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perpetuallylate1890 · 21 days ago

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Shrimp Colors

Stanford Pines is curious about colors outside the visible spectrum. Eye-related shenanigans ensue.

Alternatively: fellas, is it gay to make out with your homie's eyeballs?

Seated across from his muse, Stanford was finding it harder and harder to concentrate on their conversation. Bill was reclined with his arms crossed behind his upper angle, extolling the virtues of psychedelic moss. He’d made mention of colors Ford had never heard of: “extraturquoise,” “brown 2,” and the rather intriguingly named “insaniteal.”

Ford peered at Bill’s eye. It appeared analogous to a cat or reptile eye, with its slit pupil and faint red lines, but Bill’s vision was different than that of any life form on earth. He could see in total darkness, and Ford suspected he could perceive more spectrums of color than even insects and birds. Such an adaptation would revolutionize the field of visual science.

It took him a moment to realize that Bill had stopped talking. His muse was looking at him, eye curved in a sly half moon. “See something you like, Sixer?”

Ford’s mind blanked. “Uh.“

“I’m just messing with you, kid! Lighten up!” Bill snapped his fingers to summon a teapot. “But it’s pretty clear you got something on your mind, so spill the tea!” He poured them both a cup. Ford was grateful to have something to do with his hands.

“My muse, I was curious about the structure of your eye. If you don’t mind me asking,” he added.

“What, this old thing?” Bill dug his fingers into his eyeball and yanked it out of the socket. Blue nerves stretched to a hair’s width, and electricity sparked in the empty orbit. He let go and it snapped back into place with a wet squelch. “It’s only my best feature!”

Ford catalogued everything he’d just seen. His fingers itched for a pen to hold. “You’ve mentioned colors outside the visible spectrum—”

“Your visible spectrum!”

“Yes. Well, do muses possess a similar ocular structure to tetrachromats? Or is it something entirely novel?”

“Yes and no!” Bill said. “I have the equivalent of cones and rods, but I can change their shape anytime I want. Your crummy little peepers are missing out on a whole lotta extradimensional radiation!”

Ford reeled from the revelation. “Incredible.” He stood up and started to pace.

Bill sipped tea with his eye-mouth. “Did I ever tell you your universe is a hologram?”

“I proved that on my first day in college,” Ford scoffed, waving his hand. “But light from other dimensions, passing through this one, I never even considered the possibility—“

A holographic chalkboard appeared in front of him, and he began scrawling equations. After a moment he paused to look thoughtfully at Bill. “There must be a way to perceive it. Perhaps biomechanical eyes…”

He drew a rudimentary diagram. He felt, rather than saw, Bill’s presence hovering over his shoulder.

“That’d work!” Bill said. “Hey, since you’re not gonna need these puppies anymore, can I keep ‘em? They’d look nice on my wall!”

He snapped his fingers, and Ford suddenly found himself in a jar, looking at his eyeless body. How was he processing this without a brain? Bill gave the jar a little shake. Ford’s vision bounced in all directions. He felt his body stumble, and blindly grasped for the back of the armchair.

“As delightful as that sounds, I’d be hard-pressed to find a surgeon willing to perform the procedure,” he admitted. It was strange to watch himself talk. “And I’m no surgeon myself.”

“Fine, I’ll put the eye-stealing on hold.” Bill sounded genuinely put out. With a snap he returned Ford’s eyes to his skull.

Ford pressed his hands to his eyelids to ensure everything was in place. An idea came to him then. “You said you change the structure of your eye at will,” he started. “Is there a way to change mine?”

“Yup! Never done it on a primate, though.” Bill rubbed the bricks above his bow tie. “There’s only, like, a seven percent chance of permanent blindness. That’s basically zero!”

Though Ford disagreed with his math, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. “What do I do?”

“Just sit back,” Bill said. “Your old pal Bill’s gonna take care of you, don’t you worry.” He placed a hand on Ford’s chest and pushed him down into the armchair. Hands wound up his arms and shoulders, holding him still. Ford desperately hoped he wasn’t blushing.

Bill plucked off his glasses, fingers lengthening into claws. Oh God, he was actually going to stick his fingers in Ford’s eyes. This was actually happening. A hand in his hair gave him a light scratch before gripping tightly.

“Just hold reeeaally still,” Bill said. “Don’t wanna puncture the cornea—WHOOPS!” He lunged for Stanford’s left eye, and Ford let out an undignified scream. His muse burst into shrill laughter.

“Look at your little face!” Bill’s eye creased in a smile. “Aw, you’re not mad about that, are you?” His hands cupped Ford’s cheeks, thumbs brushing the skin beneath his eyes. Ford instantly forgot how to be angry. He caught his breath, willed his pounding heart to slow.

“Never do that again,” he gasped.

Bill saluted. “Scout’s honor! Now, keep those peepers open for me.”

Despite his misgivings, Stanford obeyed. Bill moved in close, his eyelashes brushing against sweaty skin. He was still holding Ford’s face. He drifted closer, until all Ford could see was his muse.

Bill blinked. His eye morphed into a sharp-toothed grin, and it didn’t occur to Ford what was going to happen until he felt lips press up around his left eye. Bill was warm, and buzzed with static, and his eye was looking at him from inside the mouth. It winked at him with a semi-transparent membrane, and then Bill’s mouth was on his right eye, repeating the procedure. Stanford barely had time to memorize the sensation before Bill pulled away.

“How was that?” he asked, and Ford couldn’t tell if he sounded smug or breathless.

Eyes stinging, Ford fumbled for his glasses. He opened his mouth to say something intelligent, no doubt, and stopped short at the sight of his muse. Bill was radiant. He pulsed with energy, with colors Ford couldn’t name, and had he always looked this way? Had Ford simply not noticed? His lashes fluttered through glowing, spinning particles, and his eye was brighter than the sun, crinkled with amusement.

Ford’s mouth was hanging open. “Bill, I—“

And then he woke up.

His vision was blurred with tears, likely a side effect of the transformation. The room had taken on a subtle, swirling iridescence, akin to the surface of a soap bubble, but Ford remained in bed. He stared at the ceiling for a long while and committed the dream to memory.

#billford #stanford pines #bill cipher #gravity falls #writing #ao3 fanfic #the book of bill #thisisnotawebsitedotcom #I NEED THEM INCINERATED

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perpetuallylate1890 · 1 month ago

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Chapter 15 of Bill's a human prisoner and everybody's grumpy about it, featuring: NIGHTMARES NIGHTMARES NIGHTMARES NIGHTM

Remember these? We're getting 'em both in one chapter. Plus: FORD! Also: a little bit of human gore, a lot of bizarre alien gore.

This is a shorter chapter, but it's the first one with a direct glimpse into Bill's backstory and home dimension. I hope you enjoy! And are deeply horrified!

####

"You have to stop spouting this nonsense." A golden line slithered around him, weaving back and forth, her furious eye focused on him as she paced. "Nobody comes to your services for deranged muttering about points of light in darkness. They don't want to hear about things that are above-but-not-north of us! What does that mean, above-but-not-north?"

"It means what it says, Mom." Above him—above, but not north, in an endless void outside the plane of the world—countless stars twinkled in an unending dark. "That's where the third dimension is. And that's what it looks like! I don't know how else to explain it to someone who hasn't seen it!"

"Then why explain it at all? They don't want to hear it! It's a surprise you aren't already losing congregants. I know you can tell you're losing their interest."

He could tell. Sullenly, he said, "Maybe we just—just need smarter congregants. If they weren't too stupid to understand—"

"People are stupid, sweetie. That's why they follow you. You don't want the smart ones anyway, or they'd be smart enough to see through all the lies you make up about the third dimension—"

"I'm not making it up!"

"Every week you talk about impossible places that can't exist! Either you're lying or insane—which is it?"

How could he answer that? He looked up into space, as if the distant stars only he saw could help him.

"Oh, don't do that, I hate when your eye goes white like that. It might impress your worshipers but it doesn't work on your mother, young triangle." She paced around him faster, coiling tighter, surrounding him on all sides in gold, her eye peering straight into his. "I don't care whether you're a liar or a lunatic—you're still my golden child, and everyone else will see that too as long as you tell them what we say. Nobody wants to hear that the third dimension is a dark, empty void! Tell them it's full of color and life! Tell them it's filled with the spirits of departed shapes, or messengers, divine guides, muses—"

"But it isn't! I don't care what they want it to be, it's not true! I'm trying to make them understand!" He had to make them understand, he needed somebody to understand. He thought he'd go insane if he was the only one who could see how empty and awful space was.

"I've listened to your gibberish about points of light and up-not-north for months and I don't understand it, so how can anyone else—"

"You're not trying to understand!" Space and all its vast emptiness was oh, so close, so achingly close. Pressing against everyone's bodies, breathing over their organs, lighting up those tight-coiled fibers beneath everyone's skin, shining on the bloody bones and thin muscles. "Either you're not listening or you're stupid!" How couldn't anyone else see space?

"How dare you—!"

How could they be close enough to touch it and still deny what it was?

Why was he the only freak who could bend up into it?

Her sharp tail cracked like a whip behind his base. "I'll teach you to talk back to me like that!"

His mind was feverish with anger, pulsing and roiling behind his eye—and for a moment, he wasn't afraid of anything.

She could bend and flex and coil, she was the most flexible line he'd ever seen. The doctors thought he might have inherited his ability to bend up-not-north from her, some genetic predisposition to flexibility. If he could bend UP, so could she. He'd make her. He'd force her. He'd show her.

He jammed his corner into her side. She shrieked, uncoiling from around him to scrunch around her wound. "Watch your— What are you—"

"You'll see," he said, shoving her against the wall, shoving her into a corner. "You'll see if it's the last thing you do!" It was like cramming a long rope into a short box; each time he shoved, she bent and curved and bent again.

"Stop—stop, it HURTS—"

He could see it in his mind's eye: if he kept pushing and pushing eventually there'd be no more room in two dimensional space for her to fill, and then she'd be forced to bend UP, up into the third dimension, all that open free space. Then she'dsee the dark, she'd see the far points of light—

"STOP!" She howled in pain. He kept pushing. She was out of room.

She didn't bend up.

He shoved—and she splintered. Bone snapping, cartilage tearing, he could see inside her thin body as things broke and ruptured.

He didn't know what to do.

And for several long, long seconds—he couldn't remember what was happening. The world seemed to bend wrong, rippling up-but-not-north and down-but-not-south, and his head swam and his vision blurred, and he couldn't remember.

Her skin fractured and peeled off, strand after strand. He’d seen grotesque injuries and rotting bodies before—he’d been in hospitals and seen through the bandages, been in graveyards and seen into the coffins, unable not to see though the doors and walls and tombs. He’d seen the way the skin came off, the way it split into hairy filaments as it loosened from the body, bristly around injuries or sloughed off whole from the long dead. But he'd never seen dead skin curl like his mother's, loosely zig-zagging back and forth and wrapping into spirals like the centers of flowers. It filled the spaces between his fingertips, wrapped up his arms. He could shut his eye but he still saw it through his eyelid, still felt it tickling at the corners of his mouth.

Irrationally, wildly, hysterically, watching his mother die, he wondered—when he died, when he was a corpse, when he rotted—when his body split open in half from his burst eye, as the labyrinth of his guts bloated and unwound and inverted themselves to spill in sick threads from his mouth, and his skin peeled free, layer by hairy layer, from his eyelid out—would his rotting golden skin curl like his mother's had?

He knew it would. He knew it would. He knew it would.

####

He woke to moonlight streaming through curls upon curls of golden skin dangling in his eye, choking him on rot.

He squeezed his eyes shut, batted the hair aside, and forced himself to breathe until the nausea subsided.

He hated how humans dreamt.

He decided he didn't want any more sleep tonight.

He dragged himself upright, shambled downstairs, and tried to ignore the coils of his internal organs spilling out of his head and dangling around his face.

He needed a drink.

####

Ford woke up standing over a bed and a body.

He couldn't identify the shape or size of the body under the sheets, due to how badly it was contorted and the way the dark pools of blood in the bedsheets distorted the shadows. All he could see was the head: a flash of a pale cheek turned away, and the unmistakeable Pines hair curls. The hair was matted with blood.

Ford's hands were coated in hot blood and cold blue flames. There was a nauseating metallic taste in his mouth and something thick and warm dripping down his chin.

He heard a quiet chuckle. He whipped around to face it—

And saw himself reflected in a triangular window, a gray shade. He was smiling so widely he could see moonlight glinting off his molars. His slitted eyes glowed a sickly yellow.

Ford woke up staring at the ceiling. He licked his lips; reassuringly dry. He held up his hands; clean.

He sighed.

Ford could roll over and go back to sleep. He'd gotten used to dreams like this decades ago; these days he hardly even had them. But he was already awake and irritated. He might as well pick up where he'd left his research at dinner time—do something that felt productive. He got up, fished a crumpled paper that said "Downstairs" out of his bedside stand and set it next to Stan's glasses, and crept out of the guest room to head for the vending machine.

Bill was in the kitchen.

Ford stopped in the next room, staring through the doorway. Bill was sitting in the dark, only his silhouette visible in the light through the window. He was hunched over the kitchen table, supported on his elbows, unmoving. Ford couldn't see Bill's reflection in the window. Not even his eyes.

Ford wondered what he dreamed about. Perhaps the thrill of possessing people.

He was half tempted to confront Bill—demand to know what he was up to—but, Ford told himself, there was nothing to confront Bill for. They'd given him permission to use the kitchen freely. Bill wasn't up to anything. It was well within his rights to sit silently at the table in the dark.

Ford just didn't like it.

He crept into the living room. Bill never noticed him.

####

Dipper divided the nightmares he'd been having since last summer into two categories: the Bill nightmares; and the Bipper nightmares—which were, in a way, also Bill nightmares.

The Bill nightmares were just his regular nightmares, except that Bill was also in them. For Dipper, regular nightmares were a mishmash of fears, insecurities, chaos, and random weirdness. It was natural that Bill, the most terrifying entity Dipper had ever met, occasionally guest starred in his dreams. The problem was that, since Bill actually could invade dreams and always brought chaos and random weirdness in his wake, it was that much harder for Dipper to realize he was dreaming rather than actually facing Bill—and, once he woke up, harder for him to reassure himself it really was only a dream.

(Mabel told him she had similar problems, and it wasn't even limited to nightmares. Sometimes, no matter how sweet or unthreatening her dream was—and sometimes because it was so sweet—their erratic scene-changing logic-breaking wish-making nature gave her the creeping sense that she was trapped back in Mabeland. Not often, she said. But occasionally, when Dipper couldn't sleep either, he could hear her wake herself repeating "—I wanna go back to reality—I want to go back—go back to the real world," and then meow herself back to sleep.)

On the other hand, the Bipper nightmares were like no dreams he'd ever had before.

They might start out as normal nightmares—dreaming of a near death experience, or a monster charging at him, or some humiliation too deep to endure further sleeping through—until he jolted awake. Or he'd think he'd jolted awake—in truth, he'd just woken up into another dream, so realistic he thought he was awake until he realized he was hovering over his bed, and the world looked hazy and false, and his body was still beneath the covers. Just like when Bill had ripped him free of his body.

The first time he'd had the Bipper nightmare, Dipper thought Bill had taken over him again, and that at any moment his body would open its eyes and laugh at him. When that didn't happen, he thought he'd died. He'd flown to Mabel's room, to his parents', to Waddles, to the neighbors' houses, trying desperately to get someone's attention—and when nothing worked, he returned to his still body in despair and waited there, sure that in a few hours his parents would come to get him for school and find him dead...

But then he'd woken up. For real, this time. And then he woke the rest of the house with his screaming.

He learned to cope with these nightmares, both the Bill ones and the Bipper ones. He talked about them with Mabel during the day or went to her for reassurance at night. Sometimes he called Ford, if he and Stan were in a time zone where they'd still be awake. (Ford said he'd had nightmares for years about Bill invading his dreams—and almost none of them had been real. He said that his visits from Bill were usually less chaotic than a normal dream. Bill liked his weirdness but he liked being the center of attention more; he liked to stage his dreams like a movie director, keeping a firm grip on the setting and the narrative flow, snapping from location to location and moment to moment with an artistry that natural dreams didn't have. The muddled mundanity of your average nightmare was beneath Bill.)

And Dipper learned to wait out his Bipper nightmares. Sometimes he wandered the hallways, but he found that engaging with the dream tended to prolong it; instead, if he stayed by his body and didn't do anything, eventually he'd drift back into deep sleep and wake back up. He started keeping a radio on at night—he could hear it in his sleep—and listening to the weird 3 a.m. broadcasts kept him entertained enough until he woke.

####

But since returning to Gravity Falls, Dipper had found a new way to deal with his nightmares:

Yelling at Bill about them.

Tonight, he was having his guilt-dream about his dad asking why he'd given up kickboxing; until the dream was interrupted by Bill emerging from the refrigerator to announce that Weirdmageddon was opening a second location in Piedmont and then throw a rabid skunk at Dipper's face. Dipper had woken up too angry to think straight, stomped to Bill's empty window seat, and then stomped downstairs.

He found Bill sitting in the kitchen in the dark, washing down a bag of cookies with a pack of hard cider and staring out at the night. Dipper stopped in the doorway. "You!"

Bill turned to give Dipper a bleary-eyed look. "Me?"

"Stop messing with my dreams and stay out of my head!"

"Beg pardon?" Bill's eyelids were desynchronized as he slowly blinked. "I'm just..." He gestured vaguely around the kitchen with a mostly-empty cider can. "I am just—sitting here."

"You've been in my nightmares all year," Dipper said hotly, even as he was waking up enough to realize that Bill, down here in the kitchen, probably wasn't influencing his dreams. "So just—just..." This was stupid. "Cut it out, man."

"You've been dreaming about me? How sweet." Bill gave Dipper a mocking grin, propped his chin in his hand, propped his elbow on the table, actually missed putting his elbow on the table by at least six inches, and fell to the ground with a yelp.

Dipper stared tiredly at Bill cackling on the floor, and turned around and trudged upstairs.

Dipper found that, whenever he had nightmares about golden geometric apocalypses, it was reassuring to get an instant reminder that Bill had been nowhere near his head. Even if he thought Bill was laying on the "helpless human" act a little thick.

####

(I'm still recovering from Health Junk, so if you've got any comments, I'd deeply appreciate them now even more than I usually do. Thank you, y'all readers and commenters and friends are really keeping me going during this time of feeling like a pile of half-sentient gunk. 🙏✨)

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perpetuallylate1890 · 1 month ago

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I heard the song "Frontier Psychiatrist" by The Avalanches and it immediately reminded me of your Bill- the artists make songs out of clips from old movies, and I feel like this one is a perfect mix of chaos, tragedy, Bill's childhood, and the Theraprism.

On that note, is there a specific genre of Earth music or an artist that Bill would listen to? We know there was music in Euclydia, but is there any flavor of human music he likes? (Or would at least tolerate?)

Boy are you ever in luck because I have a whole post about what (mostly human) musical genres I think Bill would canonically like. And an addendum. And what he'd think about dreamcore. And a few specific bands I was asked about. And the ONLY Lemon Demon song I'd ever add to his (and Mabel's) playlist. And I made a playlist of what I think he'd listen to, although it's really more of a small sampling of the kind of nonsense he'd play. And what songs he'd like playing on the piano, which is a different question from what he listens to. And a further addendum to the initial posts about his tastes, plus a mention of how, in fic, Bill's tastes would change due to being stuck with the humans. And a little summary of most of the above.

(And as long as this post is turning into a masterpost for my musical taste headcanons, I'm going to add my post about the Mystery Shack gang's musical preferences and Ford and Mabel's similar tastes and songs Ford would like but doesn't know about and a smattering of stray thoughts including about Gideon's tastes and Gideon's tastes part 2 and Gideon's tastes part 3 goddammit. And the next time I try to find all my GF music headcanon posts, I'll run into this post first and save myself time searching for the rest.)

tl;dr:

Based on the info we have from canon:

we know he thinks non-musical (to us) sounds make for some damn good music, but understands the difference between music he likes and objectively "good music" by human standards

he's into mid-20th-century music—but one of the first human songs he specifically highlighted as good was garage rock and he really hit his stride infiltrating the human music industry with motown, so I tilt him closer to the 60s than the 40s

he's into fun party music, which drowns out the screams in his soul

he doesn't say he hates country music, but he really gives off those vibes

He's heard listening to a fair amount of EDM despite claiming synth music is "painful," so I put the dividing line for "good electronica" and "painful electronica" around 1990 and have him steer away from new wave in particular

Addictive earworms are his enemy, and I like to imagine him battling them like how medieval scholars drew knights battling giant snails

He's fairly fluent in popular music in general and can casually drop song references into conversations with humans.

Outside the info we have from canon, I imagine he's pretty easy to get into new music as long as it's "fun"—he doesn't like broody downer sad songs—but I think getting him into 3 or 4 mad-at-the-world-and-your-parents early '00s alt-rock bands would fix him.

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perpetuallylate1890 · 2 months ago

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do u guys ever think about how ford fell in love with bill cipher and not Bill Cipher ™️

like everyone else bill has ever dated has known him as the dream demon and king of nightmares and dimensional authority's most wanted. he can never be given a chance to be more than his reputation, not without putting his reputation in jeopardy and he's not gonna do that

but ford is ignorant to who bill is. yes he believes bill is a powerful being, but he doesn't understand how powerful or what that truly means. he lacks the context to see bill as anything more than as he presents himself

so bill can be whoever he wants. and i think it's so heartbreaking that, given that, bill chose to be himself. set aside the crown set aside the party hat and just sat with this naive wide eyed trusting human and showed him the last atom of his dimension. bore his heart and soul to this child who doesn't realize he's got god wrapped around his finger

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perpetuallylate1890 · 3 months ago

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My first storyboard! This made me cackle while putting it together

#gravity falls #bill cipher #gravity falls fanart

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perpetuallylate1890 · 4 months ago

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I headcanon that as a kid, Ford was so enraged by the US customary system he trained himself to think in metric

Stan: "Are we theeere yet?"

Ford: "Just three more kilometers."

Stan: "Kill-o-whats?"

#gravity falls #stanford pines #stanley pines

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perpetuallylate1890 · 8 months ago

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Omg loving this!

I'm only asking this because you said you want to draw some Billford and now I'm thinking about it. It seems to me that Bill would bring Ford extremely upsetting presents (like a cat) and Ford (like a cat owner) would be disgusting/horrified, but charmed despite himself. Am I correct? Also, would the same thing happen in reverse

Yeah that's basically where they're at in canon lol. Buuut my goal's to write them struggling & clawing past their toxic history to reach a place where they work.

And when they work, I think usually Bill gives Ford gifts that should horrify him, but that he only finds charming, because these two freaks are on the same wavelength. And same goes in reverse.

(there's another five pages under the cut)

In billford as "toxic exes who get under each other's skin because they know each other so well," having them constantly bickering and getting on each other's nerves works just fine. But when they're actually a couple, I like to see them like each other. Enjoy each other's company and do things for each other that they appreciate.

Even if it's batshit by outsiders' standards, it needs to work for them. Bill knows when Ford would love to be cursed and Ford sees weird gross body parts and knows "Bill would want this."

#billford #ford pines #bill cipher #gravity falls

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perpetuallylate1890 · 10 months ago

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Why would Bill want souls?

So I was wondering why Bill would want to buy as many souls as possible. In TINAWDC he states that he's become a "soul billionaire," just in case he needs to "CASH IN one DAY." He wants to make the reader think souls don't actually exist, so they'll be more likely to sell him theirs. Then he tries to rope people into a pyramid scheme (LOL). But none of this answers WHY he's collecting so many. He's gotta have some reason, or else he wouldn't be so persistent about it!

Then I remembered this passage from TBOB: "Help! This is not Bill Cipher. My name is Grebley Hemberdreck of Zimtrex 5. I'm one of thousands of beings Bill has devoured over trillions of years whose souls are now trapped inside him."

He eats souls. He's got thousands of souls trapped inside him, and they're stuck listening to "Good Vibrations" by Marky Mark for all eternity. Truly, a fate worse than death.

So what does he gain from consuming souls? Does it grant him power, or is it simply a means of obtaining nutrition? This creates more questions than answers...

#the book of bill #tbob spoilers #gravity falls #bill cipher #thisisnotawebsitedotcom

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perpetuallylate1890 · 10 months ago

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Happy Weirdmaversary!!! Let's celebrate the time a millionaire got his face rearranged! I'm off to buy nog and do something upsettingly weird in public!

#bill cipher #gravity falls #gravity falls fanart #fanart #the book of bill #colored pencil

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perpetuallylate1890 · 10 months ago

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10 years of Bill Cipher Fanzine!

I was honored to be part of the zine last winter. Everyone is amazingly talented and kind, and working on this project felt surreal. If you haven't already, give the magazine an order. The art and stories are incredible, and proceeds will help kids in Ukraine affected by the war. The shop link is below:

Without further ado, here is a snippet of my piece, Fashion Disaster!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He was splendid. He was glorious. He was magnificent.

Flames alight in every hand, Bill Cipher descended towards the mortals cowering in a wrecked spacecraft. Their leader, a scrawny kid with acne, dropped his gun in slack-jawed terror. Bill’s entrance was, as usual, on point. He made for an imposing figure in his cape and vertebrae crown, bricks glowing with nightmarish power. The lightning of the Nightmare Realm framed his silhouette in flashing gold. He prepared to launch into his speech, flames roaring higher, and–

His cape snagged on a metal rod. He tugged at it. It didn’t budge. Irritated, he yanked harder. It gave with a rip and the momentum sent him flying into a nearby wall.

#bill cipher #gravity falls #writing #fanzine #fandom zine #zine preview #zine promo #charity zine #zine #gravity falls zine

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perpetuallylate1890 · 11 months ago

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He's just a silly guy!!

#bill cipher #gravity falls #gravity falls fanart #fanart #colored pencil #traditional art

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perpetuallylate1890 · 11 months ago

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The mantra of "just fit in" shows up a few times in TBOB and thisisnotawebsite.com. We first saw it here in code, repeating all the way off the book page:

Then, if you enter JUSTFITIN as a password in the website, it pulls up a video of people playing Perfection, a game in which shapes are fit into their corresponding slots.

The motif reappears when SAY BAAAA is entered in the website. This pulls up a pitch for Ciphertology, the final line of which is: "It's time to fit in."

Funny how he's still repeating the mantra that was drilled into him from an early age. Only now, he uses it to prey on vulnerable people for his cult. Anyways I'm sure this is a coincidence and has no bearing on Bill's character at all

#bill cipher #gravity falls #the book of bill #thisisnotawebsitedotcom #ciphertology #tbob spoilers

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perpetuallylate1890 · 11 months ago

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Check out this completely normal non-suspicious bird!

Unfathomable time had passed. Alone at the edge of the universe (not that it mattered, he didn't need anyone), he had almost (not really) resigned himself to an eternity of questionnaires and insidious, inescapable muzak. But when he felt the shiver pulsing through his entire body, Bill Cipher gleefully accepted the summons.

The fluorescent lights of the Theraprism began to swirl away into nothingness. He let out a shrill laugh, bidding farewell to the padded rooms, those useless group therapy sessions, that horrid "TRY-angle" poster. As his form broke apart, the healing orbs began to blare red–too late, he was already spiraling upwards and away, straight to the chump who had just shaken his statue's hand.

He wasn't surprised it had worked. Sure, it had taken a little longer than he'd hoped, and that whole book ploy had been a flop, but he was Bill Cipher, and things always went his way. Eventually. That stupid salamander had been wrong: Bill was off scot-free, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop him.

Weirdmageddon 2.0, baby! His form entered the familiar atmosphere of the Disappointment Ball, and he rubbed his hands together, anticipating the rush of a new body's sensation. He plunged downwards, thinking up ways to kickstart the party. Maybe he could dig up that old wizard's portal, or salvage what was left of Sixer's handiwork. The world was his oyster, and now that he was free, it was only a matter of time before the cards fell back into place.

Down into the clearing where his statue rested. Without looking down, shrieking with laughter, he tore his way into the vessel of the unlucky bastard who had shaken his hand. And opened his eyes, which were now on the sides of his head.

The world was suddenly huge. Bill blinked rapidly. Three eyelids, and he could see into both the ultraviolet and extraturquoise spectrums. Not human, then. He peered down at his feet, which were scaly and delicate, with talons a needle's width. Bill was in a bird of some kind.

Alright, not what he'd been hoping for. It'd be impossible to operate the portal machinery at half an ounce, but he'd find a workaround. There were plenty of little girls who craved their own Inkwell princess moment. All he had to do was find one, sing a cutesy song, and switch vessels. Easy.

He fluttered up to a nearby branch and surveyed his statue. It was moss-covered and crumbling, a ghost of Bill's former glory. It didn't matter. He'd get it back soon, and this time, there'd be no one to hold him back. No Oracle, no Henchmaniacs, no stupid unreliable human pawns. Just him and his glorious party, forever.

He laughed. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed. And even through his useless bird syrinx, it sounded just like he always had.

#bill cipher #gravity falls #gravity falls fanart #the book of bill #writing #tbob spoilers #tbob #the book of bill spoilers #I don't think this will happen #but there's been an awful lot of bird imagery recently #(It's a purple finch by the way)

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