[someone else] can you do *task* right now?

Mechanical Minds Au (inspired by My Perfect Stanford Au), is what I'm going to call it for now. If anyone has a better name, please tell me it.

Basically, Ford. Right. We all know him, he's a idiotic genius, an' yadda yadda yadda.

And then we got Bill. Interdimensional demon. Triangle. Fake as shit.

Oh, last but not least at all- Fiddleford. He's the mechanic behind everything. Guy who makes the cool stuff and stuff that makes everyone go insane. Yeah, we know him.

Smush them all together and you get an interdimensional portal and bad decisions.

Stanford is going about his normal day to day lifestyle of 'ah yes, my muse is beautiful and perfect and I will let him stay in my head rent free forever because he is my muse', when he checks the calendar and... he could've sworn it was the 14th of March... not the 15th.

How odd... it doesn't matter, things happen with this kind of stuff all the time in Gravity Falls. He'll ask Bill about it later.

As the day goes on, nothing else is weird. He gets Fiddleford to check his notes for the fourth time, gets forced to take a break and eat something, falls asleep on his notes for about two minutes, mixes something he shouldn't have, and accidentally whispers to his Muse while Fiddleford is in the room. A normal day.

He forgets about the calendar by the days end. He forgets to ask Bill about it.

After all, tomorrow is the big day! Portal test time. Nothing was going to go wrong. They had quintiple checked the math, equations, and structure. It was all up to date and working as according.

It was all going to be... just... fine-

Nothing is correct. Why is this happening? When did Fiddleford build a memory gun?

How did the portal test go wrong?

How did Fiddleford fall through?

They had checked.

He- he- he thought he knew this scene. He knew it very well, actually. Too well.

This exact scene was playing out in his mind, ten times over.

Fiddleford, holding aloft the memory gun to his head, explaining how he was going to rid Ford of the demon in his head. Of his Muse.

How Ford had struggled to have that not happen. Bill wasn't a demon. He could explain his Muse to Fiddleford get him to explain.

He could make his friend see reason.

And the shot goes off, and Ford wakes up, swearing that it was the 14th of March, not the 15th.

Huh. How odd.

[ID: bubble numbers drawn with red, chalky line art, and alternating shades of vibrant and soft blue. any gaps are drawn with stars, and the line art is occasionally broken up with dashed lines.