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skelewashere · 2 months ago
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One random fact about every oc youve ever made. now
Well this might take a while
Skele - first ever oc, cringe
Crem - heavy inspiration from the fish people in avatar 2
Mire - he has a USB stick filled with oiled up men, it's canon
Snair - his name came from an inside joke, literally Snape chair
==========
SCP related:
Cody - the reason why he has the forgetti face is because I was too lazy to draw his face
Maria Fibonacci - MtF character!!! I can't tell too much because people who I write this story with might seeeee
There's more, but these are the main people!!!
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dr-cody-sullivan · 4 days ago
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What is your third favorite color
third? specifically third? i suppose that would be orange.
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freshnectarine · 1 month ago
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Sebastian Stan just became the first man to be nominated in both lead actor categories at the Golden Globes within the same year and win for Musical or Comedy.
It's historic.
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dronescapesvideos · 8 months ago
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The History Of The Secretive U.S. Military Test Site | Edwards Air Force Base
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HKJEPE71 SITUS TOP GACOR BERSITIFIKAT RESMI TERPECAYA SE ASIA
💎𝐃𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐀𝐑
💎𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐈𝐍
💎𝐈𝐃 𝐕𝐈𝐏 𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐌����
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𝗛𝗸𝗝𝗘𝗣𝗘𝟳𝟭💎 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗔𝗗𝗠𝗜𝗡 ☑️𝗛𝗸𝗝𝗘𝗣𝗘𝟳𝟭💎 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗠𝗨𝗗𝗔𝗛 𝗠𝗔𝗫𝗪𝗜𝗡 ☑️𝗛𝗸𝗝𝗘𝗣𝗘𝟳𝟭💎 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗣𝗢𝗣𝗨𝗟𝗘𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 ☑️
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HKJEPE71༆༆𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙺 𝚁𝙴𝚂𝙼𝙸 𝙾𝚁𝙸𝙶𝙸𝙽𝙰𝙻 𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙱𝙰𝙸𝙺 𝙳𝙰𝙽 𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙿𝙴𝙲𝙰𝚈𝙰 𝚂𝙴 𝙰𝚂𝙸𝙰 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟻
༆-𝐃𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐀𝐑༆-𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐈𝐍༆-𝐈𝐃 𝐋𝐈𝐌𝐈𝐓𝐄𝐃
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HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗔𝗗𝗠𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗠𝗨𝗗𝗔𝗛 𝗠𝗔𝗫𝗪𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗣𝗢𝗣𝗨𝗟𝗘𝗥HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗔𝗗𝗠𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗠𝗨𝗗𝗔𝗛 𝗠𝗔𝗫𝗪𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗣𝗢𝗣𝗨𝗟𝗘𝗥
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HKJEPE71༆༆𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙺 𝚁𝙴𝚂𝙼𝙸 𝙾𝚁𝙸𝙶𝙸𝙽𝙰𝙻 𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙱𝙰𝙸𝙺 𝙳𝙰𝙽 𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙿𝙴𝙲𝙰𝚈𝙰 𝚂𝙴 𝙰𝚂𝙸𝙰 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟻
༆-𝐃𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐀𝐑༆-𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐈𝐍༆-𝐈𝐃 𝐋𝐈𝐌𝐈𝐓𝐄𝐃
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HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗔𝗗𝗠𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗠𝗨𝗗𝗔𝗛 𝗠𝗔𝗫𝗪𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗣𝗢𝗣𝗨𝗟𝗘𝗥HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗔𝗗𝗠𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗠𝗨𝗗𝗔𝗛 𝗠𝗔𝗫𝗪𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗣𝗢𝗣𝗨𝗟𝗘𝗥
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༆༆HKJEPE71༆༆LINK RESMI ORIGINAL TERBAIK DAN TERPECAYA 2025
༆-𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐈𝐍
༆-𝐈𝐃 𝐋𝐈𝐌𝐈𝐓𝐄𝐃
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HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗔𝗗𝗠𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗠𝗨𝗗𝗔𝗛 𝗠𝗔𝗫𝗪𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗣𝗢𝗣𝗨𝗟𝗘𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 ☑️
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༆༆༆LINK RESMI ORIGINAL TERBAIK DAN TERPECAYA SE ASIA༆༆༆
༆DAFTAR
༆LOGIN
༆ID LIMITED
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HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗔𝗗𝗠𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗠𝗨𝗗𝗔𝗛 𝗠𝗔𝗫𝗪𝗜𝗡 ☑️HKJEPE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗣𝗢𝗣𝗨𝗟𝗘𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 ☑️
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skelewashere · 6 days ago
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Reading my writing idea notes from last night and one just says "kill him"
Like, what does this mean, who did I plan to kill
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dr-cody-sullivan · 4 days ago
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Poppyseed wont stop climbing into my coffee mug, i need to convince the foundation to get me another
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lgoace71-lgoace71-onllyv2 · 13 days ago
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༆༆LGOACE71༆༆LINK RESMI ORIGINAL TERBAIK DAN TERPECAYA 2025
༆-𝐃𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐀𝐑
༆-𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐈𝐍
༆-𝐈𝐃 𝐋𝐈𝐌𝐈𝐓𝐄𝐃
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LGOACE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗔𝗗𝗠𝗜𝗡 ☑️LGOACE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗠𝗨𝗗𝗔𝗛 𝗠𝗔𝗫𝗪𝗜𝗡 ☑️LGOACE71♦️ 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗞 𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗣𝗢𝗣𝗨𝗟𝗘𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮5 ☑️
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thorsenmark · 1 year ago
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Sun Temple Walls and Ruins (Mesa Verde National Park) by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: While walking around the ruins and Ancestral Puebloan archaeological site at the Sun Temple. This is in Mesa Verde National Park. The view is looking to the east down a hallway.
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babyetears · 1 year ago
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☆ be your promise mini set ☆
New mesh
Base game
All lods
compatible HQ
Custom thumbnail!
71/47/17  swatches
TOS
Do not claim as yours
Forbidden to remesh the mesh
Do not RE-upload this content or any other to other games like SL, IMVU, GTAV, etc etc
Do not RE-upload this content to sites that are free or folders
Patreon!
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ckret2 · 6 months ago
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Chapter 71 of human Bill Cipher trying to debate his way out of still being the Mystery Shack's prisoner. Soos has found the stolen Journal 4 in Bill's possession and has to decide what to do about it in light of everything else he's learned about Bill lately.
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[*this chapter was renumbered to squeeze in the Axolotl plot arc! If you. Haven't read it yet, go back to ch 61 and read it!]
Soos stared dumbfounded at the journal with a 4 on the cover that he'd pulled from Bill's hiding place. Ford had lost Journal 4 last fall—he'd said gnomes had stolen it. How in the world had Bill gotten it?
Soos sat in the attic window seat and flipped through it. The first few pages were Ford's journal entries—his observations of the dimensional rips they were glueing shut in Gravity Falls post-Weirdmageddon, a hand-drawn map highlighting various places around the globe he wanted to investigate, a few drawings and observations of paranormal beings he hadn't seen his first time in town, half a sketch of a gnome that ended with a jagged scribble across the page followed by a page that said "Shmebulock" over and over.
And then a page that said, in an unfamiliar handwriting of jagged, narrow gray letters: "CURSED BOOK! If your name is Mabon Mason Pines, STOP READING NOW or ENJOY YOUR HEX!"
Bill had written page after page of some weird code of gray and yellow-green dots and dashes. A few sentences in English—every one of them was a threatening message to Ford. "Everything would have been fantastic if you'd just helped me finish, Fordsy." "You'll regret not siding with me when you had the chance." "You should have known better than to let your idiot brother turn you against me." "Sixer, you're lying to yourself every time you say you never worshiped me, and you know it. You spent the first third of your life running away from the god you were raised with and the second third chasing after me. Don't waste your last third denying it. YOU'RE MINE." A small, worrying diagram of what looked like the interdimensional portal. And a sticker.
Wait, hold on.
A sticker. One of Mabel's. The rest of the page was the same as the others, the two-tone dots and dashes, except for the sticker, and an arrow drawn from one paragraph to the sticker.
A yellow smiley, its round edges filled in with black marker to make a triangle, over the words "Good job!"
Soos stared at the sticker.
####
A couple of weeks ago, Melody had texted to let Soos know that there was a mess in the upstairs bathroom, and the kids said they'd been fighting a werewolf ghost.
When Soos had gotten home the next morning, Melody had pulled him aside and quietly told him she hadn't wanted to worry him and the Stans, but she did not think it was a werewolf ghost.
When Soos saw the bathroom, he didn't think it was a werewolf ghost either.
It was a scene from a horror movie. Menacing magical sigils painted all over the walls in blood and toothpaste, Bill's zodiac painted on one mirror, the other mirror broken, glass and water all over the floor. It looked like the site of a really wet demon summoning. This contained none of the hallmarks of ghostly or werewolfish activity. Why would Bill do this?
Soos was kind of reluctant to ask Bill. Bill still sorta scared him sometimes. Sure, he looked like a lost 18-year-old, but Soos knew what teens were like in a fight. So he asked Mabel instead.
Mabel pursed her lips uncomfortably. "Ask Dipper."
So Soos asked Dipper.
Dipper winced and. "Promise you won't get mad."
Soos considered that. "Yeah, I guess that's a fair deal."
Dipper confessed that Bill got accidentally locked in the upstairs bathroom for like a whole day, because he and Mabel didn't hear him yelling. Not because they were out of the house when they shouldn't have been. They were just... somewhere else in the house. Doing something loud. For the whole day.
While Bill was trapped alone.
####
Soos had vented to Abuelita about cleaning the bathroom. Like sure, he got Bill was annoyed about being stuck, but that seemed excessive.
Abuelita had made the observation that sometimes people in profoundly bleak and oppressive situations would just... destroy whatever was around them. Like punching a hole in the wall or snapping a pencil when you were angry, but much more so. Not because they wanted their surroundings to be destroyed, but because that was the last and only thing they had power over, and they needed to feel like they were in control of something. Even if that thing was merely changing their environment from ordered to chaotic.
Bill didn't have control over very much. He probably hadn't since he died. Soos didn't know what kind of space triangle afterlife Bill had been in before he showed up as Toga Lady, but it couldn't have been great if he'd come straight back here.
Soos could remember the one time weeks ago he'd let Bill into the bathroom to shower and forgotten to come back and let him out. How Bill had screamed so all the Mystery Shack's tourists could hear; how he'd seethed in Soos's face, how he'd said he'd rather blow their collective cover and throw them all on the mercy of the town's law enforcement than remain locked in the bathroom a second longer than they'd agreed upon. Soos had thought Bill was just impatient and hotheaded.
Standing in the bathroom, looking at the material evidence of Bill's claustrophobic terror—the broken glass, the spilled blood—he wondered.
####
The same day, he had felt a breeze in the gift shop and found the trap doors to the roof left open. He'd climbed up, shut them, and in between tours he'd visited his office to check yesterday's security tapes. 
He saw Wendy coming into the shack to hang out the morning before. That was fine. Soos had discovered she did that from time to time on days the shack was closed, but she wasn't doing anything bad and she hadn't brought it up yet, so Soos didn't bring it up either. Maybe she just needed a private place to hang. Teen stuff. He was just glad Wendy felt that safe at the Mystery Shack. Maybe she'd just gone up to hang out on the roof and forgot to shut the trap doors...
And then, right there on screen, Soos saw Bill letting himself into the gift shop, through the door, which he shouldn't be able to open. A chill shot up Soos's back. The door curse was their only real means of containing Bill. If he could use doors now, he was out, there was no way they could trap him without doing something crazy like locking him in the bunker and hoping he didn't kill himself.
Or could he use doors? Soos thought back to the frantic messages on the bathroom wall, written in Bill's own blood—his desperation over being unable to escape. Maybe he could use doors but not doorknobs. That was okay, maybe?
On tape, he saw Wendy run into Bill. He saw Wendy take Bill onto the roof. Out in the open air, where he could just... do whatever. But he didn't do whatever. Soos fast-forwarded the tape until Wendy and Bill came back down, and Bill simply returned to the living room.
He'd had the perfect opportunity to shove Wendy off the roof or escape. He didn't take it.
If all Bill was using his new door skills for was ducking into the gift shop and hanging out on the roof with Wendy, Soos thought maybe it would be kinda mean to take that away from him. There weren't a lot of other places Bill could go in the shack. (Soos kept seeing the blood on the bathroom wall. He kept trying to imagine what kind of helplessness would drive someone that far.) Maybe Bill needed the open air.
So Soos had put the security tape on his desk, not sure what to do about it.
####
A couple of day after that, while Soos was restocking the gift shop in between waves of tourists, he'd seen Wendy reading an oddly dull-looking booklet instead of one of her usual magazines. He tilted his head to glance at the cover. The Oregon state driving manual. "Aw dude, gonna get your learner's permit?"
"Think so," Wendy said. "Don't tell my dad."
Soos remembered Wendy groaning about her dad wrangling her into doing errands if she ever got her license. "Your secret is safe with me."
"Thanks."
"What made you change your mind? You were totally against getting a license a week ago."
"It's probably those stupid Gleeful Auto commercials that have been worming into my dreams." Wendy laughed. "I'm just waking up in the morning like, neeeed caaar."
"Oh yeah! Heh, funny coincidence, Melody says she had a dream like that too. Sometimes she gets these like, dreams about monsters watching her in bed? But one time, the monster was Bud Gleeful, whispering in her ear about a big car sale. She totally woke up laughing!"
"Ha! Annoying car commercials should be banned, man. Why do we need to be told multiple times a day to spend thousands of dollars?"
"You make a salient point."
They fell silent for a moment as Wendy read a couple more paragraphs. Then she said, "That, plus... I was talking to Goldie the other day."
Soos looked up from the t-shirt he'd been putting on a clothes hanger. "Oh. Yeah?"
"About where we wanna go when we get out of town."
"Huh." Very casually, Soos asked, "What did Goldie say?"
"He wants to go on some big vacation. Like a world cruise or something, I dunno."
"Huh." Soos wondered if that was true. He tried to imagine Bill Cipher as a tourist. Floating triangle in a Hawaiian shirt with a camera hanging from a strap and a fanny pack. What kind of places would he even visit? Soos bet he wanted to visit the pyramids. Heh. (Was that stereotyping? Maybe that was stereotyping.)
"And I told him I'm moving to Portland for college."
"Oh, hey, I didn't know you were thinking about college."
"I... actually, never told anybody else before," Wendy said. "I've been thinking about it for years, but part of me felt like it's just a fantasy? But Goldie said when he got out of high school, he did the same thing—moved to another town, made a new group of friends, all that. And... I don't know, actually talking to him out loud about it just... made it feel real, you know? So I thought, if I'm gonna move to Portland, I should probably start planning for it. Starting with how I'm getting there." She held up the driving manual.
Soos nodded slowly. "Huh. Yeah. That's a pretty mature way to look at it."
And that was what Bill was talking to Wendy about on the roof? Just... listening to a teen vent and helping her figure out her future?
And so, Soos took the security tape off his desk and put it in a drawer.
####
A few days later, Soos had heard the downstairs bathroom sink running for several minutes, assumed someone had forgotten to turn it off, and went to turn it off himself—and had caught Bill, in the dark, half undressed, washing himself in the sink.
After Soos had backed out and profusely apologized, he'd asked, "But—how come you're washing in the sink? I can let you in the upstairs bathroom if you need—"
"Worry about your own grooming habits and leave mine alone," Bill snapped. "As long as I don't smell, what do you humans care how I do it. Soap is soap and water is water."
It took Soos several days to realize he didn't think Bill had had a shower since he got locked in the bathroom. And nobody had noticed, because Bill made sure nobody noticed, because he'd been keeping himself clean in the bathroom he couldn't get locked in.
####
Dipper would go all summer without showering if he could get away with it; Stan showered like once a week and had constant old man smell; Abuelita also showered weekly and had a more refined old lady smell; Soos didn't know when Ford showered, but he'd never caught him doing it and Ford always smelled weirdly like burned hair. Soos showered almost daily during tourist season—that Mr. Mystery suit was hot—but outside that might go three days at a time. Mabel showered near daily.
From what Soos had observed, Bill was showering like, at least twice a week. He didn't know how often Bill cleaned himself in the sink in between.
That meant he was showering more often than two-thirds of the house.
Yet he was the only one in the house living under the threat of being thrown in the tub at 3 a.m. if someone decided he hadn't bathed enough for their tastes.
The reason Bill had refused to shower during his first week of imprisonment was so he could use the condition of his body as a bargaining chip—with no physical possessions in the world, his own body was the only bargaining chip he had—to try to buy a little more dignity. In return, his captors had taken more dignity away. They permitted Bill less autonomy over how to take care of his body than the household's children had.
Dipper had never gotten forced into a bathroom he couldn't let himself out of.
####
The day after the eclipse, Ford had pulled Soos aside and said quietly, "Soos, as soon as you have some time—could you repair the door to the kids' room? Before the end of the day? The latch has been broken since the tooth fairy's attack."
"Uh, sure, I can probably do that," Soos said. "How come?" The latch had been broken for a couple weeks, and the Pines hadn't been worried about it before.
"Right now, the door can swing freely with just a push," Ford said. "I think Bill's figured out how to use that to get in. Which is worrisome, since he shouldn't be able to use any doors..."
"O-oh." Soos thought about the swinging door into the gift shop. "Yeah, uh... sounds bad. Byyy the way—how'd you figure out he knows how to use the door?"
"Dipper says Bill somehow got in and out of the room last night," Ford said. "Mabel fell asleep in the living room and Bill carried her upstairs. I really don't like the thought of Bill being able to get his hands on the kids while they're asleep and defenseless."
Ford was mad at Bill for tucking a kid into bed? That was the big red flag? "No problem! I'll fix the door right after work."
The next time Soos visited his office, he took the security tape out of his drawer, rewound it, stuck it back into the tape recorder, and let that day's security camera footage overwrite and erase the evidence of Bill's visit to the gift shop.
####
And now, today, carrying Journal 4 in both hands, Soos trudged downstairs, trying to figure out what to do with it. He had to return it to Ford, obviously—but Bill and the Stans were already in the middle of a discussion that sounded a lot more like an argument. Flinging a stolen journal into the middle of the proceedings would just make it worse. Maybe he should wait until they were finished and everyone had cooled down a little—?
While Soos was upstairs, the discussion had apparently moved into the kitchen. He hovered awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs, watching.
"What do you mean, you need kitchen access," Stan was asking, "you already have kitchen access. It's never been off-limits! Even after you peed in the sink!"
"It's not kitchen access if I need to ask someone else for permission to eat anything but snacks." 
"No one's making you ask for permission! You can take what you want!"
"Okay, fine. So what can I eat?" Bill gestures at the shelves. "Go on. List anything you can think of. Anything."
Stan grimaced, and glanced at Ford to see if he was willing to walk into the obvious trap first.
Ford looked at the nearby shelves. "Cereal."
"One point for Stanford Pines! Cereal! So am I supposed to eat dry cereal for every single meal, or—?"
"No, of course not."
"All right, then what else?"
"Brown meat," Stan said. "We've got plenty of brown meat. It's good for you!"
"You didn't give me can opener rights," Bill said.
"Huh."
"So no brown meat," Bill said. "No canned soup, no canned chili, no canned fruit, no canned vegetables—"
Ford cut in, "Some of the cans have pull tabs, you don't need a can opener for those."
"Terrific observation! As soon as you realized I could open those cans myself, you moved them all under the counter because you thought I'd use the sharp edges as weapons!"
"It's... possible to open cans without a can opener, I did it sometimes while roughing it in other dimensions—"
"Yeah, wearing off the metal rim with a rock, right? Lemme just go outside and grab a rock—oh wait." Bill crossed his arms.
Ford sighed, and turned to Stan to suggest something else.
Stan surveyed the available supplies, spotted the bread, and said, "You could make sandwiches!"
"With what filling?"
"Uh..." Stan kept looking.
Meats and cheeses, of course, were kept in the fridge. Along with jelly, condiments, most vegetables... tuna or spam weren't options, they were canned... "Hey, we leave out some meats that don't need refrigeration. Sausages and stuff."
"Right, right. The ones that don't need refrigeration because they're wrapped in plastic you need a knife to cut," Bill said. "Sometimes I bite the plastic open with my teeth and rip off chunks of sausage with my fingernails, that's always fun! Then you put the leftovers in the fridge, and I'm out of luck until we buy another sausage."
"You could put... peanut butter on your sandwiches?" Ford tried. "Peanut butter's nutritious."
Bill fixed him with a hard look. "For the past five weeks, every time I've gotten a meal without asking someone else to help feed me like a baby, I've had nothing but peanut butter and banana sandwiches, peanut butter and jerky sandwiches, peanut butter and raisin sandwiches, and peanut butter and potato chip sandwiches. And we're out of bananas, jerky, and raisins." He pointed at the tortillas. "Once I decided to get creative and made myself a cold peanut butter quesadilla! I can't even add spices, because guess where the breakable glass spice jars are kept?"
"Pasta," Ford tried. "We could keep the pasta out."
"Oh, wow, that'd be great! I just love pasta! But I can't open the microwave and I can't turn on the stove! How do I heat the water, Stanford?"
Ford frowned. "Hm."
"I can cook, you know—not that any of you bothered to ask! It might not suit your tastes, but it suits mine! I wouldn't need your help to eat if you didn't make me need help! I am sick to death—" his voice went thick and took on an uncharacteristic waver, "—of having to beg to... eat." He cleared his throat, squeezed his eyes shut, and rubbed his eyelids with one hand. "Sh-shouldn't even—need to eat." He clenched his jaw to keep it from trembling.
Stan and Ford exchanged a guilty look. Stan said, "You don't have to beg— I mean, we know the, uh... position you're in..."
Bill was silent for a moment as he tried to get a tough face back on. His voice came out as a rough whisper—too thick to get any louder without breaking. "I had to negotiate to get burnt eggs."
Ford winced.
Soos was dumbfounded.
When had Bill had to negotiate for food? He could all too easily understand how it might have happened—Bill was an annoying guy, sometimes they had to pull out dumb bargains to get him to do stuff. But bargaining for food should never be on that list. Meeting Bill's basic nutritional needs couldn't be dependent on whether he was annoying that day. If it was, he'd starve.
It sounded like he was starving. Right under Soos's roof. He hadn't even noticed.
He thought about the piles of junk food trash upstairs and the bag of chips Bill had hurled across the room.
Ford said, "We'll... discuss it."
"We'll figure something out," Stan said. "I mean it."
Bill nodded silently. Head down, without uncovering his eyes, he hurried out of the kitchen and toward the stairs.
He nearly bumped into Soos's chest without noticing him. Soos backed up a step, tucking Journal 4 under his arm. "Whoa, hey!"
Bill froze, head jerking up. "You." His voice was thick and his glare was watery and poisonous. "Don't you have anything better to do than eavesdrop?" He tried to elbow past Soos, smacking his leg with his umbrella. "Move."
Soos realized uneasily that Bill's face looked a little slimmer than it had when he'd arrived.
He stepped in Bill's way. "Can't go upstairs right now. Attic's being cleaned."
"I didn't ask you to clean!"
"I'm not cleaning for you, dawg. It's just gotta be cleaned."
"Fine! Whatever!" Bill veered around the staircase and stomped down the hall, muttering, "Can't decide when I eat, can't decide when I shower, why should I get to choose when my hovel's swept..."
Soos's leg hurt where Bill had smacked it. (Bill couldn't even control whether or not he cried; all he had control over was making someone else hurt.)
In the kitchen, Stan murmured, "Didn't even realize we don't keep anything decent out on the counters. They're so crowded..."
"Chip bags take up a lot of space." Ford sighed. "I assumed he'd get a serving with everyone else whenever Mrs. Ramirez cooks."
"He does, but she only does dinners. And he'll only eat it if he watched her cook it. I've seen him get lunch with Mabel, but I don't know what he does when she's not..." Stan spotted Soos on the stairs. He tiredly called, "Soos? You need something?"
"Uhhh..." Soos hid the journal behind his back. "Nope! I just thought I'd come downstairs! For no reason." He awkwardly walked up the stairs backwards, journal still tucked behind him. "And—and now I'm going up again." He stopped at the landing and scooted sideways up the next flight of stairs. "See ya."
He pressed the journal to his chest and returned to the attic.
####
When Soos and Abuelita moved into the shack, the first thing Soos had done was turn Ford's ground-floor study into a bedroom for Abuelita. Because she was a little old lady, and not quite as steady as she used to be, so Soos didn't want her constantly going up and down the stairs—because falling once, just ONCE, could send her to the hospital or worse. That was how serious it was! You don't mess around with that!
Bill tripped and fell on the stairs so often that they could use it to tell when he was awake. And nobody had thought to offer him a cane? Did anybody even ask if he was alright?
When Bill first arrived and tried to murder everyone, naturally, he came out of it pretty banged up and bruised. That was to be expected. It was self-defense. They'd gotten used to seeing Bill with scrapes on his arms and legs, rope burns around his ankles, and the angry purple-black bruises of chain links over his arms. But in all the weeks since then, Soos hadn't seen Bill bruise-free once. Bruises on his shins and arms, scrapes on his elbows and knees. Soos had seen him with a four-inch burn on his forearm. Bill had brushed it off.
In Bill's first few days in the shack, he'd resorted to peeing in the kitchen sink because nobody had bothered to give a guy who couldn't open doors a way to use the bathroom. And they were the reason he couldn't open doors in the first place!
He threw up in the living room in the middle of the night and went upstairs to sleep on couch cushions on the floor and nobody had talked about it.
He burned off all his hair and was so upset about it that he stole Soos's zodiac blanket and hid under it for half a week, and everyone but Mabel just ignored him.
In less than a month in the Mystery Shack, Bill had lost a tooth.
He had been dragged out of the house during a weird weather phenomenon while terrified out of his mind. Soos had seen Bill cowering on the ground in fear, Ford looming over him, grabbing him by the collar and snarling in rage. Bill had been pleading with everyone in hearing range not to make him go, and had come back in such a state of shock he could hardly walk. 
And yet, he'd protected the whole town from getting hurt in zero gravity—and he'd brought a pet for Soos.
They'd tried to execute Bill two days later.
####
Soos sat in the window seat, flipping through the remaining filled-in pages in Journal 4. The last few pages were packed with stickers. A cat that said PURRFECT! A smiling fish that said A REEL PAL! Bill had started a little collection of pizza slice stickers for some reason. A couple of holographic rainbows, a smiling scratch-and-sniff sun. (Apparently, the sun smelled like lemons and oranges. Astronomy facts!)
Soos reached the current page. Bill was using several pieces of paper—regular printer paper and notebook paper, folded in half—like a bookmark. Soos unfolded them. A list of animals ranked by fuzziness. (Soos was satisfied that he'd been placed under the "smooth and squishy" category, but wondered whether he should be bothered by the fact that he shared the category with pigs and slugs.) A drawing of Bill riding a looping rocket ship and waving a fishbowl helmet above him. A drawing of a blue house with a couple of kids and a pig in the window. Several drawings of shape people kinda like Bill: a pink heart person labeled "Me in Flatworld," a stern-looking red stop sign wearing sunglasses labeled "Bill's parole officer," Bill dancing, the pink heart protecting Bill from some villainous-looking shapes—all clearly Mabel's art.
Several notebook pages in someone else's handwriting detailing names, addresses, and contact information, with statements Soos couldn't make sense of—as if maybe someone had been asking somebody else questions and writing down their answers. He thought the questions might be about how some people had reacted to the end of Weirdmageddon. He got the impression the people being discussed had known that Weirdmageddon was coming. He got the impression they were disappointed it hadn't happened. There were several questions at the end: How will we rendes-vouz? (Whoever was writing didn't know how to spell rendezvous, but to be fair Soos wasn't 100% sure either.) What supplies do you need? What are your interim orders?
Soos stared at the notebook papers.
He flipped back through the journal again, looking at each page more closely.
Sometimes the two-tone dot-and-dash segments had a stray human word: a few characters he recognized from his Teach Yourself Japanese workbooks, sometimes words Soos thought might be Arabic but honestly he didn't have a clue. At one point he listed half a dozen human names that Soos didn't recognize. The most common character was a stretched-out letter M (Mabel?), followed by a 6 knocked on its side (Sixer?).
The dot-and-dash segments had occasional amateurish illustrations. Sometimes they were human stick figures; sometimes the stick figures' heads had symbols off of Bill's zodiac wheel. He saw Stan's fish symbol, Gideon's star symbol, and Mabel's shooting star symbol. Ford's stick figures were the only ones with hands; Bill consistently gave them six fingers. The doodles were like particularly esoteric cave drawings; they were so bad that Soos couldn't tell what most of them were supposed to illustrate.
Except for one featuring Bill (as a triangle) and Mabel and some other inscrutable figures in a really awesome car with flames on the side, its coolness limited only by the fact that it was all in gray and yellow-green crayon. When Soos had been in high school, there had always been a couple of kids who didn't know how to draw anything except expensive cars or name-brand sports shoes, but they drew them in extreme realistic detail. Apparently, Bill was that kind of artist. Nothing but stick figures and the sickest crayon car Soos had ever seen.
It didn't do anything to dispel Soos's impression of Bill as a lost alien 18-year-old.
On one page, in sloppy lines of handwriting that meandered drunkenly up and down the paper, Bill had written, "I don't get why you won't give me a second shot. I asked you to join my gang. I serenaded you in a pyramid. I got a fantastic makeover. I offered you godhood. I showed you my dimension. I didn't torture you until I had to. I even made you a skin couch! I know how much you've always wanted a leather furniture set! I've given you everything from chicken zombification magic to jelly beans, what does it take? What am I missing?"
Soos reread Bill's other messages to Ford. All that "you'll regret not siding with me" junk wasn't threats. It was the impotent rage of a socially inept teenager who didn't understand his own creepiness had driven his friends away. It was the whiny moan of some guy going "Why doesn't she like me anymore" about an ex-girlfriend who had told him five times she didn't like him anymore because he didn't listen to her. Like that guy Wendy dated last summer. So like, a jerk, but not a terrifying world-ending monster jerk, just an annoying creep jerk. A regular jerk. A human jerk.
Soos stood, gave one last look at this journal—clearly stolen, definitely a violation of Bill's "no writing materials" restriction, completely stuffed full of mysterious messages to outsiders and some kind of weird alien code that could say anything at all and might have been super dangerous—and he slid it back into the ripped seam in the attic seat cushion where he'd found it.
He finished vacuuming up the potato chips Bill had flung across the room, thinking about how offended Bill had been that Soos had given him any food except what he'd asked for, remembering what Abuelita had said about people who destroy the things around them when they feel like that's the last and only thing they still have power over.
Enough was enough.
####
(Hope y'all enjoyed! Next week we may interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming to post a TBOB-based chapter I'm inserting early into the fic—it depends on if I get it done by next Friday. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to hearing y'all's thoughts on this chapter!)
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elinerlina2 · 1 year ago
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The Leshan Giant Buddha, a 71 m tall statue built between 713-803 AD in China.
The massive stone sculpture became listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.
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