Bill Cipher has been watching the Pines for a while, but something strange happened to him one night when he visited the closet in their bedroom. One-shot. All characters belong to Alex Hirsch, not me.

Invisible Wizard

Bill Cipher was making the rounds of his vantage points in the Mystery Shack that night. Everywhere there were representations of him, he could watch. The Shack was full of them: the rug in the Gift Shop, the big stained-glass window that looked into a big room in the attic, the backs of playing cards in the living room, and so on.

The Eye in the Pyramid on the back of every dollar bill worked too, although the view from inside wallets and cash registers wasn't that great. The image of him on the negative twelve dollar bill was a better likeness, but nobody used those any more.

Then there were the more subtle ones. Even the simplest representation of a triangle would do, like the diagrams of equilateral triangles in geometry text books.

Even more subtle were the negative triangular outlines, where the third edge was completed in the human mind by gestalt. Bill liked those a lot, because even if people started realizing it was dangerous to keep images of triangles around they would probably forget those. Later that summer he would try to get V-necks brought back into style. His Llama could be influenced to do that.

When the Pines kids went time-traveling he had managed to use their disturbance of time to induce a subtle design change in the fez symbol for a high-ranking member of the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel. Instead of a rounded shape inside the crescent there was now an angle, with a dot inside for his single eye. It was now a sideways Bill silhouette. The change had percolated forward in time, altering every place that symbol appeared, from bobble-heads to wax figures, and altering people's memories so they couldn't remember the symbol had ever been different. Shooting Star, as a responsible party for the time change, had a dual memory that included the old symbol, but it was fading. He foresaw that the next time she made a rough picture of Fez Symbol, an omelet in the shape of his head, she would use the old symbol. Nobody would notice, and it would be eaten quickly.

Bill visited the triangular window that looked into the bedroom of Pine Tree and Shooting Star. It was a mess. Pine Tree was absent, Shooting Star was asleep on the floor amid pizza boxes and glitter, and a friend of hers was duct-taped to the ceiling. It was ridiculous what these meat-bags got up to. He planned to change that when he took over, by killing off most of them and forcing the rest to worship him.

There was one other vantage point he liked to visit whenever he came to look in this room, not that there was usually much to see from there. There was a closet with nothing much in it. There were a couple of shirts on hangers and a pair of old boots on the floor. It was the boots that gave him access, with a triangular notch on each.

Shooting Star had once sensed him there, and called him the Invisible Wizard. She had a bit of a sixth sense. She, like the others on his Wheel, was pivotal in his plans. She would either help him or block him entirely.

Inside the closet, things looked different than usual. He could see in the infra-red a large girl, half asleep, leaning against the side of the closet. She stirred and said, "Who's there?"

Bill said nothing, but directed his astral presence closer to watch her. One of Shooting Star's friends. Grendo, or something like that.

"There's a guy in here with me," said the girl. "Dipper, are you making a move on me? Gotcha!"

She had a grip on his astral arm! Bill was astounded. She was the strongest psychic will he had encountered since that Native American shaman he met decades ago.

"You don't feel like Dipper. You have funny edges," said the girl. "Doesn't matter. Since you came in here, you're gonna get kissed!"

Bill found himself pulled into her strong arms. She began kissing his surface, transferring onto him some sticky red stuff she had smeared on her lips in a pretend mate-attracting ritual.

"Yum yum, it's fun to kiss you!" said the girl. "Your skin feels kinda rough, though."

Bill cared nothing for this animal behavior, bred into humans by evolution for their reproduction. It was purely disgusting. She couldn't reproduce with him, obviously. He was just a practice dummy for her, to try out her brute instincts in preparation for a real mate. He scanned her future and found the strong possibility of a rich Austrian husband who would enjoy being dominated by her. Once Bill took over, he would be sure to change that future to an agonizing death as early as possible.

There wasn't anything he could do now. He hadn't yet been summoned, so he couldn't make deals or give her nightmares. All he could do was patiently wait until she fell asleep and let him go, which she finally did, two miserable hours later.

He left the closet, feeling angry and violated. From the window, he looked at Shooting Star again. Maybe he would feel better if he gave her a little payback for inviting over such a disgusting friend. He scanned her future and found she would soon be in competition with her brother for a new room. They would swap bodies with the Electron Carpet and rush from the room to sabotage each other's chances. He could possess small objects as temporary vessels and make them move a little. It wouldn't take much effort to untie Dippers shoelaces and trip her up, giving her brother a head start. He normally wouldn't bother with something so petty, but he was in a really bad mood.

As he left he snarled back at Grenda, "You monster!"