#i want to read that book
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if i could find a fantasy novel that was as well written as the poppy war series, that had characters with insane chemistry and history and emotions like rin and nezha, but was ACTUALLY AN OVERT ROMANCE..... then there would be peace on earth.
if you have recs..... let me know....
#rinezha makes me feel like bees are buzzing under my skin#like they make me insane#and it's like NOT actually a romance#even if they do love one another IT'S NOT ABOUT THAT#the closest we get is rin thinking he's going to kiss her in book 2#but it's like. a very dark series about war and colonialism and how far you'll go for your principles etc#it's not a romance book at all#but my question is.... what if... was romance book#i want to read that book#give me something as well written and emotionally devastating and tension-filled as rinezha#but let them actually kiss#also pls read the traitor baru cormorant if you havent bc.....#my text
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People on here are always like "fuck capitalism, why can't things be weird anymore" and then write up a whole dissertation about how the biggest IPs need to change to be weirder.
Like, you are so close. You are so close to getting the point. "Big" IPs *can only exist because they are normal*. They will *never* be weird. They will *never* do what you want. Go find some smaller IPs. Bring back discovery. Bring back never having heard of a book before you buy it. Bring back watching obscure anime online that none of your friends know about. Bring back trying new things, even if they're bad or cheaply made. That is how you get *weird*.
#if y'all want some obscure recs i got em#but understand that centralized will never be weird#weird exists because it appeals to a few#mainstream exists because it tries to appeal to everyone by boiling out individuality#it is impossible for the weird to become mainstream because that would inherently make it *not weird*#stop trying to shift the things you like into the capitalism model#break the capitalism model#fiction#fandom#stories#books#reading
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HOT, SINGLE, UNSTUDIED SPONGES. 3000 NAUTICAL MILES AWAY. Come sail the distance and read Tiger Tiger!
#tiger tiger#ludovica bonnaire#remy bonnaire#jamis arlesi#This comic has been on my radar for *years* and I only recently - finally - sat down to read it. And by god is it amazing.#I don't want to spoil anything! But if you like amazing art and character writing *and* high seas adventure? READ TIGER TIGER.#If you asked my who my favourite character is I could not tell you. I truly like them all!!!#I even like the sleezeball who has less charm than a dead rat. He's *my* darling little rat man. With every disease.#A special shout out to my lad (he is the lad of all time) Jamis Arlesi.#Who - upon walking into frame makes me go 'Sir! Is your bosom too heavy? Do you need a new bra? My hands are free on Thursdays!'#And Ludo! My lass! I love her dearly! Every page made me more fond of her.#Book smart and uses it in very good ways! Naive enough to think it is all she needs! Learns a lot and stays kind through the horrors!#I could go on and on but...you...the person reading this...you *are* going to read it - aren't you?#So I'd hate to spoil you any more! Go read Tiger Tiger! Do it! For the sea sponges!#Rumour has it they are also freshly divorced. It was messy. Sea sponge needs a distraction. That could be you. Distracting that sponge.#You wont know until you click that link and start reading!
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Audio books but it’s Michael Sheen reading books as Aziraphale and sometimes you hear David Tennant shouting something obnoxious as Crowley.
#good omens#good omens fandom#innefable husbands#good omens 2#aziraphale#aziraphale good omens#crowley good omens#I just want Aziraphale to read Plutarch’s Lives to me for my homework#actually I need him to read to me when my brain doesn’t understand the book#history & English classes but Aziraphale is the teacher#i’m going insane#bonesiscrazy#david tennant#michael sheen
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Shout out to FNAF phone guy finally getting a name!
#myart#chloesimagination#comic#fnaf#five nights at freddy's#fnaf fanart#phone guy#fnaf ralph#william afton#spring Bonnie#FNAF the week before#SO idk if yall heard#but a new fnaf book is about to drop but some folks got it early#and the book is called ‘the week before’#and it stars phone guy! official name revealed to be Ralph!#I’ve seen a few pages of it already and god it’s peak#phone guy is officially a full character now#SO in celebration I wanted to draw something out for him!!#William just calling Ralph ‘phone guy’ over and over#cause the book mentions too 💀 phone guy is his canon nickname in fnaf too#SO silly love it gonna get this book no doubt to read in full#fnaf is so good rn guys I’m deep in it 🩵#so expect more arts 🩵🩵🩵
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an Angel
#moist von lipwig#discworld#going postal#terry pratchett#fanart#marcia#literally shutupshutupshutup i knOW he is not that cool but i really wanted to draw wings#i dont think im drawing him lame enough even though he is not all that lame#i mean lets be real if youre reblogging this youve read this book you know i mean#he is just so shaped as a character#lame in some aspects overcompensating in other and perfectly capable and even admirable in some other other aspects too#regardless he is not that cool.#illustration#digital art#original art#artists on tumblr#character art#marciaillust#the alternative caption is “And then an Angel appeared” which is a direct passage from the book but i dont want to discourage the uninitia#ted from reblogging; the tumblr art sphere is already dying lolol
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pls assume i'm thinking about this moment 24/7 all week every week
#ahsjgdh i love the young xianle quartet sm they're almost barely not traumatized...kinda#they're very silly especially in retrospect#aaa i do also really want to draw young xie lian and mu qing but the idea of rendering that much gold detailing sounds like hell ywy#i'll do it but christ alive#my art#fanart#tgcf#tgcf fanart#tgcf spoilers#technically#also i haven't read past book 3 for now ywy#tian guan ci fu#heaven official's blessing#feng xin#hua cheng#...he gets one tag bc i'm not keeping track of all the aliases#every time i draw hc his hair gets worse and worse#my man has not seen a hairbrush in the past 800 or so years of his existence
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so. i understand where the sentiment "listening to an audiobook is the same thing as reading the book" is coming from - i mean, yes, the bottom line is you are taking in the same words in what is possibly a more accessible (or maybe just more enjoyable) format for you! and i'm 100% in agreement that "book snobs" who say "no you didn't really read it" if you listened to the audiobook are full of shit. ofc you should engage with stories in whatever way works for you, there is no moral or intellectual superiority to reading words off a page vs. listening to them
but it also is different? an audiobook is a performance. choices a narrator makes about line readings can drastically influence the meaning of the lines. even just different voices, accents, etc. - there are creative choices being made by the person delivering the words to you, and that affects your experience of the story in a different way than if you were making those choices in your own head. it might even change the way you visualize what's going on!
this isn't a bad thing it's just An Actual Thing & i think it's worth talking about. it rubs me the wrong way when people act like accommodations (and for many people audiobooks are an accommodation) always result in a completely identical experience, or even that they should, & if you suggest that people accessing media in different ways are having different experiences it's somehow ableist
anyway on rare occasions i really enjoy audiobooks but mostly they are much less accessible to me than words on a page (i need to be able to reread, flip back and forth, go at my own pace) & i also just really strongly prefer to encounter a text on my own before hearing someone else's performance of it, if possible! again i don't think it's "better" to read a physical book i just think it is a Distinct form of experiencing a story & acting like the two things are entirely the same is sort of doing a disservice to both
#rambling thoughts#audiobooks#was talking to jey about this the other day & that helped me clarify what i've been musing on#i really truly think people should read in whatever way they can. listening or using an e-reader or holding a physical book#i always always want to hold the book but i don't think i'm fucking superior for it lmao
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who wants a prism break?
So, the Theraprism! The Theraprism sucks, right?
This is like, a good day.
The Theraprism clearly sucks.
Have a one shot of Bill escaping Theraprism with the most desperate escape plan imaginable: reincarnation.
(Warning for, as you might expect, psychiatric hospital abuse.)
####
There are fates worse than death. Like boredom, for instance!
####
Everything was black and numb and silent and cold so so cold but no he could only call it cold if he felt cold and Bill didn't feel coldness there was just the absence of a feeling the absence of heat the absence of light the absence of sound the absence of touch the absence of air.
The absence of everything.
Bill had loved a void once—a micro black hole. Every time they touched it slowly killed him, spaghettified his limbs, drained his energy. His energy was so vast that she never claimed a drop of a drop of a drop of his reserves—but it still hurt like nothing else to be crushed and stretched and ripped and consumed by her event horizon. The pain was wonderful. Being shredded was ecstasy.
This void was the opposite of her.
He couldn't even feel anything when he tried to scream—without air, he couldn't feel his vocal plates vibrate. He couldn't feel his hands, his face, his eye; he tried to bite himself just to feel something and he couldn't feel his mouth, he tried to rip open his wounds and couldn't find them; why couldn't he see his own light, why couldn't he see his blood, where had he gone, was he gone—
Reality returned like a light bulb being switched on.
The first thing he registered was a shrill sound on the verge of inaudibility; and then the pain in his eye, his sides, his wounds; and then the dull gray light, the hard floor under his knees, the antiseptic stench in the air conditioning.
He stopped screaming. The shrill sound stopped.
"Energetic as always, are we?"
Bill blinked blearily at the Orb of Healing Light hovering before him. He croaked, "I'll regurgitate you."
"I'll pretend I didn't hear that." A glowing translucent clipboard manifested in front of the Orb. "Well, you've gone through this enough times to know the drill! Do you need a moment to recover, or—?"
"No no, I'm fine, I'm fine." Bill slumped forward, trembling hands on the floor, waiting for the vertigo to pass. "I'm fine. Do your thing." He'd rather get the post-Solitary Wellness Void reorientation interview over with.
"Perfect. What's your name?"
"I'm ol' Vinegar Pete."
"No clowning, please."
He sighed loudly. "Bill Cipher."
"Good. Where are you?"
He considered saying hell, but decided he'd used up all the clowning he could risk for one day. He didn't want to go back in. "The Theraprism. Ward 333."
"Very good. When are you?"
"I was gonna ask you," Bill groaned. "How long was I in the hole this time? A million years? Ten million?"
The Orb checked its notes. "Eight minutes."
"Wh—no, no I know that time moves slower out in reality than in the prism. I'm not asking how much time passed in reality, I'm asking how much time passed here."
"Eight minutes," the Orb repeated. "Outside the Theraprism, one third of one second passed."
Bill groaned again and flopped flat on the floor.
"Do you know why you're here?"
"Why are any of us here?" Bill asked the gray linoleum tiles. "Usually because some dumb beast tripped into the booby trap that sets off its reproductive process. How's your species work, you pop outta nebulas, right—?"
"I meant, coming out of the Solitary Wellness Void."
"Oh." Bill tried to remember what his infraction had been this time. "Because I failed to escape."
"Because you tried to escape."
If he'd succeeded, they never could have punished him. "Sure."
"Good, you seem oriented to your surroundings. Let's get you to the nurse and then back to your cell." The nurse? What did he need a nurse for?
He only realized then that he must have succeeded in reopening his wounds in the SWV: the never-quite-healed crack across his exoskeleton was wider, the edges chipped and bent. It hurt. His eye socket hurt too; he tasted blood. With the way his whole body usually ached after leaving the void, he hadn't even noticed.
Through the crack in his exoskeleton, his edges had frayed into fine golden threads. The sight of silvery blood on his hands made him nauseous; he hastily looked away and reminded himself it was only his own.
####
As Bill wearily followed behind the Orb and two security guards followed behind him, he had to periodically turn to hover sideways to streamline himself. These days he was so weak that he could feel the air resistance pushing back against him when he floated; with his wound reopened, he felt like the air pressure could snap his exoskeleton along the crack and break him in half.
"You're not Emmy," Bill said. "You're, uh..."
"A-AOX4."
"Oxyyy," Bill said weakly. "Heyyy. S'been a while. Usually I get a personal welcome back from the void, why didn't Emmy show? Don't tell me it doesn't see me as a threat anymore!" He'd be offended if it didn't. D-SM5 was the closest thing he had to a nemesis these days. Even if he couldn't beat it, he wanted to think he still irritated the daylights out of it.
"Director SM5 couldn't make it. It's overseeing the preparations for Paingoreous's reincarnation."
"That's today? Good riddance." Paingoreous had started getting sanctimonious the past few hundred group therapy sessions—don't you have any compassion for your victims and it's possible to live a happy life without slaughtering all your enemies first and maybe I should ask for permission before I vivisect my friends' faces—passive, self-defeatist crap like that. Vivisecting your friends and seeing who complained was how you found out who your lame friends were! Now that the wet blanket was leaving, the rest of them could get back to spending their sessions reminiscing about the glory days and trying to set the donuts on fire when the therapist was distracted.
"Yes," A-AOX4 said pointedly, "it is good he gets to leave to go become a productive member of reality. We're all so happy that he's rehabilitated enough to earn a new chance at life." (Bill rolled his eye. A-AOX4 ignored it.) "Wouldn't you like a chance to rejoin reality, Bill?"
More than anything. He'd been in this crystallized brain's perpetual dreamscape for what felt like both a thousand years and a single day—time never passing, an eternal inescapable moment. He'd tried to break out, sneak out, or bargain his way out more times than he could count; sometimes he was locked in the SWV as punishment; and sometimes the staff gently stopped him, confiscated his supplies, and chastised him for the effort—and the reminder that he was as powerless as a child was worse than the void. He'd gone delirious from the boredom, hallucinating screams and burning faces as his mind struggled to stimulate itself (and he'd been medicated for it). He'd so despaired of escaping that he'd looked for a way to burn up the remains of his energy and vanish for good (and he'd been medicated for it). He ached with the need to see the stars again.
But not enough to sell his soul for it. If he took the staff's route—let them break him down, sandblast off his rough edges, erase everything that made him him, and finally physically transform him into some alien creature—then whatever left the Theraprism would no longer be Bill Cipher.
"What, and force you guys to find a new 'unique case'? I wouldn't do that to you! I know how much you love me," Bill said. "Besides, why would I go through all that just so I can reincarnate as a sentient snowflake, or Mi-Go antennae lice, or..."
"A butterfly," A-AOX4 cut in, an edge of impatience creeping into its tone. "Paingoreous has chosen to reincarnate as a butterfly. We all think that's a very productive way to channel his desire to digest his own skin."
"Unless it's one of those blood-drinking butterflies, lame." Bill scoffed. "Wait—hold on, you said butterfly? Like an Earth butterfly?"
They were, of course, not actually speaking an Earth language, but an interdimensional pidgin that borrowed words and grammar from dozens of worlds. When around the Orbs of Healing Light that held half the staff positions, Bill tended to speak a dialect of the pidgin that used flashes of light for 40% of its vocabulary. It was perfectly possible that the word Bill knew as "butterfly" was also used for some alien creature, but—
"Yes, an Earth butterfly. A Vanessa atalanta, to be precise."
Aw, boo. Not even a cool butterfly. "He's reincarnating on Earth?"
"Yes. Many of our patients reincarnate on Earth. As long as you're careful about which region and century you reincarnate into, it's at the top of our recommended list of Goldilocks zones."
There was another phrase that Bill recognized, but this time he was sure his definition was not A-AOX4's definition. "Whaaat do Goldilocks zones have to do with reincarnation."
"You didn't pay attention to the orientation session on our outpatient reincarnation program, did you."
"What! I didn't get an orientation session!" said Bill, who probably didn't remember any such session because he didn't pay attention to it.
"Well—we rank millions of planets and their dimensional parallels based on their potential to help patients reintegrate into reality. We do try to set our patients up for success," A-AOX4 said. "To qualify as a Goldilocks zone, a planet has to meet the Theraprism's rigorous list of criteria: its lifeforms, cultures, laws of physics, and position in interdimensional society must all be conducive to a patient's continued recovery. We want to ensure that our patients' new lives are neither so difficult as to retraumatize them, nor so easy as to let them coast by avoiding continued personal growth, but right in the middle, so that they're emotionally and spiritually challenged without being overwhelmed. The Goldilocks zone: a perfect compromise between two extremes."
"Yeah, sure, sounds great." Bill could feel his eye glazing over in disinterest. Fight it, Cipher.
"Do you miss Earth?"
Bill tilted to glance askance at A-AOX4, and was surprised to see it had turned to focus a spotlight on him. Oh—it thought it had finally found a carrot to dangle in front of him. That was a popular strategy here: they figured out what a patient wanted most, and then used it to coax them into good behavior and "rehabilitation"—better still if they could attach a sense of urgency to it. Don't you want to see your descendants again before the last of them dies out? Don't you want to see your homeworld before its sun swallows it? Don't you want to reconcile with your god before the heat death of your universe?
But Bill had no universe, no homeworld, no family; no lovers or friends or gods that hadn't betrayed him and left him to rot here; and he'd remained smugly steadfast in refusing to give D-SM5 and its minions anything else it could use to get under his chitin. He was proud that he was too broken for even the famed Theraprism to fix him.
A-AOX4 probably thought it had finally found an opening. It might be useful to let it keep thinking that.
"You kidding me? Earth? Pfff! I don't miss that overgrown asteroid one bit!" He waved off the suggestion, and winced when the gesture tugged wrong at his reopened wound. "But hey, you don't study a world for millions of years without finding a few things about it to like. The music's pretty good. And the movies and literature, though if you ask me, they peaked between the first two World Wars. I like trees, evolution did a great job with trees. And humans really went off with the architecture. The pyramids? 10 out of 10. And some of the locals aren't bad, I've got a few exes from Earth."
"Do you? How many exes?"
"Living? Just a hundred forty or fifty," Bill said dismissively. "Earthlings just have those pretty eyes, you know? I'm a sucker for a pretty eye! But outside of that, no, there's nothing on Earth for me."
"I see," A-AOX4 said lightly, and dropped the conversation.
Hook, line, and sinker.
####
The original definition of a "Goldilocks zone" came from astrobiology. The Goldilocks zone was the ring of space around a star in which an orbiting planet could support liquid water and thus water-based life: not too close to the star and too hot, not too far and too cold, but just right. Earth, for instance, orbited Sol in its Goldilocks zone.
It was from this definition that other, more metaphorical definitions of Goldilocks zones emerged. Such as the Theraprism's: a world that was neither too stressful nor too boring for a newly brainwashed—sorry, "cured"—patient. And apparently Earth was in that Goldilocks zone, too.
Which was very interesting to Bill—because in their search for a new home, the Henchmaniacs had come up with their own definition of a Goldilocks zone. For them, it was a dimension close enough to the Nightmare Realm with a thin enough barrier that they could easily punch through it, but not so close and so thin that puncturing the barrier would pop it like a balloon and cause the dimension to immediately prolapse into the Nightmare Realm—which was a problem they'd had before. More than once. They needed a dimension they could easily cut a hole into, but control it, so they could slowly pump the Nightmare Realm's contents in. A barrier neither too vulnerable nor too strong, but just right.
And wouldn't you know it—but Earth happened to be in that Goldilocks zone too. Right next to a point in the dimensional membrane so thin, the Nightmare Realm could almost stretch through and kiss it.
####
Since Bill Cipher was infamously known as the last survivor of a trillion-years-extinct species, and had until recently been capable of instantly repairing himself, there were no medical records on how his anatomy worked. It didn't help that at some point eons ago he'd somehow managed to graft a 3D exoskeleton to his 2D anatomy without breaking his own physics, meaning no one had seen his true body in recorded history. Bill knew how he worked, but refused to offer any hints. So the Theraprism staff had to guess at Bill's medical treatment.
But Bill was still made of energy, and even weakened he could eventually self-repair. So whenever his injury was exacerbated, the nurse tended to just patch up his exoskeleton to keep it stable enough to send him back to his room.
On top of his mysterious anatomy, the staff had no idea how to medicate his physiology. They knew he could be medicated—Bill's personal substance (ab)use experiments were notorious far outside the Nightmare Realm—but they had to treat him like a newly-discovered form of life in figuring out what affected him, how it affected him, and how much it took. He'd been on and off hundreds of drugs as they tried to chemically stabilize a mind for which they had no idea what baseline stability looked like. D-SM5 had told him that between the enormous doses needed to impact his energy-based physiology and the vast variety of drugs he'd been through, Bill's medication regimen was the most expensive in the Theraprism. He took some pride in that.
He had very few things to take pride in anymore. He clung to what meager victories he could.
If Bill got his way, he wouldn't be medicated at all. None of the substances they wanted him on were what he'd call recreational. (Although for a while he had gotten away with not telling the docs that one of his antipsychotics had given him a side-effect of kaleidoscopic hallucinations.) Plus there was the fact that he'd heard rumors that quite a few pharmaceutical execs were good pals with a certain director—not that Bill would name names, of course!—that's his motto, Don't Slander Maliciou5ly!
But when he resisted taking his meds, they could send in the guards to pin him down so a nurse could inject a sedative so strong he wouldn't remember anything that happened for the next few hours to months (hard to tell) until they started tapering it off... and although he'd rather die than admit it, after losing that fight five or six times, even he had to admit to himself it was a lot less scary to just take their rotten drugs. Better to go through his days with his mind dulled and hazy than blacked out altogether.
To retain what little pride he had left, he'd reached a compromise with his jailers.
When the nurse had finished attaching the reinforcing splints around Bill's injury, they grabbed a medication measurement cup, filled it halfway with syrupy eye drops, and double-checked Bill's chart as they dropped thirteen different pills (plus a fourteenth pill for a painkiller) in the cup.
As Bill redressed, he eyed the unappetizing cocktail of antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and things he'd forgotten the purpose of but that probably weren't doing whatever the doctors hoped and definitely weren't doing anything Bill liked. "My straw?"
"Right, right." The nurse handed over one of the wide-diameter disposable white straws they kept on hand for patients who struggled to drink (or, in Bill's case, patients they struggled to get to drink).
Only a tiny fragment of Bill was actually locked up in the Theraprism—like pinching the glowing lure of an anglerfish in a trap while the rest of the fish thrashed outside—and because most of Bill's vast energy was elsewhere, he was nearly powerless. But he still had enough energy to heat up a finger, twist the straw around it, and hold it there until it had melted into a new shape.
The nurse sighed. "Do you have to do that every time? You ruin more straws than you get right."
Imperiously, Bill said, "Leave me to my whimsy." He tugged off the straw when it had cooled down to examine the corkscrew shape he'd made. The wall was a little flattened in one place, but he could pinch it back open. "See? It's perfect!" Cheerfully ignoring the nurse, he stuck the straw in his cup and slurped down his pills like tapioca balls. He tried not to remember what was in them.
A-AOX4 had left Bill with the nurse, but the two mall cops with medical kinks known as Bill's personal guards were still waiting nearby. The nurse's office was next door to the cafeteria—for ease of patients picking up their medications at meal times—in an anteroom that was connected to the rest of the ward by a set of locked double doors. A couple of guards were stationed near those doors at all times, and generally the guards assigned to Bill hung around with them while Bill was in the cafeteria or nurse's office. Bill floated up to them, regarding them with the disinterest of a king ignoring the servants he expected to open doors for him, and continued to ignore them as they escorted him back to his cell, one in front and one behind, while he sipped on his drugged cocktail.
The Dimensional Tyrant Ward was already one of the most heavily-guarded wards in the Theraprism; but to reach the maximum security cells, a patient had to pass several increasingly heavy security checkpoints with increasingly impenetrable security doors. The final door was warded against all magic, unhackable, unbreakable, and so airtight that even without his exoskeleton there was no gap Bill's 2D form could slide through. The doors to each cell—outfitted with tiny one-way mirror portholes, no latches or hinges on the inside—were a little less heavy duty, but packed with just as many failsafes. The Dimensional Tyrant Ward's max security hall had the most advanced security architecture of any psychiatric facility in the multiverse.
Bill had made a trillion year career of trying to break his way through a door nobody wanted him to go through. He could think of seven different ways to get through the doors. Sooner or later he'd find a way out of this place altogether.
A few of the doors had modifications: this one with a metal slab over the porthole to protect passersby from the occupant's petrifying gaze, that one with extra soundproofed padding coating the door. Bill was almost insulted his own door didn't warrant any special modifications.
His favorite door was The Beast's. A comfortingly yellow triangular sign on the door displayed a black symbol of a steak. Red signs above and below read "CAUTION! FEED UNSEASONED MEAT ONLY." "NO SUGAR ALLOWED." The Beast's heavy snuffing was audible through the door; his hot, sickly sweet breath seeped through the slot in the door that had been installed to deliver his food.
Bill's escorts automatically drifted to the far side of the hall to avoid The Beast. Bill, whose first medication was already starting to kick in, zigzagged lazily back and forth across the hall, heedless of how close he came to The Beast's cell.
Bill had never seen this door opened once in all his time incarcerated, and the dust settled on the additional chains and padlocks stretched across the door showed just how long it had been since the last incident. But some of the patients who'd been here longer than Bill still couldn't bring themselves to speak of the last time he'd escaped. Elder eldritch gods shuddered and gibbered nervously at the mention of his name.
Bill tilted over to try to peer through the food slot at The Beast. A quivering, sickly blue eye stared back at him. Honestly, Bill thought The Beast was adorable.
Outside Bill's door, the guards waited for Bill to finish his medicine, hand over his cup and straw, and open his mouth and lift his eye out of the way so they could check and make sure he'd swallowed them.
And then he was left in his cell.
####
A perfect cube of uniform dull grey tiles supernaturally lit by a uniform dull grey glow, no light source, no shadows; in a max security room in the Maximum Security Wellness Center, patients weren't even trusted around light fixtures. The staff had removed everything Bill had used thus far to commit violence or attempt escape, plus a few more things as punishments for various infractions: journal, paint, pens, books, magazines, puppets (he missed those the most), even the furniture. He'd never earned the privilege of a TV or radio. By now, all he was permitted were black, red, yellow, and blue dry erase markers to draw on his walls—and the red and blue had gone dry; the "Be a TRY-angle!" poster they'd replaced whenever Bill left the room until he gave up and stopped tearing it down; and the clothes on his back. He'd gradually gotten himself banned from every extracurricular and recreational activity the Dimensional Tyrant Ward offered. Whenever he was fresh out of the SWV, when his restrictions were highest, his schedule consisted of mandatory individual therapy, mandatory group therapy, med checks, and the cafeteria.
He spent the vast majority of his time in his cell, sitting curled up alone, day after night after day, barely moving, barely talking, barely eating, waiting for nothing at all.
####
The seamless door swung open and admitted an Orb of Healing Light.
Bill blinked blearily up at the Orb. It was hard to tell how slowly time passed here, but he was sure it couldn't have been more than a couple hours since he'd been returned to his cell: that was when his medications made his mind the foggiest. "Emmyyy. Where ya been? Didn't see you when I came out of the Solitary Dullness Void. Nice of you to, uh..." A second ago he'd had a clever quip about how D-SM5 had clearly dropped by because it missed Bill, but he'd forgotten how to word it.
"Well, I'm here now. I'm flattered you missed me, Mr. Cipher."
Bill blinked heavily. "You turned that around on me," he griped. "Not fair." Ugh, the room was spinning. He flopped on his back.
"A-AOX4 tells me you showed an interest earlier in our outpatient reincarnation program," D-SM5 said. "Since it looks like your schedule is light these days, I thought you might be interested in attending Paingoreous's reincarnation?"
It took him a moment to process the offer. "Really? That's something people can attend?" What was the catch?
"We usually only extend the offer to the departing patient's friends, and—exemplary patients. But... I thought you might benefit from watching the process for yourself. It may encourage you to take a little more interest in your future."
For it to push a possible lead so fast, it really was desperate to find some leverage they could use on Bill. It probably thought of this as a rare opportunity—a patient from Ward 333 wasn't ready for reincarnation every day.
"Wow. I sure am encouraged," Bill said. "You have no idea just how encouraged I am."
####
If an unambitious office building and a utilitarian hospital reluctantly got married out of a vague sense of heteronormative social obligation, had a depressed child, and the fae spirited it away to replace it with an even more depressed changeling child, the child's small intestines would look a lot like the Theraprism's interior hallways: it was windowless, it was labyrinthine, it was beige, and it was grey, and it didn't even care anymore. Monotonous commercial high-traffic carpet alternated with monotonous commercial high-traffic linoleum. The fluorescent lights buzzed just enough to be annoying, but not quite enough that you'd feel justified in snapping and screaming "I've had it!" as you swung a pleather-seated metal chair at the light fixture.
Even though Bill had been languishing in the Theraprism for hours and/or millennia (Bill couldn't tell; he couldn't feel the passage of time), he hardly knew his way around the Dimensional Tyrant Ward, much less the rest of the facility. As D-SM5 led Bill (and six guards) out of Ward 333 and into a lower security zone, he looked for any scant identifiable landmarks and tried to memorize which turns they took by coding the lefts and rights and ups and downs into a mnemonic word. The walk helped wake him from his medication stupor; but his mind never quite felt fully on.
Bill had only briefly glimpsed the Theraprism's reincarnation unit during intake, just one of many rooms he'd been whisked past as he was dragged to Ward 333 screaming and cursing the Axolotl's name. Entering the unit now, it looked like an occult sacrificial altar carved from marble that had been modeled after a 23rd century starship's teleportation platform, contained in a room that looked like a magic planetarium: glowing stars hovered around the dome of the ceiling. Against the back wall in pale pink marble was carved an impossibly long axolotl, swimming in a figure 8 so its vapid smile almost caught the tip of its ribbonlike tail. Bill glowered at it. Backstabber.
He, D-SM5, and the other observers who'd already arrived were in a connected observation room with an enormous, thick window and a sealed door. Next to the window was a large computer console encased in the same marble as the reincarnation altar. That probably controlled the process.
The audience consisted of three aliens who looked a little like Paingoreous might have with his face unpeeled, a few patients and staff Bill recognized, more he didn't, and Jessica with the shining spherical head and the thirteen fingers. Oh boy. If he'd known Jessica would be here he would have tried to polish. Bill straightened his bow tie and smoothed his rumpled orange jumpsuit.
Paingoreous himself was already in the next room, standing on the altar. At the sight of Bill, his exposed facial muscles twitched, as though trying to widen his eyes even though their eyelids were already long gone. "Bill? What are you doing here?"
D-SM5 answered before Bill could blurt out a witty retort. "I invited Mr. Cipher. I thought he would benefit from seeing what he can look forward to once he's improved. I hope you don't mind."
Paingoreous's face immediately smoothed out. "Yes—of course, director, if you say so. I remember how difficult it was in the early days. I'm happy to help my fellow patients in any way I can." Suck up. A dry note entered his voice, "Especially a more troubled patient."
Bill took one of the folding chairs lined up in front of the window and shot back, "I'm about to have one less trouble! Byyye!" (Did Jessica think that was funny? Sometimes she did. He snuck a sideways glance to see if she was laughing. Oh, right—she didn't have a face.)
Paingoreous didn't dignify him with a response. Too good for the likes of Bill, no doubt. Paingoreous wasn't obligated to answer anybody—except the staff, of course.
Bill had never met the real Paingoreous. By the time Bill was committed, the monotony, medication, and mandatory therapy were already well on their way to killing whoever Paing had once been. No way the offensively bland sap leaving now was the same one who'd come in with his face skinned and muscles pinned open.
A technician was already turning on the computer console, running through a whole list of checks as the machine booted up. A hum filled the room as the altar began to softly glow. To all appearances Bill was facing forward, slitted pupil aimed straight at Paingoreous; but his anatomy was built for watching things out of the corner of his eye and his real attention was focused on the reincarnation technician. "So how's reincarnation work in this dump?" Bill asked D-SM5. "I didn't get the orientation."
"Yes you did," D-SM5 said. "I was there."
"Oh yeah? Well, I don't remember seeing you."
D-SM5 sighed. "First, Paingoreous's memories of his current life must be erased, to give him the best fresh start possible and to comply with Earth's soul sanitization regulations."
"Seems like a big waste of time. His head's already empty enough."
One of the Paing-ish aliens a couple seats over shot Bill a dirty look. "That's my son in there."
"Not for much longer, he isn't."
"Be respectful," D-SM5 said warningly.
Bill ignored it. "So once you've scrubbed his brain clean, what then?"
"Then, we reincarnate him. We've already carefully selected his destination and species; except for special circumstances, we generally don't customize the patient's body further, as the program is already set up to divinely design the body most well-suited to the soul about to inhabit it."
"If these bodies are so perfect, why customize them at all?"
"We wouldn't want, say, a recovering pyromaniac to be reborn with pyrokinesis." (Bill felt unfairly targeted.) "Once his species and destination are entered into the program, off he'll go to start his new life as an egg."
"An egg?! Sheesh, wasn't going through childhood once bad enough? I assume his childhood was bad, anyway! Nobody with competent parents ends up like him."
The Paing-ish alien beside Bill bolted out of their seat and lurched aggressively toward Bill. (Ha. Too easy.) The next alien over tugged them back by the arm. Bill was sure he heard a whispered, "Careful, do you know who that..."
D-SM5 said, "One more crack like that and you're going back to your cell."
"Fiiine. Why can't he skip straight to being a butterfly, though?" What he really wanted to find out was how to skip straight to adulthood.
"For starters, because spontaneous generation has been heavily restricted on Earth since the 15th century, and banned completely outside of special circumstances since the 19th century."
Spontaneous generation. The creation of fully formed life from unliving matter: maggots that emerged from flesh, geese that emerged from barnacles, snakes and crocodiles that wriggled out of the mud of the Nile. He'd always planned to legalize it again when he took over. So if the only reason the Theraprism couldn't do it was because it was banned, then they must have the technology for it, right?
Bill tuned D-SM5 out as it prattled on about the mental health benefits of restarting life and beginner's mind and boring therapeutic psychobabble, and ignored the flashing lights and divine music as Paingoreous's memory, personality, and identity were all wiped clean. He was only interested in what the reincarnation technician was doing. (Although when Bill briefly glanced at Paingoreous, his shape seemed somehow uncertain, as though his molecules had only just walked into the room and promptly forgotten what they'd come in for or who they were supposed to be. Ready to be reshaped into something else.)
The technician opened up the primary reincarnation program, checked a box confirming that the patient's previous incarnation had been erased, and began setting up the specifications for his next incarnation. Choosing the reincarnation world was easy enough: under the drop down menu, the "Goldilocks zone" worlds were sorted first. Earth was sixth on the list. Choosing a dimension was just as easy.
However, choosing the location and time period looked more complicated; rather than searching through a handy list of continents or geological epochs, the technician checked Paingoreous's patient file and typed a couple of long strings of numbers into the blanks for the coordinates and time. They didn't look like any date system or coordinate system Bill was familiar with. How the heck would he work with that?
And selecting the species, to Bill's horror, meant scrolling down a menu ordered by how frequently a species had been selected for reincarnation at this facility. That was insane! The Theraprism always discharged patients as unambitious species where one member was nearly incapable of making a meaningful impact on the local biosphere—anything useful like an octopus or a goat would be buried amongst the literal billions of species that had received zero reincarnations. Couldn't you just start typing the species's name to jump down to—? But no, the Theraprism's keyboard didn't have characters to type human loan words. The technician seemed to be scrolling manually.
That was fine! That was fine. Whatever Bill left as, he wouldn't be it for very long. He wasn't shopping for a makeover; just for an escape pod.
The technician located Vanessa atalanta (147 prior reincarnations) and kept moving, tabbing past a dizzying array of options—sex, size, coloration, visual clarity, caterpillar spine distribution, a whole list of health conditions and mutations the technician skipped—and every box she tabbed past automatically filled in with the word "DEFAULT". How many boxes could be filled in with defaults?
Bill leaned toward D-SM5. "So do you chuck these suckers out anywhere random on the planet or what?"
"Of course not," it said promptly. "What a thought! We take a deep interest in our discharged patients' well-being. We never leave where they spend their next lives at the whim of the computer's randomized decision."
But they could leave it up to the computer. Still watching sideways as the technician scrolled past an "advanced settings" button without touching it (was that where the spontaneous generation option was hidden?), Bill asked, "Do youalways choose for the patient, or can the patient make requests?"
Dryly, D-SM5 said, "Unless you make some enormous progress, I doubt you'd get clearance to reincarnate anywhere near that town you terrorized, if that's what you're wondering."
"What! Who said I want to visit that crummy valley! All those mountains and trees? Ugh! No, do you know what kind of place I like? The Greater Cairo metropolitan area. Dry! Sandy! Flat!" said Bill, who detested flat landscapes with all his heart. "Covered in pyramids! Sometimes with my face on them! Plus there's the Nile! I love the Nile! I love being in the Nile! I'd spend all my time in the Nile if I could! I've had some loser ex-friends say that living your whole life in the Nile is an unhealthy coping mechanism to avoid addressing problems in your life, but if you ask me they're just jealous of how amazing my life is—"
"Ready for reincarnation," the technician said. "Proceed?"
D-SM5 left its seat, hovering closer to the glass to catch Paingoreous's attention. "Are you ready?"
"Sure," said Paingoreous, who clearly wasn't certain what he was claiming to be ready for.
"Proceed," D-SM5 said. Bill fell silent, paying close attention to how the technician began the reincarnation process.
She clicked a button that said "EXECUTE" (gruesome), clicked through a couple more confirmation screens, and then the faint background hum grew to a rumble and the magical stars glowed brighter. "Ten seconds," she said. "Nine... eight... seven..."
"Hey!" Bill shouted through the glass. "Friendly tip for Earth! Humans love when you fly into their eyeballs! You should do that!"
D-SM5 rounded on Bill, glowing furiously at him. (Maybe it was Bill's imagination, but he thought Jessica looked amused. Worth it.)
The soon-to-be caterpillar formerly known as Paingoreous stared in confusion at Bill. "Okay," he said—and then there was a bright flash of light.
He let out an awful wail of pure soul-rending agony.
When the light faded, he was gone.
The observation room had fallen perfectly silent.
"That's fine," D-SM5 said. "That's—that's normal."
####
Every once in a while, the Theraprism got something right. It was one of the few big government-sponsored "respectable" institutions that didn't make a fuss about how Bill ate. They just let him go to the cafeteria, strip down, unpeel his exoskeleton, and hang out with the photosynthesizers for half an hour or so in the corner under the grow lights. No gasps of horror or screams of outrage—not from the staff anyway; some of the patients took a bit to get used to it when they were new. It was a refreshing change.
On the other hand, even though they were willing to turn a couple lights high enough to melt most mortals' eyeballs when Bill was feeding, he never left feeling truly energized. The grow lights were designed for species with leaves and solar panels; they weren't designed to fuel up a god made of energy. A few bright lightbulbs didn't measure up to raw starlight.
He figured there wasn't any point in complaining. As much as he hated feeling like a gas tank trying to burn a dust mote for fuel, he knew that they knew that long before he even reached 1% of his usual power, he'd be strong enough to vaporize the Theraprism with the snap of a finger.
When he'd had his daily dose of light, he folded shut, redressed, and drifted over to the actual food for dessert. He grabbed a bottle of an allegedly "lemon" nigh-flavorless clear soda—this would do—and hovered toward the exit.
The cafeteria monitor stationed in the door elbowed her way in front of Bill. "Ahem."
"What?"
"You know the rules. No food outside the cafeteria."
"What! This isn't food, it's a soda. Beverages aren't food, everyone knows that." The monitor didn't budge. Bill tried whining. "C'mooon, I got injured in the void today. Look at this!" He gestured demonstratively at his splints. "Look how much pain I'm in!"
The Solitary Wellness Void made this cafeteria monitor uncomfortable. She'd never said so directly, but she tended to turn a blind eye when patients who'd just come out of the SWV were more aggressive than usual or tried to sneak extra desserts. One time when Bill had come out of a week in the SWV, she'd wordlessly slipped him a couple of packets of low-sodium fear sauce, a condiment usually distributed exclusively to the obligate phobophages in the ward. "Besides, it's my birthday! I'm a birthday triangle! You wouldn't deny a birthday triangle a soda, right?"
"Is it really your birthday?"
"Heck if I know. It could be. I don't know it isn't."
She was trying not to smile. "Fine. Just one time. Don't let anyone catch you with it and finish it before you're back in your cell."
"You got it, toots." Bill glided past her.
He slipped from the cafeteria into the nurse's office before his guards could catch sight of his illicit drink. "Hey, bartender! I'm here for my nightcap."
The nurse prepared Bill's evening battery of drugs. He bent his straw into a fun zigzag—honestly it was really more of a sad N shape—slurped down half the eyedrops, and opened his soda to refill his cup.
The nurse looked over at the hiss of the cap opening. "Hey! Hey—"
"It's just soda!" Bill protested. "The cafeteria monitor said it was fine! Besides, what's a little soda gonna do? Nullify all seven of my antipsychotics before I reach my cell?" (Bill had overheard the nurse grumbling to a colleague about the amount of antipsychotics he was on. They thought it was utterly excessive, considering that they'd had no evidence the drugs were doing anything but making him more erratic—which was something, because Bill had seen patients near drooling catatonia from their meds without any of the nurses questioning their current dosage. Conversely, the docs thought Bill's odd biology meant they needed to give him more if they wanted any hope of impacting him.) "Come on. It's not even caffeinated!"
The nurse took the soda bottle to check the ingredient list, then relented. "Fine. I suppose it won't do any harm."
"You're a peach." Bill topped off his cup, poured the rest of the soda over his eye, crushed the bottle, and consumed it too.
"The plastic probably isn't good for you, though."
"I like the way it melts in the back of my throat."
As he drank his medicated soda and got escorted back to his cell, he lazily drifted back and forth in the hall as far as the guards would let him go, dawdling more than usual—he knew they hated it when he dawdled, but they knew he hated spending one second more in his cell than necessary and grudgingly put up with a little lollygagging to keep the peace. But their tolerance ran out in the max security hall as Bill slowed down even further near The Beast's cell. The guard behind Bill pushed him. "Hurry up."
"Hey!" Bill wobbled off path and stumbled into the wall, spilling some of his drink. "What's your problem!"
"You stopped moving."
"I did not! I'm just taking my time! Enjoying the weather out here."
"Well, take less time."
"Ugh, fine. Didn't realize you had plans I'm keeping you from." Bill rolled his eye and kept moving.
"Hold it!"
Bill froze. He turned around. The guard was pointing at a streak of clear fluid that had spilled from Bill's cup and rolled down the door. His bones frosted over.
"You dropped a pill," the guard said.
Bill's gaze focused on the circular soap-green tablet on the floor. "Are you kidding?! Aren't the other twelve enough?"
"No exceptions, Cipher."
"You don't expect me to eat it off the floor!"
"Do you want to go all the way back to the nurse's office for another?"
Bill groaned in frustration. "Fine!" He snatched it up, wiped it off on the guard's sleeve, and popped it in his mouth. The guard raised a fist; Bill bared his fangs; and after a tense moment, the guard backed down first. The Theraprism had taken nearly every other power from Bill, but it couldn't take his teeth—and though he knew the guards would win any fight, Bill could make it hurt.
They returned him to his room; Bill handed over his cup; they checked to make sure his cup was empty, inspected his mouth, and locked him in.
He hoped they wouldn't notice that half his pills had stuck in the zig-zag bend of the opaque white straw.
He hoped they wouldn't notice The Beast's tongue thrusting through his food slot to lap up the spilled soda that was running down his door and over the bright red "NO SUGAR ALLOWED" sign.
His entire plan hinged on it.
####
Bill was drawing on the wall with his scant art supplies when he felt reality ripple around him, like the wave in a still pool when someone new quietly slides into the water. He looked up from his work. It was happening.
There were several thuds; then a crash; and then the peal of a prison alarm piercing the air. The alarm melted into shrill dolphin-like laughter, and then the frenetic staccato of a hyper speed dance song that threatened to fracture Bill's internal organs. He shuddered as the sound tore at his wound like freezing ice crystals expanding a crack in a boulder.
But he rose into the air and turned to face the door, ready.
Just in time for the door to vanish. The Theraprism melted away like mist in the sunlight—and oh, the sunlight was glorious. The wide open sky pulsed maddening colors so vivid that the faraway rainbows looked monotone in comparison; the land consisted of rolling hills of candy-coated tongues and stomachs and muscles, the paws of enormous buried corpses thrusting up into the sky, the crevasses between burial mounds running with artificially-flavored saliva. It was Bill's kind of place. He wished he had time to hang around.
Before him, orange fur matted with a fine dust of powdery sugar, wild eyes contracted to pinpricks, stood The Beast.
"You did it, you beautiful monster!" Bill shrieked with laughter. "I knew you'd come through!"
The Beast rumbled, "Em deerf evah uoy."
"You're welcome! You can return the favor later! Me, I have somewhere to be." While The Beast was asserting his personal reality on top of the Theraprism's idea of reality, none of the Theraprism's walls or doors existed. Bill wasn't sure exactly how far The Beast's radius of influence extended, except that it was at least far enough to get him out of the maximum security hall—but he had to move now, before the guards rallied to sedate The Beast. Bill slipped a finger into the band of his ankle bracelet and found that under the influence of The Beast's physics, the stiff plastic stretched like a warm rubber band. He tugged it off and tossed it aside. "Seeya, pal!"
But The Beast held up a paw, blocking Bill before he could zip off. "Noob ym tpecca," The Beast said. "Hself ym emusnoc."
"Oooh. Woww." Bill looked at The Beast's candy paw. "Oh, man. Generous offer! You have no idea how tempting it is to take a taste, but I've really gotta get somewhere, and I've gotta be at least sober enough to pull that off..."
"Emusnoc," The Beast insisted. "Hsur ragus eht fo ssendam gnilims citatsce eht ni em nioj. Rehtegot srorroh letsap dna serusaelp kcis hcus wonk lliw ew. Evarg lufituaeb ym ni em htiw tor."
Bill stared again at the paw. The tip of his tongue slipped out beneath his eye to lick hungrily at his waterline. When was the last time he'd been on something that felt good? "Oh, what the heck!" He took The Beast's paw. "I can do this buzzed! How much damage can one little lick do, anyway?"
####
The guard heaved open the maximum security hall's door. The floor was covered in tacky pools of neon candy and removed ankle monitors. "It's just like we feared," the guard shouted into a walkie-talkie, glancing quickly through each cell door's window. "Every single max security patient escaped under The Beast's reality-altering field."
The guard stopped at the sight of neon yellow and orange, peering through the window at the triangle flopped flat on the ground and surrounded by powdery pink sugar.
"Well," the guard said, "all of them except Cipher."
Through the walkie-talkie, D-SM5 tiredly said, "He licked the paw, didn't he."
"Looks like it, boss."
D-SM5 groaned. "All right! Positive thinking! That's the second biggest threat in the ward already accounted for! Silver lining to Mr. Cipher's substance use issues. Assist in securing the others."
####
The good news was that The Beast seemed happy to frolic randomly around the Theraprism rather than head toward the exit, forcing the other escapees to follow along to remain under his reality-altering protection rather than get stranded in small rooms and locked-down halls. The bad news was that his meandering route let him pick up more and more revelers. After an hour, only a third of the max security patients had been re-captured and dragged back to their cells, and twice as many medium security patients had joined the riot.
A-AOX4 was on hand in the maximum security hall to supervise as the guards brought in super-powered escapees. Most of them came back loopy on either The Beast's toxins or on the sedative that had been injected to keep them calm. A-AOX4 was checking them for awareness of their surroundings—name, where are you, when are you, why are you here—as each one was locked back in their cell.
And each time it passed by Bill's cell, it glanced in, concerned.
Bill had been almost pleasant when he'd come out of the Solitary Wellness Void—maybe after all those sessions in isolation he was finally ready to be more of a team player. And D-SM5 had said that he'd been unusually well-behaved and attentive during the reincarnation. A-AOX4 had hoped their most surly patient was finally opening up. It would be a shame if this incident with The Beast resulted in his new progress backsliding.
Plus, it took a heavy dose of anything to impact Bill at all, much less knock him out cold. He'd already had to go to the nurse earlier today; what if he needed medical attention?
So after locking up the latest subdued prisoner, A-AOX4 said to one of the guards, "Take over monitoring incoming patients. I'm checking on Cipher."
It unlocked the door and hovered into the room. "Cipher?"
No response. He was plastered flat to the floor.
"Bill?" It floated lower to check his condition.
He was paper.
Paper meticulously colored in with yellow marker and folded into a triangle; scraps of paper colored black, carefully torn into hand and feet shapes, and shoved in the sleeves and pants of his prison uniform.
A-AOX4 lifted up the paper. On the other side was Bill's "Be a TRY-angle!" poster. He'd written across it, "IS THIS TRYING HARD ENOUGH FOR YOU?"
It turned toward the door—and discovered Bill had filled the wall with a drawing of himself making an obscene gesture, with a word bubble that read, "GIVE MY REGARDS TO THE AX! And tell Jessica I said bye xoxo"
It zoomed out into the hallway and grabbed its walkie-talkie. "Director SM5! Cipher's escaped his cell! He left a decoy! He's not with The Beast, we don't know where he is!"
There was a moment of dead air. And then the director growled, "I think I have an idea."
####
Trying to keep his giggles as quiet as possible, Bill looped through the Theraprism's halls, drifting between The Beast's rolling fields of hard candy corpses and the Theraprism's rigid monotone halls. What had he been worried about! Getting hopped up on astralplanar sugar before escaping his cell had been a great idea! It gave him instant shortcuts through half the walls! And he could handle a little buzz like this! He was totally in control of his actions and knew exactly what he—
How long had he been flying the wrong direction? He turned around. Wow was he high, he could barely focus on anything but all the colors. He wondered if The Beast's toxins had any weird interactions with his meds.
He was lucky The Beast had decided to dawdle around the Dimensional Tyrants Ward: here at the far end of the Theraprism, there were no signs of crisis beyond the sealed doors indicating the facility was under lockdown—and once he was outside a high security ward, there were plenty of cracks, gaps, and vents that Bill was thin enough to slide through. He hadn't even seen a guard since he'd left his cell. By the time he reached the reincarnation room, The Beast's landscape was fading out and the sugar crash headache was fading in, but the facility was still on lockdown and no one seemed to be looking for Bill. He slipped beneath the locked door and powered up the console to the reincarnation machine.
He skipped straight to the reincarnation program and checked the box that said, yes, the patient's brain had been washed. He paused when a warning pop-up blocked the screen. The technician hadn't gotten a pop-up. He had to read over the two-sentence warning three times before he understood what he was looking at. The soul sanitization routine hadn't been run recently, was he sure the patient's memory was erased—ugh, yes. He irritably clicked the confirmation and hoped that would be the last of it.
Bill quickly selected Earth and dimension 46'\; he tabbed past the coordinates and date, and they both automatically filled in "DEFAULT." D-SM5 had said the computer would make a "random" decision if you didn't plug in a time and place, but the staff didn't know Earth like Bill did. If he left the time and place up to the whims of fate, then something as weird as a trillion-year-old alien chaos god escaping a criminal insane asylum to spontaneously generate as a fully grown mortal would be sucked straight into the weirdest place and time on Earth. Gravity Falls: August, 2012. Weirdmageddon. He was willing to bet his life on it.
He was betting his life on it.
After that, with any luck, he'd be able to shed his new body like any other puppet and return to his castle in the sky. If for some reason he couldn't get out of it, he'd only need to pull a couple of magic tricks outside a normal mortal's capabilities to catch his past self's attention, find a way to prove his identity—heck, with any luck, they'd be seeing through each other's eyes and that would instantly confirm it—warn his past self about the Pines' treachery, prevent his own death, save Weirdmageddon, restructure the universe in his image, and rule his new party paradise as god-king for all eternity. Easy.
He scrolled down the list of available creatures, looking for something that would be easy to reach the Fearamid and prove his intelligence with—something with vocal cords that could speak eye-bat would be useful, it'd save him a lot of trouble if he could just shout at his sentinels in their own language and startle them into listening—but, to his surprise, the first useful species he found was humans, down amongst the species that had received a single-digit number of reincarnations from the Theraprism. Really, humans? They allowed that?
Over the blaring alarm, a voice made an announcement. He completely tuned it out—and only realized a moment after it ended that he'd heard his own name. They knew he'd escaped.
Bill didn't have time to search for anything better. He selected humanity.
He tabbed past dozens of features he could choose from for his body—default default default default—who cared what the body peed out of, he wasn't keeping the thing long enough to fill its bladder! He clicked open the advanced settings—there, spontaneous generation! He hoped this thing wouldn't drop him on the sidewalk as a baby, but usually when a human suddenly popped into existence, it was an adult sculpted from clay or something, right? He'd be fine! He checked the box for spontaneous generation.
He got another error message. He groaned. He wasn't sober enough for this.
Something about spontaneous generation being banned on Earth after 1859, is he willing to assume the liability if the patient generates after—yeah sure whatever, he clicked yes. Another pop-up prompted him for the digital signature of the person assuming liability. He typed in D-SM5's name.
As soon as he clicked enter, another error message popped up. "What!!"
He flinched at the sound of a muffled pneumatic hiss. Outside, somebody had unlocked the doors to this hallway. The alarm was still blaring; the Theraprism wasn't coming off lockdown. That meant whoever had unlocked the hall was coming for him.
"Focusss." He skimmed the new warning. Something about humans being on a list of species for which spontaneous generation was restricted—what loser had written a law about that! Who cared if a fully-formed, brand-new human popped out of thin air in the middle of town! What about Bill's wants?! He checked another box YES HE'S SURE HE WANTS TO SPONTANEOUSLY GENERATE A HUMAN YOU MONSTER and pounded enter.
Another pop-up. It wanted to know on which god's authority the spontaneous generation had been authorized.
Bill froze. Why did it need to know. Would it check? A machine that could reincarnate a soul was probably also a machine that could shoot off a prayer. Or was Bill supposed to have some kind of divine authorization code? Which gods were even allowed to authorize that kind of thing? He didn't know which stupid legislative body had made this stupid law or what their stupid definition of a god was! Gods weren't even real, they were just stupid, arrogant, stuck-up jerks who were powerful enough to trick people into thinking they were important! Like Bill! What name were they looking for?!
He heard voices in the hallway. He darted over to the door, slid his fingers through the seams around the doorframe to crush the latching mechanism so it couldn't be opened, and darted back. That wouldn't hold them long; he knew from experience that the guards could bust down the doors in these low security wings without much difficulty.
"Bill Cipher!" That was D-SM5. It had come personally? In any other circumstance, he'd be flattered. "Open up immediately!"
"Has that ever worked?" A god, a god, a god... his eye caught on the bas relief at the back of the next room. If there was any god this place would accept orders from... The guards were ramming the door; the bending metal groaned. He typed "THE AXOLOTL" and hit enter.
The button grayed out but the pop-up didn't go away. The screen froze. "What." Bill tried clicking again. The cursor turned into one of those little spinning balls that meant the computer was quietly having a stroke. "No no no no—"
D-SM5 hollered, "You know what the consequences will be if you don't—"
"I'm not listeniiing to yooou!"
"You're only going to hurt yourse—"
Dropping his voice to a demonic boom to drown out the director, Bill recited, "'I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited! People were not—" There was a shriek of tearing metal, and then a bright glow behind Bill as D-SM5 peered through the gap in the door. Bill started talking faster, "'Were not invited they went there they got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow—'"
The pop-up disappeared. The cursor returned to normal. The box next to spontaneous generation was checked. Bill stared for a split second, then quickly closed out the advanced settings, scrolled to the bottom of the page, and hit "EXECUTE."
Someone blasted the door out of its frame; based on the blinding glow that accompanied the blast, Bill suspected that wasn't one of the guards, but D-SM5 itself. He frantically clicked through the next two confirmations, flung a couple of folding chairs toward D-SM5 and its thugs, and dove beneath the door to the next room. Ten seconds.
"Cancel the reincarnation!" D-SM5 snapped.
A guard ran to the console. (What if they saw where Bill had gone? They could probably guess the planet, but would the computer keep records of his destination, what his new body looked like—) "I don't see a cancel! I don't think—"
"Then get him off the altar!"
Five seconds. Please spawn as an adult and not a baby, please spawn as an adult and not a baby, please— Bill hadn't broken the door between the observation room and the altar; the guards easily unlocked it. "No no no—!"
"Don't let him esc—!"
Three seconds. An impossibly bright light shone down on Bill. He reflexively peeled open his exoskeleton to accept it. LIGHT—oh, he felt even more alive than the time he'd stolen a bottle of stimulants from the nurse station, ground them up, and snorted them off Mrs. Mirrorcube's back. His eye widened, taking in as much free energy as he could—and then he focused his gaze through the window on the console, focusing the infinite light into a laser powerful enough to instantly melt through the window and explode the computer. The guards fell back, trying to shield their tender mortal flesh from the fury of Bill's fire. Enjoy the blisters.
D-SM5 bellowed, "Bill Cipher, you mo—!"
"CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, SUCKA!" He could feel his body ripping apart, cracking open at the wound. It hurt, but not the hurt of dying; it was the euphoric hurt of spaghettification, of being infinitely sucked beyond a beautiful event horizon. Bill's triumphant cackle filled the air—
—and then the room was silent and dark, and Bill was gone.
####
(If you're new here: I posted this as a one shot because I think we could all use a little Bill escaping from Theraprism, yeah? However it's ALSO part of my ongoing Bill-stuck-in-a-human-body fic I'm currently editing for TBOB compatibility. So, if you enjoyed this and want to see where post-reincarnation Bill goes, check out the fic!! And if you DON'T want to read the rest of the fic, I hope you enjoyed the one shot and I'd love to hear your thoughts.
If you do check out the main fic be forewarned it's only 100% TBOB compatible up to chapter 6. After that it is, bizarrely, 98% TBOB compatible, because somehow I accidentally wrote a fic that lines up with the book so well that I'm legit worried people could use TBOB to work out fic spoilers. But I still need to edit the remaining 2%.
If you're NOT new here: hey gang this is the new chapter 6!!! I finished editing this chapter about fifteen minutes before post time so it's not as polished as my usual chapters, but I hope it didn't read that way. Anyway, I look forward to hearing what y'all think!)
#bill cipher#theraprism#the book of bill#the book of bill spoilers#gravity falls#gravity falls fic#gravity falls fanart#fanart#my art#my writing#bill goldilocks cipher#(posting this like a oneshot because it basically is and i want people to be able to read it like a one shot)#(however it's ALSO the new chapter six)
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he did it! 🐍 and it only took...uhhh...well, there probably could've been less punches, but why hold back!
PUNCHES FOR EVERYONE
#art#twisted wonderland#twisted wonderland spoilers#twisted wonderland episode 7 spoilers#twisted wonderland book 7 spoilers#twisted wonderland episode 7 part 9 spoilers#twisted wonderland book 7 part 9 spoilers#snakes#ONE MORE DOWN#oh my god happy jamil was SO scary and yet adorable all at once#i want real jamil to see him and just be utterly disgusted#and yet he got nothing on the return of everyone's favorite twst character: WEIRD RHYTHMIC ELEPHANT#oh weird rhythmic elephant what would we do without you#me kicking my stupid little feet as jamil wakes up through sheer force of kalim though#he was SO happy for jamil and SO ready to just go along with everything. my sweet boy.#jamil getting so flustered by him that he's just shocked back into reality#and the SLAPFIGHT#silver being like 'they need this' and doing his one smile animation as kalim and jamil are pulling on each other's hair and going YOU SMEL#mmm yes delicious#also this is probably nothing but#but...they brought up the whole thing with azul having dirt on crowley again#the thing that was briefly alluded to in episode 4 and never mentioned ever again?!#i had JUST finally convinced myself that i was reading too much into it and it was just azul playing along with jamil's plan#but now they've mentioned it again and i'm going to be all BUT WHAT DOES IT MEEEEEAAAAN for another three years about it#is it a meaningless reference to that one scene?! is it absolutely ridiculous foreshadowing?! am i ever going to be validated?!#I HAVE TO KNOW
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listen there really was just something about how in the book, snow’s 3-page descent from hesitant lover boy to deluded mfer happens entirely in his mind. lucy gray gives him no indication whatsoever that she suspects him, that she’s going to leave or betray him. he’s just sitting quietly in the cabin waiting for her to return when that seed of calculated suspicion, which he has needed to survive the capitol, takes a hold of him and chokes the life out of any goodness left inside him. it really drives home your terror as a reader that “oh my god did he kill her? did she escape? what happened to her? why would he even think that?” in a way that when the movie had to adjust for visualization it lost some of that holy shit this guy has lost it emphasis.
#seeing some discourse and im not saying lucy grey didnt know#im saying she never dropped the kind of hints that she knew like she did in the movie#or if she did snow isnt worried about them until he very suddenly is consumed by them#snow is not concerned about whether or not she believed him. of course she did! hes snow!#but then shes gone…. for a while……#and its the sudden immediate drastic unravelling that comes across so clearly in the book#that i knew wouldn’t translate to screen yet still cant help but miss#the hunger games#coriolanus snow#tbosas#lucy gray baird#not a crime or anything just a note that i cannot stop thinking about#the ballad of songbirds and snakes#this is all from memory of reading it quite a while ago. so maybe 3 pages is an exaggeration#but i remember it happening VERY quickly and without much external cause#like we as the reader have no indication as to whether shes nearby or not.#snow has no idea either. he just SUSPECTS. and his suspicion breeds the hatred that has been bubbling inside him all this time#he hates how she undoes him. he hates that he WOULD run away with her if shed let him keep his secrets#and he HATES more than anything that she makes him WANT to tell his secrets#he wants to be vulnerable and reveal the ugly nasty parts about himself and still be loved#but he does not let himself and it is everyone’s downfall#he chooses cruelty bc it is easy and familiar and makes him feel more powerful than the vulnerable give and take that real love requires
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i said that gale and cyra have disaster romcom energy and now it's all i can think about
#bg3#baldur's gate 3#galemance#gale dekarios#tav#i think it falls under miscommunication trope bc she's SO hard to read that he would think she's fucking with him#but no she genuinely wants to know every reason he disliked that book#in this au she actually has a phd instead of just being. a weird lady#she's still a weird lady but she's licensed now#also idk if it's registered bc i haven't done a lot of comics with her but i see her a lot like elizabeth zott from lessons in chemistry
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tshirt that says NO LIVE ORGANISM CAN CONTINUE FOR LONG TO EXIST SANELY UNDER CONDITIONS OF ABSOLUTE REALITY
#i literally JUST finished hill house a few days ago and i already want to reread. Badly. it's sooo so so soo sooooooooo good <33333!!!!!#also completely enamored by shirley jackson's writing style i NEED to read everything she has written ever like right now..#opening lines of ALL TIME btw 👆❗❗❗#r.txt#the haunting of hill house#ALSO i've seen commentary videos on the tv show they made of hill house but from what i remember of it it's SO different from the book???#i think they were all siblings in the show which is??????? like why would you change that part?? i love sibling relationships as much as the#next guy but i feel like the fact that none of them knew each other was such an essential part of the story like why would u change it....#also eleanor was like. an entirely different character who was also already dead in the show i believe??? and dr. montague doesn't exist??#hill house could've been really good as a show idk why they changed it up like that...like was the original story not interesting enough for#you or something?? WHO decided to make that change i just wanna talk 🤨
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Everyone thinks that dick was the golden child when in reality it was Jason.
Clark: Bruce who was your favourite robin?
Dick: obviously it’s me?
Tim: it’s dick
Damian: I am superior robin, it will be me.
Bruce: it’s Jason
Everyone: WHAT?!?!???
Bruce: why are you so surprised? He didn’t jump on too my chandeliers which I had to replace each week
*everyone looks at dick*
Bruce: he didn’t drop out of school
*everyone looks at tim*
Bruce: I didn’t have to stop him from killing everyone who annoyed him
*everyone looks at Damian*
Bruce: in fact, he enjoyed school and handed all his homework in on time, we would spend hours in the library reading his favourite classics. He even helped Alfred with most of the cooking, He was my little boy
Jason: stop spreading lies, I hate you go away
Bruce: my precious little boy
#jason todd#Bruce Wayne#dick Grayson#Damian Wayne#tim Drake#clark kent#Batman#alfred pennyworth#Bruce: he my little baby#jason: I’m 6’2 and have the ability to kill you if I wanted#Bruce: my baby my little son#jason: GOD YOURE SO EMBARRASSING DAD#jason was probably the most behaved child before he went boom boom and I stand by that#he enjoyed school#most likey hated it when he missed it#and he loves classic literature???#bros a huge nerd#yea dick is all smiles but probably gave Bruce’s near death heart attacks everytime he swung from chandeliers and rooftops#jason just wanted to live his life in the library reading his fav books and homework
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#original comic#artists on tumblr#comic#indie comics#every heart a doorway#seanan mcguire#id in alt text#my comic#my art#i started re reading it as this was loading and realized i shouldve drawn nancy with streaks in her hair#oughhhg i love this book#beyond this the aesthetics are also just so on point for my interests#like the creepy/gory subjects and the literal murder to be solved lol#i think id have probably gone to a nonsense world that pretended to be high logic#the opposite of kade's fairyland#crap now i want to design a world eVEN THOUGH IM BUSY ENOUGH
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#all i know is when this comes out in may im gonna be obsessed#warning yall now#kind of want to read this book now too#bridgerton#penelope x colin#colin x penelope#penelope featherington#colin bridgerton#love#polin#the angst is too good#the chemistry damn#Nicola Coughlan#luke newton#season 3
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