i ate the forbidden chip

"Oh, Yvooonne!" Bill knocked on Yvonne's apartment door. "Guess whooo!" He had a big date today with Yvonne Torizon—black hole, performance poet, prettiest girl in Dimension Zero, and Bill's first girlfriend—and only girlfriend, because he was completely confident that they were perfect for each other and would remain in love for the rest of eternity and nothing he could do would ever ruin things. He'd planned the perfect date: live music, fancy restaurant, when he made the reservation he'd even remembered to tell them not to put a tablecloth on their table so it couldn't accidentally get sucked into Yvonne. This date would be perfect.

He straightened his top hat, adjusted his bow tie, and floated patiently in front of Yvonne's door as he waited for her to answer.

But she didn't answer. "Vonnie? Hello?" He knocked again, louder. "Is everything okay in there?"

She was home, he could tell—even from the hallway he could feel her pull. But still no answer. His throat and eye went dry as panic wormed its way through his veins. "Yvonne!" He pounded on the door.

There was the thinnest sliver of light beneath the door—which meant there was a crack between the door and the floor. He dove down to floor level and slid underneath. "Yvonne, what's going o—" His voice cracked as it jumped, "WHAT!"

Yvonne was there, all right, floating over her couch. And next to her, heavy corners digging awkwardly into the couch cushions, was VENDOR—feeding Yvonne planets vended out of THEIR product dispenser box like they were chocolates out of a candy box, assuming the candy box also happened to be a smarmy interdimensional god-politician's lap.

Bill's voice jumped an octave, "What's going on here!" He grabbed Yvonne by her spectral arm and yanked her away from VENDOR. (The moment he touched her, his hand spaghettified and she began swallowing his arm into her body. He let her.) "What are you doing with my girlfriend!" This wasn't how things were supposed to go.

VENDOR didn't even have the decency to look embarrassed that THEY'd been caught. (Admittedly, Bill wasn't sure how a planet-filled vending machine could look embarrassed, but still.) "I should think that's obvious, mortal."

"Whoa whoa whoa, you're still not calling me a god?! What if I divinely intervene my fist up your—"

Yvonne slid between Bill and VENDOR, snapping, "Bill! Back off!" And in a saccharine-sweet baby voice Bill had never heard Yvonne use, she asked, "Are you okay, Vendy-wendy?" Vendy-wendy?

"I am now, Vonny-wonny."

Bill cringed in disgust. If he had to hear any more of that, he might hurl. "Yvonne?" He attempted to meet her eyeless gaze, eye wide and pleading. "What's going on?"

Yvonne gazed back from the abyss and said coolly, "It's over, Bill. I'm leaving you for VENDOR."

He felt his heart crack. "What? I—but—but why? Why for THEM?! You've gotta see what a downgrade THEY are!"

Still reclining on the couch like THEY owned the whole universe, VENDOR said snidely, "Perhaps you overestimate how much of a catch you are."

"For one thing," Yvonne said, "THEY have a job. A real, steady, respectable job—not child con artist."

"But. But I'm a king," Bill said pathetically. "That's a job."

VENDOR scoffed. "No law, no economy, no infrastructure—you're no king. You're just a bully everyone's too scared to contradict."

Yvonne went on, "And for another thing, THEY're better looking than you."

"Oh, you've gotta be kidding!" Bill telekinetically yanked VENDOR into the air and spun THEM around, showing off all THEIR sides. "This uggo?! THEY're a rectangle wreck slathered in last season's shade of Grandma's Yawn Turquoise."

"I beg your pardon." VENDOR wrenched free of Bill's psychic grip and loomed over him angrily. "Better turquoise than a fool in fool's gold!"

"And at least all of THEIR corners are exact right angles," Yvonne said. "THEY don't have to pretend to have perfectly equilateral corners."

Bill flinched. "H—hey. That's a low blow, come on."

She ignored his protests. "And, finally? THEY have future prospects. Ambitions bigger than going dancing and getting wasted! Things THEY plan to do and will actually do! All you have is empty promises."

"That's not true at all! I'm gonna..." He trailed off as he tried to think of one real, serious, important thing he'd accomplish over the next trillion years, and came up blank. "I mean..."

"The most noteworthy thing you'll ever do with your life is die and go to therapy," Yvonne said. "You're not the triangle I thought you were. In fact—you're not a triangle at all."

"Wait—what?"

Bill looked down at his hand. It was no longer flat and black. It was a series of uneven cylinders, fleshy, squishy, covered in earth tone skin and pores and fingernails. He gasped in horror, his eye—eyes—darting down to his body: no longer yellow and glowing, just meat encased in the dull hue of alien dirt, wrinkles and stretches and folds and hairs and lumps and protrusions and dips...

"Absolutely barbaric," VENDOR said, with as much schadenfreudian glee as disgust. "You'd have been better off staying dead with dignity."

Bill tried to back away from the two of them—but was tugged back. Too late, he remembered he was holding Yvonne's hand.

His hand had been torn off. The remaining flesh and bone stretched and twisted like hot taffy, the damage climbing toward his elbow. He wrenched his arm free and bolted out the open door, the ruin of his arm trailing behind him like a fleshy ten-foot-long tail. He shoved past her alien neighbors as they gasped in disgust and horror. Yvonne's mocking laugh chased him out as VENDOR called, "Enjoy slowly rotting!"

He collapsed against the door out of her apartment building—unable to open it—human heart pounding in his human ears, human breath heaving so fast it burned dry and cold in his human esophagus.

A passing neighbor took sympathy on Bill's humiliation and patted a cutlery-bedecked hand on his shoulder. "Tough luck. Your girlfriend must take physical fitness really seriously," the passerby said. "She left you because you've gotten... out of shape!"

Bill blinked dumbly as the "neighbor" laughed uproariously at his own pun. "Hold on. Did—did you make me go through all that, just for that stupid—!" He rounded furiously on the ghost and swung a fist as huge, hard, and heavy as an anvil at his obnoxious face.

It collided with the ghost's skull like a metal bat with a baseball, sending him tumbling so far into Bill's dreamscape that he looped all the way around it and tumbled back to where he started. "Hey. That hurt." He rubbed his cheek, pouting.

"Yeah, and after this little dreamscape home invasion, you oughta consider yourself lucky you still can feel pain! Just what do you think you're doing in my dream!"

"Telling... jokes?"

Well. Yeah, okay, that much was obvious.

Bill knew who this unfunny clown was. In the eighties, Ford had met him and subsequently griped about him to Bill for half an hour: one of the many local ghosts who had adopted the old Corduroy cabin in the woods as their unofficial clubhouse, a "Category 9" ghost Ford had dubbed the "dream hipster." Frankly, Bill thought Ford's need to categorize and rank ghosts was as adorable as it was pointless; but if he'd been forced to rank how dangerous human ghosts were, he'd probably give this joker a 9 outta 10, too.

Dispenser of terrible puns, fully capable of killing the living in their sleep, and only as harmless as he was because he enjoyed psychically tormenting his victims until they died of fright slightly less than having a captive audience to his nightmare stand-up routines. From what Ford had told Bill, he had an incredible mastery of other people's minds: capable of invading a victim's head undetected to comb through their memories for their worst insecurities, seize a REM cycle by the throat, and flawlessly choreograph every element of a nightmare—all just to set up cutesy one-liners. (Ford had regaled Bill with a tale of the hipster giving him a nightmare of his own car-sized disembodied hand crushing his twin, just to receive a quip about "giving his brother a hand.")

This creep even managed to maintain that control over an accomplished lucid dreamer: Ford had never been good enough to overpower Bill's control of a dream, but Bill had made sure he was good enough to overpower almost anything else on Earth. And within their own brain, a dreamer had a natural home field advantage over any psychic invaders.

Those were the kinds of dream skills Bill himself took great pride in; a human mastering them in less than two lifetimes was remarkable. The first time he'd heard of this guy, Bill had been impressed by the hipster's purported skills—not to mention his outrageous modus operandi.

Having now been on the receiving end of it, okay, he could understand why this guy had driven Ford up the wall. "Telling jokes about my ex insulting me while she dumps me for an elected politician? I mean, she was a psycho, but she wasn't that out of touch with reality!"

The hipster held up his hands to ward off the accusation. "Not my fault! All I did was find your girlfriend, find some guy you hated, set up the scenario, and get your subconscious to supply the burns. But, you have to admit—" He started giggling, "I got you good, I reeeally got you good. The look on your face when I said 'out of shape'—ha! You went through all five stages of grief backwards!" He let out a hearty guffaw.

Every time he inhaled to keep laughing, his head swelled a little larger like a balloon. Bill waited until he noticed, felt his head, and stopped laughing as his stretched features twisted in horror, before Bill said, "All right, fine, you got me—but don't get a big head over it."

"How are you doing that?" The dream hipster frantically tried to squish his skull back down to size.

He was right to panic. Usually, a dreamer's psychic self-defense depended upon altering the environment around the demonic oppressor or astral projector that had invaded their mind. It was rare for an intruding human spirit to exert as much control over a lucid dreamer's dreamscape as the hipster did; but it was also just as rare for a dreamer to be able to directly control an intruder's form—like Bill could.

Bill summoned up his cane and twirled it one hand. "I hate to burst your bubble—"

The hipster frantically tried to wave him back, "No no no no—"

Bill pointed the cane at him; the tip shot out toward his face; and with a loud POP his head exploded. "—but you're not the only one around here who knows how to steer a dream, jack."

The hipster sullenly regrew his head. "Yeah, yeah. I figured that out while I was doing recon in your memories. You're hard to catch out of a lucid dream, you know that? And you broke free from my routine!" He gestured around them. In the manner of dreams, their environment hadn't quite come into focus until they'd paid attention to it; but Yvonne's apartment was gone and they were now floating in Bill's natural dreamscape: a blue starry void and a faraway sun, glowing blue grids rolling out in the distance like an ocean made of CGI graph paper. Bill had been imposing his invasive species of a dreamscape on top of his human victims' dreams for so long that slamming it down on top of the hipster's dream had been second nature. "I had another three skits planned!"

"Aw, shucks. And to think I missed them." Bill rolled his eye so hard that his whole body rolled over too, taking his dreamscape with him. The hipster tensed up like a dog spooked by thunder as the world rotated around him. "Beginning to regret choosing me to follow home and haunt?"

He had met the dream hipster himself before, albeit only briefly: two nights ago, when he'd stopped by the abandoned Corduroy cabin in the woods for a few minutes. He'd had to ask the hipster to poltergeist open the door for him. Bill could just imagine how this whole saga must have happened from his perspective: some blonde babe cursed so she can't use doors wanders into the Corduroy place in the middle of the night, greets the ghosts like old acquaintances, starts blasting puns at the hipster like she knows exactly what he is, he decides her mind might make an interesting target, follows her from a distance to find out where she lives...

He'd probably barely penetrated "her" meninges before realizing he'd judged this book by a cover that had been torn off a novel in another genre entirely.

There was a hint of nervousness to the hipster's rueful laugh. "What's going on in this shack? I've run into an actual, hunting sleep paralysis demon and an astral projecting fifth grader." (Bill elected not to correct him on Dipper's age.) "And you..." The ghost glanced over Bill—once again triangular, glowing yellow and void black.

Encouragingly, Bill said "Uh-huuuh?" He batted his eyelashes flirtatiously.

"You're... not from around here."

"Nope—and you're a coward!" Bill flung an arm around his shoulders, and was smugly satisfied when the ghost's shoulders hunched up like he was trying to protect his neck from the touch. Nothing was as satisfying as scaring the tough guys. "Come on, we both know what you're thinking, bite the bullet and get it over with."

"You're that alien demon that attacked the town last year, aren't you?"

"Tried to liberate your town, not that you killjoys gave me an opportunity to prove it—but hey, a lot of hurtful things were said and done last summer, let's call it water under the bridge and move on!" As a reward for giving the right answer, Bill let the hipster go. "'Alien demon' sounds so pejorative, though—I prefer Bill Cipher! Remind me what name you're going by in this timeline, you'd be surprised how much it can vary." (He had, in fact, not met this ghost in another timeline; but it paid to convince people you knew more than you really did.)

"It's Eddy Forkhands."

Bill's gaze locked on Eddy's right hand, with the leather glove covered in an array of cutlery. "Did the glove come first, or—?"

"The name, actually."

"Huh." Weird. Eddy earned a point for being weird. "So! If you recognize me, you must've been in town for the parade! But I don't remember seeing you in my throne of frozen human agony." Under the Nightmare Realm's influence pouring through the rift, Gravity Falls' landscape and mindscape had collapsed together into one layer—putting ghost humans and flesh humans on the same physical level. Bill had noticed a few ghosts caught in his throne. An eye-bat reported she'd caught one ghost who'd tried to fly through a wall and concussed himself when he discovered it was now solid. "Where were ya hiding?"

Eddy admitted, "The Creeper set up a bunker in the crawlspace."

Ah, Bill's weakness: he still had a tendency to think of a world's surface as its plane, and all his life he'd been accustomed to looking up from a plane... but he always seemed to forget about down. He hadn't even thought to send someone to check the crawlspace. "The Creeper! You shacked up with the Creeper?! Oh, desperate times really do call for desperate measures! Honestly, if I'd been floating in your shoes, I would've flung myself at the agony throne."

"I considered it," Eddy said. "What are you doing back here, anyway? Didn't you die? We all thought you crossed over, nobody's seen you haunting the town."

"Crossed over, hated the half-a-star hotel they put me up in, crossed back. I'm stuck in a reincarnation gone wrong."

In truth, Bill should have been more concerned that somebody outside the household had figured out who he was, never mind telling him about how he'd gotten back here. A dead human was still a human; and aside from the opportunities Weirdmageddon had offered the dead to interact with a level of existence they hadn't touched in decades or more, Gravity Falls' ghosts had no more appreciated Bill's leadership than the living humans had. If Eddy wanted, he could rally a mob against Bill—of ghosts and the living alike.

But it was hard to worry. First—because, once he snapped out of a nightmare into a lucid dream, both the dreamscape and distant reality seemed to take on the fuzzy, soft fog of a fantasy one doesn't believe in; it numbed all fear, rage, and anxiety.

Second—because when he dreamed, he could be anything he imagined. And he could imagine being himself. And when he was himself—sleeker than a shadow, face like a warning sign, burning hands that drained the warmth from anything they touched and body shining with the stolen light of a thousand trillion prematurely aborted nebulae—he was a god. When he was entertaining a human guest within his own dreamscape, no power in all the multiverse nor consequence of his own actions could touch him.

And third—because if Eddy thought Bill posed an active threat to the town, it seemed weird that he'd stick around to give him a nightmare about getting cucked by a vending machine.

"So, congrats on stumbling on the big secret! But now that you know, I'd appreciate it if you keep my identity..."

Bill suddenly winked out of existence. Eddy flinched and looked around wildly for Bill—nothing but the blue starry void.

He reappeared, the size of a corn chip, atop Eddy's head, lifting up his fedora. "...under your hat."

"Har, har."

"Because if you don't, the things I'll do to your sorry soul would make an exorcist drip out of every orifice in envy."

"I'm not telling." Eddy snatched off his hat and shook Bill out of it. "You're a real show-off, aren't you?"

"Whatsamatter, you can dish it but you can't take it?" Bill summoned up an empty food dish and flung it at Eddy like a frisbee. "You're not the only one who knows how to make psychic puns!"

"You'd just better watch out—I'll get you back, you'll see!" Eddy caught the dish in his cutlery-covered hand with a clatter of metal on porcelain, spun around with it once, and flung it back toward Bill. When he let it go, it was coated in a thick layer of ice. "And everyone knows revenge is a dish best served cold!"

"Ha!" Bill rolled his eyeball back, opened his eyemouth wide, and swallowed the dish into the void of his throat. "You're quick, slick—I like that. Not a lot of humans are adept with dreams. But you don't know how to handle competition!"

"I don't run into very much," Eddy said sourly. "I do a lot more performing than sparring."

"And it shows. En garde!" Bill whipped forward his cane again like a fencing blade, body turned sideways so the human spirit would only see his thin edge.

Eddy flinched in surprise, but summoned up an exaggeratedly-curved cutlass with a skull embossed on its basket-shaped guard just in time to parry Bill's swing.

"Ooh, piratical!" Bill said approvingly. "It really compliments your eye patch."

"Yeah, the eye patch brings the whole look together. It throws off my depth perception, though." He took a swing at Bill. "Good thing I'm fighting an opponent without any depth!"

"Ha!"

This guy really was pretty good, Bill thought. At controlling sleeping minds, at scripting and choreographing dreams, at the quick witty retorts... all while slinking around in somebody else's brain, which was the telepathic equivalent of doing a dance routine backwards and in high heels. Simply getting in here was impressive for a human that Bill hadn't helped train.

And that gave him an idea.

"All right, enough with the cutting remarks." Bill poofed away Eddy's cutlass just as he attempted to swing it through Bill. "You're not too bad for a human—but you haven't had anyone to push your craft in a while, have you?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing! Like I said, you're not bad!" Bill said. "For a human. But there's a whole multiverse of dream manipulation out there that you've never even touched. You think your garden variety sleep paralysis demon is impressive? You ain't seen nothin' yet, bub."

Eddy studied Bill a moment, nose scrunched up like he thought he smelled a trap. But if Bill knew anything about show-off attention hogs like this guy, he wouldn't be able to stand being a little fish in a big pond. Just like he expected, Eddy cautiously said, "Go on."

"So you're good for a human. Now, me? I have a lot more skills with dreams than you do—I've been studying this art for hundreds of billions of years!—but I don't have much practice using any of my skills in a human body. I can't quite get the hang of a few of my favorite tricks that you seem pretty adept with—tricks like astral projecting out of my mind and into somebody else's."

Eddy scoffed. "Oh, astral projection's the easy part," he said. "You can use my method! If you want to project your soul out of your body, all you've gotta do is die!" He laughed.

Bill rolled his eye. "Yeah, yeah, you think you're cute. But I've got a bounty on my point and I'm not about to risk peeling this banana until I know whether the fruit inside is made of flesh or geometry.

Eddy gave Bill a surprised look. "You can't tell what species your soul is?"

Bill shrugged—and as he did, the self-image of his dream form flickered back and forth and back and forth between human and shape. "Can you?"

Eddy didn't answer; he didn't need to. Just looking at his eye as he studied Bill's form(s), Bill could tell he had no clue. It was easy to get the sense for things like that when somebody else was inside your brain.

"All right. So, what's your proposal?" Eddy asked. "I help you relearn some of your old tricks, and you teach me a few new ones?"

"Ding ding ding! Give the mammal his prize!" Bill snapped his fingers. Poof. "Here, have a spider made entirely out of blood vessels." The "spider" flopped through confusedly through the space between them like a jellyfish.

Eddy's eye widened. "Ooh, I've always wanted one of those." He reached for it—only for it to puff out of existence.

"Aaand while I'm still relearning my old skills, I need somebody to run a couple errands for me in other people's heads," Bill said. "Nothing strenuous! Some light oneiric espionage, maybe incepting an idea or two—if you managed to dig deep enough into my head to find my first psycho ex, this'll be a cinch!"

"She didn't seem like a psycho to me."

"You shoulda dug deeper." Bill zoomed closer to Eddy, staring him down with a plate-sized eye. "So, whaddaya say? Have we got a deal?"

Eddy leaned away. "This isn't some kind of—fae bargain, is it? What happens if I can't uphold my end, do you get my soul or something?"

"Hey, if you wanna offer it as collateral, I'm not gonna turn it down! But no. If you can't run my errands, I stop teaching you. No tricks, no strings attached. I realize the whole spooky Eye of Providence look throws off some humans, but I'm really not the backhanded-deals secret-conspiracy type of guy! I'm pretty straightforward once you get to know me!" Man, since Bill's death he hadn't gotten to spent nearly enough time unsupervised with people who didn't know him. It felt good getting to just lie to someone.

Eddy shrugged. "Then it sounds good. Deal."

"Great!" Bill shot out a hand, flashing blue with flames, and grabbed Eddy's ungloved hand in a tight squeeze.

"Hey!" Eddy jerked his hand back and cradled it protectively. "Watch it, I don't like flames."

"Oooh, the flammable organic doesn't like flames! You baby," Bill said. "Anyway, feel free to drop in any night I'm not sleepwalking! Unless I'm having a dirty dream. If you duck into my head and see me putting the moves on a poison frog with more fingers than a millipede has legs, no you didn't."

Eddy raised his hands dismissively. "None of my business," he said. "But really? Extra fingers? Is that why when I followed you home, I ran into a dungeon bondage dream about that guy with those journals—"

"Out!" Bill sat bolt upright as he woke up.

Eddy, ejected from Bill's mind when the dream shut down, somersaulted backward in the air and crashed into a wall.

He didn't remember dreaming that. Had he dreamed that? He hated that he still couldn't remember everything he dreamed when he woke up. What had he been thinking of before bed the night he'd first met Eddy? Hadn't that been the night Ford had called Bill a "wonderful person"? Yikes. Embarrassing.

Bill pointed sharply at Eddy. "Revenge fantasy," he said. "That was a revenge fantasy. You know what it's like when somebody murders you, the revenge fantasies can get pretty elaborate!"

"Ow." Eddy rubbed the back of his head, wincing. "Kind of a steamy scenario for a revenge fantasy, isn't it?"

"What good is a revenge if you can't eroticize it a little bit! Come on, don't tell me your revenge fantasies don't get at least a little hot and heavy."

He considered that. "Honestly, most of the hotness comes from gallons of gushing blood."

"Remind me to come to a party in your head sometime," Bill said. "Anyway, get out of here, you've pestered me enough for one night. Why don't you give that 'astral-projecting fifth grader' a nightmare or two?" He pointed. "He's sleeping in there with his sister. Don't tell him I sent you."

Eddy's eyes lit up. "Oh, I just love torturing children."

"Hey! Keep it to the boy! The girl's under my protection. If you torment her, the deal's off and I hunt you for sport."

"Fine, just the boy." Eddy waved his threat off as he ghosted through the curtain protecting his room. "See you tomorrow!"

"Yeah, sure, tomorrow's fine." He lay back down. He'd been planning to do some sleepwalking tonight, and now he'd have to wait to fall asleep again before he could get to work.

Still—he supposed it hadn't been a total loss.

####

Heart pounding in terror, Dipper ran through the labyrinth of the Mystery Shack, desperately trying to keep ahead of his pursuer as he searched for the one thing that could save him: his hat. The lights were out, Dipper never found a light switch no matter how much he scrabbled at the walls, and he was sure that even if he'd found a window it would have been dark outside. Only two things illuminated the dark: the glowing stars in his constellation-shaped birthmark, acting both as his only guiding light and as a beacon to his pursuer; and the occasional flash from behind as the pursuer took aim at him with the memory gun.

Dipper desperately tried to smooth his curly bangs down over his birthmark again, only to discover he no longer had bangs. He discovered why when he skidded around a corner and nearly ran into a mirror. In the faint light from his forehead, he saw clumps of hair falling off his head, leaving him half bald and his birthmark totally uncovered. "What?! No no no!"

The glow of the memory gun's bulb in the mirror was the only warning Dipper got before another bolt shot at him. He dove out of the way, and ran into a corner. Dead end. He squeezed down into a ball, trying to cover his forehead with his hands. It didn't seem to dim the light at all. "Please, please, please don't. I need my brain! It's all I've got!"

Memory gun still raised, his pursuer stepped into the light from Dipper's birthmark—

He gasped. "Mabel? Why?!"

"I'm sorry, Dipper." Her jaw was set in determination, and there was no mercy in her dark glare. "But I'm tired of being the 'dumb twin.' This is the only way!"

"It doesn't have to be," he said quickly. "I—I can help tutor you! You can even copy my homework if you want!"

"Then everyone will know you're smart enough to do your homework and mine!" She closed in on Dipper as he cowered in the corner. "Once I'm the smart twin, I'll be able to get into a fancy college with an electrical engineering program like Dad wants!" She aimed the memory gun at Dipper's forehead, the tip of the bulb touching the center of the constellation. "But don't worry. If you can't get into college, I promise I'll take care of you."

"Mabel, please—"

A strange man clapped a gloved hand on Dipper's shoulder. "Come on, kid, you should be more supportive," he said. "Don't you want your sister to shoot for the stars?"

"Of course, but not like th—" He froze as he processed the stranger's word choice. "What?!"

The pun enraged him so much that he immediately sat bolt upright in bed. "Are you serious?! All that for a stupid joke?!"

"Whoa, calm down kid!"

Dipper whipped around to glare at the ghost crouching in the window. "You again! You're one of the ghosts from Grunkle Ford's journal, aren't you!"

"I said calm down," the ghost insisted. "Look at you! You're beside yourself with anger!"

"What?" Dipper looked down at his soulless body still lying in bed. The ghost wheezed with laughter as Dipper groaned and flopped his head back onto his pillow.

When he opened his real eyes, the ghost was gone—or, at least, wasn't visible. Grumbling under his breath, he got up, trudged to Bill's room—he wasn't in bed—and sighed and headed downstairs to tell Ford about the category 9 ghost in the house.

####

Mabel cautiously pushed open the door, creeping deeper into the decrepit, abandoned house. "Hellooo?" Dust motes flitted like ghosts through the moonbeams shining down from a hole in the roof. She swallowed hard and started creeping across the room.

Just as she was passing through the moonbeams, a shadow fell over her, and she gasped. A small figure was silhouetted in the light above. It hopped silently to the ground and crept closer as Mabel stood paralyzed by fear, until it entered the light and—

Mabel gasped, "Kitty! Hiii!" She crouched in front of the cat. "Ugh, you don't look so good. Are you okay?" The gray cat's fur was matted and mangy, and its snarl revealed sharp fangs and gums crusted with something that might have been dried blood. Half a dozen other cats in similar conditions crept out of the shadows, surrounding Mabel on every side and eyeing her face hungrily.

"Oh, you poor things! Look at you! This won't do at all. Here!" She clapped twice, and the cats all turned into fat, fuzzy, big-eyed leopard and tiger kittens with neon rainbow spots and stripes. The cubs stopped dead and looked at each other in bewilderment.

"That's better! Now, let's see what we can do about your house." She clapped again, and the room lit up with a chandelier made from glass ice cream bowls. The hole in the ceiling was replaced by a skylight letting in smiling sunshine, and the walls and windows were decorated in bright flowery wallpaper and lavish curtains. One of the cubs cautiously batted at a silky pink ribbon tying a curtain open. Another clap, and a round table covered in cookies and tea cups appeared in the middle of the room with enough chairs for her and all the cats.

She slowly turned around, surveying her handiwork—and spotted a lost-looking man standing in the doorway, staring around in confusion. "Oh! Hi there! I don't think I've dreamed about you before!" She was pretty sure she'd have remembered him. She didn't usually dream about boys that ugly. But who was she to turn away a new friend? She summoned up another chair as she sat at the table. "Wanna join us? We're having a tea party! It's catnip tea with milk. Mmmostly milk."

"Oh," the new guy said, "err, I shouldn't. I was just trying to set up a joke—"

"I love jokes! Sit down, you can tell it over tea and cookies!"

"But— I— Okay." He sheepishly sat down and speared a cookie with a fork strapped to his finger.

"Whoa! I like your glove! My friend Candy's making one like it."

"Yeah?"

"She's got all kinds of ideas on how to upgrade humans. Her glove is pink, though. And her mom won't let her add knives to it. She says she might trip and stab out her... um..." Mabel uncomfortably eyed the new guy's eye patch.

He nodded solemnly. "Her mom's right."

Mabel laughed nervously and changed the topic. "Um—I like your sweater, too! You're a pro at wearing sweaters, I can tell. Red and green stripes are a daring choice, but you pull it off."

"Oh—really?" The new guy looked down at his sweater in surprise. "This old thing? I got it for a Christmas party years ago. I should replace it, I just never find the time!"

Mabel gasped. "Then you're in luck, because you're talking to a sweater-making master!" She gestured at a door that had just appeared to a walk-in closet. "Would you like to see my offerings?"

He looked at the closet; looked at Mabel; looked at his sweater; and said, "Yes."

####

Bill had been able to lucid sleepwalk for over a week now, but between sleepovers, sleep deprivation, and date nights, this was the first chance he'd had to return to the underground lab since the night he'd returned from his brief escape. He'd still only barely gotten started on clearing out the rubble, never mind starting to actually rebuild the portal. Who knew how long that would take? Within a couple of hours, he got frustrated enough to kick a chunk of metal twice his size, and the pain in his toes was enough to wake him up properly.

If Bill was very grudgingly being honest with himself, it wasn't the portal he was mad about.

It was Eddy.

This ghost had been inside Bill's head. He'd realized he'd stumbled across an evil space demon who'd almost conquered the world, he'd dug deep enough in Bill's memories to find his first girlfriend and his least favorite politician, and he'd been paying close enough attention to figure out calling up those particular ghosts from his past would push Bill's buttons—so he had to have at least skimmed Bill's ascent to power! He must have seen what a threat Bill was!

And after that—after seeing the worlds conquered, the galaxies seduced, the dimensions demolished—the full extent of his godlike power, the wrath he could bring down upon Earth if he were ever again unleashed—this guy had thought to himself, "Yeah, this clown seems like the perfect target to hit with a nightmare about his ex calling him a loser"?

How low had Bill fallen, if he looked like an easy, vulnerable bullying target to a chump who was awed by a garden-variety sleep paralysis demon?

He hadn't been an easy, vulnerable target, he reminded himself. Bill had turned the tables on Eddy! He'd proven he was still a force to be reckoned with! Eddy had underestimated him!

He kind of wished he'd been overestimated. He wished he'd gotten undeserved credit for a threat he no longer posed. Right now, bound in a human body and brain, he felt neither powerful nor respected—and if he were asked which one he wanted back first, there was an irrational, hungry pit in his soul that craved the respect more.

You could feel respected without power, but you couldn't feel powerful without respect.

####

(This chapter was written post-TBOB, but the headcanon that Bill had a girlfriend who's a black hole performance poet "howling void" is one I came up with in 2023, and I have proof.

You'll be seeing a looot more of her later.