application for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
entranceway
Jul. 29th, 2019 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mothmansplainingName: Krystal
DW username: N/A
E-Mail: On request
Discord: Magpie#4977
Plurk: spartabitch
Other Characters: N/A, but I'm co-apping Dib
Character Name: Stanford Pines
Series: Gravity Falls
Timeline: Postcanon
Canon Resource Link: Here!
Character History: Ford was born dirt poor in New Jersey to a concrete-pouring concrete-hearted father and a compulsively-lying phone psychic mother. He was also born with an extra finger on each hand (and toes!) and was made fun of for it all his life, giving him an atrocious bullying complex. Luckily, his twin brother Stanley was there to shield him from thrown footballs, football trophies, and football books (but not from developing persecution complexes the size of Mars). School was hellish for Ford: a girl screamed when he tried to hold her hand, his classmates called him a six-fingered freak, and once when he tried to practice kissing by building a robot with a rubiks cube for a mouth, the thing's alarm went off during gym class and Ford had to solve the rubiks cube with his mouth to make it stop. In front of the whole class. So you can imagine the kind of dreams of escape this kid had. He and his brother found a ship on the beach and called it the Stan o'War, devoting their free time to fixing it up and dreaming of sailing the oceans, being a pair of pulp-novel adventurers, a perfect pair of brains and brawn ready to take the world by storm. Not that they didn't have adventures of their own in Glass Shard Beach: once, they caught the Jersey Devil! ...but, thanks to a complicated circumstances and a shitty pair of twins, it got away.
That set of circumstances involved Stanley stealing their dad's medallion from the pawn shop. Ford had asked Stan if Stan had stolen it and believed Stan when Stan told him he hadn't. The shitty twins showed him photographs of Stan stealing it, and though by the end, the misunderstanding was sorted out, the rift that had been growing between the twins didn't fully heal. Things came to a head their senior year, when Ford, being a genius, built a perpetual motion machine for the school science fair. The project attracted the attention of West Coast Tech, a prestigious college on the other side of the country. Ford was thrilled by the opportunity, but it would mean that when they graduated, he wouldn't be treasure-hunting with Stan. Stan went to the school at night to yell at the perpetual motion machine and accidentally broke it. He, like any teenager would, covered the problem up with a sheet and ran off. When Ford tried to present it to the West Coast Tech talent scouts, the machine was broken, and he'd lost his chance at his dream school -- and when he found out it was Stanley who had broken it, Ford was furious. So was their father -- he kicked Stan out of the house, telling him not to come back until he'd earned enough money to make up for his mistake, because that's A+ parenting. Ford didn't speak up in his brother's defense, and Stanley drove away.
That fall, Ford went to the aptly named Backupsmore College, and there he met a brilliant engineer named Fiddleford McGucket, who will be important later. Even though the school was supposedly garbage, Ford still wound up taking classes like Five-Dimensional Mathematics and Advanced Cryptology. We're not really sure what was going on there. Anyway, he studied several times as hard as the students around him, went from undergrad to PhD three years before anyone else would have, and wound up awarded a research grant because the thesis he wrote was that damn good. He took the grant money and decided to put it to use studying the paranormal in a small town in Oregon that was a hotbed of supernatural activity: Gravity Falls.
He found a bunch of crazy shit in Gravity Falls, but the craziest shit of all was one shit named Bill Cipher. Ford had hit a roadblock in his paranormal studies -- it wasn't enough for him to prove that super-weirdness existed, he had to find out why. What it all had in common. But he couldn't identify any unifying principle. He was afraid that if he published only what he had, some opportunistic fuck would come along and discover the Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness (yeah) and become famous instead of Ford, who deserved to be the one who got famous, and rubbed elbows with presidents, and got given the time of day by girls, ever, at all! That's when Ford stumbled across writing in a cave that said, basically, "THIS BEING HAS ANSWERS. BUT HE'S GARBAGE. DO NOT SUMMON HIM."
Ford summoned him.
And then listened to him.
His choices really only got worse from there.
Bill told Ford that the reason Gravity Falls was so paranormal-fucky was that a dimension of ~weirdness~ was leaking into Ford's world, and the way to make a scientific discovery impressive enough to publish was to build a portal into that dimension. Ford swallowed this hook, line, and sinker, and immediately began work tearing a hole in the fabric of reality. He called in his collegecrush buddy, Fiddleford McGucket, and together they started work on the machine, raiding parts from the UFO crash site in the woods and having horrible misadventures where Fiddleford gets traumatized by something Ford shrugged off. Ford advised him to meditate to deal with his anxiety, but Fiddleford had an idea. Not a better idea. Just a different idea. Fiddleford McGucket built a gun that erases bad memories, because that isn't horrifying, and used it to self-medicate and deal with the horrible nightmares he'd been through.
Despite Fiddleford's help, the interdimensional calculations needed to open the portal were behind schedule. So, Ford does the sensible thing, and makes a deal with Bill Cipher, trading access to his body for....using his body to do calculations while Ford's brain sleeps. He's a really easy mark, you guys, it's awful. Anyway, Fiddleford got suspicious because the calculations promised disaster and tried to warn Ford, but Ford was too obsessed with being the first person to explain the paranormal that he didn't listen. There was some shit with a fortuneteller and a ring that Ford didn't believe because he thinks fortunetelling is bunk, even though he has definitely used magic multiple times. Anyway, the next day, they test the portal and disaster strikes. Fiddleford was exhausted from having compiled all of Ford's findings into a publishable report, a gesture Ford took as Fiddleford trying to steal his thunder (and not helped by Bill's manipulative whispering about how Fiddleford couldn't be trusted and would chicken out) and wound up stepping over the thin bit of caution tape Ford had put down as the one cursory nod to lab safety he's ever made. Fiddleford got caught in the rope that was tied to the crash-dummy they were sending through the portal, and glimpsed the other side before Ford pulled him back. On the other side was Bill Cipher, removing his exoskeleton to feed and basically being an insanity-inducing Lovecraftean monstrosity, and, predictably, poor Fiddleford went absolutely insane. Ford finally wised up to the fact that Bill was no good (the cave had told him so) and realized he'd opened up a portal to somewhere terrible, somewhere that could end the world.
The next several weeks were bad. Very, very bad. Bill still had access to Ford's body while he was asleep, so Ford did his best not to sleep. Winter set in. Ford hid his journals with the instructions on how to open the portal in three different places: the woods, an elementary school, and with his estranged brother, Stanley. At least, he tried to. When Stanley came to Gravity Falls at Ford's request, they ended up fighting over old bad blood, and the fight, in a billions-to-one chance, hit the exact correct combination of buttons and levers to open the portal and pull Ford through.
Ford's adventures in the multiverse were weird and wild. Once he realized he wasn't dead, and after a narrow escape from Bill, he decided to devote the rest of his life to learning as much as he could about Bill so that eventually he could kill him. Ford learned a lesson from the portal mishap. Not his lesson. A lesson. The lesson he took from it was that he should never have tried to share his burdens with anybody and just had to be a lone hero, working tirelessly to destroy the ancient evil that had destroyed his life. So, basically, the most dramatic snitfit he could possibly throw. He met a bunch of wild and weird aliens, got a truly awful tattoo, and let a very nice space lady cut his head open so that she could install atinfoil hat metal plate that would keep Bill out. Thirty years went by like this, and Ford put together a superweapon that, if the beam hit Bill, it would create a localized black hole. Armed with this weapon, he went back to the Nightmare Realm and had a cool sci-fi laser fight, but before he could win (totally would have won), the portal to his home dimension re-opened. Ford leapt through it and found that Stan had spent the last thirty years rebuilding it.
And now we get to the point where Ford actually appears in the show.
The first thing he does is punch Stan, a character the audience has spent the last season and a half growing to love. The next thing he does is write off Dipper as sweaty and panicky, but he was immediately charmed by Mabel. Then, he begins to draw a portrait of himself, coming out of the portal, in one of his journals. After wiping the minds of a bunch of government agents with one of Fiddleford's memory guns and telling Stan that he's kicking Stan out of the tourist trap Stan turned his house into, Ford decides to go down from the basement and not engage with his family, because he can't afford to let anyone in, again, ever. Lone hero. Means you can't be close to your family. Trust no one.
...unless they play nerdy dice tabletop roleplaying games with you. Dipper wins his way into Ford's good graces when they bond over their shared nerd love of Dungeons, Dungeons & More Dungeons, and that's when Ford stops writing Dipper off completely and actually reads what Dipper wrote in the journal. Ford warms up to Dipper remarkably quickly for a man who's been convinced he has to be alone for three decades (it's because Ford is way warmer and easier to befriend than he thinks) and decides that clearly the thing to do is to make Dipper his apprentice. He doesn't tell Dipper the truth about Bill at first because he's too embarrassed, but it all comes out when Ford tries to use a machine to encode Dipper's thoughts so Bill can't read them, and Dipper uses the machine on Ford because he knows Ford's hiding something. The whole sorry history comes out, and Ford tells Dipper that his paranoid tendencies are great! Then he invites Dipper on a mission to seal up a crack in reality that was opened when Stan reactivated the portal. They go to a UFO together and Ford asks Dipper to be his apprentice, and Dipper, after rescuing Ford from an alien prison drone, accepts. Mabel hears the whole thing go down and, upset, grabs her backpack and runs off into the woods.
Unfortunately, it wasn't her backpack, it was Dipper's, and it had the rift in it. She takes it out past the protections on the Mystery Shack, and Bill gets it and tears it wide open, triggering an event called Weirdmageddon, and also the series finale. Ford deals with this like a reasonable adult: he grabs his death ray and his apprentice nephew and goes out to shoot the alien. He misses, and Bill captures him and turns him to gold. He misses the whole second part of the three-parter, but Bill revives him when Bill realizes that Weirdmageddon's catastrophic effects can't go past the Gravity Falls town limits. He brings Ford back to life in a giant evil penthouse, gives him a drink, serenades him, shows him a PowerPoint on why Bill destroying his home dimension was actually totally a good thing, and how turning this dimension into a chaos hellscape is, too, and asks Ford to give him the mathematical equation that will let him leave the edge of Gravity Falls. Ford says no. Bill tortures him with electricity, but he's interrupted by a rescue operation by the other Pineses, who turned the Mystery Shack into a giant fighting robot.
Ford uses this opportunity to try Plan B: Magic Zodiac Friendship Circle. Everyone necessary for the circle to work is present, but, once again, at this moment of crisis, he and Stan argue. Ford corrects Stan's grammar, and a fistfight erupts. Bill captures everyone but the Pineses, and Dipper and Mabel run off to keep Bill distracted, sure they'll find a way to destroy him. Ford isn't so sure. He passes Stan a flask that is definitely full of space booze and they regret their choices together, since those choices are going to lead to the deaths of Dipper and Mabel, who they both love. Then, Stan gets an idea.
Stan and Ford switch clothes and do perfect impressions of each other. Stan tricks Bill into going into his mind by promising him the equation, and Ford uses the memory gun to erase Bill out of it. Along with, you know, the rest of Stan. Stan's selfless sacrifice is the noblest fucking thing Stanford Pines has ever seen, and he has to break it to the kids that Stan's mind is gone and never coming back. He hugs Stan, cries, and tells Stan that he's a hero.
Luckily, the kids don't give up. It isn't the journals that save the day, but Mabel's scrapbook. By reminding Stan of familiar things, she is able to reverse the damage done by the memory gun, and Ford basically promises to spend the rest of his life making it up to Stan Pines. They spend the whole week telling stories and watching home movies, and when the younger Pines twins have their 13th birthday party, he asks Stan to go sailing around the world with him, having adventures. It isn't what Ford wanted, but it's what he needed, and they sail off into the sunset together in the best possible ending either of them could have had.
CRAU: At least, until Ford died. Ford is coming in from The Last Voyages, and boy has a number been done on him. He's been trapped on an afterlife prison boat with Bill Cipher for a year and a half, and this has had a few measurable effects. One, Ford is very blase about dying, since there are no lasting penalties for dying in TLV. Two, he's realized a few more things that make him an asshole (i.e. his disregard for collateral damage, his assumptions that everyone can handle the same kind of physical and mental strain he can if they just, I don't know, meditate or something, and his assumption that he is more mentally resilient than he is). Three, he broke out of the Barge with Bill's help into the "real world" (a world on the same level of reality as the Barge). Also, he's been teaming up with Bill, who has worked very hard to build trust between them, and they're actually kind of friends. (We mean friends in the same way the Journal 3 special edition did. Like how Sailor Moon means "cousins." They gay.)
Abilities/Special Powers: Oh, jesus. Okay, so, Ford is ostensibly a badass normal, but also, he's got cartoon resilience to electrocution and spaceship crashes, unbelievable mental resilience (looking at you, Winter of '82), scientific genius, 12 PhDs, the ability to cast magic (like everyone does in his universe) and a metal plate in his head that keeps possessing entities out. Also, as of TLV, Ford has a sigil he wears on his sock that turns his blood into helium (or ammonia, depending on which sigil he's wearing) once it leaves his body. He also has anti-magic protection runes woven into the lining of his coat, which is a dark gray now, since he had to replace the old one. Also, he'll have a Sub-Atomic Particle Splitter, a device that identifies an object's physical and chemical makeup as well as its universe of origin, a bunch of emergency survival supplies, and possibly a sonic screwdriver on him when he gets there.
Third-Person Sample: Ford isn't sure he hasn't wound up on another reality show.
It's the "events." It is the fact that here, as well, people temporarily become other versions of themselves, living out other lives. It's the fact that no one ages here either. It's the fact that some ruling power provides them all with whatever they want, as long as they ask it. It's the fact that this place, as well, is supposedly impossible to escape. (They'll see about that.)
But he isn't sure. As Ford asks a closet for an old sock from his own world, he muses that, perhaps, changes to your very self are a naturally occurring phenomenon in this sector of the multiverse. The fact that the two pocket dimensions he's found himself in have had similar phenomena makes Ford wonder how much of the Barge's floods and breaches were deliberate. He takes the sock and scans it with, ugh, with the Pan-Dimensional Analyzer, a very useful piece of technology that he wishes he could use without thinking about the person who'd helped him make it. Ford looks at the display with grim recognition: the matter registers as coming from Wonderland, despite being a perfect replica of his childhood test-taking socks.
Of course, the similarities could also just might be a popular entertainment format, he thinks bitterly, tossing the old sock carelessly back into the closet. Who knows. But he will keep testing, and pushing, and learning until he's free of all of them. Until he's somewhere that he knows he won't vanish, and he isn't afraid of his family vanishing. It doesn't have to be safe. It just has to be somewhere they can actually live.
First-Person Sample: Greetings!
My name is Ford. I'm a newcomer to your mansion, and I have a few very serious questions. First: I need someone to describe to me in detail precisely what happens when you temporarily become an alternate version of yourself. I came from a place where something very similar happened, and it can't be coincidence.
Second, is there someone here who acts as an intermediary, someone you can ask for favors, who penalizes individuals who don't conform to expected conduct?
And third, has anyone determined where the first-floor skylights really lead?
Eway return: N/A
Lost memory: N/A
DW username: N/A
E-Mail: On request
Discord: Magpie#4977
Plurk: spartabitch
Other Characters: N/A, but I'm co-apping Dib
Character Name: Stanford Pines
Series: Gravity Falls
Timeline: Postcanon
Canon Resource Link: Here!
Character History: Ford was born dirt poor in New Jersey to a concrete-pouring concrete-hearted father and a compulsively-lying phone psychic mother. He was also born with an extra finger on each hand (and toes!) and was made fun of for it all his life, giving him an atrocious bullying complex. Luckily, his twin brother Stanley was there to shield him from thrown footballs, football trophies, and football books (but not from developing persecution complexes the size of Mars). School was hellish for Ford: a girl screamed when he tried to hold her hand, his classmates called him a six-fingered freak, and once when he tried to practice kissing by building a robot with a rubiks cube for a mouth, the thing's alarm went off during gym class and Ford had to solve the rubiks cube with his mouth to make it stop. In front of the whole class. So you can imagine the kind of dreams of escape this kid had. He and his brother found a ship on the beach and called it the Stan o'War, devoting their free time to fixing it up and dreaming of sailing the oceans, being a pair of pulp-novel adventurers, a perfect pair of brains and brawn ready to take the world by storm. Not that they didn't have adventures of their own in Glass Shard Beach: once, they caught the Jersey Devil! ...but, thanks to a complicated circumstances and a shitty pair of twins, it got away.
That set of circumstances involved Stanley stealing their dad's medallion from the pawn shop. Ford had asked Stan if Stan had stolen it and believed Stan when Stan told him he hadn't. The shitty twins showed him photographs of Stan stealing it, and though by the end, the misunderstanding was sorted out, the rift that had been growing between the twins didn't fully heal. Things came to a head their senior year, when Ford, being a genius, built a perpetual motion machine for the school science fair. The project attracted the attention of West Coast Tech, a prestigious college on the other side of the country. Ford was thrilled by the opportunity, but it would mean that when they graduated, he wouldn't be treasure-hunting with Stan. Stan went to the school at night to yell at the perpetual motion machine and accidentally broke it. He, like any teenager would, covered the problem up with a sheet and ran off. When Ford tried to present it to the West Coast Tech talent scouts, the machine was broken, and he'd lost his chance at his dream school -- and when he found out it was Stanley who had broken it, Ford was furious. So was their father -- he kicked Stan out of the house, telling him not to come back until he'd earned enough money to make up for his mistake, because that's A+ parenting. Ford didn't speak up in his brother's defense, and Stanley drove away.
That fall, Ford went to the aptly named Backupsmore College, and there he met a brilliant engineer named Fiddleford McGucket, who will be important later. Even though the school was supposedly garbage, Ford still wound up taking classes like Five-Dimensional Mathematics and Advanced Cryptology. We're not really sure what was going on there. Anyway, he studied several times as hard as the students around him, went from undergrad to PhD three years before anyone else would have, and wound up awarded a research grant because the thesis he wrote was that damn good. He took the grant money and decided to put it to use studying the paranormal in a small town in Oregon that was a hotbed of supernatural activity: Gravity Falls.
He found a bunch of crazy shit in Gravity Falls, but the craziest shit of all was one shit named Bill Cipher. Ford had hit a roadblock in his paranormal studies -- it wasn't enough for him to prove that super-weirdness existed, he had to find out why. What it all had in common. But he couldn't identify any unifying principle. He was afraid that if he published only what he had, some opportunistic fuck would come along and discover the Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness (yeah) and become famous instead of Ford, who deserved to be the one who got famous, and rubbed elbows with presidents, and got given the time of day by girls, ever, at all! That's when Ford stumbled across writing in a cave that said, basically, "THIS BEING HAS ANSWERS. BUT HE'S GARBAGE. DO NOT SUMMON HIM."
Ford summoned him.
And then listened to him.
His choices really only got worse from there.
Bill told Ford that the reason Gravity Falls was so paranormal-fucky was that a dimension of ~weirdness~ was leaking into Ford's world, and the way to make a scientific discovery impressive enough to publish was to build a portal into that dimension. Ford swallowed this hook, line, and sinker, and immediately began work tearing a hole in the fabric of reality. He called in his college
Despite Fiddleford's help, the interdimensional calculations needed to open the portal were behind schedule. So, Ford does the sensible thing, and makes a deal with Bill Cipher, trading access to his body for....using his body to do calculations while Ford's brain sleeps. He's a really easy mark, you guys, it's awful. Anyway, Fiddleford got suspicious because the calculations promised disaster and tried to warn Ford, but Ford was too obsessed with being the first person to explain the paranormal that he didn't listen. There was some shit with a fortuneteller and a ring that Ford didn't believe because he thinks fortunetelling is bunk, even though he has definitely used magic multiple times. Anyway, the next day, they test the portal and disaster strikes. Fiddleford was exhausted from having compiled all of Ford's findings into a publishable report, a gesture Ford took as Fiddleford trying to steal his thunder (and not helped by Bill's manipulative whispering about how Fiddleford couldn't be trusted and would chicken out) and wound up stepping over the thin bit of caution tape Ford had put down as the one cursory nod to lab safety he's ever made. Fiddleford got caught in the rope that was tied to the crash-dummy they were sending through the portal, and glimpsed the other side before Ford pulled him back. On the other side was Bill Cipher, removing his exoskeleton to feed and basically being an insanity-inducing Lovecraftean monstrosity, and, predictably, poor Fiddleford went absolutely insane. Ford finally wised up to the fact that Bill was no good (the cave had told him so) and realized he'd opened up a portal to somewhere terrible, somewhere that could end the world.
The next several weeks were bad. Very, very bad. Bill still had access to Ford's body while he was asleep, so Ford did his best not to sleep. Winter set in. Ford hid his journals with the instructions on how to open the portal in three different places: the woods, an elementary school, and with his estranged brother, Stanley. At least, he tried to. When Stanley came to Gravity Falls at Ford's request, they ended up fighting over old bad blood, and the fight, in a billions-to-one chance, hit the exact correct combination of buttons and levers to open the portal and pull Ford through.
Ford's adventures in the multiverse were weird and wild. Once he realized he wasn't dead, and after a narrow escape from Bill, he decided to devote the rest of his life to learning as much as he could about Bill so that eventually he could kill him. Ford learned a lesson from the portal mishap. Not his lesson. A lesson. The lesson he took from it was that he should never have tried to share his burdens with anybody and just had to be a lone hero, working tirelessly to destroy the ancient evil that had destroyed his life. So, basically, the most dramatic snitfit he could possibly throw. He met a bunch of wild and weird aliens, got a truly awful tattoo, and let a very nice space lady cut his head open so that she could install a
And now we get to the point where Ford actually appears in the show.
The first thing he does is punch Stan, a character the audience has spent the last season and a half growing to love. The next thing he does is write off Dipper as sweaty and panicky, but he was immediately charmed by Mabel. Then, he begins to draw a portrait of himself, coming out of the portal, in one of his journals. After wiping the minds of a bunch of government agents with one of Fiddleford's memory guns and telling Stan that he's kicking Stan out of the tourist trap Stan turned his house into, Ford decides to go down from the basement and not engage with his family, because he can't afford to let anyone in, again, ever. Lone hero. Means you can't be close to your family. Trust no one.
...unless they play nerdy dice tabletop roleplaying games with you. Dipper wins his way into Ford's good graces when they bond over their shared nerd love of Dungeons, Dungeons & More Dungeons, and that's when Ford stops writing Dipper off completely and actually reads what Dipper wrote in the journal. Ford warms up to Dipper remarkably quickly for a man who's been convinced he has to be alone for three decades (it's because Ford is way warmer and easier to befriend than he thinks) and decides that clearly the thing to do is to make Dipper his apprentice. He doesn't tell Dipper the truth about Bill at first because he's too embarrassed, but it all comes out when Ford tries to use a machine to encode Dipper's thoughts so Bill can't read them, and Dipper uses the machine on Ford because he knows Ford's hiding something. The whole sorry history comes out, and Ford tells Dipper that his paranoid tendencies are great! Then he invites Dipper on a mission to seal up a crack in reality that was opened when Stan reactivated the portal. They go to a UFO together and Ford asks Dipper to be his apprentice, and Dipper, after rescuing Ford from an alien prison drone, accepts. Mabel hears the whole thing go down and, upset, grabs her backpack and runs off into the woods.
Unfortunately, it wasn't her backpack, it was Dipper's, and it had the rift in it. She takes it out past the protections on the Mystery Shack, and Bill gets it and tears it wide open, triggering an event called Weirdmageddon, and also the series finale. Ford deals with this like a reasonable adult: he grabs his death ray and his apprentice nephew and goes out to shoot the alien. He misses, and Bill captures him and turns him to gold. He misses the whole second part of the three-parter, but Bill revives him when Bill realizes that Weirdmageddon's catastrophic effects can't go past the Gravity Falls town limits. He brings Ford back to life in a giant evil penthouse, gives him a drink, serenades him, shows him a PowerPoint on why Bill destroying his home dimension was actually totally a good thing, and how turning this dimension into a chaos hellscape is, too, and asks Ford to give him the mathematical equation that will let him leave the edge of Gravity Falls. Ford says no. Bill tortures him with electricity, but he's interrupted by a rescue operation by the other Pineses, who turned the Mystery Shack into a giant fighting robot.
Ford uses this opportunity to try Plan B: Magic Zodiac Friendship Circle. Everyone necessary for the circle to work is present, but, once again, at this moment of crisis, he and Stan argue. Ford corrects Stan's grammar, and a fistfight erupts. Bill captures everyone but the Pineses, and Dipper and Mabel run off to keep Bill distracted, sure they'll find a way to destroy him. Ford isn't so sure. He passes Stan a flask that is definitely full of space booze and they regret their choices together, since those choices are going to lead to the deaths of Dipper and Mabel, who they both love. Then, Stan gets an idea.
Stan and Ford switch clothes and do perfect impressions of each other. Stan tricks Bill into going into his mind by promising him the equation, and Ford uses the memory gun to erase Bill out of it. Along with, you know, the rest of Stan. Stan's selfless sacrifice is the noblest fucking thing Stanford Pines has ever seen, and he has to break it to the kids that Stan's mind is gone and never coming back. He hugs Stan, cries, and tells Stan that he's a hero.
Luckily, the kids don't give up. It isn't the journals that save the day, but Mabel's scrapbook. By reminding Stan of familiar things, she is able to reverse the damage done by the memory gun, and Ford basically promises to spend the rest of his life making it up to Stan Pines. They spend the whole week telling stories and watching home movies, and when the younger Pines twins have their 13th birthday party, he asks Stan to go sailing around the world with him, having adventures. It isn't what Ford wanted, but it's what he needed, and they sail off into the sunset together in the best possible ending either of them could have had.
CRAU: At least, until Ford died. Ford is coming in from The Last Voyages, and boy has a number been done on him. He's been trapped on an afterlife prison boat with Bill Cipher for a year and a half, and this has had a few measurable effects. One, Ford is very blase about dying, since there are no lasting penalties for dying in TLV. Two, he's realized a few more things that make him an asshole (i.e. his disregard for collateral damage, his assumptions that everyone can handle the same kind of physical and mental strain he can if they just, I don't know, meditate or something, and his assumption that he is more mentally resilient than he is). Three, he broke out of the Barge with Bill's help into the "real world" (a world on the same level of reality as the Barge). Also, he's been teaming up with Bill, who has worked very hard to build trust between them, and they're actually kind of friends. (We mean friends in the same way the Journal 3 special edition did. Like how Sailor Moon means "cousins." They gay.)
Abilities/Special Powers: Oh, jesus. Okay, so, Ford is ostensibly a badass normal, but also, he's got cartoon resilience to electrocution and spaceship crashes, unbelievable mental resilience (looking at you, Winter of '82), scientific genius, 12 PhDs, the ability to cast magic (like everyone does in his universe) and a metal plate in his head that keeps possessing entities out. Also, as of TLV, Ford has a sigil he wears on his sock that turns his blood into helium (or ammonia, depending on which sigil he's wearing) once it leaves his body. He also has anti-magic protection runes woven into the lining of his coat, which is a dark gray now, since he had to replace the old one. Also, he'll have a Sub-Atomic Particle Splitter, a device that identifies an object's physical and chemical makeup as well as its universe of origin, a bunch of emergency survival supplies, and possibly a sonic screwdriver on him when he gets there.
Third-Person Sample: Ford isn't sure he hasn't wound up on another reality show.
It's the "events." It is the fact that here, as well, people temporarily become other versions of themselves, living out other lives. It's the fact that no one ages here either. It's the fact that some ruling power provides them all with whatever they want, as long as they ask it. It's the fact that this place, as well, is supposedly impossible to escape. (They'll see about that.)
But he isn't sure. As Ford asks a closet for an old sock from his own world, he muses that, perhaps, changes to your very self are a naturally occurring phenomenon in this sector of the multiverse. The fact that the two pocket dimensions he's found himself in have had similar phenomena makes Ford wonder how much of the Barge's floods and breaches were deliberate. He takes the sock and scans it with, ugh, with the Pan-Dimensional Analyzer, a very useful piece of technology that he wishes he could use without thinking about the person who'd helped him make it. Ford looks at the display with grim recognition: the matter registers as coming from Wonderland, despite being a perfect replica of his childhood test-taking socks.
Of course, the similarities could also just might be a popular entertainment format, he thinks bitterly, tossing the old sock carelessly back into the closet. Who knows. But he will keep testing, and pushing, and learning until he's free of all of them. Until he's somewhere that he knows he won't vanish, and he isn't afraid of his family vanishing. It doesn't have to be safe. It just has to be somewhere they can actually live.
First-Person Sample: Greetings!
My name is Ford. I'm a newcomer to your mansion, and I have a few very serious questions. First: I need someone to describe to me in detail precisely what happens when you temporarily become an alternate version of yourself. I came from a place where something very similar happened, and it can't be coincidence.
Second, is there someone here who acts as an intermediary, someone you can ask for favors, who penalizes individuals who don't conform to expected conduct?
And third, has anyone determined where the first-floor skylights really lead?
Eway return: N/A
Lost memory: N/A
