Unfamiliar Ground

Ford was pretty sure she'd been ripped off when it came to at least part of her tattoo.

She knew the language translation symbol was legitimate, at least, because when she'd managed to sort of pantomime what she wanted and it had been finished, her tattoo artist had enthusiastically and comprehensibly started to upsell her. She'd still been pretty new to dimension-hopping at that point, and had been a bit too charmed by the tattooist's hulking form, spindly spiderlike arms and many smiling mouths, and it hadn't been too hard to convince her to add more symbols and glyphs onto the tattoo in a branching, fractal pattern. One that was, at least, beautiful, if kind of the equivalent of getting a kanji tattoo that you thought meant Luck and really meant Lettuce, because the parts of it that were supposed to confer protection and luck sure didn't seem to actually work.

That had been nearly thirty years ago, and, Ford reflected, they had never seemed to work. Not that she'd been ceaselessly unlucky, and obviously she'd survived this long. But unlike the translation, which had been immediately noticeable, she considered that if she could have conceivably had the same mix of good luck and bad luck without the tattoo if she'd just wished really hard, it probably wasn't doing anything.

Few dimensional jaunts seemed like as much of a stroke of bad luck as this one initially did, however. It wasn't that it was a hellscape; there was nothing notably unpleasant about it, but that was because it wasn't notably anything at first.

It was, in fact, initially completely incomprehensible.

She couldn't tell if she was inside or outside, or what the place actually looked like. She wasn't blind, exactly, it was just that nothing she was seeing actually made any sense. There were no real shapes, there was no real color although certain things seemed... tinged slightly differently from one another without having anything that she could actually call 'color', impossible as that seemed. She spun around, and could look around at least even if she couldn't tell what she was looking at -- and that meant she could still move, too! -- but when she tried to angle her head or just her eyes even the slightest bit up or down, absolutely nothing happened.

"What--" she started, and then realized. For the sake of safety and comprehension and not getting completely lost, she'd tried to stick mostly to the third dimension in her travels, but this time she must have slipped down: "Is this a second dimensional plane?"

"Oh!" someone exclaimed behind her, and Ford whirled around again, startled. She couldn't quite make out what the person looked like, but there was someone there, she was starting to be able to tell, they looked like... practically a line. They also sounded alarmed. "Oh. Oh wow, oh no. Whatever you are, you need to come with me right now."

Well, that was unnerving. "What's wrong?" Ford asked, trying to glance around again, but not seeing anything recognizably amiss. Not that that meant anything.

"You're lucky I found you," the shape insisted. "If anyone else does, you're dead. Come on!"

Whoever this was, they couldn't reach out and touch or grab her, Ford realized. They couldn't make her do a thing, and she gave in and trusted their urgency, admittedly very nervous by that point, and tried to move towards them. Despite not being able to take steps in the way she was used to, she somehow managed it, and she didn't have time to figure out how she'd even done it before they made a relieved almost-sighing sound and sped off.

Ford had to run (or, she supposed, 'run') to keep up, but it wasn't a hardship; something about her body was definitely different here, and she didn't get fatigued in the same way she would have anywhere else she'd been.

"Who are you?" Ford tried, as they moved, and tried to reach up to make sure her glasses weren't slipping down her face. That was disorienting, because she couldn't reach up, up and down weren't really things here, and at least that meant her glasses couldn't go anywhere if they tried.

"A Pentagon," the answer came, and somehow, that stunned her.

"That... that's your name... as well as your shape?" she asked. That had a lot of implications, and hell, just the fact that this was apparently a polygonal being had some implications that had her reeling. Maybe this was good luck, after all...

"What else would I be named?" Pentagon answered. "Here -- in here."

There were shapes, sort of, that were a bit different than Pentagon's shapes, though Ford couldn't tell for the life of her that they were going into anywhere for sure. She took Pentagon's word for it, and continued after them, slowing as they finally did.

"I-- don't know," she admitted. "But aren't there other pentagons?"

"Yes," Pentagon said. "We can differentiate. I suppose, if you're from... somewhere else, you can't."

"I'm from the third dimension," Ford confessed, and something strange happened to Pentagon's hue. It would be inaccurate to say that they changed colors for a moment, exactly, but it was something like that, and it surprised her almost as much as their response, in hushed tones:

"Don't say that too loud!"

"Why?" Ford asked. She'd always asked too many questions and at the exact wrong times, she knew it but she couldn't quite stop herself.

"For the same reason you're lucky that I found you first." Pentagon seemed to relax a little, though Ford would never for the life of her be able to explain why she thought that. Maybe her tattoo was also 'translating' a bit of whatever these beings had for body language... "We're probably safe now, but let's keep moving."

"Where are we going?" Questions had been working out okay so far, so Ford just continued on, following again at a more sedate pace.

"I can't tell you. You understand. But there are a few others you'll be safe with, and we try to stick together as much as possible. There were never very many of us, and there are fewer now..."

"Very many of who?"

"We who acknowledge the higher dimensions," Pentagon said, and they arrived soon after, while too many questions were still swirling through Ford's head.

The few others consisted of, as Pentagon introduced them, 'A Line', 'A Line' (differentiated not in any way that Ford could recognize, but they seemed to have slightly different voices), 'A Square', and 'A Nonagon'. Except for when the lines faced her in a way that made them look mostly like points, and the way Nonagon almost seemed to curve, they were not readily distinguishable from one another, to Ford.

"A third-dimensional being," Pentagon introduced Ford as, voice almost awed then, and the other shapes exclaimed, shocked.

"My name is Ford," she introduced herself, awkwardly, and Square giggled.

"That's such a strange name! Does it even mean anything?"

"It..." Ford knew her name did mean something, and had even known what it meant at one point, but it had never seemed important and she'd forgotten it. Now she drew a blank, a little embarrassed for the first time to not be able to bring the answer to mind. "--What do I look like, to you?" she asked instead.

"Not like any shape I've ever seen," Line 1 said.

"You have round edges, but you don't look like A Circle," Nonagon agreed. "I've never seen an irregular Circle before."

"That's why I brought you here," Pentagon said, addressing Ford earnestly, "and you mustn't go back out there. If they realize what you are, they'll make you disappear, probably even kill you. But if they think you're an irregular Circle, they'll kill you for that as well. They've been more and more extreme about the deviations they will allow, lately."

Ford's mouth felt dry. "That's... That's horrifying."

"They know their hold is slipping," Line 2 said. "It's good, but they've also become more dangerous because of it."

"How did you come here?" Line 1 asked, curiously.

"I made a machine," Ford explained, "that allows me to travel between dimensions. I was actually trying to get back to my own. This is... very far from where I meant to end up."

"So you left your own dimension!" Pentagon said. "I knew you must have, but... We haven't been able to figure out how. Only one of us ever has."

Ford took a shaky breath. That nearly confirmed her suspicions, but while she had initially been a little excited, thinking that perhaps these people could help her defeat Bill, the more she heard the more that changed to horror... and almost trepidation.

Still, she had to ask, and did, biting the bullet: "Do you know Bill Cipher?"

That... did not get the response she'd been mostly expecting. "That name is unfamiliar," Nonagon said. "It's nearly as strange as your own."

Ford realized her mistake, adding quickly, "You-- may have known them by a different name; Bill is 'A Triangle'," it felt strange to say that in the way they did, audibly a name, it slotted Bill into something normal and interchangable and she felt a creeping wrongness to that, "an... equilateral triangle, I believe. They has..."

She was realizing that pretty much any description she could give was probably not one these beings would recognize. Yellow? Color wasn't exactly a thing here. Neither were patterns. Hats and bow ties would look like nothing. Would Bill have even had arms and legs here? These shapes didn't seem to, and without an up or down direction, there was no way to raise or lower them even if you had them!

"...a loud, somewhat high voice," she managed, a bit lamely. "I've only seen them in the Mindscape..."

She didn't need to explain more than that, though; several of them gasped, and Square squeaked, "A Triangle -- An Equilateral -- who left this dimension? They must be!"

"This 'Bill Cipher' you ask about isn't A Triangle," Nonagon informed her. "Not anymore. They is The Triangle."

"The only...?" Ford asked slowly, uncertainly.

"The infamous," Nonagon said.

"The Triangle is the one who told us all about the higher dimensions," Line 2 said. "They told us that the Circles knew, and had imprisoned and killed others for planning to tell us before."

"Circles have that much power in your society?"

"A Circle is the perfect shape," Nonagon said. "So they are our priests, the highest of us."

"What?" Ford could help from exclaiming. "No. No, that..."

"Ford is right," Line 1 said, severely, and there was a flicker to their hue as there had been to Pentagon's, before. This time, Ford was reminded abruptly of the way Bill had flickered, once or twice, to an agitated red before calming again. "You shouldn't repeat that unquestioningly."

"I'm sorry," Nonagon apologized immediately, and at least did sound like they meant it. "I am trying to do better."

"The Triangle told us there were places that shape didn't matter," Pentagon picked up the explanation, almost sounding reverent. Ford was shocked to recognize -- something of herself, in the past, when she had worshiped Bill, in their voice. "Where a Line could be a doctor, or a Dodecagon a craftsman, and that we didn't need priests. That there were wonders even beyond that, beyond our understanding. Freedom of understanding and movement and from all laws."

"That is..." Ford said shakily; she felt a bit sick, tried to get all of this to fit with the mental image she had of Bill, of her understanding of them, and found it worked far too easily, "almost certainly Bill Cipher."

"Is they well?" A Square asked eagerly.

"...I don't know. They seemed to be, the last time I saw them."

Ford realized she couldn't ask these shapes how to help defeat Bill Cipher; they were the only safe people for her in this dimension, apparently, and the respect they had for Bill meant they might turn on her if she positioned herself as Bill's enemy. More than that, for the first time in almost thirty years, she felt a twinge of doubt in her understanding of their positions. Of Bill as her enemy, of her as theirs. It was a very strong twinge.

Caste. The second dimension had a rigid caste system that associated shape with life function and social strata, that apparently killed anyone who deviated from the standard shapes too much, that hid knowledge from its members and would destroy lives to hide it. Body, mind, and life were controlled rigidly, they had no names outside of their forms which were also their functions. Who knew what sort of gender schema they even had, but Ford had a feeling it would also not be kind. Had any part of them here not been stifled?

Freedom of understanding and movement and from all laws.

"Are you the only ones resisting your leaders?" Ford asked, hoping against hope they were not. 'There were never very many of us, and there are fewer now', Pentagon had said.

"No," Line 2 said. "We go a step beyond, and are not welcome even among other rebels. They see much of what The Triangle told us as a curse. They want some things to change, but they don't want to know more. They want to forget the higher dimensions even exist."

"Many of them still believe a deformity of the body reflects or causes a deformity of the soul," Pentagon said, almost apologetically. "That's why even they would be dangerous to you."

Ford shook her head, an automatic gesture that probably didn't look like anything, so only served to shift her field of vision over the still-confusing plane. "I should go."

"Good luck," Line 1 said. "Returning to your home."

"If you see The Triangle, will you please ask them to come back?" Square asked suddenly, and Ford felt something twist in her heart.

"Don't," Pentagon said suddenly. "We don't need them. They abandoned us. They started a revolution and then left."

Line 1's hue flashed, that same annoyed-feeling sort of flash. "We don't need them," they agreed. "But not because they abandoned us. We want to leave too. If we deserve better than to stay--"

"We should not argue like this in front of our visitor," Nonagon said meaningfully. "If The Triangle wishes to know what is happening to our world, tell them the Circles' power is shifting, and that many who listened to their pronouncements are still fighting, and surviving. Things will not be this way forever."

"All right," Ford said, insufficiently, because she didn't want to say 'I'll tell them' and potentially break a promise. She wanted to tell them, though. She wanted to see their face, wanted to ask so many questions. "Good luck with your fight."

She had to figure out how to activate the machine without actually being able to lift her arms, or it, to manipulate it in the usual ways, but eventually she managed, and when she blinked her eyes she was in a much more sensical third-dimensional plane again.

She was also right in front of a group of cops, who looked even more shocked by her sudden appearnce then she was to see them, glancing between her and something behind her before raising their guns towards her. "Freeze!"

She raised her hands slowly, turning her head to see that the wall right behind her had one of her own fucking wanted posters on it. "...Ugh." Really?

There was a blur of movement, and a smallish figure tackled one of the police officers full-speed around the waist area, making an odd clacking-clattering sound. A pair of fireballs shot from the same direction, superheating two of the other cops' guns and making them drop them with exclamations, and Ford caught a glimpse of fire in her peripheral vision before she could even turn to look, someone next to her suddenly and grabbing her arm.

"If they're after you, too, that's good enough for me! C'mon!"

"Wha-- Agh!" For the second time, Ford was running, but this time she was being pulled along initially, by someone she'd barely caught a good glimpse of but looked almost superheroic from the back, with a cape, bodysuit, and long gloves and leggings that looked like they were made of white-hot fire, and a pink glow all surrounding her.

Actually, other than the fire, she was entirely pink, including her hair, and the odd horns that covered her head and were the only thing (other than her somewhat oversized head) that even slightly threw off the impression, from the back, that she could have just stepped straight out of one of Earth's comic books.

There was a chattering sound from behind them, and Ford glanced back as she ran; they were being pursued by... a mouth creature of some sort, practically just a mouth, with pink gums that also formed short arms and even shorter legs, as well as teeth and a tongue that was visible as they ran, mouth open. The chattering was their teeth clacking together, and was the same sound from the figure that had tackled the police, so Ford could only hope they was friendly.

"Hurry it up, I'm not gonna carry you!"

It was not as easy to run in this dimension as it had been in the second dimension; Ford was in good shape, but still found herself gasping, legs on fire (less literally than her rescuer's), by the time they stopped in an alleyway, the superheroine(?) tossing up fire towards the latch holding a fire escape's ladder up, causing it to creak alarmingly and then drop, liquid metal dripping onto the ground.

"They won't think to look for us in here." She started to climb, and the tooth person scurried past Ford and up after her, surprisingly nimble. Ford glanced back, but did hear that there were still police in pursuit after them, and started to climb herself with very little hesitation. What else could she do, at this point?

They only went up to the second story; the window was already broken, and the woman melted the rest of the broken glass in it, slipping through and followed after by her toothy friend. Ford followed through trying to touch anything as minimally as possible, not sure if it might be sharp or incredibly hot or both, and managed to drop down without too much trouble but with a painful twinge in her legs. She was getting too old for this for this kind of thing, she reflected, and the superheroine turned towards her.

She was actually very arresting from the front, much more recognizably nonhuman. Her head, Ford noticed, was a near circle, with an almost cartoonishly wide, large mouth and big, jagged, gapped teeth. She had only one eye, also very round, and either brown or just tinged with the pink that kind of covered her, and a slightly too long neck.

"So what'd you do, pal? I didn't get a chance to look at your--" she started, then actually took a step back in apparent astonishment. "Whoa! It's you!"

Ford looked around, as if she could possibly be talking to anyone else, but she was honestly fogged. She didn't recognize this person at all. "I'm sorry, have we met?"

"I mean, not officially." Astonishment had for a moment looked almost horrified, but then her expression shifted, more fascinated. "But you're Stanford Pines."

"I suppose my reputation did precede me, then," Ford said wryly, a bit ironic since obviously her reputation had preceded her to this dimension, given the wanted posters.

The woman shook her head. "No, I don't mean you're 'Stanford Pines, criminal whatever'. You were the human with Bill!"

Ford was startled, taking a step back herself uneasily, not sure how she thought of Bill anymore but also not sure if their acquaintances were safe. "You know Bill?"

"Sure do! Or did, I guess. Right, Teeth?"

"Yeah," the tooth-person -- whose name was apparently, fittingly, Teeth -- agreed, with a surprisingly almost Earth-Southern accent. "Haven't seen 'em since we left the Void, though."

Ford was, momentarily, fascinated by how Teeth could talk without vocal chords or lungs, but then shook herself a little. "--The Void, do you mean the Nightmare Realm?"

"There's a lotta names for it," Teeth kinda. Shrugged, without shoulders.

"That's one of the sillier ones," the superheroine-looking woman said. "More like 'nightmare to find anything to do'. Or 'nightmare to get out of'. Anyway, name's Pyronica."

"Very fitting," Ford commented lamely. She seemed friendly enough, both of them did, and they had saved her life. And this-- apparently long-abandoned, broken down building also seemed to be a good hiding spot from those cops, like Pyronica had said. Which, now that she was thinking of that, "Thank you, by the way. For the help."

"Not a problem." Pyronica casually flopped down onto the moldy remnants of an old couch that was still there. "Fuck the police, right?"

"Well," Ford admitted, "I did break the law. Maybe several... hundred... times."

Pyronica barked a laugh, at that. "Ha! See. And I bet it was one of those laws worth breaking."

"Stealing isn't very nice," Ford said uncertainly. "But in this case, it... seemed warranted. I need the parts I stole to get back home, anyway."

"Yeah, most people have reasons. Good reasons! But the system doesn't care about that. The system's made to chew people up and spit 'em out -- if it spits 'em out at all." Pyronica rolled her singular eye. Ford felt almost sick to her stomach, thinking back to the second dimension, to where Bill had come from, and now one of their... friends?

"You've thought your position through," she noted.

Pyronica shrugged. "I used to be part of the problem. Can you believe I was a superhero once?"

"I... actually can, yes." Though she was actually surprised she'd gotten that right.

She pointed at Ford. "All cops are corrupt, Stanford Pines. They're corrupt or they don't stay cops anymore, and that just goes double for superheroes. See, I was a legacy hero, daughter of heroes, a wide-eyed idealist... an idiot." She sighed. "But I'm actually not that mad you screwed up our plans."

"Bill said it was going to be a party," Ford recalled. She had cooled down from the run, wasn't breathing as hard, but she was still sore and went ahead and carefully took a seat on the floor. "Why was that your plan?"

"I didn't come up with it," Pyronica defended herself. "Actually, Bill didn't either."

"...Really?"

"Opening up a portal to Earth was their idea! Cracking open the walls between your dimension and their place and letting all that chaos leak in, that was their plan. But, you know, you've gotta package it right. I like a good party, sure, but a lot of the weirdos in that place," she said 'weirdos' fondly, "were real party animals. I mean, fun guys, sometimes, but I wouldn't want to spend an eternity in a frat, you know what I'm saying?"

Ford grimaced a little, imagining that. "I do, yes."

"They thought you'd like the sound of it. Said you thought weird was fun."

Ford was astonished. "They-- thought I'd like what they was saying?"

"Sure did! Tried to damage control when you swore to stop them, some of the guys started thinking they was losing control of things right then. Everybody started going their own ways after that. Teeth and I stayed a while, but..."

"And Bill didn't go with any of you?" They seemed pretty single-mindedly focused on Earth for some reason, Ford thought, if that was the case.

"They couldn't."

"What?" That, too, was a surprise, and Ford squinted at her. "Why?"

"Look, you're a genius." Pyronica waved a hand. "Which Bill is, too, but you've got access to supplies, which they doesn't, even if you have to steal them. It's easy to get to that place from any dimension because it's not a dimension, it's a weird little extra-space other dimensions leak into! But people got a kinda resonance to their own dimensions. You can go back where you came from pretty easy, but not anywhere else."

"And Bill can't go back to their own dimension," Ford muttered, and dragged a hand down her face. "Oh, no."

She stood up, slow and wincing a little. "I need to go talk to them."

"Go there?" Pyronica exchanged a glance with Teeth, for all there was one eye between them. "Do you know how dangerous that is?"

"I thought you said it was only a boredom nightmare," Ford said dryly.

"It is," Teeth said. "But it's fallin' apart."

"...Falling apart?"

"Collapsing in on itself," Pyronica explained. "Look, I'm not a physicist, but places like that pop up and collapse all the time. They don't last. Bill shored that place up somehow, so it's been around way longer than it should have been. We all knew it was gonna collapse. Why do you think we had to leave? I mean, I love the guy, but we couldn't just stay there."

Something clenched around Ford's heart and squeezed tight. She tried to ignore it. "Then I really do have to go. Thank you for the warning, Pyronica, Teeth, but you're their friends. And I was too, once. I can't just leave them there."

She said that, but she hadn't ever really been their friend. Even when she'd called herself that, she had outright worshiped them, she had put them on a pedestal and had all the stars in her eyes and she hadn't seen them, and where had that gotten the both of them? She'd panicked, completely. She'd changed Bill's classification in her mind from Muse to Demon, she'd thought them evil when they had just been desperate, when they'd had -- apparently -- some pretty good reasons for rebellion. She'd listened to Fiddleford, for fuck's sake, the man who screamed at dinosaur fossils and had talked like he'd seen one of the Horsemen of the Biblical Apocalypse, and she had let that plant seeds of doubt in her about Bill. What had she been thinking?

She started to fiddle with the machine again, having a good idea of where she was going this time, and how she might get there. A non-dimension in between every dimension, one that they leaked into constantly...

"Hey," Pyronica called out, "Stanford."

She glanced up again. Pyronica was sitting up straight on the couch now, and was smiling at her. "What you're doing's pretty great. Like, a real actual hero move. I can see what Bill saw in you."

"Tell 'em we said hi!" Teeth added, as Ford flushed a little and looked back down to their invention.

"Will do," she said, and pressed the button, and the scenery changed again, and she was floating in a starry, almost psychadelic void of nothing.