Across the Universe
Title: Across the Universe Fandom: Gravity Falls Rating: G Characters: Portal Stanford Pines, an OC, and various surprises. Description: Three vignettes of Stanford Pines’ adventures while in the portal. Word Count: 8202 Notes: This is @eregyrn-falls‘s commission for @fluffstravaganza (finishing off the last of my commissions) AS WELL AS a secret Santa gift. Yep, I got you for @gravityfallssecretsanta too, so I figured, why don’t I just supersize your commission by a good 6000 words for the holidays? Happy holidays, and I’m sorry this is so late, but I hope it’s worth it. c:
Ford occasionally found universes that felt so much like home that he ached. This was one of them. He had stepped from his disappearing blue portal into a rolling cornfield, brilliant and golden and massive, so massive that he could see machines like dots off in the distance, threshing the stalks and cutting neat green rows in expanse of yellow. Humans, so human that they could come straight from his own world, walked along the rows and the borders of the field, though they were too far away for him to see their faces. This was for the best, since otherwise, the portal he had just tore open into their world and then closed up would have drawn attention.
He sank into the surrounding corn, settling on the dirt and sliding his blaster off his back. He had to fix it up, since there had been a lot of ambient energy in the last dimension and it might have messed up its circuitry. He had set it in his lap before he noticed he wasn’t alone.
A small, terrified face peered at him from between green stalks. It was a little girl with the appearance of a tiny dark-skinned scarecrow, frozen, crouched low to the ground with an ear of corn clutched in her hands.
She stared at him like he had popped out of thin air. Which he had.
“Hello, there.” He popped his energy cartridge from his blaster. “Do me a favor and don’t scream.”
The child was draped in mismatched, patched cloth with rubbed-in grass stains, and that plus her bare feet and wild, unkempt hair left her looking like a stray. Oh well. Not every dimension liked to make fancy clothes. Or shoes.
He pulled a rag from one of his many pockets, wiping down the inside of his blaster.
“Where’d you come from?” the girl asked in a hushed tone, like she was afraid he would snap and shoot her in the head for it. What a silly notion. Of course he didn’t just go around shooting people. That was a great way to get arrested even faster than he usually did.
“I was just in the Dimension of Broken Glass.” He flipped open the blaster’s panel, checking all the fuses to make sure none had flipped. “Honestly, I think it’s just a dumpster for an alien species that has developed interdimensional travel and a terrible drinking problem. There is no way it spontaneously generates all those broken bottles.”
The girl furrowed her brow. “You’re weird.”
“It was the six fingers that tipped you off, wasn’t it?”
Her eyes darted to his hands before becoming even more quizzical, but his blaster was in working order, so he put it back together while ignoring her. “So what is this dimension like? Are there any obvious dangers I should be worried about?”
“If they see you with weapons, they’ll shoot you,” she said.
“No visible weapons, got it.” Ford twisted his blaster until it was small as his palm and stuck it into his pockets. With the way the girl was looking at him, he was starting to wonder if her face only came in shades of shock and confusion. “Anything else?”
“How…?” She shook her head and clutched her ear of corn to her scrawny chest. “That doesn’t matter. They’ll shoot you in the head anyway when they see you’re not working.”
“They seem to like shooting people here.” That was never a good sign. It was unfortunate, since he had been hoping he could stay in the Earth-like dimension for a while, but it was best if he left after a night’s rest. “What about you? You’re not working.”
“I’m stealing food. I’d be extra dead if they found me. Me and my whole family.” She hugged her ear of corn for dear life. “So don’t give me away.”
Ford frowned, slowing down a moment to properly look at the child. Her face lacked the baby fat it should have had. She couldn’t be older than eleven, but her cheeks were drawn, and her bare knees were knobby and crisscrossed with scars. When her teeth flashed as she spoke, he noticed distinctive white rings on them, marks of periods of starvation while they were growing.
They were surrounded by miles and miles of corn, but the girl wasn’t eating.
“I’ll make you a deal.” Ford peeled an ear of corn from a stalk above him, causing the girl to wince. “We’ll shrink a lot of corn and hide it in my coat. If you can get me somewhere I won’t get shot, I’ll un-shrink it and give it all to you.”
The girl squinted. Ford took back what he thought earlier. Her face came in shades of suspicion too. “I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Ford. Deal?”
She still squinted. “You can’t take too much. If they notice that corn is missing, they’ll shoot people.” She shoved her ear of corn down her shirt. “And I’m Sorrel. So… deal.”
“Okay, Sorrel. Grab as much corn as you think you can and let’s go.”
Sorrel started off by stuffing her shirt, but Ford just shrank the corn with a shrinking ray and put it all in his pockets. The girl managed to stop staring long enough to lead him to the edge of the corn field, where an electric chain link fence topped with razor wire marked the border, and cameras swiveled on metal poles. Not too far away, hardly half a mile, was a guard tower.
On the other side was a vast strawberry field. Zero cover, with more armed guards walking between the vines while small children with stooped backs scurried with overstuffed baskets balanced on their shoulders.
“How were you planning on getting out?” Ford asked low enough to not draw attention from the other side of the fence. He and Sorrel stayed in the relative safety of the cornstalks, out of view from the cameras and guard towers for a moment.
“I got to borrow a lady’s rubber kitchen gloves today for cleaning her house.” Sorrel tilted her chin up, as if to challenge him into saying she hadn’t earned her right to those gloves. “I was going to put them on my hands and feet.”
“No ideas for the guards?”
“I’m waiting until they’re not looking.”
“So you were planning to get shot.”
The girl puffed up her cheeks to glare at him. “My family’s gotta eat. They cut pay last week.”
He almost made a sarcastic comment that, yes, being down one mouth to feed would make it easier to eat. Then he remembered that he was talking to a little girl, regardless of her scruffy and tough exterior, and he bit his tongue. “You’re lucky I’m here.”
Ford pulled on thick rubber gloves and rubber shoe coves, then unfolded a crinkly silver blanket from his myriad pockets and threw it over them both (provoking a yelp from the girl). “This will hide us from the cameras. Guards too, as long as they don’t look too closely.” He crouched low, his hair standing on end as it rubbed against the inside of the blanket. “Climb on my back.”
To her credit, Sorrel was getting better at going along with him. She climbed on without fuss or too much frowning at the blanket that now covered them, wrapping her scrawny arms around his neck, hooking her ankles around his waist, and settling her chin on his shoulder.
“Are you magic?” the girl asked.
“No, I’m a scientist.”
He hoisted himself onto the fence, frowning as the razor wire drew closer. Sorrel didn’t add much weight. His blaster was heavier than her.
“You should tell people you’re magic. They’d believe you,” she said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Once they were at the top, Ford risked a glance at the swiveling cameras before flattening one small section of the razor wire and pinning it to the fence. Then he swung his legs, just barely clearing the caught himself on the other side, chain links digging into his hands and the girl’s grip tightening until he almost couldn’t breathe. “Gentle,” he said as he quickly removed the pins and allowed the razor wire to spring back up where it had been forced to lie flat. She loosened her grip around his neck. “Now don’t scream.”
Her teeth chomped shut over noise when he let go of the fence and hit the ground. If any of the workers heard, they didn’t show it. The guards were far enough away that they wouldn’t notice the faint disturbance of light the blanket caused, and the worker children kept scurrying in the bright sun without the energy to care. Ford skirted the border, keeping Sorrel on his back, and watching for breaks in the fence until he saw an open gate, flanked by guards, leading to a paved road covered in rows of unmarked trucks. Workers were hauling crates of strawberries into the back of the trucks, which left a perfect opening for Ford to slip through the gate.
Sorrel’s shallow breath brushed his hair as one guard turned his covered head to frown at them, noticing the mild light disturbance the blanket made, but the churn of workers was enough to let them past before the guard decided to raise any alarm. They were on the open paved road now, walking past fields upon fields of farms towards a slummy city where wooden shacks were built on each other and the streets were littered with the corpses of starved dogs mixed with starved humans.
The stink of poverty and famine stung Ford’s nose and made his eyes water. The smell of death and misery clung to his clothes. “Take a left here,” Sorrel mumbled in his ear.
Ford didn’t take off the light-shifting blanket. The people here were beyond caring about a strange man in their midst, but he stuck out. Even traveling between worlds, he kept some fat and muscle, maybe not enough to be healthy but enough not to be starving. His clothes were worn, but well-made, versus the sackcloth rags and patches dangling off the frames of people sitting on their porches, people too old or weak to work and left to gossip together quietly. Mysteries and technology glimmered in his every pocket, behind every fold of cloth, but they had nothing.
They were old, poor, and dying. Nothing more and nothing less.
The home Sorrel guided him to—her home, he assumed—was a ramshackle structure trembling on its foundations, like an old man leaning on a rotting cane. Inside, there was a pot, a straw mattress, a wood stove, and a massive flat screen TV blaring colorful talking heads.
“We’re safe,” Sorrel said, pushing off the blanket and letting it crumple to the floor before jumping off of Ford. “Don’t talk too loud or the neighbors will ask questions.”
“How could anyone hear me over this?” Ford gestured to the TV, grimacing at the two commentators blabbing about… fashion? They were a man and a woman, the man with garish orange hair (if he wanted to pass as a natural redhead, he had failed miserably) and the woman with more jewelry than Ford had ever seen in his life. Were they both wearing eye shadow? “This is given to you by the state, I’m assuming?”
“Yeah. They’re just talking about a bunch of stuff from yesterday. They don’t let us turn it off this time of year.” Sorrel pawed at his pockets, and before she could dig up something dangerous, he brushed her off and pulled out the tiny ears of corn, lining them up on the floor for some enlarging. “How do we make the corn big again?”
“Switch settings on my shrinking ray.” Ford pulled out his ray and fiddled with the slider, which was helpfully labeled. Sorrel watched curiously as he enlarged all the corn, then grabbed one ear to shuck and began devouring it right there on the floor.
Ford sat on the ground, and the TV switched to an overhead shot of a town square full of huddled young people, some with faded dresses and dirty faces and some with pressed pants and blow-dried hair. The commenters yammered on, and he relaxed while Sorrel ate until something caught his attention between the inane chatter.
“…Stanley Pines…”
Ford jerked, taking a breath to ask Sorrel what they were watching, but the camera switched to a shot of two familiar teenagers.
Stanley and Stanford, standing together, holding hands like they were scared little boys rather than nearly fully grown. It was like Ford was staring at his own past, but it was clear these were different boys, even if they had the same name and faces as him and his own twin. They were skinner than Ford and Stan ever were, and the Stanley counterpart had tiny dotted burns on his hands. The young Stanford’s lips moved, but the only audio was of the commentators talking about nonsense, using words Stanford didn’t bother to try to understand.
The boys squeezed each other’s hands, but then let go, and Stanley walked through the crowd to a great stage together with a girl about his age… was that an alternate Carla McKorckle?
The alternative Stanford looked ready to turn to dust.
“What are we watching, Sorrel?” Ford asked faintly.
“That’s District 3’s Tributes for the Games this year.” Sorrel glanced up from her corn, her teeth pausing over the nearly-depleted ear. “The boy looks a lot like you.”
“What Games are we talking about?” Ford had a sinking sick feeling. Did he want to know the answer? Maybe he should just leave.
“The Hunger Games. They reap a boy and a girl from all twelve districts and they fight to the death in the Capitol. Then the Victor gets lots of food and money and lives like a Capitolite in the Victor Village.” She frowned at the screen, her corn still clutched tightly in her hands. “Is that your son?”
“I don’t have kids.” There were more questions. Whys, hows, whats, but he knew it wasn’t smart to ask them. Already, half his brain was planning, plotting, figuring out how to get Stanley out of this mess, but that wasn’t his twin brother. That was another Stanford’s brother. He couldn’t afford to risk staying in this dimension. This world couldn’t afford it. It was best if he didn’t get any more invested than he already was.
Would the world be destroyed if he touched Stanley? They had the same DNA. Did they function as counterparts across space and time?
Best not try experimenting.
“He’s going to die.” Sorrel said it like she was telling him that the harvest was tomorrow. “He’s from District 3, and they don’t have Careers. Career Tributes are the only ones who win.”
“He will win.” Stanford had no evidence to support that claim, no future-seeing tools, but he knew it in his heart. If this world’s Stanley was anything like his, he would win.
“If you say so, Mr. Scientist.” She turned her attention back to her corn, gnawing at it even after all the kernels were gone. “You sure that’s not your kid?”
“That’s an alternative version of my brother, actually. This is an alternative universe to mine.” Ford pushed himself to his feet. “Which means I have to leave immediately.”
“What?” Sorrel dropped her spent corn and jumped up to grab the edge of his coat. “But you just got here!”
“There is another version of myself and my brother here. Every moment I stay is a risk.” He did his best to ignore her face as he patted his pockets for his pocket portal maker.
“But why?” She dug her fingers into his coat, and he could only sigh, shaking his head.
“Because there’s only supposed to be one Stanford Pines at a time. The longer I’m here, the closer the world comes to tearing itself apart to deal with the paradox.” Even if he didn’t contact his counterpart, every moment was a moment that strained the existence of this world further. His brother’s counterpart was in a tight situation now, but wasn’t nearly as tight as it would be if his universe collapsed.
“Can’t you at least stay to meet my family?”
He dared to look at the girl’s face, and he really shouldn’t have. It was like staring down at a starving puppy. A starving, heartbroken puppy he was about to leave in a dimension where people made puppies fight to the death.
Traitorous pullings at his heart urged him to do something, anything, but he couldn’t think of what he could do without risking the world.
Then an idea.
“I have to leave, but you don’t have to starve.”
His light-distortion blanket was still on the ground. He wrapped his shrink ray in it before offering the package to the girl. “You saw how we stole food. Now you can do it yourself.”
She stared at him, then at the package. Slowly, she reached one arm out to accept it, then she hugged it tight to her chest. Her other hand was busy gripping his coat.
“And I’m not saying that you should shrink all the guards to the size of ants and see how they fare with your feet, but the shrink ray works on humans.” He gently pat her head. His fingers tangled in her thick curls, like even her hair was trying to get him to stay. “Now have fun robbing them blind. Go start a revolution when you’re older.”
She still held onto his coat. He patted her hand, and then slowly, slowly, she uncurled her fingers. “Thank you,” she said quietly, her voice shaking. “Thank you.”
“Thank me by gaining some weight. You were too easy to carry.” Ford grabbed his portal maker, fiddling with the controls. Yes, the film between this world and another was thin enough to tear open here. “Take care of yourself, Sorrel.”
“Good bye, Mr. Ford.”
He tore open a blue sparking hole in the air of Sorrel’s home. She hugged her gift to her chest, staring at him as he stepped through and closed the portal behind her.
Then she was left alone in an empty house with piles of corn and hugging technology far beyond her world.
Sorrel shook her head, staring blankly at the wall. “No one is ever going to believe me.”
The next world was also something that could have been on Earth, but it wasn’t nearly as nostalgic. Winter, but no snow. Instead, biting cold that chipped away at his fingers. He stepped out into a forest of leafless trees in a torrent of freezing rain, boots hitting slick iced cobblestone. He was in a walled-off courtyard, surrounded by a dead garden in front of a grand black castle, which looked all the grander for being compared to the slum Ford had just been in.
There weren’t any lights inside, electric or otherwise. Maybe abandoned? Or full of monsters? Ghosts? Ford pulled his coat tighter around himself and trudged to the front door anyway. The weather was awful and he wasn’t in the mood to search for shelter when there was a perfectly nice castle presenting itself to him.
The door creaked open like he was trying to roll a cannonball down the hall, but it didn’t look like there was anyone around to hear him. The foyer looked like it had once been grand, but now the carpets were torn as if by careless animal claws, the curtains were moldy and moth-eaten, and all the paintings of nobility long gone were cracked and peeling. Even the furniture (and figures that a rich noble could afford to leave behind so much furniture) was mostly cracked, rotting, or tarnished. The marble tables were chipped, the candlesticks slathered in dripped wax, and the grandfather clock between two marble stairs sagged on itself like it needed a cane. Water damage, probably.
Ford shucked his coat and shook out his hair, spraying water droplets over the faded carpet and wrinkling his nose. The smell of wet fur, moldering wood, and rotting animal carcasses lingered in the walls like someone had rubbed it in. Clearly, strays had moved in. Hopefully, nothing with too many teeth.
“Who are you?”
Ford swung towards the source of the voice, hand automatically going to the pistol at his hip, but there was nothing there. Just a cracked window and a chipped table topped with an empty vase and a tarnished candlestick.
Oh boy. This was either a haunted mansion, or the universe had rules he didn’t know. Universes often had weird rules, like thoughts becoming manifest or everything colored red turning into fish to skip on clouds. Some rules were more confusing than others.
Ford shook his head and folded his wet coat over his arm. He had a feeling he shouldn’t just leave it lying somewhere. He still wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have to jump out of this world at a moment’s notice.
Up the marble stairs, there were scratches on the wall. More animal claws, but they looked to be the size of a bear.
There were whispers downstairs from the foyer. There was no one there, but there were whispers, and apparently a very big animal had made its home in this castle. Maybe he should leave?
Ford sighed, taking just a moment to rub his eyes. He hadn’t slept for over two dimensions prior to this one. How long would that have been ago? He didn’t know, but he was getting far too old to go so long between sleeps.
“Would you like to rest, sir?”
Ford snapped his hands away from his face and swung around again, searching for the voice (it was new this time, different), but there was nothing. Just peeling paintings and abandoned finery.
“Do you think that’s him?”
“It can’t be.”
He was definitely hearing voices. Gently, he rubbed his temples to combat the oncoming headache. The plate in his head kept anyone from implanting voices in his head—inconvenient for aliens that communicated through telepathy, which caused him problems in the Dimension of Telepathy and Incomprehensible Screaming—so something had to be actually speaking for him to hear it. Either that, or somewhere between the last dimension and this one, he’d snapped and he’d soon be a raving loon in the woods.
“Alright, let’s make this quick,” Ford said to thin air, pressing his hands together like he was explaining to a child. “I am here because it is raining outside and I need a place to sleep and work before moving on to another dimension. If I can do that with minimal cryptic mumbling, that would be ideal.”
“He definitely sounds right,” a female voice with a slightly mocking lilt joined in the whispers.
“Wendy, show some respect.”
“Uh, how about I don’t?”
“For the record, this counts as cryptic mumbling,” Ford told the ceiling when he still couldn’t see who the hell was talking. Luckily, the voices didn’t sound hostile, so he kept walking through the winding halls of destroyed paintings and scratched up rugs.
Eventually, he came across the rotting remains of a devoured deer, just lying on the floor for the rug to soak up all the various fluids it leaked in death.
“Oh right, we were supposed to clean that up,” the female voice piped up again, somewhere behind him. Ford glanced towards the voice, but as usual, there was nothing, just some chipped tables with empty vases and one tarnished candelabra.
“Dude, how long has that been there?” a new male voice rose from ahead in the hall, but Ford couldn’t see anything in the dark this far away.
“I dunno.”
“If you’re supposed to be some kind of poltergeist maid service,” Ford said as he inched around the corpse, covering his nose against the ripened smell of half-eaten offal, “you should all be fired.”
“Ha! Too late. You’re stuck with us!”
“Curses are great for job security, dude.” There was thumping ahead, like something heavy was moving across the floor. Ford grimaced, doing his best to not shiver. It was like he’d been implanted in a bad ghost movie. “I’ll get the broom!”
“Soos, you don’t have hands.”
“Hands are overrated, dog.”
“If this is what I have to look forward to all night, I should have just camped out in the rain,” Ford said, but despite it all, the banter took the edge off of the creepy haunted mansion atmosphere the castle had.
“Yeah, so, about that,” the female voice started as he kept walking down the hall, “who are you? Because you look a lot like a guy we know.”
“I do?” A rock sat in Ford’s gut. It was never a good sign when people recognized him.
The hall rumbled. Something was thundering behind him. Claws against wood. Ford froze.
“I smell something!”
The roar that came from behind wasn’t a voice from a playful poltergeist. It was gravel and teeth. Oh shit, could the thing that ate that deer and destroyed all the woodwork talk?
“Run!” the female voice whispered, and he had no problem listening. He sprinted, checking doors along the hall, searching for a place to hide until one door flew open to show a thin stairwell. “Don’t run there, don’t run there!”
But it was too late. Momentum carried him forward, tumbling up the stairs. They were crumbling, and he could quickly kick a large rock that used to be a step against the door, probably not enough to stop a creature that caught his scent but enough to slow it down.
The stairs were winding, narrow, but he burst into an abandoned master bedroom after stumbling. Torn, unrecognizable paintings framed with gold leaf, a four-poster bed and plush moth-bitten chairs covered in sheets, a dusty glass container set by the window, open and allowing ice to creep onto the worn rug.
Ford dragged both the chairs in front of the door. After a moment’s consideration, he pushed a massive armoire that was probably worth more than his childhood home in front of it too. Barricading was the kind of thing one didn’t want to skim on.
Listening for any crashing noises from the bottom of the stairs, Ford glanced around, searching for an escape route, and… there was nothing. No hallways, stairs, or hidey-holes. The open window led to the roof, but the tiles were ice-slick and he’d topple to his death in no time.
That left two options: either he fought the creature hunting him down, or he hopped to another universe and hoped it was hospitable.
He didn’t really want to leave a dimension that clearly so matched his own, but he wanted to be eaten by an angry monster even less, so he patted his pockets until he found his portal maker.
Something rattled in the room. At first it was easily dismissed as mice, but the tapping persisted, banging near the window. Had his pursuer taken to the roof?
But no, the tapping wasn’t at the roof, but at the glass case on the table next to the window. Inside the case was a book attached to a small gold monocle. The monocle was floating and tapping on the inside of the glass. On the cover of the book, a familiar six-fingered hand embossed in gold gleamed at him.
Shit.
The book flipped open as soon as it was clear he was paying attention, half its pages rotting or falling out. It was never a good thing when Ford could recognize something in a universe from his personal life, because it usually meant that either he was in an alternative universe or an alien that depends on manipulation is about to eat him.
The book flipped to a blank page. As if a ghost were writing, words in neat script appeared. Who are you?
“I don’t tell haunted books my name.” If nothing else, this meant he had to leave this universe. He fumbled with his portal maker, trying to pay attention to that while his curiosity kept his eyes on the book, where more words were forming.
I’m not haunted. I’m a human who was cursed to be a book.
“And that makes it better, how?” Wait. Ford’s fingers paused on his portal maker, frowning at the book. A human cursed to be a book, and that book happened to look exactly like one of his journals. Oh no. “Your name doesn’t happen to be Stanford Pines, does it?”
You look how I would have if I had aged as a human. Who are you?
Ford looked at the ceiling, taking a deep breath. “Damn it.” He was too close to his counterpart. He had to leave now.
Something downstairs crashed. The room shook with a howl as something barreled up the stairs. Oh right, Ford was being chased.
That’s my brother, the book wrote.
“Stanley?” More words were appearing on the book’s pages, but Ford had no time to read them. His barricade exploded, and it was only Ford jumping in front of his counterpart that kept a stray chair from crushing the glass case—though the chair instead left a massive bruise on his shoulder. Ow.
“WHAT ARE YOU—” a gravely roar erupted. Before him was a massive beast, like a cross between a bear and a wolf standing on its hind legs, dressed in the tattered rags of what might have once been finery, but it was its face that drew the most attention. Even covered in fur, twisted in anger, and bordered with a broad brow suited more for an animal, Ford saw himself.
And the beast saw himself, too. He reeled back, his claws skidding on the floor, and his jaw went slack. “Stanford?”
“Yes and no. Your brother is still the book.” Ford had no idea what kind of fairytale awfulness he’d stepped into, but he had zero intention of sticking around to find out. With Stanley not immediately about to kill him, he looked down at his portal maker, fiddling with the controls. The fact that it allowed him to avoid looking at either the alternate Stanley or the alternate Stanford was a happy side benefit. “Long story short, I am from another dimension with its own version of Stanley and Stanford Pines, and my travels through different dimensions has landed me here. Don’t touch me because it might destroy your whole world.”
The floor trembled as the alternative Stanley sat down on his haunches, looking wholly nonplussed about the risk to his world as he leaned forward to see what Ford was doing. Ford ducked away before they could touch, and the beast scowled. “You’re not making sense, poindexter.”
For a moment, he sounded so close to his own brother that Ford’s gut lurched and he wanted to snap at him, but he just shook his head and took a deep breath. This wasn’t his Stanley. This was someone else, someone he’d never met before in his life.
“Unless you have a solid grasp of interdimensional physics, it’s hard to make much sense. Suffice to say, I’m not your brother, just a different version of him.”
“Yeah. A version that isn’t a dusty old book.”
The book flapped impatiently in his glass, which lost some effect with how ragged and thin his remaining pages were. Stanford did his best to ignore it, and the alternative Stanley just snorted bitterly in the book’s general direction. “Denial doesn’t suit you, Sixer.”
Sixer. Ford grit his teeth and shook his head to dislodge all the thoughts and feelings that stoked. “Sorry for interrupting your… cursed existence with ghosts, I guess, but I have to be going.”
“We don’t have ghosts here,” the alternative Stanley said, wrinkling his snout. “Just some useless servants who were turned into furniture. You met Wendy. She’s the candle stick thing.”
Words bloomed on the book again, which Ford only briefly glanced at. She’s a candelabra, Stanley.
“You don’t have to go,” the alternative Stanley continued, ignoring the book. “I’m not going to eat you. I was just acting like I would to get you out of the house.”
“The longer I stay, the more danger your world is in.” While that was true, if Ford were being honest, he just wanted to get away from the shadow of his brother as fast as possible, his curiosity about the condition of this world be damned. He activated his portal maker, and a bright blue tear ripped through the air all at once.
The alternative Stanley snarled, hackles rising as he jumped between the tear and the glass case holding his decaying brother, but when the portal didn’t consume the whole room, his ears perked cautiously. “What the hell is that?”
“A portal to another world. Hopefully, one without any versions of either of us.” Ford dropped the portal maker into his pocket. “Good luck with this… whatever it is you both got into.”
“Wait, wait,” the alternative Stanley lumbered close, but not close enough to touch, thankfully. “Before you go, where’s your Stanley?”
“Mine?” Ford focused his eyes on the portal. “He’s home. Still human as far as I know, and probably exploring the world on a boat.”
“Oh.”
Ford could tell the alternative Stanley wanted to ask more. The alternative Ford probably did too, though it was hard for him to ask anything when Ford was determined not to look at him. Before they could ask him anything else, he stepped into the portal. “Good luck,” was all he said.
Then he shot to another world.
The next time he met another human, he was in a hub dimension. It was a vast wetland, with great trees with thick roots digging into the water, covered in vines that bled purple poison that covered the water’s surface like oil. Wooden slats floated over the poison, giving people enough room to set up floating boat houses and stores, and it was full to the brim with interdimensional rejects, refugees, and merchants. Also, bounty hunters. Bounty hunters very interested in claiming the price on Ford’s head.
He was running from a particularly determined hunter that skimmed the water like an insect, cutting past the traffic on the wooden slats, but that gave Ford the advantage of disappearing in the crowd.
Unfortunately, the bounty hunter was able to jump into the crowd too.
She burst from the surface of the water, scattering droplets of purple acid from the tips of her legs as she landed on the wooden slats, and the crowds reeled back, screaming as they tore their clothes off before acid could get to their skin (or scales, fur, feathers, ionized surfaces…) and Ford scrambled to weave through them to disappear, but the bounty hunter’s grasping mouth pincers snatched at the edge of his coat. He kicked it in the nose and started sprinting.
The crowds were closing in on him. They wanted to end the conflict quickly and let the hunter take him, but he barreled through the crush of bodies, shoving them into the water where they screamed and thrashed.
The only sign that he was still being pursued was the screams behind him. This hunter was silent, skittering over water and jumping into the crowd over and over, utterly relentless as she followed the convergence of people as some struggled to grab Ford’s arms, nearly yanking them out of his shoulders. He was buried in aliens and someone grabbed his hair, wrenching him into a floating house.
He hit the floor, the whole building wobbling on the water surface, and he jumped to his feet just as his captor locked the door behind them.
Instinct drove his fist towards his captor—human, or at least something that looked human, and that was not a good sign—but they ducked away, a blur of leather as they grabbed his arm and jammed it into his shoulder. He bent and grabbed their leg around the thigh, lifting them off the ground and slamming them against the wall. He kneed their gut and they gasped out the air, their body drooping against his, until their foot tucked against his supporting knee and forced it to buckle. He hit the ground again, but this time, they were on top of him, and they punched his throat. He convulsed as he instinctively reached up to touch his neck, and they rolled him onto his stomach, digging their knee into his back.
“I’m not here to hunt you,” they muttered into his ear, and that was the only thing that stopped him from grabbing their ankle and yanking them off balance.
After a moment, it registered that not only was the form basically human (or at least he thought it was, since he wasn’t focusing on establishing his captor’s (savior’s?) species in the last few seconds), but the voice was as well. An adult woman’s voice, in fact. Either he was dealing with a human or a psychic shapeshifter.
“Okay, no more fighting? No more fighting.” She rolled off his back, lying flat on the ground and listening for any sign that the hunter or hostile crowd noticed he had been pulled away. Ford stole a glance at her, frowning as he couldn’t find any evidence of non-humanness in her face. She could have easily been a woman he knew back home—about half his age, probably in her thirties, with dark cropped hair and big brown eyes. She caught him looking, and she flashed a smile with crooked teeth. “Hi there.”
Ford didn’t even try to smile back. He didn’t know this woman, and he didn’t trust anyone to help him out of the goodness of their heart. After three seconds of him staring at her, she screwed up her mouth and nose into some parody of seriousness before nudging him with her elbow. “That’s you. That’s what you look like right now.”
She rolled to her knees—full leather jacket covering a turtleneck sweater, leather clothes, waterproofed leather boots, this was a woman dressed for travel—and crawled to the door, peering through the keyhole. “The hunter’s gone, but the crowd is upset. We should stay in here while it cools off.”
They were in a single-room cottage. There was no bed nor cushion, but there was a station that cleansed water and a wood fire stove, which would be all a person really needed to survive. A tall traveler’s backpack was tossed next to the cleansing station, but there weren’t any personal affects there. For all he knew, the woman could have been living here for weeks, or maybe this place was completely abandoned.
“Why are you helping me?” he asked as she settled next to the door. She pulled out a knife from one of her pockets. He tensed, but she lay it on her lap, keeping one eye on the door.
“You’re Stanford Pines, right?” She smiled at his wary expression. “Don’t worry. I don’t know for any weird reason. Your name was written in the stars.”
She gestured vaguely at the sky, and just as Ford decided he was dealing with a madwoman, she giggled to herself. “Literally. They set up the stars to spell out all the names of people who have bounties on their heads in this world. Closer a person is to the hub, the brighter their name. It’s a good system if you like catching people for money.”
“Oh, great.” Ford leaned his head against the wall, keeping his voice low to keep it from carrying outside. He’d have to leave before the next nightfall, and he’d only been in this world for a few hours. “So that’s how every bounty hunter knew I was here.”
“Yeah. Everyone wants to get on Bill Cipher’s good side,” the woman said, still smiling. Odd. Most of the people he met in the multiverse would flinch at the sound of Cipher’s name, if they knew who he was at all.
“But not you?”
“Nah. I don’t like him, so if he’s mad at you, that probably means you did something good.”
Ford wished he had, though he supposed his ongoing attempts to create a weapon that could destroy him counted as threatening enough. Either way, he understood the deep desire to spite Bill Cipher, and maybe that was all this woman needed to help him escape.
“Are you a shapeshifter? You look human,” Ford said, keeping careful watch on her expression for signs of deception.
“Pfff. Me, a shapeshifter?” If she really was a shapeshifter, she got credit for nailing a perfect human eye roll and grin. “I wish. No, I’m 100% human. You didn’t think you were the only human who’s ever left their world, did you?”
Ford didn’t answer because that was exactly what he had thought. She must have seen it in his face, because she laughed again.
“You’re not even the only Stanford Pines out there. At least, that’s what the stars say.”
It made sense. There were, after all, infinite alternative universes. It only made sense that there were other Stanfords out there, even just other humans. Despite that, the revelation rocked the world (or maybe that was just the current under the house). In all the years, the decades, he had been traveling the multiverse, he had never met another human outside of their native dimension.
“How long have you been traveling?” he asked, scooting closer to her to see her better. She had a thin scar on her lips, a faint smattering of freckles on her nose from sun, but nothing would make her stand out if she were suddenly transplanted back home. He wondered if the illusion of normalcy would hold up if she removed her collar or sleeves. Goodness knew that the illusion wouldn’t hold for him.
“I think…” She frowned, propping her chin on her fist. “Twenty years, maybe? It’s hard to keep track.”
“You couldn’t be older than thirty-five,” said Ford. Lines were already beginning to come to her face, but he had a feeling that that was only because she was exposed to the elements like she wouldn’t have been back home.
“Yeah. I started world-hopping when I was a kid.” She smiled again, but the smile seemed off this time. “I adventured early.”
There was a story there, but Ford decided to let it lie. Her ear twitched, still straining to listen to the crowds outside, but her smile quickly shifted into something warmer. “So how long have you been out and about the multiverse?”
He weighed the pros and cons of lying. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t guess his age just fine by looking at him. “Nearly thirty years,” he said, deciding to be honest.
“Thirty years?” She whistled softly. “Do you have any cool stories?”
“I’m sure I don’t have much more than you. Twenty years, thirty years, it all comes down to about the same out here.” Sure, the extra ten years gave him more experiences, but at a certain point, he could only remember so many without referring to his journals. It was the first ten years that were the most significant—the years he learned how to survive, the years he buckled down and gave up on going home—and she’d already been through those. “I can’t keep track of all the stories these days, to be honest.”
“Too many? Yeah, I had that problem too. Then I started writing them all down on my skin!” She turned her back to him and pulled up the back of her jacket and sweater, showing off her bare back. “Check it out!”
‘Writing’ was the wrong word. ‘Tattooing’ was better. All across her back was an intricate tapestry of images so crowded that he needed a moment to pick them all apart. The colors shimmered, the art popping out like it was three dimensional rather than inked, and he slipped closer to squint at it. Some of the designs trembling along the edges of others, and some were so small that he’d need a microscope to make them out. They seemed to be constantly moving. After a moment of proper examination, he was able to make out the centerpiece woven into so many other images—six prongs of lightning hitting the ground, and from that ground, a tree growing. It looked like a fir tree sprouting with glowing stars growing instead of cones. As he came close enough to see the design in full, she stretched her back and the whole thing shifted, turning into an entirely different tapestry.
“You’ve layered different tattoos on each other.” He never seen that on a human before, but some aliens had developed techniques that effectively made pocket dimensions on skin to allow room for multiple tattoo layers. She laughed, and every rattle of her back shifted the designs until they were swirls of color and shocks of scenes of battle and intrigue.
“I couldn’t fit twenty years on my back without that!” She dropped her sweater and jacket back over the tattoos, turning around so their knees were almost touching and she could grin at him properly. Despite himself, he started to smile too. (He didn’t think he’d ever talked to someone else in his position before.) “Do you have any tattoos?”
“None as good as yours. Just some I picked up in the early days.” Normally he did his best to hide his tattoos, but the woman had just shown her own. He pulled his collar down and showed his dorky star with a rueful smile. “Not my proudest moments.”
“That is the best tattoo I have ever seen in my whole life,” she said with such seriousness that she crossed straight into parody. Ford laughed, letting his collar pop back into place.
“Clearly, you’ve never seen your back.”
“It’s pretty hard for me to see,” she admitted before checking out of the keyhole again. “And I think the crowd has calmed down. How do you want to do this?”
“If all the bounty hunters know I’m here, I should move on. Where is the closest space that a portal maker could tear?”
“I’ll show you.” She pushed herself to her feet and offered him a hand. After a moment’s hesitation, he took it. “They’ll probably mistake us for each other anyway. If they catch us, I’ll just run off and pretend to be you.”
It was a mistake that would be easily made by aliens who had never seen more than one human before (especially as they hadn’t seen more than one white brunette human before), but he still frowned at the thought of a complete stranger putting herself in harm’s way like that for his sake. It was… suspicious.
“Why would you do that?” he asked.
“Because humans have to stick together, right?” She pushed the door open, keeping a grip on his hand as she pulled him into the mesh of aliens squeezed onto wooden slats in the greenish sun. “Besides, if Bill Cipher wants you dead, you’ve got more important things to be doing.”
That wasn’t enough of an answer. What kind of grudge could she be holding against Bill that justified pretending to be a hunted man? But it was too late to question her. The crowd was squeezing around them, and the only thing keeping them together was her tight hold on his hand.
“The fabric between this world and others thins out right over the water this way. Make a portal and jump from the dock, and you’ll be gold.”
“Wait.” Ford frowned at the woman as she led him to the edge of the docks between swamp boats stained in purple. “I don’t even know your name.”
Screams tore through the air behind them. The bounty hunter from before, the water skimmer, had jumped into the crowd, balancing on the burning heads of aliens and staring down at Ford and the woman.
“You’ll figure out my name in a few years.” The woman let go of his hand. “Give Bill a good kick for me, won’t you?”
Then she took off, streaking through the crowds like a bat out of hell. The bounty hunter tried to pounce, but she was ducking between people, using her small height to her advantage. The crowd began to tighten around her, but she was slick, avoiding the hunter as nimbly as Ford himself would.
Waiting around would mean making all her efforts meaningless. Despite his questions, he tore open another portal and took a running start off the dock, hurtling towards poisoned water before a new world swallowed him up.
He did eventually figure out her name once he was back home for a few years. It took his grandniece growing up and going through a phase where she cropped her hair short and drew sharpie tattoos on her skin.
That just left him with more questions, honestly, but Bill Cipher was dead. All the counterparts of him or his family, whether cursed or impoverished or lost in the multiverse, were safer for that.
Hopefully, that was enough.
