-You’re probably wondering- Part 2

Bill snarled and turned away from it, not expecting an answer to anything he'd just said. He twisted his head on his neck almost painfully, working his way back to what Miz had said earlier. "--'Worried', 'misses you', or wants you back for WHO KNOWS WHAT other-reason, maybe. I'D put MY gold on door number three," Bill told his sister, as his coloring slowly dulled to a darker red-brown, then began to shift over to a nasty sharp yellow instead, rather than blue. "Or did it say why it wanted her back as part of that 'message'," Bill said to the AXOLOTL, not quite gritting his metaphorical back-teeth as he side-eyed the lizard. (It was hard to lie this far 'UP' where they were, but he wouldn't put it past any of them anymore, if THIS was the sort of thinking these stupid lizards did at this level. WITH EACH OTHER.) Bill glared at the AXOLOTL right in its eyes, once again.

The AXOLOTL observed the two of them for a while, silent, but there was something in his eyes, an expression that Miz couldn't quite understand. (And there was a feeling inside her, some sort of… loneliness… a sense of… being alone; if they weren't here, then…) Finally, he sighed again, closing his eyes and looking about as tired as anything. -Please leave- He turned away from them and floated off, clouds of energy flowing around his form.

(Not the same, better, worse, not that it knew. Don't risk it. Just be content with what you had.)

"Counterpoint: pLEaSe fix the damn place so everything and everyone doesn't have to lose siblings forever anymore!" Bill shrieked out at its retreating back, not even caring at this point that he'd 'won' a third staring contest with it. Because it was-- just-- it-- that--!!! "--You fix it right now!!" Bill yelled out at it, fed up with its… its… stupid-lizardness! "OR I'LL DO IT FOR YOU!!!" Bill thundered out at the last, far more of a threat than a promise.

Miz frowned at the AXOLOTL's back, unsure how to process these feelings she was getting (couldn't hear thoughts, not from Ax or that damn baby, but emotions were different, they were there and here and now and this Ax was so…) "Why can't you just make a world where people can be happy?" she asked this Ax, upset that he was just going to leave things as they are. All he seemed to care about was holding Reality together 'as long as he could'. Not making Reality a happy place, not making Reality a better place. Just keeping it around longer. Was that really all he cared about? "Why are you just… giving up? You're the goddamn AXOLOTL! Can't you FIX things? Can't you…"

-Fix and fix, but it'll only break again. Always and every time, no matter what I do. So what's the point? Starting over is more efficient for making less mistakes the next go around...-, was the faint words that carried to the two triangle-demons as the human-shaped salamander vanished from their sight. Miz's metaphysical heart ached at this. It felt as if he'd… given up, like he couldn't even imagine a world where things could be 'better' because he'd already seen it fail over and over and had resigned himself to just keeping this shitty existence going as long as he could, to delay the inevitable end where he'd be forced to start over or-- or...

Miz shuddered. There was a feeling here, like she was wavering on the cusp of understanding and yet...

"Then you aren't fixing it PROPERLY!" Bill yelled out at it, seething. Because how DARE it try to pretend that starting over was more EFFICIENT!! How could it POSSIBLY be easier to START OVER than just FIX the things that were there! How stupid did this thing think that he was?!? "--SO GET SOME HELP AT IT IF YOU CAN'T DO IT YOURSELF, YOU IDIOT!!" Bill screamed out after it, irate. Because, as far as Bill was concerned, that was what his Zodiac was for!! Helping him! With doing THAT!!! "You stupid lizards can't TAKE TURNS?!" --What was wrong with this stupid thing?! Even his OWN stupid lizard wasn't THIS stupid!!! It--

Miz suddenly made a sound of understanding. "He said that his Bill won't help and his Time Baby won't listen to him either... "

"Then it should get the other lizards to help it out, since they all apparently talk!" Bill said caustically.

Miz frowned. "What if… what if they can't?" She turned to her brother, frowning.

"Why not?" Bill waved off, still seething with anger and irritation at the stupid thing. Stupid lizard. --Even more stupid lizard! "If they can TALK to each other, they can exchange information and energy. WHAT ELSE could they possibly need!!"

"You need your Zodiac to help you…" Miz pointed out. "What if the AXOLOTL are like that too? But… instead of a Zodiac, they have a Trinity?" She thought this made sense. At least for this Ax they just met and for her own… probably? Her dad had mentioned that he needed her and Time Baby, and well, they were all in this together, eternal and endless, the three of them, immortal and interminable. Deathless, doomed to come back, over and over and over until all Reality ceased to be--

"I need my Zodiac for ideas, support, and energy," Bill told her simply, ticking them off. "My stupid lizard doesn't need ANY of that," Bill pointed out next, because his dimension wasn't set up that way with a Trinity or Zodiac for 'his' lizard, or anything else! --Not at all! "So CLEARLY not all of them do," he huffed out, crossing his arms. Counterexample given! Q.E.D.! (His overall coloring was slowly -- very slowly -- shifting from his striking warlike yellow back down to his favored blue, as he talked with her.)

"Well, the ones who HAVE a Trinity set in their worlds wouldn't be able to get help… right? Unless there's some loophole?" Miz rubbed her forehead. "This is kinda messed up." Some unfortunate cosmic trinity being repeated in more than one dimension, heck, that sucked. She really hoped the Ax, Time, Bill trinity wasn't something that happened often, because it seemed to just result in the three being stuck with each other, whether they liked it or not.

--Yes, it was messed up. That was the problem, as far as Bill was concerned! --All these dimensions were MESSED UP and this even-more-stupid lizard that actually talked with other beings still wouldn't fix ANY of it! "Well, WE'RE here. Obviously there is a loophole, since there are ways to get from one to the other when you're a pillar. --Because you're a 'pillar'!" Bill told her. "Don't see why they can't just talk to mine if..." Bill trailed off, then slumped his shoulders and glowered as he realized... "Unless MINE really DOESN'T talk to anyone other than..." demons-from-the-outside -- and even then it only did that right before it kicked them back outside, Bill had gathered. He made a 'tsst' chitter-hiss of a sound in annoyance. Stupid antisocial pink frilly jerk of a lizard. --Why was he not surprised by this? SO ANNOYING!

Miz floated over to his side, not quite touching. "Well… maybe… if we help this Ax fix this world… the others can see that it's possible to do so?" she suggested. She hoped they would, she hoped that they would be able to stop… feeling so sad...

"Oh, I'm gonna FIX this place, all right," Bill said in threatening tones. "I'm going to fix this place SO WELL!!" He glared at the lizard's retreating back as it vanished into the clouds, then turned back to look around at the rest of everything-else that was here-and-there with them. "We aren't even that far UP," Bill groused (and tried to talk himself less shivery about said UP as he went). "Didn't even really need to reconfigure myself that much, or even contort myself around hardly at all, to get myself up this high," he muttered out. --Because it was higher than the mental-energy state he usually tried to hold himself in and exist at, yes, but… it was different. Getting 'up here' had been almost reflexive on his part, Seeing and then ending up here -- because objectively? "This isn't nearly as 'high' 'up' as the AXOLOTL in my own dimension is," Bill groused out next (...rightly or wrongly...) because... it felt more twisted-partly-sideways to Bill than anything, really. So he should be able to do this, right? RIGHT!!! (--HAHA, was that even a question?)

So Bill pulled in a 'breath' he didn't need. He Looked down, and around again once more. And then Bill turned to his sister and said quite seriously: "Where do you want to START FIRST?"

"I don't really know." Miz admitted. "If we just made it so everyone never dies, we would have to either roll back and start from the beginning when life first formed, or we could just make it so 'no one can die from now on' and have that be a thing…" She frowned as she looked around. Well, the Ax that was here didn't seem to be stopping them. No doubt it was because he was already planning to just scrap this place. Miz shuddered. How awful. Trillions of lives, all gone because the god who created them decided he didn't want them anymore? That was… beyond horrible.

Bill stared at her.

"...I was talking about taffy-izing the strings and making a net below," Bill said slowly, pointing downwards. Because as far as he was concerned, THAT upside-down instability was the first thing that needed addressing. Fixing dying could come after fixing impending-and-imminent-total-destabilization-of-all-dimensions-into-a-nonexistence-from-which-no-dying-could-be-reversed. ...Because with no dimensions, there would be no dead time in those dimensions to reverse, to get any of them back. First things should come first, for a reason.

"Oh right, that too." Miz face-palmed. She had almost forgotten. Zoomed out too much to look at the picture. She glanced down. "Well, I'm pretty good at holding stuff together. I could do that 'lower them down' gently thing and see about organizing this mess." She could already see all the problem areas where the stress was beginning to show.

"I'm used to nets from my own dimensional set," Bill noted, then looked around. he should be able to set up something similar here. Not like there was anything or anyone -- demon or being -- around to stop him or make any of it difficult, HAHA! Then Bill got a somewhat evil grin. "--Hope this lizard doesn't care about us deflating its own little pocket dimension of resources a bit 'for a good cause'!" Bill called out at their surroundings, then laughed a very Bill Cipher laugh loud and long, as he spun in place and then flew out, gathering up a quickly-growing bundle of 'pink fluffy cloud' material (for matter-energy conversion) in his hands as he went.

Miz shrugged. "Maybe once he loses some of his stuff he'll try working a bit harder." (Like annoying her dad until he actually did something about it, she always tried to discourage his apathy, and she was stubborn enough to continuously poke her dad until she got a rise out of him) She held out her hands to begin gripping onto the edges of this Reality, ready to catch anything if it fell. Slowly, she lifted one of the Dimensions up and began to gently guide it down a bit lower, separating it from the rest of the bunch and positioning it somewhere a lot less precarious. Heck, this didn't even take that much effort; she wasn't creating anything, just moving stuff around.

(Okay, so maybe finding a place to PUT the Dimension was a little difficult, in the end she decided 'fuck it' and attached it to an arbitrary 'location' within Space for now. It hung there, supported by the Spaces Between. Like a rubber duck floating in a pond, except it was inside the pond and not bouncing back up to the surface because there WAS no surface.

"Oh, I can MAKE it get MORE INVESTED in what happens to this place, yes!" Bill called out threateningly. "But if it tries stopping us, I'm killing it," Bill said of the local even-more-stupid lizard, as he beelined his way back over, cloudstuff in his hands.

Miz snorted. "Considering he knew how we felt about what was happening here and STILL left us alone? I think he doesn't care."

"It's stupid," Bill reminded her. "CLEARLY does not think things through, if this is what it came up with. After falling asleep in the middle of things when the stupid thing should know better," he muttered, as he frowned and started spinning 'netting' up into the first row of 'knots'. "Do your job right!" Bill called out to the absent lizard, to no response -- not that he'd expected one. Being efficient, Bill 'coded' the process into being once he had the first 'edge' together and started (and attached via long-hanging 'lines' to the farther 'edges' of the cloud pocket dimension, so that it could hang 'below' and 'underneath' it, a bit like a 'hammock' or 'fishing net' of sorts) and then set the spinning-netting spell-like process running, so that he himself could shift to feeding more cloudstuff into it while controlling the speed of the netting-spin.

"--I'm starting with the junk-rules from mine," Bill warned Miz. "Have to start somewhere! Should be compatible, at least," he muttered. They were certainly general enough -- the ones used for supporting and controlling things from the underlayer, at least. He hoped he had enough energy for this. He was 'cheating' terribly by shoving against and grabbing and feeding some of the energy here from their surroundings directly into what he was doing (rather than supplying it all from himself). Since the stuff here was so consistent to start with, he hardly needed do anything to it, but...

Miz was reaching into each Dimension as she worked on them, absorbing the emotions (filtering them quickly) for a little boost to help her pace herself. These Dimensions were pretty small, all things considered, not that 'heavy' if she had to equate what she was doing with weight. Making them 'float' on their own without falling apart or plain falling wasn't difficult, just tedious and boring.

Bill frowned (but also hummed) as he worked, trying to encode sections of the 'net' to shift the basic ruleset to the local-dimension set that would 'sit' against and 'above' it. Gradients for how far out they extended. (There didn't seem to be a higher Ruleset above it; not here. Not one that he could See, while he was here, like this.)

"Little sis, you'll need to place those dimensions 'down' far enough away from each other to keep these dimensional ruleset compatibilities from conflicting once I put the 'net' down, and pull the 'net' up. Or put them all down in a different ordering! The stupid gradients are gonna cause bleedover between them if you don't! So do one of the two, unless you WANT it to all collapse into a crazy tangled-mess later!" he called out almost cheekily as he kept spinning out 'net' (while pretty sure that she would pick at least one of the two of those, knowing she did not want that sort of collapse to happen). Because that whole upside-down structure was haphazard in its local rules groupings (hint: there weren't any consistent groupings, not in the least!) and interconnected in the stupidest way Bill had ever Seen! (Not that he'd Seen many dimensional setups before, just his and this-one. But the way it was all set up right now reminded Bill of stupid human-brain neural-connectivity! HA!)

Bill wasn't certain how many dimensions his little sister could hold up at a time, let alone while they were in so fragmentary and lopsided a manner, so he didn't bother to give her any suggestions as to which method she might choose. He just focused on his own work and left her to hers.

Miz nodded absently, most of her attention on grouping the Dimensions in some semblance of order. Dimensions with standard-Physics in this section, dimensions with anti-physics in another, and so on. The fragmented pieces were a little difficult to keep track of, but she'd had to wire and bead delicate paper figurines for arts and crafts, if there was any practice for keeping track of tiny round things that could easily fall and get lost, she had all the experience.

Bill hummed as he continued to feed in more and more cloud material that spun-about and knitted-together and spun-out, down and down again. Really, compared to what he had been working towards figuring out what he was going to have to do back 'home' in his own dimensional set to fix things, all this was EASY to handle by comparison. The whole place was self-contained! No ongoing extraneous incoming-outgoing connections to handle to-and-from the outside, because there was no outside that needed its ever-changing connections to it maintained with it, here. That meant no ongoing changes to account for from a multitude of sources, at all times, all-at-once. Here, all the edges and pieces here were static -- Looking at things from where they were, Seeing what needed to be done. So he didn't even need to be able to See EVERYTHING all-at-once to be able to pull any of this off! --This was just TOO EASY!!!

And Bill's grin widened just a bit further, as the 'net' spun-out and about towards completion, as he measured and calculated the needed area -- broad and deep -- that would be needed against the rather large number of currently-existing dimensions that were all banded and bandied-about, tied-and-being-untied together. He let out a chittering chuckle, as he cancelled the spell-process, finishing the other-'edge' himself, the last row of 'knots' (and then floated off a good bit away to anchor-in another set of long-hanging 'lines' to another farther 'edges' of that pocket dimension, in the opposite direction of the first set of long-hanging 'lines', to connect to that other-edge).

He checked out all the long-hanging 'lines', over all the initial structure of the 'net' itself, and once he was sure it was sound (by plucking at it here and there and listening to the key of the hum…), he then said to Miz, with a hard glint in his eyes as he picked up the 'net'...

"Let's see how likely it is to tear this down NOW, now that doing that will TEAR DOWN the rest of this -- AND THAT STUPID LIZARD WITH IT -- if it TRIES!! HAHA! CONSEQUENCES!!!" And with that, Bill half-shoved, half-tossed the new 'netting' over the side, out and away. "--Let IT have to handle some of the strain of holding it all together HERE, FOR ONCE!"

He looked out and down, watching the 'net' 'fall' and 'fall' and then 'fall' and reach the ends of those 'lines', to bottom out and down as it swung down into place, far far below everything. "Not so HIGH AND MIGHTY now! --Connected in EVERY way! No longer anything like SEPARATE! Can't even PRETEND that it is, now! NOT ANYMORE!!! HA!" Bill was downright shaking in place by this point, eyes wide, the form of his Mind's mental projection pulsating in strength, as his projection's coloration cycled between shades of red and yellow and black.

Miz watched her brother's not-quite hysterical joy(?)... vindictiveness(?) and shrugged. "Kay~"

She turned back to her own task, carefully moving things so that they weren't in each other's way or in danger of collapsing in on themselves.

Bill pulled in a 'breath'... and then he jumped up and dove in -- in and down-down-down the 'lines' on the one 'edge' above, into and over and through and all-around the 'net' that he'd just made -- his energy-and-self running across all the 'strings' below as he went.

--And he seemed to create a sort of suction force-and-flow behind him, an attraction, a push-and-pull towards him as he went, because the cloud-matter above started spiraling in and down and through the 'threads' of the 'netting' along behind him almost of its own accord, seemingly setting up a constant flow of the cloudstuff through the 'lines' down to, and 'strings' of, the netting. Bill closed the cycle by popping back up at the other-'edge' across the lines, to somersault and tumble out of them again into the clouds above.

"That's--" Bill coughed out a bit, then tried again. "That's there. That's there now. Haha." He shivered slightly, where he floated lackadaisically past his sister -- more drifting than floating at this point, really. "How are… the dimensions… Going?"

Miz gave him a thumbs up before rolling her shoulders. "It's tedious and boring. But I've got around half of them stabilized by now. I'm organizing them by set up, physical base and size." Then she paused and added, "Also color. It looks nicer this way." She grinned to herself. "Do you love the color of the sky?" Miz said, with a tone that Bill had figured out by now meant she was making some sort of reference to something she was saying more for-and-to herself than as something she meant for anyone else to understand (in this case, that generally meant it was a rhetorical question).

(Not that he didn't usually respond to those anyway with--) "Pink-is-not-my-color," he got out fairly coherently, as he closed his eyes (and his Eye) for a moment, as he relaxed against the clouds. "Stabilized is good-good-good," Bill not-quite stuttered out next, as he 'breathed' for a bit. "That'll work. ...Good spacing," he added, after rotating onto his side, opening his eyes again, and taking another Look to assess the state of that. He took in another 'breath' he didn't need to take, then forced himself to float himself a bit more upright. "Second time's a charm!" Bill laughed out, seemingly short of breath as he did. "Lower them down further; I'll connect-them in as I go; can settle-them next after that," he told her, floating up-up-up, to go diving down-down-down the new 'intake' lines again.

And this time, Bill's form wasn't so completely lost among the 'netting' below, where this time he stayed, circling and cycling through and between the knots without interrupting or stagnating the general direction of the flow -- sometimes jumping along the strings in jagged arcs of energy, in sawtooth-triangles below and side-to-side -- sometimes twisting an echo of his human-ish body around the strings like they were fireman's poles he was sliding down -- sometimes flickering into sections and pieces of a slitted eye here, a pair of eyebat wings there, a sextet of arms reaching out elsewhere -- on and on and on he went.

<Pass it down to me here!> Bill buzzed-hummed-sang out to her from below, <here-here-HERE!> calling out and up to where she was far far up above. <I'll CATCH it! I'll TAKE it! I'll MAKE it work! MINE-MINE-MINE!>

Miz nodded as she directed them downward, the awful upside-down pyramid being almost entirely taken apart.

And the pure energy that was the being that was Bill arced upwards from the 'string' of that 'net', over and over again, dragging thin 'tenets' of the 'string' from below up a bit with him. 'Filaments'. Small anchors to anchor-points, in a way, up from each section of 'net', dancing and dancing, singing out in his humming-buzz as he danced out and about along the 'string'...

...until the last dimension was lowered, and there were no more connections to make. Miz sighed and relaxed, her form buzzing out a little as she slumped against the side of the net to rest.

Bill arced and flowed himself outwards then, directing himself sideways and over and out and back up the ends of the 'outflow' strings. He more slid out of them with a half-tumble -- rather than somersaulting out of them -- this time.

It took Bill a few moments to raise his head out of the cloudstuff he'd not quite face planted into after that (along with the rest of the 'body' of his mental projection of himself), but once he did…

"Just… just need to pull it up a bit, now. You get this side, I'll get that one?" Bill said after taking another few 'breath's, after already beginning to float his way over to the other set of lines again, rather more comfortable taking the more-'dangerous' more-tricky intake side himself than the outtake one. (His sister wouldn't have to worry about her hold over there as much; he didn't want to risk her being pulled and drawn down and having to try and fight against it if she was unsure of what she was doing, or became distracted. He knew he could handle it; he didn't want to risk her hurting herself if she couldn't. If he was this tired, she might be, too.)

Miz nodded, and they both half-floated half-drifted to their respective 'sides' of the 'edges' of connection. She was having fun, tedious as this task was, she liked this type of micromanagement. Dad never let her do anything like this back home, he probably worried about her breaking something.

"Shorten your 'lines' over there about this fast? --This fast," Bill said, making a slow-moving gesture at a constant speed. Miz nodded to show she understood and had seen. And then they both began working in tandem.

The 'net' below was lifted upwards ever-so-slowly, ever-so-slightly, and as the 'net' rose, the 'filaments' that had been connecting back down to it all strengthened and thickened out as the flow had less 'Up' to fight against; and the strengthening of those filaments helped to settle each and every single one of those dimensions below in-place, to place them cleanly down into the 'net'.

And the 'net' began gleaming with colors all across the spectrum, as the specific rulesets bled into them from the dimensions. Red and yellow and black, mostly. But there were also hints of blue and silver cycling through it, as well. (And, sometimes, a bit of green, or orange, or purple, or pink even…)

The colors below slowly bled into and through things, down through the rest of the 'net', but as they spread out in watercolor-like shimmering pools into the structure, they slowly shifted and settled into the consistent 'pink' and pearlescence 'color' of the cloudstuff above, between all the space of threads between them; there was just enough space to allow the flow from above to continue on and through it all, all of it, without being diluted or 'recolored' completely, in a flow that kept on cycling through and through and through, above to below and through and around and out and back up again, and...

Miz stared. "It's so pretty…"

"It's beautiful," Bill agreed. "As it should be. Perfectly-imperfect. --Well, ALMOST," Bill amended, as he lay his head back in the clouds. "The rules need some work, but..." it all wouldn't be collapsing immediately, if any one of those dimensions did. Not on their own. Not even with a little 'help'. --Not anymore.

Miz sat back on another cloud and stretched her 'arms' out as she relaxed. "We have time, time doesn't really pass unless we let it up here…"

"Mm," said Bill, slowly stretching himself. "Need to be careful about it, though," Bill noted. "That stupid lizard fell asleep up here, and look where that got it." Bill flopped back into the clouds and shook his head slightly. "Need to add in some connections between the dimensions down there to 'bridge' the 'gaps', too, still, at some point. All those so-called 'natural portal' connections between them." He smiled. (He was proud of that one. He'd done that ON PURPOSE in his 'set, adding in each and every one of those stable-and-stabilized 'natural portal' connections in himself. --They were never meant to be structural the way he'd done it, though, not like the stupid way it had originally been done everywhere here by that stupid lizard. And it would be child's play for Bill to do it here in the same way he had done it in his own set properly, again, in the here-and-now...)

Then Bill rolled over and looked at Miz, and asked, quite seriously, "Think anybody noticed anything happening at all, down there?" he wondered 'out loud' at her mentally. Everything here seemed to be largely in-step, time-wise. They'd taken care to make sure that the 'local time' that the changes they'd made happened after they'd come here; Bill had set 'himself' (really, the general area) at five minutes past that particular time 'forward' again as-and-after Miz had pulled herself Up. (It was… odd, here. Far more fluid, responsive, and… reasonable really. Bill was able to reason through what he was Seeing rather easily. This AXOLOTL's 'outside of time' area here didn't seem to follow the same Rules he was used to AT ALL…)

(Which, somewhat alarmingly, absolutely confirmed what his little sister had said about dimensional sets that were entirely unconnected to his own set, with very different rules in play and a VERY different lizard. --Because this one talked to them, and didn't roll back time on them after answering an outright question as-posed -- so that they couldn't even REMEMBER what they'd asked, let alone its answer -- in a blatant sort of cheating maneuver! The big frilly pink jerk!)

Miz grinned. "I've actually moved Dimensions around without Time Baby noticing a few times. It was hilarious how confused he got." The tantrum he went through when his agents kept getting lost was HILARIOUS. Though, Ax had told her to put them back afterwards. No fun. He didn't want her messing with them. No fair.

"Ahhhh~" Bill sighed out, kicking his feet and legs in frustration, as Miz brought up all of the moving she'd done and he realized... "I didn't watch you working! Not properly!" He'd been too focused on what he himself had had to do, to do what he'd tasked himself with doing all properly himself! "--I don't know how to do that," he complained to her. "If I'd known how to do that BEFORE, I wouldn't have had so many problems with only having the ONE dimension I could escape out of and to!" he told her, kicking his legs out again before letting them drop. And it was true -- the real problem he'd had was that his old decaying dimension had been disconnected from nearly everything, drifting farther and farther away from everything else.

The two dimensions -- the ones where his Zodiac were -- were the closest ones that his own decaying dimension had been anything close to nearby in.. well, practically FOREVER. And they were the last ones that his dimension had been about to pass by that he might have ever been able to stably reach and connect to, ever, period. ...Grabbing and pulling down-and-in other dimensions to destabilize them into his own might've been possible after that still, to keep things going for him in his own decaying dimension after that, but escape? A true, real escape? To be able to turn back around again and then launch himself out and AWAY from...? --No. He'd really only had that one chance, because moving his own dimension himself was one of the very few things that he'd NEVER figured out, and never been able to do.

"All I could do was try to deform it from the inside a little bit," Bill told her, and even that had been pretty dangerous to do, with it already not being anything like stable at the time that he'd been trying to do it. "But I couldn't actually MOVE it." He frowned. "Is there a way to move a dimension from inside it WITHOUT destabilizing it? Or do you NEED the outside-leverage for it?" he asked her, realizing that there was one big difference between the two situations -- then, and now -- still. His little sister had actually had a lot of leverage here, being outside of it all. But that didn't mean that she did it the same way where she was from. But if she could do that and tell him how… if he could have done THAT from INSIDE it back then...

Miz rolled around on her cloud to get comfortable. "Well, I watched dad while he worked and picked up a lot from just seeing what he did." She thought about it. "But moving from the inside would require shifting enough mass to one side of the dimension that the 'weight' starts pulling it in a certain direction," and with her ability to turn pure energy into mass, well, lets just say she could really 'throw her weight around' if she tried. Reminded her of being inside a giant hamster ball, really. But more… stretchy? It was much easier to move stuff when she wasn't inside it. "I could manage it even easier by grabbing onto all the mass inside a dimension and moving them all at once in the direction I wanted."

"Hm," said Bill, thinking that one through. That might've worked if he'd been in any other (stable) dimension to start with, but... "Think mine might've been moving too fast for that to slow it down quickly enough to get anywhere in that space of dead time. --It didn't do its destabilization, HA, cleanly," he told her. "I lost a lot of matter-energy out of mostly one 'side' of it, I think? Sort of." Bill frowned. "Except not. ...The information of the matter-and-energy was retained?" It wasn't quite the right description for any of it, but… "My dimension was also completely flat to begin with, and then wasn't-later. So." Bill sighed. (This was one of the reasons he hated gravity so much. The concept Miz had described sounded a lot like trying to shift and concentrate the center of mass internally in a different enough way, through other expenditure of energy, that it would be pulled towards other-closest dimensions more than others. But with how fast his dimension had been moving, and with the lack of resources he'd had to work with… those last two nearest-dimensions would likely have collapsed on their own, at the end of their own lifespans, long before what was left of his dimension could have slowed down enough to even come to anything like a halt, let alone start speeding up again on a 'return' path trajectory, from their 'pull'. The forces involved were too weak, and what was left of his own dimension had basically been on an escape trajectory away from absolutely EVERYTHING, which had meant… well. Nothing good for him.)

He was going to have to think a lot more on this...

Miz laid back. "That sounds like it sucked." The thought of being trapped in a place like that seemed awful. She was thankful her own didn't do that.

"More like it 'ruptured'," Bill made a face. "Cheesecloth-as-a-boundary might be better-closer as a description? It got thin. More permeable. Lost a lot. Outer boundaries expanded and flexed in ways they shouldn't-and-weren't supposed-to. I don't remember it very well. Not sure I was awake-and-aware the entire time, either." Bill shrugged, giving her a grimace. (Yet another thing the stupid lizard hadn't helped him with. It hadn't tried to slow his dimension down at all, it hadn't set up a grouping of new dimensions to try and slow it down either -- and it wasn't like it couldn't have done that; it was able to create new dimensions all the time -- anytime it wanted, as far as Bill could tell. There didn't seem to be any rules on where new dimensions popped up, other than those the stupid lizard self-imposed upon itself, and--)

As Bill ruminated to himself and frowned furiously over the old state of affairs in his own dimensional set, Miz looked down at the dimensions here that were nestled neatly in the netting. Like little hammocks but not. "So how do we rewrite the Rules? Most of those places had a lot of stuff hardwired into it." Like how everything WORKED. What was up or down. What colors were what. Which wavelengths they traveled in.

"We generalize it first. Write the general rules into the 'net', with the same 'values' for 'variables' as the hardwired things. Let that bleed in and replace what was hardwired-there, since it's all technically the same. Then change the 'values' from the out-side to manage the in-side instead. And everything flows like it should. Simple and efficient." Bill closed his eyes for a moment. "Technically, I already did the first part of that, with the junk-rules in place. Now, we just have to let it sit for awhile, and finish bleeding together. Let it sit, and set, and come back to handle the rest of it later."

Miz poked at a nearby dimension. "We've probably messed things up for the native Bill. If he was trying to destabilize Reality then we've just made his job harder…"

"If he was really trying to destabilize 'Reality'," Bill put out there, "Then he's a stupid idiot who DESERVES to have his decided-upon 'job' made harder," Bill sneered out, then tossed an arm over his face. "Stupid lizard probably never had an actual CONVERSATION with him," BIll muttered. "Doubt it knows-or-understands what he's really trying to do, either." Bill lowered his arm. "I'd rather talk to him DIRECTLY. No reason to take the lizard's word for anything!" he told Miz half-cheerfully. (Bill sounded very tired as he said it, though.) "...The stupid thing didn't explain anything with that Time Baby that's supposed to be around here somewhere, either," Bill added, which they'd also not seen skin nor hair of during the whole process of this themselves. "--I can understand how they both might've been able to get in its way, though!" Bill told her next. "If this is ALL that it had to deal with, at THIS level," Bill said rather disparagingly, turning his head slightly to glance around at everything that was all around them again.

Miz hummed. "So… you think we should talk to the Bill here?" she tried to confirm. Her brother sort of sounded like he did, bring up the whole 'directly' thing there. She was a little hesitant at the idea of talking to him herself. She hadn't gotten a good look at him in that brief moment, but he was human-shaped, much like that AXOLOTL they met (and the fangirl side of herself was noting that they were both quite handsome… ugh that's a strange thought… she did NOT want to find an alternative version of her dad attractive…) and she wanted to know if that meant anything, but… he'd also seemed kind of mad, and a bit scary, during that fight.

"Yes," Bill said. "We should talk to him." He paused for a moment as he thought. "Precautions might be good," he added after a moment. "And… pick a dimension, rest down there for awhile, first?" he added hopefully, pointing towards the 'below'. He was tired, and if Stanley had been right about one thing, it was that Bill didn't handle things too well when 'tired' or 'hungry', and Bill was a big enough triangle to (continue to) admit to that being the case.

"I don't want to rest up here," Bill complained out to his sister next. "--I don't trust this stuff," Bill said, looking around at the clouds suspiciously. "What if the cloudstuff is the stuff making the stupid lizard stupid? --I DON'T WANT to fall asleep up here," Bill groused out almost petulantly. (At this point, it didn't even occur to Bill that if they stayed up there, the AXOLOTL might come back; to his way of thinking, it had run away and was probably asleep somewhere else, not lying in wait to GET them, as soon as they let themselves fall asleep.)

Miz snorted. "Sure. There's a dimension down there where everything is made out of pillows. Might be a soft place to sleep."

"Check the pillows first," Bill said in warning tones, feeling a bit loopy, but still more than coherent enough to both remember and note: "Always check the pillows first. ALWAYS."

Miz nodded and tilted her head at all the work she and Bill had done. "I wonder if the Ax here will appreciate what we did for him? It's much better now."

"It is, and it had better," Bill breathed out, his eyes fluttering half-open half-closed. "And if it wants to spin up more dimensions," Bill told his sister blasely, "Then it can expand out the 'net' if it needs to, first. Add more to it." Bill was not quite floating face-up in the clouds as he said this. He began panting slightly as he started to sit up, then gave up for the moment at doing that, flopping back down into the clouds. "--Self-limiting," Bill put out there next. "Add too much, means putting too much strain down there on everything up here, through all the 'lines' connecting down-there to up-here. Should make it learn its own limits. Not try to do more than it can, or should do. --Stupid lizard here clearly can't handle anything approaching a truly infinite-infinity all-at-once."

Bill let out a long 'breath', and marveled at the fact that, oddly, making the 'motion' with his Mindscape form did seem to have something of an impact on him, helping him to relax and to calm down. (...Was this because he was still technically connected to his body by that strung-out anchor? Was his body back there responding to what he was doing here? Was that having an effect on the projection of his Mind to where he was here? --AH! So many questions! So many questions that he didn't know the answers to, yet!)

"Running off and making us do its work for it, though," Bill grumbled, turning over in the clouds. "Lazy. Unfair! --It better N'OT complain!" Bill added, as he rolled over and out of the clouds, to float a bit more upright finally, this time without looking like he was about to pass out from shortness of 'breath' right away. "We'll come back and finish it later. --First things first! Second things second! Thenn last-things lasssst," Bill enthused out to her, as well as he could under the circumstances.

That was fine with Miz. She Looked at the pillow dimension and checked to make sure there was nothing there that could harm them before leading her brother down into it.

Bill trailed down slowly after her, more and more slowly as he went, though they both slid inside the dimension easily at the end of it. He slowly rotated around to Look at things in the surrounding area (read: entire dimension) as Miz materialized vessels for the two of them: a little girl form for herself and a teen-aged female form for her brother. The place looked safe enough to him, as far as he could See. (Even if his vision seemed to be trying to going double on him now, even with only one single Eye...)

Bill more swayed than bobbed in place in the Mindscape, eyes continually fluttering closed, then open, then closed again, barely able to concentrate on anything more than a colorless mantra of 'Look around, make sure there are no threats, don't fall asleep until you're in a body again' as Miz finished up what she was doing.

And once Miz was done, Bill barely gave 'his' own vessel a cursory glance with his Eye before slipping into it. Shortly thereafter, he was down on the ground, fast asleep, lying face-down across the flattest and least-fluffy of the nearby pillows spanning the whole pillow-scape.

Miz sat down beside him. "You must be exhausted…" she noted. "You could have told me you were getting tired…" Miz laid down on a fluffy pillow that seemed to be a 'berry bush' since it had little round cloth dangles and smelled like artificial strawberries. "Good night brother." She set up a protection barrier around them, to keep out both physical and spiritual threats. She made sure they would be safe before she finally allowed herself to drift off, a little worn out herself from the work. As she drifted off, Miz wondered why the native Ax hadn't been able to get off his lazy ass and just do it himself.

---

"Mmrmphmmm…" went Bill, as he slowly woke from his long slumber and tried to raise his head up. (Nope. Too early. Not doing this! --Don't care what time it is, still NOT doing this.) He let his head fall back down onto the pillow below him.

Miz had woken up before Bill had and had built a pillow fort around her brother. She hadn't wanted him panicking if she wasn't nearby when he woke up either, so she was sitting beside him with her eyes closed, puppeting another vessel out to explore this dimension. The grass was patchwork cloth and felt, the trees were much the same. It was a very soft world.

After another long while, Bill finally not only lifted up his head to try to look around blearily, but also actually opened his eyes this time.

And when Bill saw Miz, he blinked blankly, then blinked blankly and slowly again. (Things were not quite computing just yet.) Miz waved at him, eyes still closed. "Morning, big brother." She was making her other vessel hunt down a pillow rabbit. She was curious what it tasted like. Probably cotton, but she wanted to try anyway.

"Mor'n…-ing?" Bill echoed, as his mentality crawled slowly towards working its way from (his own native math to) Galactic Standard, and Galactic Standard to American English, and then he blinked again. "Miz. Sister." It took him another moment.

(...another dimension in another dimensional set, Miz with him, they did things Up there stupid lizard and then fell asleep down here...)

Bill closed his eyes and opened his Eye, and Looked around. (And felt a little stupid as he realized that he'd been a bad big brother, there were protections up that he hadn't put up, Miz had had to put them up for him…)

(...Miz didn't seem angry at him about that, though. And the barriers and protections were sufficient for sleeping-within, even with that other Bill out there. And she was safe.)

And then Bill pulled in a breath (that felt entirely like breathing this time, almost -- because he was in a vessel instead of his own singular body) and grimaced as he lifted a hand to his forehead (closing his not quite overworked-yet Eye) and collapsed back to the pillow again. ...Well, at least he was face-up this time.

"Tiiiiiiired," Bill not-quite slurred out at her, trying half-heartedly to wave an arm back at her and failing miserably, making more of a flopping motion with it instead.

Miz giggled. "You worked really hard yesterday. Sleep more if you want, I'm trying to find food right now." And hopefully she'd be able to get him to eat something later. This might be a vessel and not his true self but it would still help him recover some of his energy.

"Pillows. are. not. food," Bill stated slowly, though a bit more clearly this time. He rolled over again to collapse a bit where he lay on his side. --Because if Stanley wasn't here to poke him about it and Miz said he could sleep more? He was going to sleep more.

"That vessel has the same stomach as me. Pillows can be digested." Miz said softly in case Bill was asleep, she opened one eye to check on him. Bill's eyes were closed, and he seemed ready to conk out again right then and there.

"Not food," Bill murmured out at her again, as he shifted in place, getting comfortable, and slowly began to drift off to sleep again. "Mmmmmnm…" He'd tried to use as little of his own energy as possible earlier, in 'fixing' things and in making that netting, but 'as little as possible' was a far cry from 'none' of it being used by him at all.

It wasn't a minute later that Bill was fast asleep and well-under, all over again.

Miz resisted the urge to coo at him. Her brother was so adorable~ Well. Miz wasn't going to tell him that. She DID snap a mental photo to 'print' out later. Maybe she could show it to Mabel so the two of them could coo over it together?

Miz stayed vigilant, checking to be sure the native Bill didn't discover them. She could feel him around but he wasn't able to See them. She wanted to talk to him, but not right now and not alone.

---

Bill was asleep for another several hours after that. What finally woke him up was the growling noises of his own stomach.

"Stupid human-ish bod-y-- vessel-thing," Bill muttered, correcting himself as he rolled over onto his back. "Not food. Food is not the problem." Stupid vessel. He needed energy, not food, and he felt annoyed at this… this mismatch of things. --His own exoskeletons had never been this way! ...Then again, if he'd fallen asleep inside an exoskeleton, instead of a vessel that was pretty darned close to his own human-ish body at-present, then he probably would've...

There was a smell in the air that caught his attention. Like burning cloth? Bill shoved himself upright to see his little sister roasting a stuffed rabbit over a small fire. She looked very confused.

Bill saw her look up and grin at him, once she realized he was awake.

"Miz," he repeated. "Not food." He pointed at the stuffed rabbit. "Those are for hugging. You like hugging those." What was she even doing with that thing?

"I do. But I'm also curious what they taste like. The inhabitants of this dimension eat them, so that means they're 'food'."

"They don't eat them like THAT," Bill told her, eyeing the fire. Did she really think these things were going to be like meat-rabbits? Like human-dimensional type rabbits full of meat? She HAD to have noticed the feathers, though.

"You're going to burn down the entire dimension," Bill informed her dryly. "And they taste like feathers. It's all cloth and feathers. The entire dimension. --All of it." He could tell just by Looking at it; all those chained-together hydrocarbons were...

Miz frowned at the fire. "I guess that's a valid point."

"They probably rip open the outside-cloth to get-at and 'eat' all the feathers, locally, if the local-things do the whole eating-each-other thing like most places do," Bill told her, as he levered himself into sitting up upright. He hadn't Looked long enough before to See it all happening explicitly, but he was more than certain enough at what he had Seen to 'guess' that they, "Keep-and-reuse the stitching-and-cloth to expand their own outer coverings, which is dangerous to do in an open setting-area; can't really move while all those stitches sitting there, open and undone," he told her, rubbing at his eyes. Because that was generally how he'd Seen it done in several similar dimensions from his own dimensional set, at least. He hadn't done an in-depth Look at everything in this one, just a cursory one Looking for differences. "Not sure what they use for needles, here. Broken button-eyes?" He wasn't entirely sure he felt like checking to find that out for himself just then. Was that something useful that they needed to know? It probably wasn't, if they were going to be leaving soon, anyway.

Miz put out the fire and considered the burnt rabbit. "Damn, why does it have to be so cute…" she said, before she 'healed' the animal. The stuffed rabbit jerked and wiggled out of her hands to hop away. Miz sighed. "Well, I found another difference. The Ax here doesn't grab the Souls immediately. It feels like he lets them pile up a bit before grabbing them in bulk," else the rabbit would have been revived as a soulless husk.

"Thing need to learn how to automate all those flipping processes," Bill muttered out, rubbing at the side of his head vigorously and fuming. Was it going to just keep being lazy? It had better not ignore the whole 'net'-underlayer he'd set up for it here; there was lazy, and there was lazy and stupid at the same time. ...At least his AXOLOTL the stupid lizard from his dimensional set had never stooped so low as to being both of those at the same time...

Miz got up from her seat on a large mushroom pillow. "I don't think I'll be able to kill one of those again. Was hard enough the first time. Too cute." She'd eventually killed the rabbit by accident. Using her 'puppet' to chase it off a cliff onto a bed of foxes who'd torn it in half with their jagged zipper teeth.

"So? We go somewhere else to eat something that's actually food," Bill said, shrugging. "This is a problem?" By which he meant both the eating-elsewhere-not-here and the Souls in bulk. (As far as Bill was concerned, if this AXOLOTL was that lazy, and didn't even try to use the underlayer he'd put in place for it for anything, to do its own job better, then it would probably be just that much easier for Bill himself to set up things so that the Minds stayed connected with the Souls, and to then shunt the Souls away from the lazy-stupid lizard into a 'waiting area' that it couldn't get at so easily instead, using the very 'net' that Miz had helped him with himself. Because if the number of souls never built up enough for it to pick them up before the regeneration-unkilling process Bill wanted to put in place occurred? Then--)

Miz brushed her hands off. "I just usually check out the local cuisine whenever I visit a new dimension. But I can skip this one. Maybe."

"Tastes like feathers," Bill repeated for her, then frowned. "Stab the mushroom, pull out a few, put them in your mouth, they'll taste like everything else. Done. No wondering-forever later." It was about as much of a compromise as he could think of, under the circumstances.

Miz proceeded to actually try it and made a grimacing face. "BLEH. That texture…" She blinked. "But this actually tastes mushroomy."

Bill blinked at her.

"...Stab the ground?" he said next. Not that he was hoping exactly that it would taste different. He just knew that Miz liked tasting potentially-food things. He certainly wasn't going to taste it himself!

Miz poked at it and pulled out some green tinted feathers. "Well. This is kinda grassy. Like fresh cut lawn." She still didn't like the texture. Feathers did not feel nice on the teeth.

...Bill refrained from musing out loud if finding green feathers in a rabbit-pillow would have them still tasting 'grassy', or if they would slowly start to taste potentially-'rabbity' over time.

"Not food," was what he pointed out again, instead.

Miz shrugged, satisfied for now. "I saw a dimension with actual food. And beings that look humanoid enough that we wouldn't stand out." Miz looked off. Reminded her of a place from her own set, but it was different, had different people, even if it kept the same 'type' of society.

Bill slowly stood up, and shifted in place, looking uneasy. "...I need energy," he finally admitted, looking away from her. "Preferably without having to actually feed." He had a feeling doing THAT would be very dangerous here, in another 'set with another AXOLOTL and another Bill around doing who-knew-what and potentially mad at things in general (and maybe even ready to be mad at THEM…). Yes, he was drawing down energy from where his form and Mind physically were currently, but it was slow, not instantaneous, and he had to keep it that way in order to...

Miz smiled. "Well~ your vessel has my kind of stomach so you'll be able to get all the energy within molecular bonds."

That just had Bill grimacing. "I don't know how to operate it correctly," he told her. He couldn't exactly See it well from being inside it, to start with. And he didn't particularly want to get into how he'd truly learned how to operate bodies from the inside with his little sister just then. (Primarily, 'test to destruction' with a few 'test' subjects who wanted to self-annihilate and knew exactly what they were getting themselves into with their Deals with him, there.)

Miz rolled her eyes. "You don't have to do anything but eat food like a human. The stomach will work on its own."

"No," said Bill, looking uncomfortable, "YOU don't understand. I can't just PULL IN energy out of EVERYwhere, from anyTHING. There's a process," he told her, because that was what it was: a conversion and integration process. (And his reserves were already somewhat integrated into his form.) He wasn't entirely sure how she did it, but... "I'll reject it, otherwise. It won't incorporate into my Self." It was part of how he automatically rejected any- and every-thing that was not him. Part of his defenses, innate because he'd reconfigured himself to make himself so. And he didn't really want to discuss HOW he did it any further than that with her while they were quite literally standing in what could potentially be enemy territory, if the AXOLOTL hadn't been lying to them earlier about things. (And if it had, then it was still enemy territory, just in a different way…)

Miz thought about it before handing Bill a feather from the mushroom. "Test out a little and see if it works or not. If it doesn't, I can help you find something that does."

Bill grimaced. He knew perfectly well how his form as a being of pure energy both worked and didn't-work, mental projection of his Mind from where he actually physically was lying in place or not.

But he took the feather from her anyway and he put it in his mouth. And then he swallowed it.

(It wasn't as though it was going to damage him if he did it. He could handle it, however the finer details of the process Miz had set up for him actually worked, he was certain. And it would be informative for her to see…)

And a few seconds later he made a hacking noise and then bent over and spat out a small pinhead-sized chunk of ball lightning, out of said-vessel's mouth, which hit the pillow-ground hard and left a burnt mark right where he'd spat it out down onto the fabric.

"Oh my gosh!" Miz gasped and then grimaced. "Probably should figure another method then." Ball lightning? Interesting. Now she was curious if that was a thing with her brother or if she could hack out lightning too.

Bill, hands on his knees and looking a bit ill, made a sort of 'ugh' sound and sent her a look. (Yes, he'd been right; hadn't damaged or hurt him, just felt incredibly uncomfortable. That energy had actually felt like it had been forcibly INJECTED into his energy form; he hadn't been able to keep it out to begin with; he'd had to shove it out! And even after doing that, it had continued to crawl all over and across his energy form in a largely-uncontrolled manner, inside this vessel with him, before he'd decided that that was enough of that and finally forcibly-cycled it up this vessel's throat for expulsion...)

"Sorry, didn't think you would reject it that harshly." Miz felt bad that it apparently sucked THIS much.

"I'll explain LATER," he told her, as he finally straightened up a bit, swaying. He'd only just recently taught Miz layers, and she still found it a bit uncomfortable to hold them herself. Getting into how he'd quite literally ENCRYPTED the most important parts of the standing wave of his own energy form, well beyond that even? Was something he considered to be a bit of a trade secret of his. (Not 'just' ciphers, but ACTUAL encryption.) And that wasn't even getting into the algorithms he used for determining how he cycled it all -- all and which parts of himself -- between frequencies in order to make himself that difficult to characterize, monitor, track, sense, follow, trap or otherwise contain, or in any way stop. Or how he still managed to actually process and react to everything around him, incorporating that new information-as-energy-shifts into his being without disrupting or unencrypting any of the rest of these processes to do so. Or the layering-shifting-flows that he'd put in place on top of and integrated into all of that. Not to mention the error-checking and memory-'data' compression, and his own equivalent of 'self-corrective' healing…

"Not here, and not now. Not when anything or anyONE could be listening," Bill limited himself to telling her instead.

---

(ReverseFlatland!Bill interlude)

That was strange~? Bill craned his head up from where he was standing over the broken crappy house-robot and Looked. He could have sworn everything just moved. Like the multiverse had shifted. Odd. That damn lizard was too lazy to do something like that.

He opened his Eye to Look and frowned when he couldn't See it, whatever 'it' had been. It frustrated him to no end. Was that damn lizard blocking him again? --Well, no matter. All he really needed to do was See what that moving feeling was...

...what? WHAT?!

Bill shrieked with anger. Whatever had happened had completely RUINED his plans! All of them! All of it was changed! Moved! Stabilized?!!! Who the FUCK did this?! It couldn't have been that lizard -- he was a lazy fuckin' asshole and...

Bill pulled at his hair, screaming and screaming with rage at whoever had so THOROUGHLY fixed the layout of the multiverse.

...and WHY was it so neatly ORGANIZED?!