the devil in the details

[isocelesmonster]

Who: Bill Cipher
Broadcast: none
Action: Anywhere in the fleet
When: The night of the 22nd, and ongoing.

Although ostensibly the Golden has a new crew member, there's no new person in attendance at any meals. No new faces in the hall, nothing additional in the laundry. One of the standard crew cabins has been sealed up as tight as a tomb, the brass nameplate on the door unhelpfully scratched out with something sharp. No noises at all come from inside.

It'd take a careful eye to notice the only other change: the same sharp instrument has been used to carve little eyes of providence, no bigger than a fingernail, in strategic public places around the ship. They're shallow markings, not deep enough to interfere with any of the working parts of the craft, and no great works of art - each little scrap of graffiti is a matter of five lines at most. But they're there - and if sometimes the way the gold of the metal hull glints in the pupil is strangely canny, it's probably nothing to be worried about.

(It's not that Bill doesn't care about the flesh puppets that make up his new crew - oh, he does, they're all going to get very careful scrutiny over the coming days - but more important is finding out what his new playground looks like.)

When the fleet sleeps, their minds open and blossom like night-blooming flowers, each one illuminating a new section of the shared dreaming plane. For all of their poetry, few humans realize that the state of dreaming is as real an exploration as whatever meaningless actions they take while awake. It's irrelevant to their survival, most days, so evolution has never sought to provide that particular revelation. They're a young species. Five senses, auditory languages, limited psychic potential, and as far as they know when they dream they're just watching random electrical impulses fire in their brains. Ha!

(There's an expression about a one-eyed man's status in a land of the blind, and Bill intends to make it a reality.)

He steps sideways out of the material world into the closest dream as easily as a three-dimensional being can move along any of their limited axes. He makes himself invisible, at first, just to get his bearings.

[Bill is visiting dreams, as a way of saying hello! His permissions post for this ability is here. I am treating this ability on an opt-in basis. If you didn't give me the okay, he won't be spying on your character at all tonight ~but where's the fun in that~?]
ZOGSLFTS GSRH DVZP ZMW RWOV GSVNV

RH ML NLIV BRVOWRMT YFG Z WIVZN

DSVM NLIMRMT GZPVH BLF UILN NB GSIZOO

YV TOZW R OVG BLF DZPV ZG ZOO

Comments

[tetractys]

AW, HUMANS ARE GREAT!

[Bill flies in a little corkscrew spiral, up and up.]

WHEN YOU'VE BEEN AROUND AS LONG AS I HAVE, YOU JUST SEE A LOT OF THE SAME PATTERNS OVER AND OVER! SOMETIMES YOU STILL SURPRISE ME, THOUGH! FOR EXAMPLE!

[Bill blurs, and suddenly he's sitting in the image of the blood seal, his little stick legs dangling like he's in a tire swing.]

THIS PIECE OF WORK!

[He pats the baleful red of the mark fondly.]

NOW, YOUR BROTHER MIGHT HAVE INCANTED THIS, BUT YOU LIVED IT! YOU'VE GOTTA KNOW SOMETHING.

[sonofgold]

[And now Bill was sounding like the Homunculi- they thought humans were predictable, and Father had planned his sacrifices accordingly. But they still managed to surprise those monsters, every now and then.]

No, Brother never told me much about how he sealed my soul to the armor- and I wasn't exactly conscious to see it happening myself. You wouldn't want to be able to put your soul in something else, anyway. It's not a great existence.

[tetractys]

SO YOU COULDN'T TELL ME WHAT IT WAS LIKE?

[Bill sounds... disappointed. He floats down from sitting in the mark.]

HEY, WE CAN BOTH AGREE IT'S BETTER THAN BEING DISEMBODIED.

[sonofgold]

No. When the accident happened and my body vanished, I just... kind of regained consciousness in the armor. I'm not sure Brother even knows with 100% certainty.

[Al crossed his arms.]

My armor body could only see and hear. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't feel warmth... and sooner or later, the body rejects the soul. It doesn't belong anywhere but its own body.

[tetractys]

HEY, DON'T I KNOW IT. I'VE NEVER HAD ONE OF MY OWN AT ALL.

[sonofgold]

That body you're in right now isn't yours?

[tetractys]

WHAT, THIS?

[Bill peers down at himself.]

THIS IS JUST A FIGMENT, BUDDY! IT JUST COMES FROM MY IMAGINATION INSTEAD OF YOURS! YOU CAN ONLY SEE IT BECAUSE YOU'RE ASLEEP!

[sonofgold]

Well, that makes sense, I guess. But why did you choose to be a one-eyed triangle, if it comes from your imagination?

[tetractys]

WHY DIDN'T YOU?

[sonofgold]

Because I'm a human... and I was this armor for a while. So it makes sense to think of myself this way.

[tetractys]

HEY, YOUR LOSS!

[Bill stretches both sides of his little bow tie out until they snap back into place. He likes this form. It has just enough in common with his first one to feel like himself, but it also has limbs and a rudimentary face and all those things that humans need in order to be able to perceive him as a being rather than an inanimate object.]

THERE'S A LOT OF OLD MAGIC TIED TO THIS IMAGE! MOSTLY STUFF I MADE!

[Bill waves his hand at the floating alchemical symbols.]

IT'D BE A SHAME TO LET ALL OF THAT GO TO WASTE!

[sonofgold]

Suppose so. But I'd feel weird being anything other than human or armor, myself. It'd be too much like trying to be something I'm not.

[tetractys]

KNOW THE FEELING! EVEN IF I GET CURIOUS ABOUT EATING, SLEEPING - ALL OF THAT STUFF YOU MENTIONED YOU WERE MISSING, HEH - I'D NEVER WANT TO BE CONSTRAINED TO A HUMAN FORM, MYSELF. NOT MY STYLE!

[sonofgold]

No, it doesn't seem that way. But even so, the form you DID pick seems a little unusual. Why not be an animal?

[tetractys]

[What, an even dumber sack of meat than a human? Yeah, sounds great.]

WELL, PFT. OPPOSABLE THUMBS, FOR ONE!

[Big eyeroll.]

BESIDES, I'D LIKE TO THINK I'M A LITTLE MORE ORIGINAL THAN THAT! THIS FORM DOESN'T NEED TO BE CONSTRAINED BY ANY OF THE RULES A BODY BASED ON THE REAL WORLD WOULD HAVE! LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!

[In a whirl of color, Bill puts on a rapid-fire show of shapeshifting. He stretches and expands into an exact copy of Al, then splits into a dozen pieces and scatters as a flock of bare eyeballs with tiny bat wings on them. They fly in circles and briefly become a Sierpinski gasket made of blue fire and obsidian. It cracks like an egg and pours down a cascade of oily, psychedelic bubbles.

A few other forms follow, most of them too strange to exist outside of a dream. He snaps back to his usual flat yellow triangle at the end and takes a bow with his arms spread wide. His little black hat for some reason hasn't changed back. It's still stuck in the form of a chocolate gateau. Bill doesn't notice.]

TA DAAA!

[sonofgold]

[Now THAT- that definitely impressed him. He'd only seen such effortless shapeshifting done by Envy, however, and that didn't exactly make Bill seem more trustworthy. Then again, even Envy couldn't break their body apart like that, not that Al had seen.

It also violated the laws of alchemy, of course, but that didn't necessarily matter in a dream. And so, he gave a round of applause.]

Your hat still looks like a dessert, but overall... that was impressive! I guess I'm used to being constrained by the laws of alchemy. I couldn't just... disassemble myself and bring myself back together like that, for example. Or make myself bigger. Conservation of mass and all.

[tetractys]

[Bill glows a little brighter with the appreciation.]

THANK YOU, THANK YOU! YOU'RE A GREAT CROWD! - HUH?

[He looks up, then frowns at his uncooperative hat. He plucks it off of his head and flicks it a little. It glitches like a badly-calibrated video display but refuses to not become a dessert.]

THERE'S NO MASS HERE! IT'S A DREAM! NO LAWS, NO REALITY! EVERYTHING'S AN ILLUSION!

[Bill blinks and his single eye turns into a sharp-toothed maw. It is far more cavernous than his flat shape should physically allow for. He pops the cake inside whole and swallows.

A beat. Then his hat, back to its normal shape, pops back into existence, hovering over his top point again.]

[sonofgold]

[Al watched the whole display with amusement, though some alarm at the gaping maw.]

Yeah- I guess it's hard for me to turn that part of my brain off, though. Even in my subconscious, where barriers don't matter.

[tetractys]

[Bill's odd mouth shuts, and when it opens again the teeth and tongue are gone, the lips are eyelids, and the big cheerful eyeball is back, apparently no worse for wear.]

SURVIVAL MECHANISM, KID!

[He suddenly appears directly over top of Al's head, and reaches his little black hand down to knock on his skull lightly.]

YOUR BRAIN DOESN'T WANT YOU TO TAKE ON MORE POSSIBILITIES THAN IT CAN COMPREHEND!

[sonofgold]

Yeah, survival mechanism is a good way to put it, but... how do you know I couldn't comprehend it?

[He HAD seen the Truth, after all- it was like getting all the world's information dumped into his head at once.]

[tetractys]

YOU'RE HUMAN! WE DON'T HAVE A CURE FOR THAT YET, BUT I'M SURE SOMEONE'S WORKING ON IT!

[That's a lie, he totally knows how to cure that.]

[sonofgold]

A "cure"? Seriously? I don't know... trying to be something you're not doesn't ever seem to end well.

[tetractys]

LIKE A KID TRYING TO BE A SUIT OF ARMOR? HAH. I'M JUST TEASING, RELAX!

[sonofgold]

Well, I'm glad you clarified that. Sometimes one can't tell, you know.

[tetractys]

YEAH, I'M A PRETTY DRY WIT!

[No you're not, Bill.]

HMM. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH THIS ALCHEMY, KID? NOTHING YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BE COMFORTABLE WITH, OF COURSE!