#dogmouthed

at the Maximum, let's cap it at 9k because she said Thousands and not Tens Of Thousands if it was higher i'm gonna say she'd've rounded up. i refuse to believe cesare would've paid them overtime, so let's say they worked the legal full-time maximum of 40 hours a week.

Hey, Doc? Conrad?

schizospec billie is so important to me i love her. you Have activated my trap card btw.

she mainly gets auditory hallucinations and is. probably going to give herself hearing loss from the Volume she listens to music at. can't hear parents or roommates garbling at her if kim petras is at 300 fuckig decibel. (and if she can, that's not actually them bc they know to tap her to get her attention. on account of she cannot hear them. she is listening to kim petras at 300 fuckig decibel.)

the most common one that never Entirely goes away is that she sometimes hears echoes if someone's too loud. (not always. but some of cesare's Chris Fleming Is Yelling In A Small Room is real for her.)

she tries not to have a flat affect but ppl pretty much only notice the effort after seeing her Not trying

she was actually Kinda Pissed her first week at bigtop because she was like shit, am i Seeing things now too? ughhh i liked this dosage >:| and then tim was very very casually like, steve, buddy, can we NOT do the bread ghost thing right now? we can just get the buns and go!

billie: wait. that's actually a ghost made of bread that's divebombing steve?

penny, reassuringly: oh don't worry billie, it can't hurt him!

steve, being scooped up around the middle by undead sourdough and yeastblasted directly into an oven:

she asks a lot of questions about the stuff going on (see: her whole reaction to KID, so you guys are also just wearing makeup, is this normal foodtruck stuff) to try and casually feel out 1) if she's having/had a delusion about it or 2) whether This Time she's started having visual hallucinations. by the time she finally leaves the truck (a year post college graduation), she almost starts to wish the shit going on around her was just symptoms.

billie to her therapist voice "a lot of the stuff i'm gonna talk about is going to sound like my meds aren't working but i promise they are."

billie's therapist voice "no worries, b, i'll keep an open mind. can i ask though, why did you bring a clown? to our session today?"

steve, abruptly in a cardigan & half-moon glasses with a pen and legal pad: how does that make you Feel, dr. abernathy?

billie voice "proof."

a fairly common delusion for her is that she's actually an alien replacement for the real billie. this one comes back Real Bad immediately post-heaviside because like, immutable proof Aliens Are Real but also. it's not that scary anymore because aliens are mostly chill. or wimps that an old dude can kill in one hit. and like, at least she knows she's not a Real, Genuine Clown. that'd be wild.

her meds help a lot with keeping her thoughts organized, but every once in a while if she's sleeping poorly or super stressed, she'll start having problems keeping her words in order. the first time it happened on the job (around midterms time) she was asking steve something and he just. blinked at her (she's 85% sure it actually made that sound) and it took her a second to realize she was daisy-chaining words together based on how they sounded instead of Actually Saying A Sentence. she was absolutely mortified.

BONK IS BEING FOSTERED BY A FAMILY FRIEND!

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!!!

and caligari, once he was big enough to have some sort of consciousness again, happened to be in that same bog & (after hollowing out some of the corpse for Nutrient) used it to practice his fine motorcelial control. once he'd gotten that down, he used it as a vehicle to Skip Town because turns out corpses half-rising from murky depths while glowing an unnatural blue from the inside is usually a good reason for nearby communities to Start Trying To Kill Whatever The Fuck Kinda Devil That Is.

the body is his first dove. it survived decades of stagnancy and then another decade of being tugged to-and-fro by alien threads— he keeps it in Just Out Of Box condition due to sentimentality more than fascination, but it's still very much his first Safekeeping.

it isn't until probably a century or six later that he thinks of restoring the body like he restores his watchers. obviously not ALL THE WAY, that would be disastrous. every watcher with a noticeable personality has Lasted Longer, sure, but it's also been awful to manage. they get all attached to other things that aren't caligari— humans on the surface, the doves it's captured, whatever— and he would never give his first dove the chance to WANT TO LEAVE. WHY WOULD HE DO THAT. but! if he can Trick his watchers into getting attached to a "dove" that Also Wants What Caligari Wants, that'd be great.

so he starts using the threads he's got in his "dove" to make it move and speak to his spiders, except as he expands his domain more and more he spends less time Consciously moving her because he's like, watching all of his doves & finding new fascinations and also (vaguely) keeping his watchers around so he kinda just. offloads the "dove"'s maintenance of his domain to the same hind"brain" area as maintaining the watchers. neither of them notice her newfound independent sentience on a conscious level, but she slowly grows more and more bitter & envious furious toward the watchers, who have an expiration date. unlike her. she is caligari (as far as she knows) and she will never outlive her usefulness to him.

"I'm only making a SUGGESTION, surely you can't fault me for that!"

"But why do you want to Force Fem the boss…"

"I mean, he does kinda. C-Conrad, you've heard him talk about himself before, right?"