#mylongficidea

[godsfavoritescientist]

Facing the Axolotl

[godsfavoritescientist]

Things the axolotl would say to bill

[godsfavoritescientist]

Take my shitty phone drawings

[godsfavoritescientist]

The Axolotl is a passive creature that rarely gets involved in mortal lives. It rests and it dreams and it visits other people's dreams, sometimes inspiring them, many times simply watching. It's lived for an unimaginably long time--a length of time that makes a trillion years seem like a blip--and it's completely at peace with the many things it's been and done. Some people worship it like a god, or see it as a representation of everything pure and good. It does not have much to say about these mortal interpretations. It simply is what it is.

When Bill Cipher calls out for help, it's delighted to finally meet him. Bill is the only one it will ever bring back to life. He's the only one it's ever able to, thanks to a certain set of peculiarities of their existence.

Bill Cipher is as active as the Axolotl is passive. He fights and he fights and he fights, and yet he never feels satisfied. He isn't content to watch the world around him in all it's mundane intricacies. He wants to shape every atom to his whims. And the things he can't influence, he burns to the ground.

Meeting the Axolotl is the strangest thing he ever experiences. The Axolotl doesn't speak to him the way it speaks to anyone else. It speaks with a friendly eagerness that borders on over-familiarity. It seems utterly unconcerned about the destructive potential that will be caused by bringing Bill back to life. Not that he's complaining, but he'd be lying if he said it didn't make him uneasy. It's like he's staring at a magic eye poster and missing the picture amidst the noise.

Once Bill is brought back, he picks up right where he left off. He gets so far in his plans, in fact, that he ends the world all over again. But this time, he survives the world being returned back to normal. With no more tricks up his sleeves, his lifelong dream having been achieved and foiled twice now, and having been forced by necessity to forge a couple of connections with others in his powerlessly reborn state, he crumples. And the worst part? At least one of the people he formed a tenuous connection with sees him end the world, and still forgives him for it. This is what *really* breaks him.

But from there, he can rebuild. From there, Bill can put himself back together and figure out who he's capable of being when he allows himself to be loved.

He lives for an incredibly long time. He grows and changes and evolves, and forms more genuine connections with other people than he could have ever imagined. And eventually, he does a lot of good.

And a much longer time after that, after he's gone through enough metamorphoses that he's changed his name a dozen different times over the eons, his boundless energy and curiosity evolves into wanting to curl up like a house cat in a sunbeam and get some long-needed rest. And by the time he reaches this point, he's realized why the Axolotl was so kind to him all those lifetimes ago.

He keeps an eye on a sleepy town in Oregon, long before it ever became Oregon. He inspires the minds that he needs to. And eventually, from his spot curled up outside the fabric of spacetime itself, he watches with great fondness as a little golden triangle tries to take over the world.

And when that triangle reaches out to him for help in one last desperate act, he is absolutely beyond delighted to be able to finally experience that conversation from the other end of it. He had almost forgotten how fiery and fierce he used to be. He'd almost forgotten the way he used to boil with fury and hatred and fear so intense that he could never quite look himself in the eye. Even now, that little triangle trembles when it looks up at him. It doesn't know if its life is at an end yet. It has no idea that it's really just begun.

And although the Axolotl knows it can't tell Bill everything that's in store for him, and what kind of god he becomes, it wants more than anything to take this brief moment of connection across time and space to show him that he is loved.

[godsfavoritescientist]

Imagine if Bill got reincarnated and eventually learned and grew as a person, but it all happened far away from the Pines. And then one day, once he'd gone through an extensive character arc, Bill stumbled across Ford in the multiverse. Imagine if he gave a perfect apology, something really heartfelt and genuine, along with an offer to do anything Ford wanted, whether it was staying far away from him for the rest of time, or having a conversation about anything Ford wanted to talk about, or helping make things right in any way Ford could think of.

I think Ford would feel really bitter and angry about it. It's one thing to be faced with a Force of Absolute Evil that terrorized you and the rest of the multiverse for decades on end, before finally being put in the grave. It's another thing altogether to have to confront the fact that the person who hurt you so deeply and left an impact on you that might never go away... is just a person. A person who is evidently capable of change and growth and of trying to do better. A person who, despite having the capacity to do better, never put in that effort when it would've mattered most to you. And if he was convinced that Bill had genuinely changed for the better, then Ford wouldn't even be able to bring himself to destroy Bill, the way he wanted to for 30+ years, no matter how cathartic he'd imagine it might feel.

[godsfavoritescientist]

I tried to make up lore for my WIP but I could not decide on any lore for my WIP so here's this instead

plain text version under the cut:

The President's Key: REVISITED

[drawing of the president's key]

can open any lock made before 1877 <- ARE THERE EXCEPTIONS?

"Last Summer, I was given this key by Quentin Trembley, the 8 and a halfth president. This Summer, I'm testing out its full potential."

TESTS RUN SO FAR: ITEM / DID IT OPEN / WAS IT MADE BEFORE 1877? Door to the crawlspace. Yes. ??? Gravity Falls History Museum. Yes. Yes. Treasure chest from history museum. Yes. Yes. Stan's bedroom. No. Probably not. Stan's car. No. No.

"I reached a roadblock when Stan saw me near his car and confiscated the key. But this investigation is far from over. How does it work? Is it a marvel of magic or science? These are just a few of the mysteries to be solved once I get the key back."

[godsfavoritescientist]

Bill gets three seconds of "phew I'm still alive" and then he has to meet the being that is going to put him through the horrors of having a physical form

[godsfavoritescientist]

tbh this was a lot of fun to make

plain text version under the cut

Cursed Doors: Still a menace!!

[drawing of a door with clawed fingertips curled around it] Text beside the image: Where to next? CERTAIN DOOM?

This morning after a terrible nightmare, I woke up to find that my bedroom door led directly into the basement. After a piping hot cup of coffee to invigorate the mind, I realized that this is a phenomenon I've encountered before: cursed doors! Upon asking Stanley, my suspicions were confirmed: this unexplained phenomenon continues to be a thorn in the side of townsfolk and tourists alike. And even less surprisingly, the tourist bureau never responded to the letter I sent them about it. Well, it is time to take matters into my own hands. My next task is to study these nuisances until I find out how to make this ever-present danger a thing of the past.

[godsfavoritescientist]

Anyone got thoughts on what Bill Cipher would *assume* the place the Axolotl brought him to after dying to talk to him would look like? I've ruled out some of the obvious answers already

Generic outer space: boring

Clouds and pearly gates: too on the nose, too human-centric of a concept

Jail cell or something similar: possibly too human-centric? Probably too on the nose

Courtroom: I'm doing something else with that so I don't wanna use it for this

[godsfavoritescientist]

bill no don't throw away your chance at redemption noooo

[godsfavoritescientist]

what if you died and god said "play wii with me"

[godsfavoritescientist]

Snippet from chapter 1 of my WIP explaining the axolotl's pronouns:

"Towering over him, cupping him in its hands, is The Axolotl. It’s an ‘it’ in the same way that gravity or dimensions or time is an ‘it’: an ancient and well-respected concrete fact of the multiverse, no matter how elusive it is to those living within its realm of influence. And as far as he can tell, The Axolotl has been around longer than anything else on that list."

[godsfavoritescientist]

In my fic when Bill is back on Earth and in a human body I think all his dreams should be from the visual pov of someone who can only see as much as a flatlander regardless of what they're about

[godsfavoritescientist]

delighted to inform everyone that I have just come up with a gut-wrenching character arc for ford to go on in my bill-comes-back-to-life story

[godsfavoritescientist]

Bits and pieces of my unwritten fic are merging together in my mind into one of the possible versions of what it could be. Contemplating the title "once more, with feeling" and the fic focusing on bill pretending to go on a redemption arc until he can figure out how to bring back the apocalypse

[godsfavoritescientist]

Ehy, I was curious, what's the plot of your long fic?

I'm glad it's piqued your interest! There are many pieces to it that I'm still ironing out the details on and/or will not spoil when it comes to actual plot events, but here's what I will say:

The Axolotl feels so much love for Bill, and genuinely believes in him, and at the start of the fic Bill is perplexed and offput by this. And my goal here is for Bill to understand that love by the end of the fic.

So the plot is like this:

1. Bill meets the Axolotl

2. The self-destructive downward spiral angst megavortex kickstarted by bill being brought back in a human body

3. Character growth, probably