#the two-dimensional dimension

[kismetmoon]

thinking about concepts with exwhylians’ third dimensional forms and / or flatland lines’ intermediate forms when converting from 2D to 3D bodies,,

[ID: five traditional black ink doodles of concepts for Exwhylian lines and shapes from Gravity Falls, all on beige paper backgrounds.

In the first image, an Exwhylian line is shown. It has a thin body shaped like an upside-down tuning fork, with thin pointed feet and a long torso. It also has a long thing tail with a star on the end. It has a star-shaped head with one blank eye. It is stood upright and slighting smiling.

In the first image, it is a line similar to the one in the first image, except is feet are more rounded and it has a raindrop-shaped symbol on the end of its tail. It is standing and tailoring its head to the left. Its feet are held close together and its tail is curled out to the left side.

In the third image, it is a line wearing a large triangular cloak. It has a circular head with a larger blank eye, a small point on top of its head, triangular eyelashes at either side of its head, thicker pointed feet and a plain tail. It is standing facing the viewer with no expression and its tail can be seen peeking out from under its cloak on the right.

In the fourth image, it is a line with a similar body shape to the one shown in the first image, but it has small hooks on its feet. It has the same tail as the line in the second image. Its head is a circle with another circle around it, a sharp point on top and a blank eye. It is posed as though it is hobbling along, titling its head over to the left.

In the fifth image, it shows a line and an isosceles triangle sitting together. The line has a larger circular head with a small eye and a similar body to the above described line. The isosceles has a black body, a long tail with a flame-shaped end, a circular blank eye and stubby legs.

End ID].

[mostlyvoid-partiallyflowers]

The most recent episode of Interview with a Vampire let's us see Lestat's side of the story and see how it compares to Louis' accounting of their relationship. As a result, it reaffirms just how unreliable of a narrator Louis is, but it also further illuminates elements of his character that the director and writers have been playing with since the beginning of the show.

There's this part in the episode where Lestat turns to Louis and apologizes and it's framed with Lestat turned to Louis on one side and Claudia on his other side. They're the angel and devil on Louis' shoulders, but who is the angel and who is the devil? And as my friend said, Armand and Daniel are placed into that same dynamic with Louis later on. We are being asked to decide who to trust, who's telling the truth, who's the good guy, but the fact of unreliability robs us of that decision.

This whole story is about Louis, he's the protagonist, though not the narrator, and he is constantly being pulled in two directions, no matter when or where he is in his story. He's a mind split in two, divided by nature and circumstance. He's vampire and human, owner and owned, father and child, angel and devil. He's both telling the story and being told the story. His history is a story he tells himself, and as we've seen, sometimes that story is not whole.

Louis is the angel who saved Claudia from the fire but he's also the devil who sentenced her to an life of endless torment, the adult trapped in the body of a child. He's the angel who rescued Lestat from his grief and also the devil who abandoned him, who couldn't love him, could only kill and leave him.

He's pulled in two directions, internally and externally at all times and so it's no wonder that he feels the need to confess, first to the priest, then Daniel, and then Daniel again.

He's desperate to be heard, a Black man with power in Jim Crow America who's controlled by his position as someone with a seat at the table but one who will never be considered equal. He doesn't belong to the Black community or the white community, he can't. He acts as a go-between, a bridge, one who is pushed and pulled until he can't take it anymore. He's a fledgling child to an undead father, he's a young queer man discovering his sexual identity with an infinitely experienced partner. He's confessing because he wants to be absolved, that human part of him that was raised Catholic, that child who believed, he wants to be saved. He wants to be seen.

Louis wants to attain a forever life that is morally pure, but he can't. He's been soiled by sin, by "the devil," as he calls Lestat, and he can never be clean again. Deep down, I think he knows this, but he can't stop trying to repent. He tries to self-flagellate by staying with Lestat and then tries to repent by killing him, but can't actually follow through. He follows Claudia to Europe to try and assuage his guilt. He sets himself on fire, attempts to burn himself at the stake, to purify his body, rid himself of the dark gift.

Louis is a man endlessly trying to account for the pain he has caused and he ultimately fails, over and over again, because he can't get rid of what he is. A monster. He's an endlessly hungry monster. He's hungry for love, for respect, for power, for forgiveness, for death. He's a hole that can never be filled. He can never truly acquire any of those things because he will always be punishing himself for wanting and needing them in the first place. He will never truly believe he deserves them and as a result, can't accept them if they are ever offered. He can never be absolved for he has damned himself by accepting the dark gift and thus has tainted himself past the point of saving.

[lesbianalanwake]

Beyond the shadow you settle for, there is a miracle illuminated.

[radarsteddybear]

2D art would be things like drawing, painting, mosaics, stained glass, photography, diamond art, chalk drawings, lettering, etc.

3D art would be things like sculptures, mobiles, dolls, amigurumi, other three-dimensional crochet/knit items, puppets, etc.

Reblog for sample size!

[heretodefyfate]

gosh, seeing people happily discussing about their OCs make me want to show my OCs too but then i realized i still have not make any "official" art of them and their background details are still being worked on

[smbhax]

From "I Entered the Dimension of Doom!" in Tales of Suspense #23, November 1961. Stan Lee plot, Larry Lieber script, Jack Kirby pencils, Dick Ayers inks, Stan Goldberg colors, Ray Holloway (?) letters. Photoshop color reduction.

[magpiesbones]

worst thing about being disabled is that now I am fully and completely aware of exactly how much I am worth to everyone I know. And it is not a lot!!

[victorian-leviathan]

I'm not pondering my orb I'm pondering the fact I can't watch 3D movies or even imagine what they're like because I have no concept of depth perception or what the third dimension looks like

Oh People of Tumblr please explain to my little 2D self what a 3D movie is like

[strangelyregular]

how have analog horror creators not gotten their hands on old geometry videos yet? am I the only one who sees the potential here???

[hershelwidget]

I told you I was gonna do it

Very rough sketches of this silly silly family. I don't think about it enough so this weekend I WILL be thinking about it and my Braincells will just have to DEAL WITH IT

Bonus image

Dime is like a dog toy in the sense you can squish him and he'll squeak and all dogs within a 20 kilometre radius will hear him and charge straight to his location and maul him affectionately

[lolmanthecat]

Unexpected math joke detected. This was a very pleasant surprise.

[kismetmoon]

More exshylians design!!

Very pretty,very beautiful😭

aw, i’m glad that you like them !

i’m definitely going to make more of these guys in the future, they’re so fun to draw. but here’s my first run down on their adapted biology and basic body plan for exploring a new dimension in the meantime :)

[ID: a traditional black ink pen drawing of an Exwhylian line, an original conceptual character from Gravity Falls.

It has a round head with a white eye without a pupil and a small sharp point on top. Its body is black and thin, with no arms and two spindly legs that end in small fat hooks. It also has a thin curved tail.

It is stood facing the viewer directly with its tail behind it. There is text at either side of it. At the top left the text says “no pupil yet. eliminates potential seizures”. At the bottom left it says “adapted long hooked cilia (akin to spider legs) to allow all terrain and anti-gravitational movement”. On the right is says “still retains basic line body plan on top half” and “single extended cilium now acts as a pseudopod and aids in balance”.

End ID].

also i left just the body plan without any text under the cut :

[ID: the same image as above, but with no text. End ID].

[homunculus-argument]

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

[milkymars]

Everything we know about Bill Cipher's past so far

His home was called Euclydia and it was entirely two dimensional. ("Flat minds in a flat world with flat dreams.")

Bill was unique among his people because he had a mutation that allowed him to see the third dimension. This can mean that either a) Euclideans don't have eyes and Bill is the only one who had one or b) if they did have eyes, he literally had a third eye.

Bill's parents were most likely named Scalene and Euclid. Entering either of their names into the computer gives the prompt LIFE FORM NOT FOUND. Bill is stated to only draw red and blue triangles in art therapy, so those were probably their appearances.

From the code JUSTFITIN, you get this colour-coded poem:

Rock a bye billy Please don’t you cry It’s not your fault You have that strange eye Stay safe with mommy You’ll never fall And we’ll always love you Sharp angles and all

Bill says that everyone in Euclydia loved him. However, it's more likely that he was feared because of his mutation and talk of a third dimension. Bill has said numerous times that love and fear are the same, and if you enter WELLWELLWELLBEING into the computer:

Bill's parents took him to a doctor to help suppress his vision of the third dimension. This has been discovered through the codes on the silly straw page:

Fussy eater, baby Billy / Wouldn't drink unless it's silly The doctor says three sips a day / Will make the visions go away Eye doctor of a different kind / Who wants to make his patient blind Twisted out of shape after the kill / The ghosts of his family are haunting him still

Bill is responsible for the Euclidean massacre. Reversed audio on the website says that "the sky is on fire", and when Bill talks about liberating his dimension, his eye shows a fiery landscape too. Though he claims to have liberated them both in Weirdmageddon and the transmission with Time Baby, he is regretful and misses home. If you type in EVENHISLIESARELIES, you get a transcript of one of his sessions in the theraprism.

And from the axolotl's poem in Curse of the Time Pirate's Treasure:

When he tells Ford about his home dimension, he says that it was destroyed by a monster. And when Ford says that he could seek out the monster and get revenge on it, Bill replies: "Sixer, it would eat you alive." Bill also says that if he tries to talk about the day Euclydia was destroyed, there's a loud buzzing in his ears and he blacks out for 30 seconds. Still, he tells others that he freed everyone and that they are grateful for it. Until he gets drunk and starts calling out for his mom, asking her where she went...

[ckret2]

At some point, the Axolotl must've witnessed the aftermath of the Euclidean Massacre.

As you can see, Bill is very happy and definitely not at all traumatized and doing great and look at all these followers he's found who are definitely alive.

Here, have a fic about the Axolotl, the birth of the Nightmare Realm, and Bill trying so so hard to convince himself that he's the hero.

####

To the mortals he swam past, with their different calendars and their different ways of perceiving time, the great Axolotl's migration through space and between dimensions was an event of great note: his passing marked eclipses, tsunamis, festivals, omens, meteor showers; his migration was studied by astronomers and his position was marked in astrological birth charts.

To the Axolotl, he was on his daily commute home. He could take an interdimensional portal, but swimming was better for the environment and he could use the exercise.

He passed by the same two dimensional wall every day. It was covered with many little worlds, and so many of them populated with little mortals, and he'd never paid any particular attention to the wall—until yesterday. A bold little triangle had shouted at him as he passed. It had been an amusing conversation—first contact was always fun—but he'd been busy and couldn't talk more than a moment, just long enough for the Axolotl to be charmed that a lower-dimensional creature had yelled at him and for the triangle to be shocked that a higher-dimensional creature had answered. The triangle had told him that, to his two-dimensional people, these shadows on the wall, the Axolotl was an eclipse: they marked the time by the shadow he cast on their flat world during his commute.

He hadn't even learned the triangle's real name. The triangle had refused to tell him, instead introducing himself as the "Magister Mentium." Teacher of minds? Maybe it was a job title.

Between the nightmare of a case the Axolotl was currently handling and the fact that he'd had to stay late working, he'd nearly forgotten about yesterday's fascinating little meeting until he was leaving on his nightly commute. He didn't know how long the tiny shapes' life cycles were; he hoped the little triangle was still alive today. If not, maybe he'd left behind descendants.

But when he came up to the wall, it was gone.

The vacuum reeked of burning hydrogen.

The Axolotl stopped, puzzled. The wall wasn't empty, wasn't damaged, wasn't going through heat death—the entire thing was missing. No rubble. Surely it hadn't been demolished for some new construction? It had been in good condition. It was a fairly new plane of reality, likely under fifty billion years old. And it had admittedly been a few eons since the Axolotl had studied dimension use & zoning law, but last he checked it was unlawful to demolish a populated dimension without transplanting the growths first—which took much longer than a day. So what could possibly have done this? And what he saw behind the wall...

Something was very wrong. He started moving again, faster, looking for someone who could tell him what was happening. He kept the ragged rip in reality left by the missing wall in his peripheral vision. Stars and stardust slowly fell in, sucked through the tear. The wall must have come down by accident.

Nobody would have knowingly left behind such a large hole to Dimension Zero.

Assuming he was looking at Dimension Zero; he wasn't sure he was. Beneath all other dimensions was supposed to be a void, an empty in-between space. The zeroth "dimension" was simply reality's center point, the not-dimension between all dimensions; it wasn't a place. But with the two dimensional wall gone, he didn't see reality bending in toward a point like he should. He saw a roiling, nauseating mass of blinding colors, thrashing around each other like a frightened pile of injured worms.

Far in the distance, a full reality away, he saw a faint line of blue light.

It was several minutes before he began to run into other people. He passed a crew of cosmic firefighters and their ships, spread out over a span of space wider than an asteroid belt. The fact that they didn't appear to currently be fighting any fires was more disconcerting than a full blaze would have been. An eerie tension hung thick over the scene like invisible smoke. As the Axolotl swam by a couple of firefighters, he overheard them saying, "... orders of magnitude higher than anything we've been trained to handle. An entire reality catching fire is one thing, but the concept of realitycatching fire...?"

"And the speed it's moving..."

"Excuse me," the Axolotl said, trying to keep the edge of fear out of his voice. (Why was he so afraid? He was barely acquaintances with one resident on the wall.) "Can you tell me what happened to the wall? It was just here yesterday."

Rather than explain, one of them pointed in the direction he'd been going. "Sorry, we don't know any more than you do. Look for the storm. You can't miss it."

The other asked, "Are you one of the guys with the apoc cops?"

His fear leaped higher. The "apoc cops" were members of the Apocalyptic Threat Task Force. "No. Sorry, I have to go." He swam onward toward the blue line of light.

The stench of burning hydrogen grew stronger. He smelled something else acrid underneath.

####

To his slight relief, the "storm" wasn't the disaster that had brought down this wall. Rather, it was a person: a lightly raining storm cloud with a gray rain-soaked fedora perched on top, hovering in space.

It was talking to a hapless-looking furred serpent twice the Axolotl's length with four mismatched limbs: she clutched a can of spray paint in her claws, and was so nervous he could hear the marble in the can rattling. A disembodied sunbeam pierced the eye of the storm cloud to shine in the serpent's face as she spoke, and a tornado swirled beneath its cloud, carrying all its personal effects—including a tumbling badge from the Apocalyptic Threat Task Force, its logo of a mushroom cloud struck out with the "no" symbol still visible through a thin glaze of sleet. A chill ran through the Axolotl at the sight of that badge.

The cloud wasn't the only one with the apoc cops on the scene. There were several other investigators nearby, taking readings where the wall used to be. The Axolotl didn't like just how many were buzzing around. They seemed far too busy for far too empty a space, and they steered far too clear of the thrashing, multicolored miasma covering the emptiness that should contain Dimension Zero.

There were several stars in the area that the investigators had to work around. Between the crowds and the missing wall, it took the Axolotl a moment to realize where they were: this was the spot he'd met the triangle yesterday. He was sure of it. He recognized the star right next to the missing wall, the one the triangle had told him he eclipsed during his commute. He'd passed it millions of times.

Why had the apoc cops set up here?

The star was slowly falling toward the roiling miasma where Dimension Zero should have been. He nudged it back into place as he passed.

As the Axolotl approached the duo, the serpent was saying, "I told you, I don't know how it caught fire! I was just passing by..." The storm cloud's sunbeam dropped from her face to point skeptically at her spray paint. She hid it behind her back and quickly went on, "I was just passing by, minding my own business and not doing anything illegal, and suddenly the whole wall went up in flames!"

The cloud said, "The whole wall? Simultaneously?"

"The whole thing! I mean... it kind of rolled across the dimension, but—it took less than ten seconds to cover everything I saw!"

"Which direction did the fire travel?"

While the serpent tried to remember, the Axolotl swam up to the storm cloud. "Excuse me, the firefighters said you're in charge of the investigation?"

"Currently," the cloud said, in a tone that suggested it very much wished it wasn't. It looked over the Axolotl, then turned back to the serpent—she flinched when its sunbeam hit her face again—and it asked gruffly, "Is this your lawyer?"

The serpent looked hopeful. "Are you my lawyer?"

"No, I'm not," the Axolotl said, perturbed. Potential defendants aside, nobody ever insinuated he was somebody's lawyer and meant it in a nice way—and he was on the receiving end of such accusations more and more often lately. His reputation was beginning to precede him. "We've never met. I'm trying to find out what happened to this wall. I know a—friend in there. You said something about a fire?"

An active ATTF investigation was in no way the Axolotl's business. But people had a tendency to cooperate with professionals, whether or not their profession had anything to do with the situation at hand. The ATTF agent turned to the Axolotl and said, "You had a friend in there. The wall that used to be here, Dimension 2 Delta, has been completely incinerated."

The Axolotl stared at the cloud, trying to process that. But the whole wall had been there yesterday. Billions of galaxies, each with trillions of stars, each capable of supporting trillions of species—never mind lives. "You can't mean completely. Surely there are some survivors?"

"Not a single one," the cloud said. "Not even gods and ghosts made it out."

"How?"

"That's what we're trying to figure out," the storm said. "Right now, the only witness we've found was the person who called in the emergency." A branch of lightning pointed toward the serpent. "And she doesn't know a damn thing." The serpent nodded in enthusiastic agreement.

"But that's... How does an entire dimension disappear with only one witness?"

"Very quickly," the storm said. "The apocalypse Origin & Cause investigation can't make heads or tails of the scene—" a gust of wind swept demonstratively toward the other apoc cops taking readings near the missing wall, "but far as we can tell, the damn thing spontaneously combusted—somewhere near here."

The Axolotl stared helplessly between the serpent and the storm. "Dimensions aren't supposed to spontaneously combust," he said, very reasonably and very unnecessarily.

"Tell 2Δ that," the storm said. "Only time a dimension moves that fast is during a Big Bang explosion or a Big Crunch implosion—and 2Δ wasn't undergoing a Big Crunch. No natural one, anyway. In all my eons with ATTF, I've never seen anything like it."

The Axolotl had been around enough eons himself to know that, after a certain point, novelty became very, very scary—because things working like they should shouldn't do anything you'd never seen before. He worriedly searched the roiling chaos exposed by Dimension 2 Delta's collapse for any sign of what had happened.

The chaos simply thrashed. It moved like it was in pain.

"Did that..." the Axolotl gestured vaguely toward the chaotic foam, "have anything to do with the wall's combustion?"

The serpent shrugged. "I didn't see it until after the fire went by."

The storm grunted uncertainly, a low, thunderous grumble. "Heck if we know. It's connected, no doubt about that—but we haven't even figured out what it is yet. All we know is, it shouldn't have been behind the wall."

The Axolotl stared into the roiling colors, looking for anything visible through the thrashing kaleidoscopic colors.  "If you don't know what it is yet—then, how do you know there aren't survivors in there?" The Axolotl couldn't stop seeing that poor, frightened, awed triangle he'd met yesterday. All the people who'd once been in Dimension 2 Delta mattered—of course they did, those billions of trillions of trillions of billions of lives; he wanted any of them to survive—but that triangle was the one he knew, the one he saw in his mind's eye now. The whole dimension was contained inside that triangle. He had to hope. "I'm going to check."

"What—? You're crazy! Don't you know falling into Dimension Zero will destroy you?!"

"I know falling into Dimension Zero destroys you; I don't know what falling into that thing will do." He squared up with the chaos and steeled his nerves. "Besides, I can regenerate. I'm an axolotl."

"But—!"

"Sorry, there isn't time for more questions." He swam into the maelstrom.

####

Dimension Zero was supposed to be a singularity. Like a black hole, but even smaller—a point so dense it broke physics. If you fell in you'd be crushed into that point by the weight of all realities, a point so small it had no volume.

But whatever was behind where the wall had been, it was certainly no point.

As soon as he crossed the threshold, he was barraged with a psychic hurricane. Reality frothed and foamed like a flood spilling from a burst dam. Distant baby stars were born and popped like bubbles, and old stars fell in and were gloriously reignited. His every sense was bombarded with infinite sensations—every color and image in this dimension all at once; every song that had ever been played playing in the same instant and the instant extended indefinitely; strobe lights that were both flashing on and flashing off at the exact same moment. Beneath the music was a constant hiss like the background radiation of reality, the static echo of a universe's birth, but much too loud; he could swear it sounded like gibbering, babbling voices, their desperate messages unintelligible. He smelled every scent, including the lingering smell of burning hydrogen that he'd noticed outside; but above and beyond all that, he smelled the stench of burning life.

He knew now, this was Dimension Zero: it was as if all of spacetime had been crushed into a singularity, but then the singularity was bloated up to the size of an entire universe. Dimension Zero was never supposed to be this bloated.

And the most terrifying part: there were people in this bizarre ruin of a dimension. Millions of them. (Just as horrifying: there were only millions of them.) He was sure he must have been hallucinating—here, dreams and reality swirled around each other like a bottle of water and oil shaken until they were forced to mix—but the longer he looked, the more sure he was that the people were a part of reality. They were, perhaps, the most real thing in the entire dimension.

They were all dancing.

They were all dead.

"Heeey, look who's here!" Suddenly, in front of the Axolotl, there he was—as if he'd always been in front of the Axolotl, as if he were always everywhere at once. The ghost of the little triangle he'd seen yesterday, neon incorporeal. "Happy New Year, everybody!" He laughed. "Get it? That—that's a joke, time doesn't pass in the dream realm, so..." The triangle waved off the Axolotl. "Oh, you wouldn't get it. Screw you. Anyway, introductions! I should do that." 

The triangle was extremely inebriated. He was blinking blearily, floating crookedly, moving in odd uncoordinated jerks, his pupil expanding and contracting with no correlation to the light it was taking in. He seemed to flicker across multiple timelines that had been collapsed into one, like a drunk that couldn't walk a straight line: appearing here then there, then multiple places at once, then everywhere; and then became everywhere, and then collapsed again to a single triangular point. The Axolotl had the worrying impression that the triangle hadn't been sober for a long time.

"So! These are my people!" He gestured with a flourish to the dancing corpse puppets. The strobe lights—which, the Axolotl only now realized, didn't actually have a source, but were rather disembodied rays of light emanating from nothing—turned to highlight them from every angle. It was like a cloud of glitter, all these tiny, flat, jewel-tone flecks, emerald and citrine and ruby and sapphire, triangles and squares and pentagons and hexagons. Each with two spindly arms; some with legs and some without; a single dull eye or a slack mouth; some of them cracked and chipped like broken glass, some of them crushed and melted together into multi-corpsed horrors, some of them fraying and peeling apart around the edges like fabric; so much silvery blood dripping and floating around them. Such beautiful, colorful dancing gore. "All my followers and friends! They love me! They couldn't see you last time you flew by, but thanks to me, they sure can now! Say hellooo!"

It took the Axolotl a moment to realize that the triangle's eye was boring into him and the instruction was for him. "Hello," he said weakly. 

"Very nice." The triangle turned without turning to the millions lost inside Dimension Zero, reality shifting around him to put all of the dimension's prisoners in front of his eye. The Axolotl reeled from existential vertigo. "Now check this out!" The triangle gestured at the Axolotl for his people's benefit. "Behold! Your Magister Mentium presents to you: the eclipse! In the horrifying pink flesh! Quite a sight, huh?"

Many of the dancers turned toward him. Some aimed their dull, dead eyes in his direction. He shivered under their chill stares.

Heedless of the Axolotl's horror, the triangle elbowed him. "I didn't peg you for a party crasher, pinky!" (The triangle's touch was so cold.) "But hey, the more the merrier. Welcome to the dream realm, have a drink!"

A 2D cup manifested in front of the Axolotl that, based on its smooth, featureless yellow surface and its glow, appeared to be made from the triangle's own ghostly flesh. It seemed to be filled with watered-down raw existence. He didn't touch the cup. "What's the dream realm?" He couldn't stop staring at the dancers macabre.

"This is!" The triangle stretched out his arms—and stretched them, and stretched them, seeming to embrace all of reality at once. The Axolotl got the terrifying impression he was within the embrace too. "The realm of dreams! My realm! Paradise of color and light! Realm of spirits and muses!"

"It looks more like a nightmare."

"Do I come to your house and insult your wallpaper? Buzz off."

When the triangle dismissively floated away from him, the Axolotl again got the dizzying sensation that he was the one moving. The truth finally dawned on him:

The triangle, somehow, was literally the center of this universe. Point 0,0,0 on the cartesian plane of reality. Whenever he moved, Dimension Zero moved with him. When he backed away from the Axolotl, Dimension Zero backed with him, rushing past while the Axolotl held still.

And not once during their conversation did any of the millions of dead shapes stop dancing. 

"What are you doing?" the Axolotl asked, voice hushed.

"Partying," the triangle said. "We're having a party."

The Axolotl couldn't tear his eyes from the choreomaniacs' forced revelry. "How long have you been partying?"

"Uhh... pfff... I dunno, hard to keep track. A few months?" The triangle turned toward his tortured people. "Hey! How long have we been partying?"

One of the bodies mixed in amongst the dead, boogying deliriously, faintly cried back, "Time has no meaning and eternity has collapsed into a single unending moment of bliss!" (The Axolotl shuddered at the grotesque ventriloquism act.)

"Oh, yeah, right, forgot I decreed that. Thanks, pal!"

"You're welcome, oh wise and glorious Magister Mentium!"

The triangle turned back to the Axolotl. "An eternity."

The Axolotl tore his horrified eyes away from the dancers. "What about all the others?"

The triangle paused. "I don't know who you're talking about." The background radiation hissed in agitation.

The Axolotl very much suspected he did. "Your other people."

"There aren't any others," the triangle said defensively.

"There were! All of the other shapes around your world! All of the lives on other worlds! Where are all those people?!" He hoped that they might have gotten evacuated to a neighboring wall, or that they'd been concealed somehow, or even that they'd been collapsed together into the shapes he saw before him and could still be separated—

"It's fine," the triangle said stiffly. "Nothing important was lost."

"Nothing important?" the Axolotl repeated, shocked. "This was an entire dimension—!"

"A wall," the triangle said.

"A wall with lives on it—"

"Shadows."

"And do shadows not deserve to live?!"

The triangle flinched at the question as his good cheer crumbled. He didn't answer, but he gave the Axolotl a heavy, hard, emotionless look—a wretched, empty look—and the Axolotl knew he knew they did deserve to live.

"They don't matter," the triangle lied. "Nothing important was lost. Only the true believers and the worthy remain."

"Your dimension had billions of trillions of stars alone. All the people surrounding them—"

"I didn't see any stars!" He said it so vehemently—as though, if he didn't see them, they must not have existed. As though he refused to acknowledge their existence. "I told everyone about the third dimension, I told them we were going, they had their chance to join me!" His voice was shaking. As he spoke he grew larger, until he was as large as the Axolotl—or perhaps the universe had contracted around him. "And if they refused to join the liberation, then they are what we liberated ourselves from!" Distant bolts of lights flashed through Dimension Zero, responding to the triangle's outrage; the nearest stars blazed brighter for him. His dead people screamed in terror. They didn't stop dancing.

"You... tried to leave your dimension before the fire reached them?" Had he tried too late?

The triangle flinched again; his appearance flickered, like a TV that for a moment had picked up a pirate station broadcasting on the same frequency. The whispers hissing beneath the music grew more excited again, but the Axolotl still couldn't make out what they said beneath the party music.

The triangle said, "The... the fire came second."

"What came first?"

But he didn't answer. "Yeah, I brought them here." He spread his arms again, gesturing at the other shapes. "They followed me, and I freed them from our flat, restrictive dimension. They're all fine. And they all love me for saving them."

"Saving them?" he echoed. He wanted to laugh in disbelief, but it felt too much like laughing at a stranger's funeral. Laughing at an open mass grave. "But—everyone here is already dead. Even you." The triangle should be in an afterlife. Whatever afterlives his dimension once had, they were gone now. The Axolotl would have to help the triangle find one in another dimension—the paperwork alone would take time he didn't have to spare; he'd probably have to split off a timeline or two to squeeze it in...

The triangle snapped, "Whoa, hey, hey! Watch who you call dead, buddy! Look at me!" He stretched out his limbs, glowing dazzlingly bright. Brighter than a star. Even the Axolotl had to turn away from the blinding light. "I transcended my body! I'm made of pure energy! This is the most alive I've ever been!" A being of pure energy that had lost its physical form was the very definition of a ghost; but the Axolotl didn't have a chance to argue before the triangle went on, "And does anyone here look dead? Everyone's dancing! We're all having a great time, aren't we?" A few corpses groaned and gurgled in response.

If the triangle wanted to be a wandering ghost, fine. That was his prerogative. But he had no right to force the remains of his followers to deny their death with him. "Look—look at your people," the Axolotl commanded. "You're making them dance! You must know what state they're in!"

Without actually moving, the triangle had somehow become the space in between the Axolotl and his choreomaniacs, forming a sharp shield in between them. "You don't know what you're talking about. They're fine. They're immortal!"

The Axolotl gestured furiously past the triangle. "LOOK AT THEM!"

The triangle's gaze flickered toward them for a split second. The Axolotl saw guilt flashing in his eye; but then he squeezed his eye shut. "No, you look at them. Maybe it took me a little bit to get it right, but they're all great now."

To get it right? The Axolotl peered around the triangle at the shapes again, and only now saw that he was right.

Not all of them were dead.

Some were trapped in ecstatic trances; some were numb with terror; some were already long dead, and yet the corpses weren't being puppeted like he'd assumed—they danced under their own power. There were amalgams of a dozen, a hundred bodies fused together into shambling, gyrating horrors—but there was still life in their horrified eyes and their limbs twitched independently. The ones that were bleeding just kept bleeding and bleeding and bleeding, unending, blood never clotting nor running dry. The corpses and the comatose and the ailing and the bleeding dancing with the living that craved death.

The triangle was responsible for their condition?

He glided between the corpses, sliding his arms around a few of them. They kept dancing.  "I didn't quite get to a few of them in time, so I took the empty space where their souls used to be and filled them with an insatiable hunger to party," he said. "And look, they're good as new! Probably better than they were before, even!"

"These bodies should be laid to rest," the Axolotl said heatedly, "and the rest of you should be dead."

The triangle went still.

The Axolotl remembered, a second too late, that that was a perfectly normal thing to say to deceased clients and other gods in his line of work, but the kind of thing that scared the living daylights out of mortals.

"So that's a threat." His arms slid off the shapes; his fingers were stained with silvery blood that shimmered like static noise.

"No! No. But the condition that you're all in..."

"You'd better check yourself, frills," the triangle snapped. "You crash our party, in our eternal paradise, and start threatening us! Who the hell do you think you are, telling us we should be dead?!"

The Axolotl paused uneasily. "A fully licensed psychopomp...?"

"Well you'd better keep your psycho, pompous paws off my people!" The triangle blazed bright red, literally incandescent with rage. Some of his "people" slowly stopped dancing and turned their hollow eyes toward the Axolotl.

And the Axolotl couldn't say why, but he was suddenly sure he was in very grave danger.

He backed up from the triangle, moving in the direction that the edge of Dimension Zero should have been, although he was no longer sure whether it was still behind him. "I... think I should leave."

"I think you'd better."

He turned and fled. He couldn't explain his panic, but he felt in his bones like something was chasing him. He had to spend longer than he wanted searching for the edge of this bizarre reality—the triangle had turned and twisted and moved the borders so many times that he'd completely lost his bearings—spied the nearest exit, and darted for it between two unfinished planes of reality.

He thought he felt flames at his back.

The triangle's voice followed him out: "Next time, poop on somebody else's party!"

He tumbled through the membrane between the overbloated Dimension Zero and the higher dimensions with the relief of a suffocating fish escaping its net to plummet back into the water. He had to take a moment to reorient himself to his surroundings—time passing so that each moment took its turn and ended when it was over, space that felt like space rather than all distances collapsed in on themselves—and looked back at Dimension Zero.

The longer he stared into the kaleidoscopic miasma, the more sure he was that, no matter where he looked, right at the center of his field of view, he could always see a shining yellow fleck of triangular glitter.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I spoke out of emotion. I am glad that you—" well, "survived" wasn't the right word, "—still exist. And it was heroic of you to save as many people as you did. I shouldn't have said they shouldn't be alive; just..."

He felt like he could still see the shapes dancing in the corners of his eyes.

"... Just not alive like that."

####

Who was the triangle?

At their first meeting yesterday, it had been clear to the Axolotl that the triangle could see and perceive things off his wall while the rest of his people could not; he'd identified himself as "Magister Mentium" rather than by name; and he'd been surrounded by shapes, all turned toward him, listening: so perhaps he was a leader of some kind? He must have seen whatever destroyed their dimension coming and been able to use his position to evacuate a few people. The true believers and the worthy, he'd said—maybe his... congregation? Maybe he was a religious leader? At any rate, it was a miracle he'd saved as many people as he had with what must have been very short notice.

But... their forced dance... the bodies fused together... the living-who-should-be-dead bleeding and bleeding and bleeding without end...

The Axolotl didn't want to believe the triangle had any ill will. He reminded himself that he didn't know anything about his people or their culture. These shapes had been through something unimaginably traumatic. They'd watched an entire reality die; many of them were stuck in the process of dying in a place where they couldn't complete it. Any mortal would be insane with grief. Perhaps their magister was just leading them in some sort of cathartic dancing mania; perhaps this was how the shapes processed their grief. He hoped that was what it was. He hadn't gotten a chance to speak to the others—he didn't know how many could speak—but he had seen, for just a moment, how survivor's guilt ate at the triangle.

The storm cloud with the Apocalyptic Threat Task Force had said that every single living being from Dimension 2 Delta had been killed. Even the gods and the ghosts. So how had the triangle and his people survived?

And what were they doing here, in the singular heart of all reality?

And what had happened to their world?

####

(Hello, thanks for reading!! If you were lured in by the colorful art I laid out as bait and this is your first time here, welcome!! This is part 1 of a 5-or-6 part fic about the Axolotl in the immediate aftermath of the Euclidean Massacre. I'll be posting one chapter a week, Fridays 5pm CST, so stick around if you wanna read more and learn the exciting answers to exciting questions like "Bill where in the good goddamn did you find a bunch of half-dead shapes??"

It's ALSO chapter 61 of an ongoing post-canon post-TBOB very-reluctantly-human Bill fic. So if you wanna read more of me writing Bill, check it out here. If you're not sold on the idea of a human Bill fic, I've also got a one-shot about normal triangle Bill escaping the Theraprism if you wanna read that.

If this is NOT your first time here and you already knew all of the above: hey y'all remember when we had to skip over chapter 61 because it would've been posted like four days after TBOB came out and it needed MAJOR revisions? Well, here it is!! And also it's currently like six times longer than it was originally. We're gonna be hanging out with the Ax for like a month and a half, buckle up. 

Let me know what y'all think so far!!)

[neonross]

DREAMCAPTOR AU, FIDDLEFORD REF and lore rambles eheh

Grunke stan and fiddleford in this au run the mystery shack together, stan hosting the oddities and fiddleford running the ''mystical'' part of the attractions-

THERE IS A CLEAR DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE TWO ATTRACTIONS☝️💥💥💥/hj/hj XDD

now, to the nit and gritty of some of their lore, the twins are still visiting their ''great uncle stanford'' with the surprise of another oldie who the twins

mistankenly assume [mabel] they we're married, and the two kind of just wen along with it, and their summer happens-

relatively similar. however, fiddleford himself wasn't much of a fun of this set up, as you ya'll know he has ALL of his sanity and memory intact so he knows all he danger that lurks in gravity falls, but there's also another reason why he'd prefer to keep stans family out

the two have been hunkering down on gravity falls after fords ''leaving'' their dimension, and have been doing all they can to hide their dimensional signature from him, to avoid the possibility of him returning,

they've done all they could, even faking their own deaths so their families won't try to get in their way, stanley still faking his deah here and now fiddleford doing the same, no one knows anythn abt this except them