the men and boys are innocent too.
we cry "the innocent women and children" to appeal to the masses, to try and force their sympathy, but the men and boys are innocent too.
I have seen sons crying out for their mothers, their fathers, their siblings. I have seen them break down at the loss of their families. I have seen them cling to their dead and grieve.
I have seen fathers cradle their dead children, seen them kiss their faces and hold their little hands. I have seen them faint with grief when asked to identify the dead. I have seen them carry their sons and daughters. I have seen them fasting to provide what little they can for their families.
I have seen men and boys digging through the rubble with just their bare hands, I have seen them comforting strangers, playing with children, rocking them, hushing them, even if the face of such imminent danger. I have seen them cry, seen them grieve, seen them break down into each other's arms, seen them be selfless, beyond selfless, becoming something I don't have a word for.
I have seen the men who are doctors refuse to leave their patients, even when they have no medicine or supplies to give them, even when they're threatened with bombings. I have seen fathers who have lost all their children pick orphans up into their arms and proclaim them their child so they are not alone. I have seen men and boys digging pets out of the rubble.
the men are innocent too. the men and boys are being hurt and killed too. the men and boys are grieving too. the men and boys are scared too. the men and boys are fighting to save their people too. the men and boys deserve to be fought for too.
No trust me, after the first 3 hours or so it gets really good. You just have to roll a perfect 12 to level up, but if it’s not the whole game starts over, and then you gotta—
Bill didn’t want to take over the world. He just wanted to destroy dungeons dungeons and more dungeons.
Chapter 18 of Mabel has made the questionable decision to befriend human Bill (real title TBD), and the first chapter with an actual title!
After the emotional rollercoaster of the last chapter, this one's pretty lighthearted. Featuring: food poisoning, anti-intellectualist propaganda, ritual sacrifice, arson, burns, injury, cannibalism, and children almost dying. And friendship!
####
One of the things that came with immortality—mature, cosmic-scale immortality, not baby immortality like you found in vampires with a few measly centuries under their belts—was an expertise at meditation.
And it had nothing to do with being particularly wise, or serene, or enlightened (although Bill would argue he himself happened to be all those things). Even the most rambunctious, cantankerous, petty, spiteful, impatient, silly immortal in the multiverse could drop into a thoughtless trance deeper than the Mariana Trench with nothing but five seconds' notice that he had some time to kill and there was nothing interesting on TV.
Most mortals struggled with this idea, the same way fish struggled to understand how it was so easy for land mammals to hold their breath underwater. They didn't understand that it was a necessary survival skill.
Some millennia were boring. "You've had every conversation you can imagine with every person you know, you won't see a fresh planet for an eon, you're floating in the void of space, and your only company is the glitter thrown off of dead stars" boring. So boring the only way to get through them was by holding your breath until they were over. And in those times, the only way to endure the soul-crushing mind-shredding suicide-inducing boredom of those long, slow, dull millennia was knowing how to productively dissociate for the next five thousand years without so much as needing a snack break.
Bill was very old. Bill was very good at meditating.
It wasn't doing him a bit of good.
He'd lost count of how many hours he'd spent meditating since his capture: sitting in the dark, legs crossed, hands on his knees, eyes shut, trying—trying—trying to do anything. Trying to astral project out of this prison. Trying to see into the mindscape. Trying to connect to the countless windows through which he could see all over Earth.
Trying to feel the vast stores of pure energy that made up the core of his being.
He couldn't feel it.
And he was not terrified, he wasn't he wasn't he wasn't.
Surely the Axolotl hadn't taken that energy away—that would be infinitely cruel—but he'd done an amazing job of sealing it away. Bill was psychically dead when he was awake, helpless prisoner when he was dreaming. Here he'd thought the Ax was gonna help him avoid punishment.
Well, what do you do when you're in a cage and you aren't strong enough to break the bars? You pick the lock. Where could Bill find a psychic lock pick?
Someone knocked on the bathroom's doorframe. "Hey Bill?"
He snapped out of his futile meditative state. "Yeah?"
"Are you using the toilet or just lurking creepily?"
"Lurking creepily!"
Mabel pulled aside the curtain and turned on the light. "Do you wanna help me make a video on—"
"More than anything." Bill got to his feet and—ow—cracked his sore back. Meditating could keep you sane when you were in the deepest depths of sensory-deprivation boredom, but it didn't actually offer you any entertainment. Mabel, on the other hand, did.
He'd find a lock pick later. Something would come up. It always did.
####
The weaving camera only revealed a blurry patch of carpet and upholstery back before it managed to focus on its target: half a hot dog lying between the back of the sofa and the living room wall. "There it is!" Mabel said. "I knew I smelled something in here."
"Wow, look at the colors on this thing! The green splotches kinda look like tie-dye," Bill said. "Hey, nobody's had hot dogs since you locked me up, have they?" There was a moment of silence as they tried to figure out how long that hot dog had lain, cold and forgotten, behind the couch.
Then the camera jostled as Mabel tried to reach past it to the food. "I'm gonna eat it."
"I'm gonna eat it."
"Hey!"
Bill's arm stretched past Mabel's, snatched up the hot dog, and disappeared.
"Biiill! I wanted to try it!"
"No way, it's mine now! You snooze, you lose, kid!"
Mabel whipped the camera around to focus on Bill's grinning face as he inspected his prize. "Hey, this thing's growing mushrooms! It's provided its own condiments!" He held Mabel back at arm's length as he shoved the hotdog in his mouth, chewed quickly, and swallowed.
"Jerk," Mabel said. "How did it taste?"
Bill looked thoughtful. "Kinda sour and vinegary," he said. "Probably from the mold."
"Gross! Do you think it was safe to eat?"
Cheerfully, Bill said, "We'll know in a few hours, won't we?"
####
Mabel sat outside the downstairs bathroom with the camera turned toward the curtained doorway. A radio on the floor playing a Sev'ral Timez song unsuccessfully drowned out the sound of Bill heaving into the toilet.
One trembling arm reached out of the bathroom toward the radio. Bill croaked, "You're my only proof that time is still passing." He feebly patted the radio. "Tell me the universe keeps moving forward. Songs play. Moments end. I'll be free again." He made a choking noise and the arm quickly withdrew.
Mabel turned the camera toward herself. "And that concludes Mabel's Guide to Indoor Foraging! Tune in next time for... I don't know, how about animals?"
Bill replied with a deathly wheeze as he inverted his stomach.
"Animals it is!"
####
Mabel's Guide to Animals
####
The camera opened on a shot of the living room sofa, where Bill sat cross-legged and grinning next to a large easel pad. The first page of the pad was covered in drawings of cute animal faces, birds, fish, and (closer to Bill's side) skulls, lightning, and triangles.
From behind the camera, Mabel said, "Welcome to Mabel's Guide to Local Animals—"
"I'm helping," Bill said.
"—featuring Bill Cipher as my cohost!"
"That's me!"
"Yes it is. Lots of different systems have been proposed to help categorize animals—"
"These are called 'taxonomies,'" Bill said.
"—but together, we've picked out some of the best, most useful ways to categorize the animals of Gravity Falls. Such as: size!"
Bill flipped the first page of the easel pad, revealing a page covered in drawings of a couple dozen creatures ranked in size from mosquito up to lake whale.
"Color!"
Bill revealed a page with animals arranged in rainbow order. (Several of the overwhelmingly brown population had been circled in various hues of blue, purple, green, and pink, as Bill made mental notes to himself on how he'd recolor some of Gravity Fall's more visually boring creatures. Mabel had stuck star stickers beside the ideas she liked the best.)
"Friendliness!"
Another flip, and four columns capped by faces ranging in emotion from smiley to angry. The angry column was very long, but several creatures had been scratched out and hopefully moved to the sorta-smiley column.
"How good they taste!"
Bill turned another page to reveal a list of animals ranked by flavor, and said, "And a very important follow-up..." He turned another page to reveal one titled "How Many Times You Can Survive Eating It." There was a lot of overlap between the previous page's "Delicious!" column and this one's "Only Once" column.
"Super important," Mabel agreed.
Bill said, "You can also sort animals by..." Flip. "Quantity of bones!" Bill's handwriting utterly filled the page. It was unnervingly thorough. He'd listed "humans," "human babies," and "toothless humans" as three separate species.
Flip. "Planet of origin!" There were twelve different headings, only one of which was in English. One heading titled "?????" simply had a doodle of Bill underneath.
Flip, revealing a pie chart. "Percentage of known timelines in which a species has conquered the Earth!" Bill pointed at a slice that took up almost a quarter of the chart. "Humans are in the lead!"
"Yes!" The camera jiggled as Mabel pumped her fist in the air. "USA! USA!" Her chanting petered out. "Hey—what's that bit next to it—?"
"Don't worry about it." Bill smacked his hand over the pie sliver labeled "Bill" and quickly turned the page.
Mabel said, "Anyway, after several rounds of rigorous scientific debate, we've determined the most efficient and useful way to categorize the various creatures in Gravity Falls: the Fuzziness Scale!"
Bill gestured proudly at the heading on the final page, and then pointed at each category as Mabel listed them off.
"Starting with hard animals—"
Bill said, "Such as turtles and rocks."
"—then crunchy ones—"
"Roly-polies, ants, and baby turtles."
"—then smooth and firm—"
"Snakes and fish."
"—smooth and squishy—"
"Slugs, pigs, and Soos."
"—part fluffy, part bald—"
"Humans and winged snakes."
"—regular fluffy—
"Cats, dogs, and bears."
"—extra fluffy—"
"Alpacas and baby chicks."
"—and super deluxe MAXIMUM fluffy!"
"Tarantulas!"
Mabel said, "Our primary goal is to offer the scientific community a new, more accessible taxonomy that everybody can enjoy!"
Bill said, "And our secondary goal is to remind humanity of the inherent futility and cruelty of categorization! Reject boxes, embrace irregularity, and destroy the tenuous connections between concepts and synapses that you call 'knowledge'!" He pointed directly at the camera. "Return to the times of Icarus when humans could fly because no one had taught them they couldn't! Raze your universities, turn your libraries into origami, and execute your teachers as witches! Burn it all down!"
"Burn it down!" Mabel cheered. "Burn it DOWN, burn it DOWN—"
####
From atop the kitchen table, the camera recorded the stove, upon which the easel pad lay engulfed in flames. Mabel and Bill watched the mini-inferno silently.
Mabel turned to Bill. "I'm gonna get some sticks so we can roast marshmallows."
"Good idea. I'll watch the fire and not make it worse."
Mabel shot him a skeptical look.
"I promise."
"I'm holding you to that!" Mabel jogged from the room.
Bill glanced out the kitchen doorway to make sure she was gone, turned toward the stove, and slowly, ever so slowly, stuck one finger into the flames. "A—"
####
Mabel smiled at the camera. "Welcome back! My co-host has been banned from the rest of this episode so he can reflect on his behavior."
Behind her, Bill, one hand bandaged and face covered by a paper bag that read "PLAYED WITH FIRE," said, "It was worth it!" He'd persuaded Mabel to draw his triangle face over the text.
"So, now that you know several ways to categorize the creatures of Gravity Falls, you can go meet them! And hopefully befriend them!" Mabel said. "Now, meeting animals is difficult, but there's several ways you can make it easier! Such as fishing, going to a petting zoo, sneaking into your friends' homes to talk to their pets, disguising yourself as an animal—"
Bill threw in, "Using a spell to summon them."
"Using a spell to su— Doing what?" Mabel stared at him. "Do you know a spell to summon animals?"
"Oh yeah, it's easy!"
"What kinds of animals."
"Any animals in hearing range," he said.
Mabel gasped. "Can you teach me?!"
"Sure! It's easy. You've gotta be a girl, put on the fanciest dress you own, stand somewhere in the open, sing a song—"
"What song?"
"You make it up on the spot. It's one of those 'sing from your heart' deals."
"Oooh, Mabel likey."
"The most important part is keeping your mind focused as you sacrifice a..." Bill hesitated, glancing toward the camera, and said, "Well, the whole world doesn't need to know this trick, do they?" He covered the camera lens with his hand, and the screen went black.
####
Bill shot from the attic window as Mabel stood on the picnic table in a frilly lime green dress and a dozen multicolor bead necklaces and held up a cardboard sign for the camera that read, "Summoning animals with magic: ATTEMPT ONE!" She gave Bill a thumbs up. Visible from the edge of the camera's shot, Bill gave one back.
She tossed the sign aside, turned toward the trees around the shack, and started singing into a megaphone loudly enough that the camera faintly picked it up: "My name is Mabel, queen of the animals! I want all creatures to be my pals! La-la-la—um—la-la, la—be my best friends foreveeer!"
"Hey, she's not bad at this," Bill muttered. "Even got a rhyme in." He panned the camera around the scene as squirrels, rabbits, gnomes, and other small critters curiously emerged from the tree line. A couple of deer watched thoughtfully.
"To animals everywhere, small and huge—come to me and I'll give you a hug—aaAAAH!" Mabel jerked up the hem of her skirt and hopped from foot to foot. "Bugs, that's so many bugs! Ack!" She shakily resumed singing, "Um—The queen of the animals is friends with bugs too... but it'd be cool if you didn't... climb on my shoe...?" She started. "YEEK!"
The camera wiggled as Bill flinched. "Oh, uh-oh, M—Mabel, watch out—!" He banged on the window. Mabel evidently didn't hear. Under his breath, he muttered a word not designed for human tongues but that probably should have warranted washing his mouth out with soap. And then a giant hand with fingers like tree trunks reached from the woods and snatched up Mabel.
The world blurred and bounced past the camera as Bill tore across the attic, screaming, "WHATCHERNAME-MABEL'S-BROTHER YOUR SISTER'S GETTING STOLEN IT'S NOT MY FAULT—"
####
Bill aimed the camera through the tiny window in the front door to watch as Dipper and Mabel limped back to the shack—weary, dirty, clothing torn, sticks and leaves in their hair, arms slung over each other for support. Bill stepped back as they opened the door. Brightly, he said, "Hi, kids! Have fun?"
Dipper gave him a murderous look. Exhausted, Mabel looked at the camera and said, "This has been Mabel's guide to... how not to befriend the local animals." She slithered out of Dipper's grip and lay on the floor. "I'm gonna take a nap here."
Dipper looked tiredly at Mabel, then glared again at Bill, then just sighed and muttered, "Bill, take that stupid bag off." He trudge up the stairs. "This is all your fault."
"Is not!" Bill called; but the camera picked up his quiet chuckle.
The view dropped to the floor as Bill decided his amateur cameraman duties had been completed, recording his feet as he walked into the kitchen to leave the camera on a counter. He didn't turn it off.
It caught the scene through the kitchen doorway as Bill tossed his paper bag mask aside and surveyed Mabel on the floor, hands on his hips. He crouched in front of her and loudly whispered, "Hey. Shooting Star. Can you hear me?"
She didn't respond.
"Out like a light," Bill murmured. He studied her face; and then gently placed a fingertip on her forehead. The camera recorded his lips moving as he murmured, too quietly to pick up: videntis omnium, magister mentium...
He finished his chant. Nothing of any note happened. Bill frowned, stood, and sighed.
And then, after a moment of shifting his weight as though debating what to do next, he knelt back down, awkwardly picked Mabel up, and carried her upstairs. He paused cautiously on each stair step to ensure he didn't trip. A few minutes later, the camera watched him stumble back downstairs, trudge into the living room, and turn on the TV.
Half an hour later, Waddles wandered into the entryway and Bill went into the kitchen, came back with a stick of dry chorizo, ripped off chunks with his fingernails, and tossed them to Waddles while singing a song he'd made up about cannibalism. And then he returned to the living room and Waddles wandered upstairs.
Nothing else of interest happened. The camera kept on recording, forgotten, until the battery died.
####
Hmmm maybe Amophous Shape, and a bit of Pyronica?
This isn’t for your Bill playlist but your Ford and Bill playlist because I think I found another song from the asshole’s point of view :D
So I've decided to put this horrible mix of Music I've Decided Bill Cipher Would Listen To in its own dedicated playlist. And curating this playlist has already brought up some fascinating questions.
Like, "should I add the explicit version of Get Low—or, since he's a Disney character, the clean version?"
Or "should I add the version of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds by The Beatles... or the version by William Shatner?"
I'm still adding songs, so expect it to get much longer.
Random Kurogiri and Oboro headcanons
1. Kurogiri / Oboro is bad with directions. I feel like at first Kurogiri would act like he is good with directions, but quickly AFO, and the doctor would realize he is not. So Shigaraki knows he sucks with directions, but I feel like when the other lov members join he corrects one of them. Like “Twice your going the wrong way” then they get even more lost because neither of them know the correct way, and they both were going the wrong way
2. He is a gift giver, and does small things to show he knows you / was paying attention when you were talking. I feel like when someone is having a conversation with him it looks like he isn’t paying attention, but he is so maybe later he will do something to show he was paying attention. Like if you were talking about a book, or piece of media about to come out he’d get you it when it comes out, or reminds you it’s going to come out soon another day
3. Maybe he had a lot of siblings he often had to take care of because his parents could for whatever reason, so that translates into how good he is at taki no care of Tomura. Also what if when Tomura was a kid he’d make the lunches all themed like he would with his siblings, and kid Shigaraki refused to eat it any other way? Now he just keeps doing it out of habit, or something
boys and girls pretend to know me they try so hard and I get what i want my name is my credit card don’t try to hate me because i am so popular 😛😛😛
Bill bday fan art even thought I can’t draw him
I wanted to draw him in a party hat originally, but forgot, and drew him normally. Luckily I just made a edit, so now I have 2. He turned out better than I was expecting
Kuromi shirt I got at the mall a few days ago with Evanescence Fallen shirt
Old Navy clothes
5 Below stuff :p
Lastly this random purple egg cat I found while my mom was buying my brother shoes. I put a golden ribbon that says “Just for you” with a heart in it that kept my food bag closed
Hello I’m Jayden. 20. I use He/They pronouns. I like games, anime, cartoons, drawing, writing, and alt rock music
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