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[mothmansplaining]

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"Stanford Pines. Leave a message."

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[mothmansplaining]

[Ford -- frowns.]

Has someone been talking to you? What did they tell you?

[Who's interfering with this operation? This is something that's important to Ford, an attempt to keep the peace between Stan and Bill, to keep Stan safe and to keep Bill from what Ford sees as backsliding. Who the heck is meddling?]

[charlastan]

[Stan knows it's important - it's important to him too. He's made an effort not to talk to anyone he wasn't supposed to talk to, and hasn't gone around asking too many questions - at least, not about what he forgot.]

Bill told me he tried to kill the kids.

[mothmansplaining]

He what?!

[Oh. Oh, this is bad. Oh, this is Bill deciding the worst possible thing is going to happen and then trying to pre-empt it. Bill isn't technically going back on their arrangement, this detail wasn't in it, but he sure as hell is sabotaging it!

Fuck. Ford starts to pace.]

He--he must have decided to call the whole thing off, and hoped that telling you would provoke you into attacking him first. Damn it. Why is he doing it now...?

[Sorry, Stan. He's had way more time to live with this -- way more time being forced by his inmate circumstances to move past it -- than you have.]

[charlastan]

Because he's a goddamn idiot, now tell me what happened!

[It's more than that, even Stan knows it's more than that, but that's not what his concern is right now. Ford's had the luxury of knowing what happened without it destroying the universe, but Stan only just learned about the kids being in mortal peril by Bill's hand. Of course he's going to take it deathly serious.]

What happened. [It's not a question anymore.] I want you to tell me. Don't trigger my memory. Tell me.

[mothmansplaining]

[He...pulls a deep breath, then lets it out.]

A lot of things happened, Stanley.

The kids first met him in the mindscape. That folksy kid, the one with the hair? He made a deal with Bill back in our first season to try to get the code to your safe and steal the deed to the Mystery Shack. He went into your mind to get it, and the kids used my journal to follow him in. Nothing too bad happened that time -- they used their imaginations and fought him off without too much trouble.

1/2

[mothmansplaining]

2/2

[mothmansplaining]

Okay! Let me know if it works!

[beejfu]

Totally!

[mothmansplaining]

Want to get it now?

[charlastan]

Ugh, Gideon.

[He shudders. The kid might've "redeemed himself" or whatever, but Stan's not letting his rivalry go so easy.]

Y'know, I actually remember...paaaart of that? I know he wanted the deed and got it. The rest is kinda fuzzy though. I couldn't've told you how he got the thing, but he got it.

cw discussion of self harm

[mothmansplaining]

Yes, well, in the end, it wasn't Bill. He blew your safe open with dynamite. After that, things started to get dark.

[Because elementary schoolers with dynamite isn't dark?]

Bill approached Dipper directly. At least, as directly as you can when you don't have a physical form and can only speak to people in their dreams. He offered to give Dipper the password to Fiddleford's old laptop if Dipper gave him a puppet. Dipper thought Bill meant one of the sock puppets Mabel had been making for an elaborate hand-puppet play, but it was a trick: the puppet he meant was Dipper's body. Bill possessed him only for an afternoon, but he was -- careless, with Dipper's physical well-being.

[A short pause, as Ford figures out how he wants to put this.]

Bill hurts the people he possesses. Deliberately. He can make you slam your hand in a drawer, pour soda in your eyes, or -- well. Let's just say he's got a lot of creative ways to make a body feel pain. You don't feel it, not when he's in your body, but if you get your body back, you have to deal with the injuries.

[charlastan]

[Stan's face falls as Ford goes on. He was pretty sure he remembered that weird play - Mabel had gone out of her way to show him a bunch of the puppets she'd made for it, and Stan had apparently even videotaped some of it (though it was confiscated before he could watch it for himself).]

I...I was around for that. I knew the kid was acting weird, but. I dunno, he wasn't sleeping or somethin' so I just kinda...shrugged it off? I mean, it wasn't any weirder than you get when you don't sleep. And the whole thing went up in literal flames, so I thought...

[He thought the weird injuries had been from the grand finale, or even just from clumsiness after he'd finally tuckered himself out. It strikes him, even without the memory to back it up, that he might have never known. If he'd put two and two together, exorcising a demon out of Dipper would have been more of a priority. The thing that alarms him is there isn't much of a gap in his own knowledge. Some parts of the play are a blur, but he remembers that week. He remembers being horrified by Mabel Juice, and the kids completely taking over his house with puppets. He remembers driving them over to the theater with all their props and sets, and Mabel and her friends goofing around in the car with him.

(He remembers being in the basement, and leaving the kids to their own devices more often than not that week.)]

...Doesn't matter what I thought if it's not what happened. [A pause.] ...He was alright after that, right? Bill didn't take him over again?

[mothmansplaining]

No, Dipper wasn't possessed again. It seems the terms of the deal didn't allow for -- repeated possession.

[Or, perhaps, the writers didn't want to do it. Either way, Dipper was safe, and not stuck in as, well, open-ended a contract as Ford was.]

After that, you brought me back to Gravity Falls. The use of the portal tore a small hole in reality -- [He gestures with his hands to show the size] -- that led to Bill's dimension. I tried to contain it, to seal it up for good, but Bill knew it was his ticket into our world.

When Bill got his hands on the rift, he triggered a catastrophic, apocalyptic event -- the series finale. ...have you remembered anything about Weirdmageddon?

[charlastan]

[Stan thinks, he really thinks. But with this amnesia, it's like gazing into absolutely nothing. His eyes never adjust to the dark.]

I'm guessing that's the big...thing that happened? The one the town's banned from telling me about?

[The one he definitely got tased for asking about when he got a little too curious, before he understood why he couldn't have that last memory back. Stan shakes his head.]

No, nothing. There's this...

[He frowns, trying to explain it in a way that would make sense to literally anyone else. On the upside, the two of them are old enough that the only thing coming to mind is something Ford would understand.]

It's like when a record skips? It's me hanging up signs in the woods and then zzzt--! [And he makes a gesture as though he's suddenly turning a record wrong.] --I'm on the ground with no idea who or where I am. But the record's all scratched, so it won't play right.

[mothmansplaining]

[Ford nods.]

I see.

Basically -- Bill caused a localized Armageddon. He warped the whole town into what he thought would be fun: weirdness waves brought inanimate objects to life, monsters from other dimensions ran wild in the streets, and eyeball bats turned people into stone and brought them to his floating pyramid to make a giant throne of frozen human agony.

I tried to stop Bill on my own, but I was captured. He turned me into a statue, too -- until he realized that his power couldn't affect the world outside of the town. Gravity Falls' Natural Law of Weirdness Magnetism kept him and his weirdness inside the city limits, and he needed an equation I'd discovered years ago to collapse the barrier.

You and the kids came to rescue me, but Bill captured you, too. He said he'd kill Dipper and Mabel unless I gave him the equation. He'd have done it, if you hadn't figured out a way to stop him. We erased Bill from existence, but we also had to erase your memory to do it.

I thought he was gone for good, until I came here.

[charlastan]

[Stan nods along, looks appropriately horrified and disgusted at the right moments, but Ford probably recognizes Stan's lack of recognition from when his memory was first erased. Sometimes when they told him stories about himself, the reaction was as though he was listening to a story about someone else. He could pick up on the emotional beats, but the connection to it wasn't there.]

So...the memory erasing was my idea.

[He sounds...unsure if he's surprised or not. It wasn't like anyone could tell him - not without telling him what they did or who they were up against. It hits a little different knowing for sure that he volunteered to wipe himself out completely. It shuts the impostor syndrome up for a minute, and that's kind of a shock.

But...given what he's pieced together of the rest of his life, maybe it's not a surprise at all that he'd throw it all away.]

No wonder he's so pissed off - it's not that I killed him, it's that I beat that lousy two-bit con artist at his own game - with my own lousy two-bit con arting!

[That had to have been it. They had to have tricked him. Nothing else would make any sense.]

[mothmansplaining]

[Ford nods.]

You knew that once he went into someone's mind, we could erase him with the memory gun. You also knew that the memory gun wouldn't work on me, thanks to the metal plate. So you came up with the idea to trick him into thinking you were me, so he'd go into your mind looking for the equation. We switched clothes, you made the deal, and then....

[Ford makes an uncomfortable face for a moment. Stan knows the rest.

Then, Ford shrugs.]

He's also mad you killed him.

[charlastan]

[He does know the rest, and knows that uncomfortable face pretty well. But the explanation does clear up one other thing.]

And that's why you guys didn't want us doing the Pines Twins Switcheroo around here.

[That loops them back around to the uncomfortable elephant in the room. Stan doesn't exactly look happy, but he's not flipping out quite as much as when he first came in the room either, so that's something. He decides to just rip this band-aid off now.]

So...you gonna tell me how you wound up dating the guy who almost murdered the kids and literally turned you to stone or what?

[mothmansplaining]

That -- that's a long story. It's complicated by the fact that I am very angry that he went behind my back about this. I'll tell you, if you want to hear it, but I need to talk to him soon too, about what the hell he's trying to pull here.

[charlastan]

[With an opening like that, Stan can't help himself.]

Wow, I'm so shocked he went behind your back here! That doesn't sound like something the literal villain of our stupid show would do at all!

[He crosses his arms.]

If I didn't wanna hear it I wouldn't have asked, you knucklehead.

[mothmansplaining]

[Ford heaves a big ol' sigh here.]

You had probably better sit down. ...do you want a drink?

[pitt soda? scotch? this thread's not gonna be Y7 anymore in a minute.]

We can drink for real here.

[None of this "expired apple cider" nonsense.]

[charlastan]

[Stan cracks a smile.]

Heh. That's the first good news I've heard all day. I could go for a drink - and it sounds like you're gonna need one too.

[He heads right over for the card table, since it's usually a good spot for drowning sorrows and having pity parties.]

[mothmansplaining]

[Yup card table's where they're goin'. Ford clears some miscellaneous science supplies off of it and sets down two glasses and a bottle of scotch he's clearly already been at, it's like 3/4 gone. As he pours:]

Bill and I go back a long time. I first met him in Gravity Falls, back in 1981. I was looking for an explanation, a theory that would explain why Gravity Falls was so weird. Something that would account for the ghosts, the aliens, the cryptids, and magic. My research had come to a standstill, and I was getting desperate. That's when I found writing in a cave, describing a being with answers. It warned me not to summon him, but I did it anyway. After all, they'd left the instructions. How bad could it be?

[charlastan]

[Once poured, Stan takes his glass and pretends he has to think about it really hard.]

Hm...I'm gonna go with...pretty bad. Right?

[No good story starts out with "How bad could it be?".]

[mothmansplaining]

Horrible. He convinced me that the only way to complete my research was to build an interdimensional portal. He said it would lead to the dimension that all of the weirdness was coming from.

Instead, it led to him. He was trapped in an unstable, decaying, nondimensional space, and he'd been planning to use me to get out of it.

[He takes a drink.]

He's been trying to physically reach our world for thousands of years, Stan. The pyramids used to look like him, but the arms all fell off. George Washington made a deal with him to win the Revolutionary War, which is why his face is on all our currency. He even helped Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing!