Usually, burning one's cursed possessions didn't involve copious amounts of melted sugar, but something about defeating a being of pure chaos energy seemed to call for s'mores. At least, the Pines Family had thought so.

It was odd to consider just how quickly the concept of odd itself could leave once Dipper and Mabel left Gravity Falls. It hadn't even been a week, and already, they were immersed in their old status quo. Tomorrow was the first day of high school. Tonight, like most nights, was supposed to be comprised of sound sleep. Technically, Dipper was, indeed, sleeping.

As with many things, the specification of "technically" here wasn't a good sign.

Dipper had been standing in an empty void, encompassed by the sight of absolutely nothing. It like the bottomless pit, in a way, except his feet were planted firmly on some sort of ground, albeit one he had no means of seeing. Then, the sky lit up with an unearthly, almost pixelated flame, and he was left without nearly as much time to think as he had to witness.

The horizon was comprised entirely of a blazing marshmallow-like goo, in a form similar to a cloud, or smog. Wind whistled around his ears at the pitch of what could only be described as an asthmatic kazoo. Within seconds, globs of now-boiling marshmallow were dripping from the sky in baseball-sized spheres. They crashed across the clear field of flickering neon triangles, which were lit in so many colors, they just about blurred into a unified fluorescent brown—a logically impossible color which fit shockingly well with a logically impossible sight.

At first, Dipper raised an arm and hunched to dodge a coming ball of marshmallow hail. No sooner did it pass his head than a second glob lobbed itself straight at him. He stumbled back, and his left heel knocked against a boiling pile of hot marshmallow goop. The instant the goop hit his sock, it burned through the fabric to dig at his skin. The white mass warped up, coiling into the form of a two-headed snake. It started to split apart from itself in a slain-hydra-like fashion while it slithered up his leg in multiple directions.

Again, Dipper was left without so much as second to consider what this cloud-critter was, how to get it off, or if anything remotely similar had been in any of the journals before. Instead, what little space in his brain had not been preoccupied with the faint burning sensation, or the atypically black shade of the sky, or the obnoxious noise pollution from an indeterminate source, was thoroughly occupied by a grating "WELL, WELL, WELLWELLWELL—"

The cloudy, confectionary smog had melted to form a distinctly triangular hole in the black void of a sky. A hazy dark-lit glow cast across the field, muting the multitude of colors with a monochromic haze. Thin, stick-like arms and legs jettisoned out from the shape.

"GLAD YOU KEPT THE PLACE UP FOR ME. IT'S HIDEOUS. I LOVE IT!"

It wasn't possible. None of this was. It was, after all, a dream, where possible things were generally scarce. Still, it was comparatively more impossible than most.

The only tool in in range Dipper could spot in reach at the moment was a stick. He jabbed the end through the mouth of the marshmallow snake while simultaneously trying to stomp on the tail. He wasn't sure if he succeeded, because he hadn't stopped to look. He was a bit too preoccupied with gaping at the shape in the sky to check.

"You're not here. You can't exist anymore!" Dipper shouted at Bill, as if insisting on fact would make him disappear.

"DON'T BE SO NEGATIVE, KID. CAN'T LET A LITTLE ERASURE FROM REALITY GET YOU DOWN. I INVITED SOME FRIENDS OVER. WHICH I HAVE, HERE. UNLIKE YOU. HERE. YOU SHOULD MEET SOME."

In the place of what would have been the sun, a white eye blinked open overhead. The remaining clouds burst in one last, unified flame, only to char and disintegrate into feet, hands and other disembodied appendages with tinier googly eyes and scraggly fangs sprouting haphazardly from wherever they happened to fit.

Without anywhere obvious to turn, Dipper instead tried duck. He flattened himself to level with the blinking rainbow-brown grass. The moment he came into contact with the blades, the triangles cracked. The ground opened up as shattered ice would to a frozen lake, except, instead of water, it gave way into a giant mass of gelatin.

The gelatin waved over Dipper as he sank into its depths. Dipper writhed to swing an arm towards his mouth, so he could at least get some air. Instead, he got a mouth full of lemon-lime flavoring.

Before he could so much as blink, the triangle in the sky shrunk and appeared in front of him in the familiar form of a small, floating flat pyramid. "I MEAN, YOU PINES WEREN'T DUMB ENOUGH TO THINK THE UNIVERSE IS ALONE, RIGHT?"

A disembodied foot, two ears and an elbow, all with tinier stick limbs of their own, fell into the jello beside the two of them. The foot smacked Dipper's head enough to knock Wendy's old hat from his head.

A second Bill appeared by Dipper's newly separated hat. He grabbed it and placed it over his top hat. "HAH. THAT'S NOT EVEN PART OF YOUR BODY. HAT POSER." The second Bill vanished, and melded with the first one, complete with the first speaking Bill, complete with Dipper's hat. "ANYWAY. THERE ARE MILLIONS OF POSSIBLE WORLDS. YOU KNOW, LIKE THAT GERMAN SCIENTIST WITH THE DEAD CATS. SURPRISE. I'M IN ALL OF THEM."

The second Bill reappeared directly behind him, or so he presumed. Dipper couldn't turn far enough to see him. He could only catch the sliver of a shining gold shape as its emanated light fragmented through the sticky green sea. "OR MAYBE STANLEY'S STUPID BRAIN COMING BACK BROUGHT ME BACK. OR MAYBE I HAVE A TWIN, TOO."

The first Bill piped up again. "THAT'S BILLY, I'M BILSON!"

Having at least come to the conclusion that he could, for whatever reason, still breathe inside jello, Dipper tried to raise a leg and lower his foot at the same time, to dig a pathway he could move through. His flail was interrupted first by the thick mass of the gelatin not budging, and then by the flashing appearance of countless Bills, of varying sizes and styles of headwear, cluttering the plane of existence with a yellow glow.

"DIPPER PINES."

"IAJR BR TJSRE, WSYR GP. XWAP YGIE PIESAEIGB."

Dipper tried to writhe away from Bill and out of the jello pocket trap. He succeeded in, if nothing else, knocking himself in the back of the head. He flinched, and a light "oof" involuntarily sputtered from him. The world in front of him vanished. It refocused in the faint shades of black dusted with the yellow outline of a bathroom night-light.

The water of the shower running on cold smacked against Dipper's face, down the collar of his already soaked pjs. Chunks of disintegrating tissue paper stuck to most of him, including, somehow, his mouth and nose. He coughed a wad of paper into his hand.

"What?"

Aside from the perpetual rush of dripping shower water, for that first second, the entire house was the sort of silent best reserved for libraries and cemeteries. The absence of the billowing wind, or the Bill associated with it, was so overwhelmingly quiet, the word still felt appropriate by comparison even when someone pounded on the door.

"Dipper?"

"Aah—" Dipper sprung back. He tried to grab the shower curtain, only to slip on the tub floor and lean the other way.

"Not that I'd ever not approve of you trying to not stink, but this maybe kind of isn't the best time to shower? That is a shower whoosh, right?" Mabel asked through the door.

"Y-yeah. I," Dipper grabbed both knobs to turn the water off. It wasn't until he was holding the right handle that he noticed his hand was trembling. He tried to ignore it. "Just nervous, you know, about—" Dipper considered what it was he was nervous about, and second, third and fourth guessed each possibility as thoroughly as four seconds would allow. "first day of school?"

It didn't feel right to bother Mabel with this, not when he knew she was finally excited for school again, and how he could easily be psyching himself out. People did have nightmares without them including trans-dimensional chaos creatures.

Dipper could hear her bouncing on the other side of the door "I know! New friends. New outfits. Picking our classes. Spontaneous fully choreographed group hallway dance numbers. Think of the possibilities."

"I promise that isn't and will never be what I'm thinking."

"You mean, you didn't get new clothes? Don't tell me you're still wearing that vest tomorrow, or the hat. I don't think they allow hats in high school. It's in the orientation booklet, between halter tops and knives."

Dipper suppressed a sigh, tried to sound at least somewhat awake, and dismissed it. "I can take off a hat. It's fine."

"You sure you're OK in there? Didn't get up and eat that leftover pizza, did you? It's like pepperoni poodle always says, pizza after ten, you're getting up again," she teased.

"No," Dipper reached around the shower curtain. He swatted around the darkness until he found the hand towel, pulled it into the shower and smacked it to his face. In the dim light, his imagination made the flecks of paper look like a triangle staring back.

"No, you're not a pizza cat burglar or no you're not OK?"

Dipper held the towel as far from himself as his arms would stretch. "It's nothing." Both. It was both.

Having a nightmare about Bill Cipher now was the same as about on par with having a nightmare about being chased by a chainsaw wielding ghost dragon in clown makeup. It was an irrational fear about something that didn't and couldn't exist. Cryptic last threat or not, Bill was gone.

Dipper tried to tell himself that was right, yet, as much as he wanted to, he wasn't sure if he could believe himself.

An awkward silence so long he wasn't sure if Mabel had left or not later, he finally admitted it. "I had a nightmare. About, that."

Mabel's voice hushed and softened with an instant understanding of which formal noun he'd replaced with 'that'. "Are you dressed in there?"

The question was so sudden and so seemingly off-topic that it drew a blink from Dipper. "Uh. Yes. I'm wet, though. Should I ask why, or, you—"

"Don't care. Awkward sibling hug time." Mabel shoved open the door, which, to Dipper's surprise, he must have not locked in his sleepwalk to the bathroom. She wrapped both a larger bath towel and her arm around his shoulders in a quick, barely-brushing hug.

Mabel had made it to verbalizing the first "pat" when she retracted a now soggy, paper-covered hand with a startled "eeew." She reached back to turn on a light switch, and took in the sight of her own splotched palm. "What is this?"

"Too bright." Dipper, meanwhile, flinched at the sudden influx of light so much, he stopped staring at the towel and instead used it to cover his face. "Also, paper."

Mabel shook her hand out, or so Dipper assumed, based on the sudden flapping noises. "What were you doing in the shower with paper? Bath-time origami?"

Dipper gave the only answer he had left to offer; an honest, muffled statement into a towel. "I don't know."