the idea of Billie having schiz and getting hired by the reality-bending clown is so goddamn funny. Steve pulls all his typical nonsense her first week and this girl is surprisingly Unbothered(tm) cuz her internal dialogue was “ah shit my meds must not be working, ok it’ll be fine just stay calm and play it cool like usual”
schizospec billie is so important to me i love her. you Have activated my trap card btw.
she mainly gets auditory hallucinations and is. probably going to give herself hearing loss from the Volume she listens to music at. can't hear parents or roommates garbling at her if kim petras is at 300 fuckig decibel. (and if she can, that's not actually them bc they know to tap her to get her attention. on account of she cannot hear them. she is listening to kim petras at 300 fuckig decibel.)
the most common one that never Entirely goes away is that she sometimes hears echoes if someone's too loud. (not always. but some of cesare's Chris Fleming Is Yelling In A Small Room is real for her.)
she tries not to have a flat affect but ppl pretty much only notice the effort after seeing her Not trying
she was actually Kinda Pissed her first week at bigtop because she was like shit, am i Seeing things now too? ughhh i liked this dosage >:| and then tim was very very casually like, steve, buddy, can we NOT do the bread ghost thing right now? we can just get the buns and go!
billie: wait. that's actually a ghost made of bread that's divebombing steve?
penny, reassuringly: oh don't worry billie, it can't hurt him!
steve, being scooped up around the middle by undead sourdough and yeastblasted directly into an oven:
she asks a lot of questions about the stuff going on (see: her whole reaction to KID, so you guys are also just wearing makeup, is this normal foodtruck stuff) to try and casually feel out 1) if she's having/had a delusion about it or 2) whether This Time she's started having visual hallucinations. by the time she finally leaves the truck (a year post college graduation), she almost starts to wish the shit going on around her was just symptoms.
billie to her therapist voice "a lot of the stuff i'm gonna talk about is going to sound like my meds aren't working but i promise they are."
billie's therapist voice "no worries, b, i'll keep an open mind. can i ask though, why did you bring a clown? to our session today?"
steve, abruptly in a cardigan & half-moon glasses with a pen and legal pad: how does that make you Feel, dr. abernathy?
a fairly common delusion for her is that she's actually an alien replacement for the real billie. this one comes back Real Bad immediately post-heaviside because like, immutable proof Aliens Are Real but also. it's not that scary anymore because aliens are mostly chill. or wimps that an old dude can kill in one hit. and like, at least she knows she's not a Real, Genuine Clown. that'd be wild.
her meds help a lot with keeping her thoughts organized, but every once in a while if she's sleeping poorly or super stressed, she'll start having problems keeping her words in order. the first time it happened on the job (around midterms time) she was asking steve something and he just. blinked at her (she's 85% sure it actually made that sound) and it took her a second to realize she was daisy-chaining words together based on how they sounded instead of Actually Saying A Sentence. she was absolutely mortified.
and then steve answered the question she'd meant to ask and put tim on register so billie could just work the stove. this was when billie decided that if her boss ever got his bell rung by a zombie with a skullhammer, she would follow a theater nerd clown alien into hell to rescue him. she didn't know that's the decision she was making, but that Was when she made it.
