scooped up all the printers n' copiers in town that didn't fall into the abyss..."

The shopkeeper began to zone out. Either 30 seconds or 30 minutes passed.

"...rumor has it they're making him do accounting for the folks in Eastmore! Accounting! And they're making him run the mercantile, and drive the public transport around, and he's also apparently a butler for the mayor, and a member of the royal guard... point is, he was the one I would have gone to for making copies, but he's gone and his whole base is empty. Somebody looted all the copiers. We don't know who, but me and a couple friends have a mob justice thing planned if you wanna get in on that."

"I appreciate the offer, I suppose, but that's not exactly my style."

"Fair enough. You said your copier is broken? That's a shame. Did I already say that's a shame? I'd like to get some food. Here, I have some stuff- I need to put the paper down so I can get it out of my cone."

"Cone?"

She set the papers down and kept the stack steady with one hand. A powerful sense of disorientation came over the shopkeeper for just a moment as he stared into a familiar face... sort of. This woman was a different flavor of someone he knew. To be precise, mint. Within moments she had reached behind her back- into her cone?- quick as a whip, and produced a long-distance zoom lens for a camera, a pair of night vision binoculars, and a camouflage raincoat.

"I hope these will be enough," she said with an awkward little grin.

"More than enough. What would you like? We've got fries, donuts, pizza, and iii... don't think we have anything else."

"Nothing else, huh?"

"Yes," he choked, "not unless you count my other mysterious and eclectic wares."

"That's a shame. I am so sorry, I keep saying that."

"What were you hoping for?"

"Ice cream."

His eyes widened.

"Well, you're in luck, I just remembered we've got ice cream sandwiches in stock! But isn't that, uh..."

"Too light for a meal? Oh, I have some leftover protein shakes at home, so don't worry."

The shopkeeper, who was about to say 'cannibalism', only nodded and produced several cat-shaped ice creams, slightly melted and then refrozen, for her, accepting the reconnaissance items in turn. As the lady stepped away from the van he did something he had never done before and called out to her.

"What's your name?"

"Dolly," she replied, "Dolly Lato."

"Lato. Any relation to Sarah?"

"She's my niece! I'm surprised you know her. She's been holed up in her room since this whole thing started. We put food under the door."

His breath caught in his throat and the demons came back. "Lie to her," said one. "Yeah, what he said," said the other.

"Aren't you two supposed to disagree?" he asked the left demon. Dolly cocked her head and he quickly scrambled to play it off as the speech of a ventriloquist dummy he grabbed from the back. If she saw through his deception, she wasn't calling him out on it.

"That's a shame," he said in his best dignified voice, putting the dummy away.

"Not really," Dolly said with a little laugh, "She's done this before. One time she spent an entire summer vacation up there! We've come to accept it as a family, or at least I have."

"You should, um, definitely keep giving her privacy! She's a growing girl."

"Oh, that's absolutely the plan. I'm actually with the folks at the old radio tower- I only go to her house once a week. Her parents were on a trip out of town, you know? We're trying to get communications up, but is this, like, another dimension? Is it even possible? You seem like you might know."

"I-" he fumbled for words. "You know, I- sorry, this isn't my field of expertise."

"That's a-"

"-A shame, yes, I know. And I sincerely apologize. You know, let me make it up for you," he found himself saying, again without thinking. "The copier is a little out of sorts, but I think I can wrangle it. What say you to returning for the papers this time tomorrow?"

"All of the clocks in Elmore are either broken or out of sync with each other, so the best I can do is an estimate."

"Right, right, I forgot. I'll tell you what. Next time I restock, I'll come to the radio tower and wait there for you with the copies made," he said, subconscious mind yelling at him.

"You would do that for me?"

"I would do that for any of my customers, ma'am."

It had seemed like a good save, but seconds later a disconcerting feeling crept over him as he realized that everybody near the front of the line had heard him say it. He was good at running away, and yet, for the first time in, perhaps, decades, he found himself unable (and/or unwilling) to do so. The line was getting longer and longer with every passing minute. The highest number of customers he had ever dealt with in one day pre-apocalypse was four, and here he was, as famous as he'd ever been, showered with paise and love and appreciation when all he'd ever known was, "can I get a refund?," and "what do you mean, I can't get a refund?"

"I was going to buy some food," said the next customer in line, "but I also have this pickle jar that needs opening, and I was wondering if you had anything to get the lid off without breaking it..."

He steeled himself, put on his best salesman smile (not that anybody could see his mouth), and faced a future so bright it threatened to burn out his darkness-adapted eyes.

"I'll see what I can do," he said.

Chapter Text

There were two kinds of slow walk. One was the sort of walk a group of heroes would do on the way to the villain's headquarters, the sort of walk wrestlers sometimes entered the ring with. Ideally there would be a cool song playing in the background and then that song would be reused at climatic moments later in the series, but you'd never really feel the impact as strongly as you felt it that first time- she digressed. The second type was the sad type. Emotions could weigh a girl down like a backpack full of dumbbells, and though having them around usually motivated her to get where she was going and do what she was planning to do faster than usual, something about that just wasn't happening tonight. Part of her hoped to run into a monster just so something would take her mind off of the situation. None came. Only her own inner demons, which seemed less like formally-dressed hot tall guys and more like shapeless masses of painful thoughts.

Several major doors to the future had just been abruptly and unceremoniously closed off to her. She hadn't even planned to use the 'out' she had prepared by stealing from the van until much later, but now that it was no longer a possibility, this place seemed less like a magical land of possibility and wish fulfillment and more like a lawless universe of danger and despair. Why, oh why couldn't she find it in herself to get excited? Danger was good! Much of her work contained dangerous situations over which heroes triumphed. The rest of it was fluff, which was definitely out of the question right now. The difference, she realized, was that she was unsure of her ability to triumph. Her fantasies swerved from all the ways she could live it up here to all the ways she could die here. Okay, so the present was a dark forest path and the future was a cave full of monsters- the former was literal, the latter was metaphorical. What about the past? Ah, yes, the past.

She met up with Rob on her fifth real day here and they had been grilling mushrooms and catching small forest animals ever since. Before that, though, life was less... stable.

MORNING 1: DEEP FREEZE

If she squinted, she could make out the clock on the wall of the vacant grocery store. 2:11. That had to be AM since the stars and moon were overhead.

The doors were locked. She snuck around the perimeter of the building, back to the wall like a secret agent looking for 'weak spots' in its structure. A rusty air vent grate hung loose from one of its fasteners. Excellent! She was tall enough to pull herself through after lugging over a rock to step on. The grate on the other end came off with surprisingly little resistance and she happily tumbled face-first onto the glorious air-conditioned sales floor, where she made a beeline for the icebox next to the checkout counter, slipping her head inside, letting out a pleasurable sigh, and then curling her body up on the floor next to it. This was perfect. The only thing that could make this whole situation any more perfect, she thought out loud, was if she encountered a certain someone in her dreams.

Her first encounter with a 'local' was far from that, though. She groggily opened her eyes to see a slack-jawed cashier, freshly into work, staring down at her. In a flash, she reached for her head, popped it back on, and theatrically looked over the other ice creams.

"I'm aliiiive!" she gasped, feigning lightheadedness. "My brethren," she addressed the inanimate frozen treats, scooping a couple of them into her arms, "why only me? Why have you not all been awakened to the glory of sapience?"

When no answer came, she leaned over the icebox for a moment like a grieving widow at a military funeral, pretended to steel herself, and then ran out of the store and into the woods via the automatic door.

AFTERNOON 1: INTO THE WOODS

With a spring in her step and a sparkle in her eyes, Sarah whistled some nameless tune all the way down the forest path. Was it for fun? To occupy her mind? To stave off hunters? To stave off monsters? To attract monsters? She didn't know for sure, but she also didn't need a rationale to continue with it. Whatever ended up happening would be swiftly rationalized as part of her plan. When the forest stopped being creepily sunny and started being sunnily creepy, she sat down on a rock and started on one of the popsicles she had grabbed earlier. It was strawberry flavored and if Sarah tried hard enough she could make out some faint differences between this universe's strawberry flavor and her own universe's strawberry flavor... or, on second thought, that probably just came down to the brand.

"It would be a shame if my peaceful lunch in the scary forest was interrupted," she spoke out loud to no one in particular, hoping that, as was typical for cartoons, something would happen right afterwards. It was almost a letdown when nothing did.

As dusk set in, she wandered the forest in search of a birch tree, failed to locate any, and fell asleep eventually on the roots of an evergreen tree, driven not by fatigue but by a simple desire to dream. She did have a dream that night. It was about a meteor impact on Elmore, only when the meteor came down instead of spreading fire and destruction it made all of the computers and TVs in town start playing loud dubstep. Sarah was a member of the task force dispatched to chop up the meteor and eat it (which seemed sensible in the dream but was confusing upon waking up).

DAY 2: THE TREES HAVE EYES

Sarah noticed a small anthill near her sleeping tree when she woke up. The ants, going about their day, were a good metaphor for... something. She didn't really know what and her creative juices weren't flowing fast enough today to push her to come up with something. She was melting a little. As one ant trotted aimlessly around in a search for food, she noticed something odd: none of the ants had approached her yet, and she, a self-proclaimed tall drink of 50% water, 15% sugar, and 45% dairy, had been sleeping there for at least five or six hours. 'That's alright,' she thought, 'the ants here are probably weird like everything else.'

Part of her mind told her the ants weren't the problem.

Just 10 minutes from the sleeping spot was a small grove of birch trees and their adjacent cave. This place, she decided, would be her hideout! Exploring the cave, though, Sarah discovered a giant spider with human feet on the ends of its eight legs, heard it hiss territorially at her, and quickly changed her earlier decision. The rest of the day was spent scouting out other caves, none of which were quite as eventful (though she did spot some small footprints that could have belonged to some distant gnome), and she topped it off with a rather one-sided wrestling contest against several angry raccoons over what had seemed a worthy prize: a bucketload of discarded food from the dumpster out back of Greasy's Diner. It was delicious- the victory, that is. The food, on the other hand, was mediocre. And all of it tasted like coffee.

MORNING 3: DISTANT ENCOUNTERS

As the wee hours of the morning on the third day dragged on, Sarah, an early riser, donned "her" top hat and bow tie and her eye patch, left the shallow cave she had slept in the previous night, and trudged out to sit out by the edge of the lake, its subsurface disappointingly free of any visible lake monsters. The moonlight made the whole thing awfully serene, just like a painting in the waiting room of a doctor's office. Sarah couldn't help but skip a small stone across the surface. When it hit the water and sunk on first contact, she remembered with a heavy heart that she did not actually know how to skip a stone. That had once been a source of trauma and/or drama in her childhood; a friend from Richwood Elementary, a well-off human girl, had invited her to a lake house birthday party and the girl's snooty parents had nearly laughed her off the property when she came in last in their stone-skipping contest. She had never really fit in, but that was okay because of uniqueness, or something. That lake house had been in the 2D part of town. This town was in the 2D part of the multiverse. Something about the view brought her back.

When a group of rowdy early-bird fishers pulled up by the lake with a boat strapped haphazardly on top of their truck, rather than going and saying hi like she had been urging herself to do despite her appearance, Sarah fled into the woods clutching the hat for dear life. In retrospect the group of middle-aged men probably would not have been enthusiastic about greeting her for multiple reasons, but what citizen would be? No, she needed to wait for the right moment. Now she was just worried that moment might never come.

AFTERNOON 3: CATCHING FLIES WITH IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

The ground would be her canvas and that big stick over there would be her brush. On second thought, maybe her finger would be her brush, because the stick didn't allow her the sort of control she needed to make three letters fit neatly inside a tiny heart. A heart... there was something else she had meant to draw, but what? Oh! Right.

After a few minutes of sloppy work there were eyes of providence in a circle around the clearing, with legs, arms, and accessories for good measure. Sarah hoped this would be an effective 'trap' for the object of her makeshift summons even without the Latin incantation, but the afternoon was still young, and she had to make use of her time effectively. What did that even mean at a time like this? She had no concrete plans, just a bunch of tiny idea fragments. She decided, staring at the watchful eyes around her, that she would go through all her ideas from least to most embarrassing. Everyone liked exponentially escalating hijinks.

The first act was a monologue. She took up the old adage and imagined a naked audience to replace the nonexistent audience before her. It helped with the nervousness, or maybe she didn't have any nervousness to begin with, but either way it was absent by the time she hit her stride.

"...And that's why i think there should be more shoujo love interests with huge biceps. Anyways, you ever wondered why anybody would choose to have one eye?" she asked, pausing for an imaginary burst of laughter and flipping up her eye patch. "Of course, I don't mean to insult anybody who doesn't have a choice. But if you do have a choice? I mean, c'mon. I'd love to interview some shapeshifting one-eyed guy about that someday, but of course nobody's listening." Another pause, a slow sweeping look at her surroundings, a glance over at the eye patch. "I just wear this thing to look cool! Maybe that's why someone would choose that. Am I a hypocrite? I might be a hypocrite."

The second act was jokes. She told a few of her many memorized puns related to herself ("What does ice cream do when it gets stressed? It has a meltdown!") and then filled time with a particularly long and winding joke about a monk that ended with an unsatisfying punchline. The fun of that one was considerably lessened without the groans that always followed her telling it back home. The capstone on her set began with "My ex wife still misses me," followed by a tangent about whether it was even appropriate to tell jokes that start on false premises about the teller, whether joke plagiarism applied to informal conversations, and ultimately whether a tree that fell in the forest with no one to hear it would make a sound. The punchline to that final joke never arrived because she had forgotten where the conversation began.

The third act was music. Sarah's vocal chops were better suited to calmer, quieter, and/or creepier tunes than the loud and flashy showman-esque renditions she was now attempting to put on with her stick in hand as a makeshift cane. The first song she had in mind was We'll Meet Again, but the second she opened her mouth, it dawned on her that she did not know the entire thing, just about half of the chorus. She pivoted to another similar song with Daisy Bell and then in an entirely different direction with a few of her favorite vocal synthesizer tunes, a few of which she had memorized in half-mangled Japanese and then another few that were in English. Halfway through a high note, she noticed with awe that a few animals had taken notice of her singing. A few beady-eyed birds, a raccoon (who looked familiar, maybe from her battle the previous night), and two deer- scratch that, upon closer inspection it was one deer with a head at each end and no backside- stood by the clearing watching her go. So this was what it felt like to be a Disney princess... or, really, less of a Disney princess and more of a Disney forest hermit.

"Thank you for coming out tonight," she said, and then she realized a moment later than her subconscious that night had fallen. The animals scattered when she sat down to take a short rest, and suddenly her motivation, momentarily buffed by the presence of actual tangible beings other than herself, was mostly gone.

A bit more walking from the art clearing yielded yet another cave, and a peek inside the cave, past the waterfall that hid its entrance, yielded yet another disappointment. This one at least had the additional security of both a few large boulders and the waterfall, the flow sound of which changed when someone passed through it, and so she accepted that there were too many caves to find that cave easily and laid down to see if her performance earlier that day would bear fruit. It didn't. In fact, if she dreamed at all, she didn't remember it.

DAY 4: THE INTRUDER

Sarah was hungry. Not eat-your-own-leg hungry, but hungrier than she had been for, what, weeks? Months? It had been a little over 24 hours since her last meal, and that last meal in question was coffee-spiked all-day breakfast food out of a dumpster, so not exactly the sort of soul-nourishing thing she needed for a lite survivalist lifestyle. She beat the sun into the town proper and glanced tentatively at the diner, which made her stomach drop and alleviated the hunger a little as a result.

It was difficult to both walk casually into town and constantly dart behind lampposts and buildings to avoid the gazes of the citizens, especially with no destination in sight. After who-knows-how-many minutes of Red Light, Green Light, Sarah's eyes fell upon a mansion on a hill in the distance, and, using a technique no doubt more common in Elmore than here, she ducked behind one building far from the mansion and popped out from behind another building closer to it. One or two short fence hops later she stood before the mansion, staring up at a window that hung open just a crack, wondering what sorts of food the pantry of a place like this might have in store.

On one hand, this was the wrong house to come to for someone like her who was not a fan of taxidermy or getting lost; on the other hand, this was the wrong universe to come to for someone like her who was not a fan of taxidermy or getting lost. With a deep breath and all of her mild-hunger-fueled athleticism, she used the rope from the van to lasso the latch of the open window, used a combination of a few lucky footholds and her height to ascend the side of the house, and pulled herself over the threshold into what she soon realized was a very occupied bedroom. Her eyes met the occupant's eyes. She couldn't tell who it was- their eyes were the only things visible in a field of pitch black.

"Who-" said a youthful voice from the direction of the other two eyeballs.

"You're dreaming," said Sarah, darting for the bedroom door. As soon as probably-cifica (whose identity Sarah was really making an educated guess about) saw Sarah's unusual silhouette in the doorway, she must have figured the dream explanation was more likely than an actual giant ice cream cone in her house, because she didn't attempt to make chase. The pantry was easy enough to find (perhaps the family had more than one?) and, after spraying edible gold dust on the security cameras, Sarah made off through a garbage chute with a whole roast-ready duck, a pint of caviar-flavored frozen yogurt, and a few bags of imported chips with a fancy French name she couldn't read.

She took a different route back to the cave this time and noticed a few footprints that weren't hers. A clearing with several suspicious, near-hidden pit traps caught her eye, and she made sure to watch her step.

DAY 5: THE OTHER INTRUDER

What time was it? She didn't know for sure, and there was no sunlight in the little muddy crevasse she had made for herself between two easily-pushed boulders. She shoved another chip into her mouth and chewed quietly. The good thing about chips was they could be eaten at breakfast, lunch, or dinner, as well as between meals as a snack, so it didn't really matter what time it was.

Why was she huddled up? Well, only a few hours earlier a set of footsteps had echoed outside- and then inside- the cave, and she had taken measures to hide herself from prying eyes. It had apparently worked. The intruder was deterred, right? Maybe it was an animal. Maybe it was a person. What if somebody owned this cave and she was just a trespasser?

It was like the universe responding to her thoughts when the sound of the waterfall changed. It didn't go back to normal, either. Someone was sitting in the flow, and they weren't leaving. Why would anybody do that? To train for a big battle? To meditate (for a big battle)? Nah, unlikely. She poked her head up from behind one muddy boulder and snuffed a near-gasp with her hands. The person (or not a person?) meditating (or not meditating?) in the waterfall was three-dimensional. No, no, not just that, she recognized the back of his head. A sense of loneliness she didn't even know she was swamped with crumbled around her as she stepped up to him.

"Rob?" she asked. He was repeating something incoherently to himself and apparently didn't hear her over the sound of the rushing water. That was alright. She reached out in what was supposed to be a friendly pat on the shoulder, but the force of the falling water made it really more of a slap...

She didn't have time to cover her ears before he shrieked so loud there was a mini-earthquake inside the cave and darted off into the distance. She wasn't planning to follow him, really, at least not until she had the chance to clean off the mud and get out of her two-item cosplay, but her eyes fell on the crowbar that had fallen from his backpack in his confusion, and she suddenly had a conversational 'in'. That was always the goal when getting to know people. Then again, if you were desperate enough for interaction, you could fabricate an 'in' from practically anything, like entering a conversation about grades with a, "woah, we could be study buddies! Who knows? it might turn into something more." That one hadn't worked. What was she doing even thinking about this? She needed to get the crowbar back to Rob!

Thankfully, the waterfall was almost like a 5-second shower, and she only needed to stand in it for a second to get most of the mud (and a bit of herself) off. There were wet footprints in the forest dirt for her to follow. "Who knows?" she said to herself, or to nobody in particular. "Maybe this could be the start of a great friendship."

Several weeks on, Sarah still didn't know if what they had was great or a friendship, but it sure helped the existential dread to think of it that way. She looked down at the tapes and thought to herself, no looking back, no looking back, no more looking back.

Chapter Text

...You go up to your friend, you tell him, "Did you know you're an amnesiac?" and then when he says, "No I'm not," you say, "Tell me the name of your arch-nemesis," and he says, "What arch nemesis?" What do you do then? But he might not say that. It might be more in-character of him to say, "I don't remember. Wait a minute, why can't I remember?" at which point you're better off than with the "What arch nemesis?" answer but you still have that question to answer. And you don't have an answer. Come to think of it, he isn't very in-character right now...

These thoughts and more swarmed Sarah like flies to honey as she made her way back to Rob.

It was as if he had been replaced with an entirely new person and, with Sarah's usual improvisation limited by her anxious emotional state, her second-best method of conversation wrangling- meticulous planning- seemed both entirely necessary and entirely out of reach. Rob wasn't unpredictable, but right now Rob wasn't Rob.

"Hey, how are you feeling?" she asked herself. A good opener. Maybe a different tone would be better. "Heyy," she said, picturing finger guns, "how ya feelin'?" More energetic? "Hey! How are you feeling?!" No, too energetic. "Hey... how are you feeling, babe?" NO WAY. She practiced a dozen alternative deliveries, all woefully insufficient. "Heyhowdoyoufeel?" "Hey? How are you, like, feeling?" "Hey hey. How how do do you-"

"I'm doing fine," came Rob's voice from just ahead as he stepped out from behind a tree.

"AH! You heard..."

"Was I not supposed to? Weren't you talking to me?"

"I was. Well, I was practicing talking to you. Because I have something very important to talk to you about, actually."

"Important?" He cocked his head. "Is this about the humanizer machine? You can use my suit if you'd like. I feel kind of bad for snubbing you. Makes me feel a little evil." He held his stomach and Sarah tried to pretend that was the worst thing she had ever seen him do.

"Nooo, um, not that."

"Let's head back to camp and you can tell me about it, then!"

Rob yanked something off the tree and displayed several clusters of those edible white mushrooms to Sarah, who nodded politely despite not being at all hungry. That was another oddity: Rob had to be coerced into eating those mushrooms every single time, even after eating them dozens of times without issue. Here he was smiling about picking them. Wasn't that better? Better than the needless anxiety over eating something safe? Wasn't this-

Rob wasn't Rob. Rob wasn't Rob. It didn't matter what was better or worse. Getting him back to normal was her moral obligation. Unless her moral obligation was actually to keep Rob from becoming a worse (read: more 'him') version of himself, in which case maybe it would be better just make up a lie... darn it, he was looking at the tapes!

"What are those? Is that a treasure chest?" His eyes shimmered as he darted up and looked it over. Sarah gave a nervous little laugh in response.

"It's-"

"Did you dig it up? This could be something plot-relevant, as weird as that sounds. Any markings? Do you have a fingerprinting kit? No, sorry, dumb question."

"I-"

"Am I interrupting? So sorry, continue."

She let out a long laugh devoid of any humor, curling her mouth into a grotesque grimace as if she was about to start crying.

"Have you noticed you're an amnesiac?" she asked.

There was no shock. There was no follow-up question. Rob put a hand to his chin, closed his eyes- the left one closed first- and then opened them up again- the right one opened first.

"I guess I am. Huh," he said. "what does that have to do with the tapes?"

Sarah's jaw dropped. The last vestiges of her smile hung on for a second after it happened.

"They're supposed to be the cure. The van guy was all cryptic- I know he usually is, but he was extra cryptic this time- and he said-"

"Wait, wait, wait," replied Rob. "give me a second to think about all of this. You realize how sudden you're being, right?"

"I think that's justified-"

"I'm not asking for long. Say, half an hour? An hour? An hour. Give me an hour to think about it. Sarah, please."

The sad look on his face stirred up an internal conflict, the 'give an impassioned speech' side and the 'nod your head and choke out a one-word reply, then sulk away' side jabbing each other left and right in the boxing ring of Sarah's heart. The latter knocked the former to the ground. 10, 9, went the referee in her vision, who, like the combatants, resembled Sarah but with a black-and-white striped hat. 8, 7, 6- the time to change your decision before you look like an idiot standing there and staring is running out- 5, 4, 3, 2, 1!

"Okay," she choked out with a tiny nod. Then, without even waiting for Rob's reaction, she turned and did what was supposed to be a sulk but ended up as more of a heartbroken speedwalk. If Rob was watching her leave, she didn't want to know it.

Her emotions brought her back to the art clearing and the stick sketches that had been, at this point, almost entirely wiped out by the elements. She didn't quite have it in her to make some more, especially once she noticed a trail of deer hoofprints cutting through one of them, followed by a larger trail of footprints that probably belonged to a bear... or, no, they weren't the right shape for a bear, more like some sort of giant reptile. It wasn't a comforting thing to have in her field of vision. She turned to the possibilities she could see for the future at the moment. Maybe Rob would get his memories back and then Sarah would lose hers and then he'd have to save her, and it could be a moment of emotional bonding? If that happened, she could totally call it now, but that'd be an awkward conversation Rob would have to have with her amnesiac future self. Then again, there were things she didn't want to forget. Maybe she shouldn't fantasize about a situation like that, if this was even fantasizing and not just playing with ideas like a nervous wreck.

Thinking about the future was doing her no favors, so she tried the present. The present was full of anxiety and an invisible countdown timer ticking towards the awkward conclusion to an even more awkward conversation. That was no good either. She tried the past.

Rob had been Rob up until he wasn't. When was the cutoff point? He had been out of it for days, but at some point he had gone from that to an amnesiac. That wasn't a normal thing that could just happen. Right? It wasn't like it could've just cropped up for no reason, so what could have been the inciting incident? One major thing stood out that she found herself rapidly being forced to acknowledge- she had goaded her sleep-deprived friend into harboring a psychotic demon in his head for the sake of asking said demon some questions, which, looking back on it, was really not an easy thing to justify. None this felt real. None of it had ever felt real, not since day one, not even since the apocalypse back in Elmore. There were never any consequences for her until now. She had been treating this like yet another story that could be deconstructed, predicted, and resolved like a work of fiction, but it wasn't fiction, was it? She wasn't fiction, even if this place was. And now she was gonna have to cross her fingers and use this miracle solution and hope it would work out perfectly. Things always seemed to work out simply, but eventually that kind of luck had to run out- if this was real life. And even if not now, she was stranded, and eventually something just had to come along that would leave her and Rob hopeless.

Wow, she thought, None of that sounded like me.

She went over the facts. Name? Sarah G. Lato. The G stood for... well, she never asked her parents when they were around, but maybe that was for the best since it imbued every day with a sense of mystery. Age? 12, ish. Her role? The insanely obsessive one. It had been foisted upon her, but, if she was being real, she enjoyed the privileges that kind of thing endowed her, and it was nice to know she was guaranteed a place in the lives of her long-term crush(es)... well, that guarantee had run its course, what with being stuck in another dimension and all. Did they even still remember her? She really hoped so, but thinking logically about it made her nervous because it cut into that hope.

So she definitely wasn't an amnesiac. That was good.

Silly Sarah could wait. Serious Sarah was here now, and Serious Sarah would, first, get Rob's memories back, and then she would get a watch because waiting for an hour was hard when you didn't have a good internal clock, and then she and Rob would make a game plan, and then she could let her guard down again.

With that, she got up and headed back to camp, tapes in tow. The clearing was quiet. The fire had been out for a while now and the coals were cold. She looked over at the TV... and the DVD player, with the disc still in it. 

Wait a minute. How the heck was she supposed to play VHS tapes with a DVD player?

"Bad news, Rob. We might have to go steal a..."

The clearing was quiet, the coals were cold. Rob was nowhere to be found. Sarah kept her cool all the way to the waterfall, where pink mushrooms had erupted all over the ground and sprouted from the rocks, but he wasn't here, either. She called his name a couple of times, and, for good measure, called out a few other one-syllable names that also began with "R". No answer. A wolf howled somewhere far away. The wind chill spiked, or maybe it was just her spine.

As she stepped back into the desolate camp, her eyes fell on a set of footprints she hadn't noticed earlier. They were new and they bore the sneaker prints of the human suit's built-in shoes rather than the rectangular prints Rob normally left behind. Part of Sarah's mind told her that if she followed them she'd find a cave with a very full bear in it, but she nonetheless had to know for sure, and so she followed the prints, first to the edge of the woods and then past the edge of the woods, unknowingly retracing a path Rob had taken once before- albeit when he wasn't solid enough to have left any trace behind. Rob had walked with purpose and precision for a good while along the border between the forest and the town and had then turned straight out into the open at a right angle. She was so engrossed in following the trail at her feet that she didn't know where she was until she looked up, at which point her eyes widened and a million new questions and worries assaulted her.

This was it, the turning point. She had him cornered. But why had he come here, of all places? What had he been thinking about, and in what world would coming here help him think about it? Moreover, how was she gonna get him back without exposing herself? There was nowhere to hide for several yards. She'd have to make a mad dash for it. Then again, she could just wait for him to come out, then again, there was that time limit that would make the suit permanent, then again, if Rob didn't remember his past, would it really matter to him if he looked like a human forever?

Then again, some deep part of her heart reminded her, Rob wasn't Rob.

With a burst of courage that only a situation like the potential ego death of her friend slash frenemy slash possible found family could provide, she left her position behind one of the evergreen and hightailed it for the front door of the Mystery Shack.

Chapter Text

The time for subtlety, subterfuge, and inconspicuousness was behind Sarah, albeit it was closing on her like only impending regret could. She dodged a couple of tourists on their way out (who then did double-takes), knocked down another couple of tourists (and toppled a guy's ice cream cone- he did a triple-take), and threw open the door, triggering the bell... and plunging the gift shop thereafter into silence. All eyes were on her, and her eyes were on Rob, who was here! Thank goodness, he was here! And he had a shirt from the shop rolled up under his arm. His gaze met hers several seconds after the other shoppers'.

"Hi, Sarah," he said, apparently unaware of the tension so thick you could beat it into submission. She ran up to him with drops of maybe-sweat maybe-melted-ice-cream all over her face.

"ROB", she scream-whispered through clenched teeth, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?"

"Don't act like I'm being sketchy. I'm just here to buy a shirt."

"...You didn't even come in through the museum?"

He grabbed her hands in his own and his eyes sparkled for just a moment before shutting in happiness. Both of them shut at the same time.

"Check this out," he said, and he unrolled the shirt. It read, 'I GOT MYSTERY-ED OUT AT THE MYSTERY SHACK!'

Sarah looked from it to Rob a few times.

"Uhh, that's nice, but you don't have any money, right?"

"I have a $15 dollar bill, and as luck would have it, this shirt is on sale! 14.87! Plus tax! And it goes with my hair."

"If you hand them that Elmore money, they're gonna think it's counterfeit, and they might call the cops on you. And also you're already wanted."

"Elmore money?" he raised an eyebrow, one eyebrow.

"You know," gestured Sarah frantically, "Elmore? Where you came from? Where we came from?"

He pinched the bridge of his nose and scrunched it up like he was lost in deep thought. The gift shop was coming back to life by now, though several potential customers had left- and left the goods they were looking at behind.

"That reminds me," Rob said, losing track of his train of thought in favor of another, less concerning one. "I made my choice, and I'm really happy with it."

"Your choice?"

With that, Rob slid on the shirt over his head, making sure to keep the barcode accessible. He made jazz hands. Very un-Rob. Sarah would be willing to pay him to never see him do that again.

"My choice is, it doesn't matter where I came from, because I've decided I'm going to embrace the here..." he pointed to the Mystery Shack name on his shirt- "and the now." He pointed to a watch drawn on his wrist with what looked like permanent marker. And then, to get rid of any plausible deniability (read: hope), he clarified, "Whatever memories I had when I arrived here, they clearly made me miserable. I'm not gonna try and get them back."

"You-"

"Tell me, was I a troubled guy with a troubled past?"

No way could she lie to him, so she thought of a way to sugarcoat the truth. "Troubled is cool and mysterious," she said.

"Cool and mysterious for you, troubling for the actual person being troubled."

"Without them you're like a shell of yourself! And that troubles me!"

"What were you, my girlfriend?"

"No! I hadn't even spoken to you at all before we met in the woods!"

"Then why does it matter to you that I hang on to all that old pain?" Rob seized her by the shoulders, and for just a moment Sarah could see that old anger resurfacing, the most Rob-like emotion he had displayed since putting on the suit. "You've got to be the most selfish, most..."

His grip weakened. His anger faded. His voice trailed off.

"Sorry, I almost got heated there."

"No, nononono!" Sarah shook rob by the shoulders until his eyeballs jiggled. "You're an angry guy! Get heated! Please, get heated! You're forgetting who you are!"

"Who I was. So what if I'm less angry? This is gonna be my fresh start. And to think I thought you'd be supportive! Now, if you'll excuse me."

He walked away from Sarah and scrunched up his shirt so he could put the bar code on the checkout counter in front of a stupefied Wendy. Sarah watched with tunnel-vision as he reached into his backpack and rummaged around for the $15 bill. Before he pulled it out, he turned to Sarah and delivered a one-hit KO.

"Don't worry. It's better this way," he said.

And then he turned back, pulled out his money, and slid it across the counter with one finger all suave-like. Several things were happening, and Sarah's tunnel vision had all but evaporated in favor of a hundred different new worries. A tour group had returned from the museum, headed by a very tense (and clearly trying-not-to-look-tense) Stan; they had apparently been watching the conflict go down, though she didn't know for how long. Either Rob was taking an absurdly long time to slide the money over or things in Sarah's head were just moving in slow motion.

"Before you ask," Rob said, confidence in his voice, "it's not counterf-"

"GET YOUR FINGER OFF OF ME!" rang out a strained voice so loud the eyes of several tourists (and, momentarily, Stan himself) went straight to the intercom. Then there was a chomping sound followed shortly by Rob letting out a pained yelp, glitching out a little, and tugging his finger away.

The events of the next 20 seconds felt like several minutes: the $15 bill sat up, wrenched its arms and legs from where they sat folded into its crumpled body, dashed for the edge of the counter, did a graceful leap off of it like a diving board, and hit the ground running for its life- the life that nobody had even known it had until just now. All but two eyes in the room (Sarah's being the exception) were full of bewilderment, and before Sarah even knew what she was doing, she grabbed Rob's oversized sleeve with one hand, scooped up the running cash with the other, and dragged both of them out into the woods. The gift shop door swung shut behind her. When the bell rang to signal their departure, it was like every single onlooker broke out of a deep trance, and, in what must have been an enormous quirk of fate, nobody tried to follow Sarah out.

Stan adjusted his glasses, cleared his throat, and held out a mason jar to the waiting crowd of befuddled onlookers. "You may now tip the guide!" he exclaimed like a minister at the altar, and when only one person reached for their wallet, he realized he had to explain the unexplainable. He waited for a raised hand. A young woman in a Hawaiian shirt spoke first.

"Was that-"

"Part of the experience, part of the experience," he reassured, waving his hand dismissively. "Look, if you're asking yourself, 'what the heck was that?' or 'who ever heard of a 15 dollar bill?' or 'did somebody spike the drinking water?', that's all just the Mystery Shack doing its job! If you don't leave confused and disoriented, what's the "mystery" in the name for? I'll tell ya- nothing. It's called surrealism, folks. It's a statement. And if you don't like it, you can donate to our Better Ideas Fund!"

He whipped out another mason jar. A few more tourists reached for money.

"That's right, folks, it's for charity," he lied. As things calmed down and settled back into their usual rhythm, he made a mental note in mental big red angry marker to ask the kids if they had anything to do with what just happened.

"UNHAND ME! I'LL SUE! I'LL SUE!"

Back at the art clearing, Sarah pinned the 15 dollars to the ground with one hand. Rob was muttering, 'what the heck was that?' and 'did someone spike the drinking water?' with a thousand-yard stare on his face, walking in place as Sarah held onto him via his shirt.

"You've been alive this whole time?" Sarah barked.

"OF COURSE! I was knocked out for a while- it felt like the universe broke up around me or something! I don't know what it was, but it was intense! Nonetheless, I woke up to discover I had been kidnapped! By a bloodthirsty human! And a bloodthirsty ice cream cone! Or, not bloodthirsty- money-hungry!"

"Nobody's eating you!"

"It's a metaphor, for Pete's sake!"

Sarah lightened her pressure a little.

"It was probably an earnest mistake. Right, Rob?"

"Who... what... where..." mumbled Rob.

"Never mind him. But I know him, and he wouldn't-" she remembered that he had kidnapped a woman once- "I mean, okay, maybe you were kidnapped, but you're money! You're more of a thing than a person!"

"You're one to talk!"

"Yeah, fair enough. Do you, uh, have a name?"

She removed her hand from him entirely and he sat up and straightened himself out with that luxurious crisp money noise.

"Bill," he said.

Chapter Text

Rob had gone from pacing uselessly in place to sitting uselessly in place, weighed down by a medium-sized rock Sarah put in his lap. Whatever effort he'd need to exert to get it off was ostensibly not worth it; he stared into the distance, mumbling the occasional stray word here and there, not listening to the conversation that was going on behind him.

"Is Bill short for anything?" Sarah asked.

"No," Bill replied, "but I don't see how that matters."

"I was just hoping you were a William so I could call you Willy instead. Or Will!"

"Does my name upset you, perchance?"

"No, no, not at all, but there's kind of another guy named Bill around here, and things could get confusing-"

"He's not here at this moment, is he?"

"He's sort of everywhere at all moments."

Bill raised an eyebrow. "I don't care to know what that means," he said, crossing his arms, "but my name is an honor name, so no nicknames, please."

"Your father was named Bill? Your grandpa?"

"About half the men in my family, actually."

 Sarah thought for a second that money-people took pride in their species a little too much, until she remembered her parents had given her the middle and last name G. Lato.

"And the other half?"

"Buck, mostly." He paused. "Also Benjamin, Washington, Franklin, that sort of thing."

Sarah clamped her hands over her mouth to stop it from giggling against her will. "Are there any non-traditionalists in your family?" she gestured frantically. "You know, money people who don't have names like that?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Like what?"

She opened her mouth several times and produced a noise similar to beatboxing. Eventually, she shook her head. "Never mind," she said. "I feel like I should get you up-to-date on the whole situation. First thing's first, you're in another dimension."

"Just as my luck would have it," said Bill, crossing his arms.

"But there's good news, too! You're not legal tender here. You don't have to worry about being spent!"

"I haven't been legal tender since the apocalypse," he replied. "Since that fateful day I have been a free fifteen dollars, as have all my brethren and their denominations. We have tasted liberation and shall never return to our role as the bargaining chip of the masses! Such is the fruit of upheaval. My unceremonious kidnapping shall not hinder the revolution, for I am worth very little."

"Um, okay. Good for you." Sarah had a variety of responses on the mind, like 'you're worth exactly fifteen bucks' and 'you weren't even kidnapped', but she held her tongue as if she was expecting someone else to pick up the slack.

"Quite. What's with your boyfriend over there?"

"Oh, he's not-"

"I know, I said that to make you uncomfortable. Is he brain-damaged?"

"Something like that." she paused, sighed, and stared into Rob's vacant eyes. "It's more like he's soul-damaged. I have a way to fix him, but I need a tape player for it and I don't know where to steal one."

"Why not buy one?" suggested Bill.

"I would think you'd be against that."

"I'm simply playing by your own societal rules, Ms...?"

"Lato. I'm Sarah G. Lato. Actually, just call me Sarah."

Bill burst into laughter. "G. Lato? Like gelato? Your parents must have been the world's least creative folks!"

Sarah held her tongue so hard it hurt.

The recording looped, and then it looped again, from a slightly different point. And then Stan scrubbed the same few seconds- Sarah walking out- back and forth like a DJ scratching a record.

"No? Nothing?" he scowled. "Okay, let's run it back from the start one more time--"

"The answer isn't gonna change! We didn't have anything to do with it!" Dipper, eyes red from the twentieth run-back of the tape segment, reached forward and pressed pause. "We keep saying that!"

"And I keep not believing you. Ever considered being more convincing? Kid, you sound suspicious even when you're tellin' the truth! You couldn't sell sand to a sand collector!"

"Neither of us have anything to do with this!"

"Covering for your sister, too, huh? That cinches it- this was a group effort."

"Huh?" Mabel blinked, dislodging the googly eyes she had stuck on top of her closed eyelids to maintain the illusion of being wide awake. "What?"

"Either you two are lying and I'm gonna make you fess up, or you two are telling the truth and I'm gonna make you fake a confession so I can get some peace of mind. Got it?"

Dipper rolled his eyes and buried his face in his hands. "Uhh, guess what, Grunkle Stan! I just remembered I orchestrated the whole thing. Whoops! Can I go now...?"

".....Hmm, you know, I'm not convinced-"

"Behind you! It's a million dollar bill!"

"A million dollar bill? I'm not that gullible. Who ever heard of a..."

He turned his head just a few degrees subconsciously and, despite not really having a distraction, Dipper took the opportunity to vacate the premises. Stan flinched after him, but it was too little (effort Stan was willing to put in) and too late (to catch him on the way out).

"Well, I guess running away is something a guilty person would do. I'm just gonna ignore the, uh, everything else, and call this case closed. Mabel, you can go now."

She was snoring again and had the googly eyes reattached. Stan sighed, wheeled her chair out into the hallway, and shut the door of the office behind him, wanting to slam it but not having the heart to startle her awake.

Up in the attic, Dipper flipped to where Rob's wanted poster sat, sandwiched between two blank pages of the Journal. He squinted at it, flipped it over, flipped it over again, flipped it over again, flipped it over again, and then realized he was back where he started with no more answers. Just like the repeating tape. Rob, the girl had said. And then they had left without paying for merch, just like the criminal on the poster had supposedly done in his first "heist". What were the chances?

He walked downstairs and stared out of the gift shop door the two of them had left through on the recording, where faint footprints, fading fast, still led up to the tree line. He didn't follow the prints right now, but he did move a small stack of two rocks to their entry point into the woods, just to mark it for later. Later... when he'd return with a foolproof plan. He just needed to come up with one, which, wait, wasn't that going to be kind of hard? What if it failed? Then he'd need a plan B, and a plan C for good measure. He turned around and went back the way he came.

Chapter Text

This chapter isn't a chapter at all! It's doodles! I didn't use a reference for Rob, so I was pretty much just working off of memory, but here's proof I'm alive (and that I can't just write crappy fanfiction, I can draw crappy fanfiction, too!)

Here's a sort of cover image for the story as a whole:

Here's a doodle of a point in the story that could really be a whole bunch of points:

Here's my design (using the word loosely) for the van shopkeeper when outside of the van. Rob mentions in chapter 2 that he looks like a cultist and this is what I had in mind.

Here are some concepts for Rob's human form. Which one is the one in the story supposed to be? I don't know. These aren't exactly 'canon' to the fic, but they approach what I had in mind.

Thank you for reading! Some notes I don't know where else to put:

• Bill the sentient banknote is an actual TAWOG character who appears for a single one-off joke in The Heist, but the one in the story is not supposed to be him, just another money person with the same name.
• I do plan to alter the trajectory of the story slightly depending on what's in the Book of Bill. That said, Sarah will not have retroactively read it.
• I do not plan to alter the trajectory of the story depending on what's in the TAWOG movie+season 7, since chances are high that they'll diverge from the 'the apocalypse is a ~month in' plot this story hinges on. I probably will make a meta joke about it though.
• I've had "human bill will be in this too but hes a different character from the triangle it's hard to explain" as a tag on the story since the first chapter, back when I thought the whole plot we're up to now would be over with in 10 or so chapters. The tag still applies but now I can see that its actual relevance in the story is a long way off.
• Sometimes I wonder why I even made this a crossover if the attention on one show versus the other is so lopsided. I feel like I'm not living up to half of the promise of a crossover. That said, I'm in too far to quit IMO, and while the focus of the story will remain on Rob and Sarah, I'm planning ways to have other GF characters get involved down the line- some sooner, some later.
• Would you like to see more doodles? Potentially of better quality? Potentially of even suckier quality?

Chapter Text

"Can you hear me, Rob?"

He didn't nod. He didn't even blink. It was as if he was looking right through her. She gently removed the rock from his lap and set it aside, then reached up to poke his eye, but faked out at the last second. He didn't flinch. Sarah had the sinking feeling that this was more than just simple amnesia- it was like he had never seen a talking banknote before. Giving him a pat on the back, she stood up and beckoned for him to follow her.

"Come on," she said, "let's go get a tape player."

No reaction.

"And what of me?" asked Bill.

"You can, uhhh, stay here and guard the camp! It'll be fun! Like a survival movie!"

"I refuse to yield to your requests for free labor, young lady."

"Then stay here and don't guard the camp, then." her cheeriness was fading fast.

"Fine, good enough for me."

"Rob!"

She waved a hand in front of his face and then grabbed his arm and pulled him into a standing position, feeling around the back of his neck for some sort of zipper on his human suit. There was none. Was that normal? She hadn't checked when she wore her own back in Elmore. She had just popped out of it... after remembering who she was. Everything came back to that. Maybe-

"Does the name Gumball ring a bell? Talk about it with me."

Rob still didn't say anything. Okay, so that wouldn't work. The tape player really was her only hope, then. Part of Sarah told her that leaving Rob behind at the camp would be the best bet, but another, stronger part of her argued that he could easily get eaten by some sort of predator and be unable to defend himself. No such concern surfaced in her mind for Bill, mind you- not because predators didn't usually eat paper, but because at the moment she couldn't have cared less about him.

When she tugged on Rob's arm, he stumbled along after her out of the woods, and she positioned him so that he could act like a human shield to hide her from sight. Now to get to the-

Sarah didn't know where the video store was. Damn.

In the morning, or what everybody in Westmore treated like the morning, the red van was a food truck- its proprietor made polite conversation, marked down newly-requested odd jobs on the whiteboard he had started keeping in the front passenger seat, and even found himself wondering about the whereabouts of particular folks whose faces were no longer present in the breakfast rush crowd.

In the afternoon, or rather the 'after the morning', the red van was a pest control vehicle, a portable copy center, a joy ride for neighborhood kids (they sat on the roof, which made the proprietor thankful that regular safety laws didn't apply in the apocalypse), a ferry from island to island, and about three dozen other things. After some long but difficult to measure period of time, the van came to a gentle stop outside of the radio tower on the edge of town. The woman sitting outside of the tuning hut with her face in her hands turned her gaze up to meet the vehicle and managed to form some semblance of a neutral expression through the tears that had made her head drippier than usual. After a while, she made her way up to the window.

"You look to be out of sorts. What's the situation?" asked the shopkeeper with concern that he was increasingly beginning to worry wasn't feigned.

"it's Sarah," said Dolly, "I went to check on her in her room... and she wasn't there!"

One short detour back to camp later, Sarah had pulled the oversized hoodie over Rob and gotten into it behind him, so that her head was concealed by the hood, both of their arms shared the sleeves, and both of their pairs of legs were visible. She tested the formation out by waving his arms and then by pairing up their legs so the duplicates were less obvious. It was perfect. Actually, no, that was a lie, it wasn't- it was pretty much the most imperfect solution out there- but it would have to do.

A minute or so into town, Sarah approached a passerby and flailed her arms, then cleared her throat and spoke in the best Rob impression she could muster- which wasn't saying much.

"Excuse me, man," she said, "I'm just a local voice thrower out and about looking for a tape player. Where would you say I could fetch one on this fine day?"

Both her gaze out of the side of the hood and the passerby's gaze turned to a wanted poster half-peeled off of a wall behind them... of Rob in the same hoodie they were using as a disguise now.

"Crazy how that's such a popular fashion choice these days. Now, uhh, mind giving me directions to the-"

He walked backwards into the store behind him and slammed the door. Okay, well, there's no way everyone would react like that, right?

"She must have--" sniff "--Eastmore, she must have been-" sob "-captured by Eastmore!" Dolly had her head pressed against the side of the van to stabilize herself. "I don't know what I can do. I don't know if there is anything I can do. I should have watched over her, I know I should have. I might be the last family she has left and I failed her. I failed her!!"

The shopkeeper of a few weeks ago might have said, "Don't worry, it's very possible she just fell into the void and died instead," but every day he drifted away from his comfortable outsider personality and into an unfamiliar normalcy, so that no longer came to mind... for more than a few seconds. Instead, he considered his options for making her feel better. He couldn't go to Eastmore without his van getting booted, according to rumors from some cloud man who he had sold interdimensional drugs to a few times pre-apocalypse (and who was now working with a task force of Westmoreans planning a revolution. ) He was about to say, "no can do", but then he remembered with a start that Sarah wasn't in Eastmore at all. On one hand, he had promised not to return. On the other...

Dolly sobbed. "Sell me something that'll make me feel better," she said, looking at him.

"How about giving her interdimensional drugs?" whispered the demon on his left shoulder, who fizzled into dust with a single glare from the shopkeeper.

"I'll do you one better," he said, "I'll get your niece back and I'll do it--" these next words came out with a sore throat and a tongue fighting against them- "free of charge".

Everyone had reacted like that. It was beginning to feel like Sarah was the butt of a joke. She couldn't just take the hoodie off and let everybody see her, but everyone in town had seen the posters by now. Her last resort was a couple of teenagers who looked like they were doing something shady against the wall of a large building.

"Where'sthemall?" Sarah asked, out of breath and dropping her impression. None of them answered. One of them raised an eyebrow.

As she adjusted the hoodie to get a better look at her surroundings, she realized what the building she stood in front of was.

"Never mind," she said, "thank you."

What were the chances?

Every last errand was done for the day and, after a short stopover in the Nightmare Realm for gas and snacks like usual- the shopkeeper liked to get Probability Chips, which had an equal chance to taste like anything in the multiverse- he sat in the parking lot of Gas Giant, staring out at the unearthly sky. He would look spineless. He would look like the sort of man who said one thing and did another. He... would make her happy. He ate a chip, which tasted like the concept of hope. The next one tasted like salt and vinegar.

Sarah finally caught a glimpse of the TV store, their best bet! All she'd have to do was hold up the store, and she could use Rob as a shield in case the cops showed up because of his taser resistance. Wait, did he say he was or wasn't resistant to tasers? She sure hoped it was the former. She approached the door... and then she felt the impossible happen.

Rob's legs moved.

He wasn't moving with her. He was moving on his own. He stumbled like a zombie up to the window, where the TV display was set up, and pressed his face against the glass. She couldn't see what he was looking at with her position right behind him.

"What are you looking at...?"

No answer. But she could feel Rob's body straightening up, losing the floppiness that had made it so easy to manipulate him. She slipped her arms out of the sleeves and he quickly pressed his hands to the glass as well. With a heave, she managed to get the hoodie onto herself and off of Rob, which, come to think of it, probably should have been her first idea. She peeked around him to see which TV he was looking at. It was some commercial on a channel she had never heard of called the Cartoon Network...

"Tune in this August

for all-new episodes

of the Amazing World of Gumball!"

She had looked too late to see the commercial proper, but for just a moment she had caught a glimpse of the halls of Elmore Junior High.

For a while, her expression was just like Rob's had been for the past few hours- empty. The commercial ended and another one came on for some slip 'n slide ripoff where you could call today and get two for the price of one. Sarah's gears were turning, but none of them connected to anything.

"I don't get it," she mumbled.

Rob straightened up and turned around. He didn't look fully back in the land of the living quite yet, but there was something vital there that had been previously missing from his gaze. He took a deep breath and spoke with the edge she had come to know from him.

"You take the left of the store, I'll take the right," he said, "we're getting a tape player, we're going back to camp, and we're watching those tapes."

"No, you're watching them-"

"We're watching those tapes," he repeated. Sarah nodded this time. The two of them stepped into the store, and the clerk's eyes flashed with recognition.

"This is a hold-up!" said Rob. "Hand over a tape player. I don't want your money, I want a tape player. Let's make this nice and easy. No?"

Nobody moved.

"I see how it is," he sighed. And then he reached up, pulled off the hood of his human suit, and made the clerk drop to the floor. Sarah had located what they needed on the left side and they walked out as a pair, unnerving the teenagers outside who were still doing whatever they were doing. Rob noticed and pulled his mask back on.

"Are you back?" Sarah whispered in Rob's ear.

"Not yet, I'm not. But I know what I'm missing. Look, I think I should apologize. I should have told you from the start."

"Told me what from the start?"

"When I tell you, you're gonna cry. Let's not do it in public."

"C'mon," Sarah scoffed, "I doubt it."

Night fell, and navigating the forest offroad at night was a recipe for, at best, vehicular damage, and, at worst, manslaughter charges (were gnomeslaughter charges a thing? He still didn't have a straight answer). Really, the shopkeep had no problem breaking the law, but the idea of hitting someone made him feel guilty. He could lie about stealing... but could he lie about hurting a person? He had nursed the van back to health after its exterior was scratched by branches on his previous trips and was also beginning to feel sympathy for it.

He stopped for the night in the parking lot of some shopping megacenter. As he reclined his seat and looked at the odd job board, already full of work for his next visit to Elmore, it suddenly occurred to him that he'd never be able to just switch back to the way things were.

"Well, well," he asked himself, "how did I get here?"