Chapter 5
Bill woke up very early the next morning when Robert and Alistair were still asleep. He couldn’t get back to sleep, however, because he had too many questions that he wanted answers to. Why was there an old, forbidden dormitory in the dungeon? Why was the Forbidden Forest forbidden? What was blurple, and could he eat it? And, most importantly, was there an agent of Big Math in the school somewhere? Bill decided to start his investigation into that last question with Alistair.
Alistair was very confused and annoyed when he was woken up by a small, soft, very warm finger poking him in the cheek. He scrunched his eyes closed and tried to pretend to be asleep, but quickly jerked up into a seated position with a yelp after getting a surprisingly hard slap in the face. He glared down at Bill while rubbing his stinging cheek.
“Why did you do that?” he shout-whispered at the triangle.
“You’re an agent of Big Math, aren’t you, Alistair?” Bill responded, sounding very serious.
“What?” Alistair responded. “I’ve never even heard of Big Math before right now. Go back to bed and leave me alone.”
“Now that’s exactly what an agent of Big Math would say,” Bill said.
Alistair groaned before laying back down to try to go back to sleep. Bill sat in silence for a few seconds before raising his right hand over Alistair’s face.
“I WILL throw you,” Alistair threatened.
Bill slowly lowered his hand again, considered what he had heard and then raised it up again before letting out a surprised squeak as Alistair grabbed him and tossed him over Robert’s bed and onto his own. He landed in an undignified heap before getting back up and glaring at Alistair, then he got out his journal, added a note of ‘Alistair is NOT a morning person’, underlined it a couple of times, and burrowed back underneath his pillow.
When Alistair woke up again, it was almost time to go down for breakfast and start their school day. He got out of bed, stretched, then went over to wake up Robert. Robert groaned and grumbled and tried to hide under his blankets but was eventually coaxed out of bed. Alistair then went over to Bill’s bed and was rather confused to see one of his lower corners and one of his legs sticking out from underneath the pillow. After removing the pillow, he was even more confused to see that Bill was hugging his hat like it was a stuffed animal and that he was grinding a couple of his bricks together, producing a sound like someone rubbing two stones against each other.
“Wake up Bill, time for breakfast,” Alistair said.
The little triangle immediately hopped up, looking full of energy. Then he dusted off his hat, put it back on his top corner, and straightened his bow tie.
Shortly after, the three of them made their way to the Great Hall, Bill standing on Robert’s shoulder and directing ‘his Taxi’ on how to get there. When they got to the table, before they started eating, the House Prefect, Reginald Barkley, handed out the class schedules to all the Slytherin students. After that, Alistair and Robert started eating breakfast. Alistair looked up after he had started eating and noticed that all Bill had was a cup of tea, held with pinkie extended (as is proper), and drunk with a loud slurping noise (as is NOT proper).
“Aren’t you going to eat something?” Alistair asked.
Bill looked at him with a confused expression, then shrugged and turned to look at the food. He put a slice of toast and some bacon on his plate and then got distracted by Speckles diving down onto the table in front of him to steal his tea.
“--. ---/--. . -/-.-- --- ..- .-./--- .-- -./- . .-,” he chirped at Speckles, sounding very annoyed.
“-- .. -. ./-- .. -. .,” the starling chirped back, sitting smugly on the edge of Bill’s tea cup and then dipped his yellow beak into the tea and took a drink.
Bill ate his toast and bacon while grumbling about Tea Thieves, and then shooed Speckles off his cup so he could drink the rest of it.
After breakfast, their first class was Transfiguration with Gryffindor, taught by McGonagall. Bill noticed on the walk towards the class that the paranoid-looking kid, who he had recently learned was in Ravenclaw, seemed to be trying to follow them sneakily while taking notes in a blue journal with a silver pine tree on the cover.
When they got to the classroom, Robert sat at a table in one of the back corners of the room and Bill hopped off his shoulder to sit on the table. Alistair sat at a table a couple of rows in front of them with another Slytherin first year named Felicia Weatherby. A few seconds later, McGonagall entered the room and passed out toothpicks to all the students. Bill looked down at his toothpick in confusion before an idea occurred to him. He picked it up, made sure it was well hidden by his hand, and then slowly started sliding closer to Robert. Robert looked down at him suspiciously, but quickly moved his attention back to McGonagall, who was explaining the correct spell and wand movements required to change the toothpick into a needle. He laid his right hand over his toothpick protectively in case Bill was planning to steal it, and then let out a surprised yelp of pain when Bill stabbed the sensitive part of skin between his thumb and index finger with his toothpick.
“Ow!” he said shaking his hurt hand. “Why did you do that?”
“Do what?” Bill said, looking at Robert with wide eye and rounded pupil. The very picture of innocence if he did say so himself. He then slowly slid back to where he was sitting at first, looking very happy with himself.
“Now, I want all of you to practice the correct movement of your wands without saying the spell,” McGonagall said.
Everyone got out their wands and started practicing the movement. Bill watched for a few seconds, confused about what he was supposed to do before he started copying the movement by waving his hand. After giving the students a few seconds of practice time, McGonagall went through the room and had each student demonstrate the wand movement to make sure it was correct.
“Good,” she said after returning to her desk at the front of the room. “Now, say the spell while waving your wand to turn your toothpick into a needle.”
Everyone did as she said. Alistair managed to turn his toothpick into a needle on the first try, Robert had to try three times before it turned into a needle, and Bill, despite saying the spell correctly and repeating the waving motion with his hand, was unable to turn his toothpick into a needle. After trying multiple times, Bill lost his temper and angrily waved his hand at the toothpick, which was immediately enveloped in a blue light and levitated above the table, where it began to grow and turn silver and pointy, after a few seconds, a giant, six foot long needle, crashed down onto the table in front of him. Everyone in the classroom turned in their seats to see what had caused the noise and McGonagall advanced on his table with an angry tight-lipped expression.
“Cipher,” she said to him when she got to his table. “What exactly were you hoping to accomplish with this?”
Bill looked up at her with happy, innocent Triangle Expressions . McGonagall glared back at him.
“Couldn’t get it to work with the spell and got mad,” he mumbled.
“And why did you not ask for help when you noticed it didn’t work?” she asked.
Bill looked down at the table.
“Didn’t think of it,” he mumbled quietly.
After Transfiguration, they had Defense Against the Dark Arts with Ravenclaw, taught by Amadeus Scutarior. Once again, Bill noticed the Paranoid Ravenclaw student following him, this time joined by Grappling Hook and a small cat.
When they got to the classroom and seated at, or in Bill’s case on, their tables, all the students got out their textbooks and put them on the tables, ready to use. A few minutes after class was supposed to start, Scutarior burst in through the door and walked quickly up to his desk, where he dropped his books before turning to face the students. Scutarior was an older man with wild grey hair, but was full of boundless energy, he never sat still once during the lecture, preferring to wander throughout the classroom.
“In the course of this school year, you will learn the basics of how to defend yourself from the more harmless types of dark magic and magical creatures,” Scutarior began, pacing in front of and around the students’ tables, occasionally pausing to thump loudly on one of the tables to make sure he had their attention. “There will be assigned readings from your textbooks, as well as practical applications of what you will learn from that. But for now, we will be in this classroom together a lot throughout the year and should get to know each other better. So, starting with the front row and moving towards the back, we will stand up, say our name and one interesting fact about ourselves. I’ll start. My name is Amadeus Scutarior, and one interesting fact about me is that I am quite adept at playing the kazoo.”
He pointed at a student in the front row, who stood up, looking a bit nervous.
“Um,” she said. “My name is Rhonda Hornstadt, and I have a pet snake.”
Scutarior pointed at the next student to stand.
“I’m Russel Stevens, and my father plays Seaker for the Chudley Cannons,” he said happily.
After a few minutes, Scutarior got to Alistair, who stood up.
“My name is Alistair Jones, and …,” he trailed off, looking like he was thinking desperately for anything remotely interesting about himself before he continued. “And I play the oboe?”
Scutarior pointed at Robert, who stood up.
“I’m Robert Little, and I once wrote a book about dragons,” he said happily, before continuing in a quiet voice. “But then mom made me burn it because it was too graphic.”
Scutarior paused for a second, before pointing at Bill, who hopped up and waved happily.
“Hiya kids,” he said. “Name’s Bill Cipher, and I got at least two jars of deer teeth in my Weirdness Collection.”
Alistair slumped face down onto his table.
“What is wrong with you two?” he said.
Scutarior thumped his hands down loudly on the table in front of him, making the students sitting at it jump.
“Well,” he said, “we have learned each other’s names and probably a bit more about a couple of us than we really wanted to know,” he looked at Bill and Robert with a slightly disturbed expression, “but now for your assignment. Read chapter one of your textbooks, remember to take plenty of notes, it covers things that will be very important later on.”
Between Defense Against the Dark Arts and the next class, they had a break for lunch, and even though Bill still seemed a bit confused about the whole food thing, he ate something anyway after Alistair stared at him in silence for a few minutes. After lunch, Bill went exploring around the school for a while until the next class. He very quickly noticed that the small cat was following him around everywhere he went. He didn’t see the Paranoid Ravenclaw or Grappling Hook, though, and was wondering if they had given up following him or just got better at sneaking. After taking a few random turns and hopping his way down a few staircases, he came up to a locked door down in the dungeon and was just pondering sliding in underneath the door when a voice spoke from behind him.
“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you, Bill. You might not like what you find.”
Bill spun around, breath whistling sharply between his bricks and heart beating rapidly and looked up to see Dumbledore looking down at him with an expression full of regret.
“This is the forbidden dormitory,” Dumbledore continued gesturing at the locked door. “Though new students and the more curious older ones still find their way into this corridor and one of the teachers or Mr. Filch has to chase them off. Run along, Bill, there isn’t anything in there you need to know about. I suggest you make your way to your next class.”
Bill looked around to try to find some way to sneak under the door anyway and noticed that the small cat had returned and was sitting at the end of the corridor, staring at him.
The last class they had that day was History of Magic with Hufflepuff, which was, apparently, taught by a ghost. Bill very quickly decided that that was the only thing interesting about it and spent most of the lesson leaning back against Robert’s arm with his eye closed and contentedly grinding a couple of his bricks together.
After that class, Bill spent the rest of the day wandering throughout the school, attempting to ignore the fact that the small cat and the Paranoid Ravenclaw were following him again. It was hard to do, however, because his every move was accompanied by the scratching of a pen against paper or the soft paw steps of the cat. It was starting to annoy him, a lot. And then Grappling Hook joined in on the stalking and her ceaseless quiet chatter was added to the mix. So, when he rounded a corner and found himself confronted by the small cat yet again, he very quickly lost his temper.
“Why are you following me everywhere?!" he yelled. “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”
The cat meowed innocently.
“Oh, so you think it’s just fine to follow me around, do ya?” he yelled back at the cat, turning a bright red.
The cat sat in front of him calmly with its tail neatly curled over its paws and stared up at him.
“Just leave me alone!” he screeched. “And tell your other spies to stop following me around as well.”
The cat very calmly started licking one of its front paws.
“CURSE YOU SOUL AND DAM YOUR EYES,” he shouted, barely noticing that his voice started wavering between its normal high-pitched tone and an incredibly deep one. “I’LL DESTROY THE EARTH BENEATH YOUR FEET AND DROWN YOU IN ITS ASHES!”
The cat, once again, meowed innocently.
Bill heard some quick shuffling sounds coming from behind himself and turned to see the Paranoid Ravenclaw and Grappling Hook looking down at him with very nervous expressions.
“YOU,” he yelled, pointing at them with a shaking finger, overcome with rage, with the desire to BURN THEM ALL. “YOU AND YOUR DEFECTIVE CLONE! YOU’RE ALWAYS THERE, ALWAYS FOLLOWING ME! JUST LEAVE. ME. ALONE!”
Dipper and Mabel didn’t have to be told twice and immediately turned and ran from the hallway as quickly as they could and didn’t stop until they were almost on the other side of the castle. After taking a few seconds to catch his breath, Dipper got out his blue pine tree journal and started writing a summary of what had happened.
“I think he might have noticed we’ve been following him,” Mabel said.
Dipper grunted in agreement while scribbling in his journal. Mabel went closer to him to look over his shoulder and see what he was writing.
“Wasn’t he calling you the defective clone?” she asked after a couple of seconds.
“I don’t think so,” Dipper responded.
“Well, it was sort of hard to tell with how much his finger was moving,” Mabel responded while doing a highly exaggerated imitation of it.
Dipper chuckled a little at his sister’s antics before closing his journal and standing back up.
“I have to go sneak out of school grounds to update Great Uncle Ford on the..” Dipper started to say before Mabel interrupted him.
“On the ‘Nacho Situation’?” she asked.
“Is that really what you’re calling it?” he replied.
“I sure do love me a good plate o’ nachos,” she said with a big smile while gesturing behind him.
Dipper turned around and saw the two students that he had seen hanging around Bill a lot. They looked like they were trying to find something and after a few seconds, one of them noticed that there were other people in the hallway with them.
“Hi, I’m Alistair Jones,” he said and then gestured at the other one. “This is Robert Little. We seem to have lost track of our friend, perhaps you’ve seen him. He’s a small yellow triangle, and I’m fairly certain that if left unsupervised long enough, he will decide to set something on fire.”
“He would,” Dipper and Mabel said at the same time.
“He’s not already done that, has he?” Alistair sounded very concerned and then turned to Robert and said in an annoyed voice. “I told you not to give him matches.”
“Don’t look at me, I’m not allowed to have matches either,” Robert said.
“There is something seriously wrong with you two,” Alistair said, burying his face in his hands before turning his attention back to the twins. “Like seriously, you do NOT want to hear what those two said to introduce themselves in Defense Against the Dark Arts.”
Dipper and Mabel looked at each other for a few seconds before looking at Alistair again.
“What did they say?” Dipper asked nervously while Mabel pulled her grappling hook out of her robes and shouted. “I showed off my grappling hook first DADA lesson!”
“Oh, so THAT’S why it got confiscated for a couple of weeks,” Dipper said.
“No, they actually meant to keep it indefinitely, but I stole it from Filch’s office,” Mabel replied happily.
“Is this really something we should discuss here? I mean, those two might helping Bill with some sort of evil plan,” Dipper said to her quietly, but not quietly enough, apparently.
“Evil plan?” Alistair asked, confused. “You think the thing who apparently thinks eating is optional is capable of making an evil plan? Now, Big Math is something you apparently have to worry about, if for no other reason than that Bill WILL wake you up at three in the bloody morning to accuse you of being part of whatever the hell Big Math actually is.”
“He tried to destroy the universe last summer,” Dipper told him.
“But he got defeated through …… TWIN POWER!” Mabel yelled, throwing a handful of glitter in the air.
“That’s impossible,” Robert said.
“Yeah, Bill has been living with a woman named Lisa for eleven years and doesn’t remember a thing before that,” Alistair agreed.
“Really?” Dipper asked skeptically. “And have either of you met this Lisa? Seen a picture of her with Bill? Have any proof other than Bill’s word that she actually exists?”
“Yep,” Robert said, handing Dipper a picture he had found in Bill’s trunk of the small triangle sitting on the shoulder of a woman with a long, thin face, surrounded by shoulder length black hair.
“Huh. How could he have lived with this woman and tried to destroy the universe on the other side of the world at the same time?” Dipper asked.
“Maybe it’s like that Inspector Whom book where that one guy is such a big fan of The Inspector that he undergoes some sort of surgery to basically become him,” Mabel suggested.
“First of all, who would like Bill that much?” Dipper asked. “Second of all, what have you been reading? That’s just….ewwww!”
“Mostly Ducktective fanfiction,” Mabel answered happily, Dipper gave her a really weird look.
“You do realize how messed up some of that stuff gets, right?” he asked. Mabel shuddered.
“Oh, the horrors I’ve seen,” she said quietly.
“So, anyway, in answer to your first question, Alistair, the last place I saw Bill was on the other side of the school,” Dipper said to the increasingly confused looking Alistair.
“Thanks, I guess,” Alistair said before grabbing Robert’s arm and dragging him out of the hallway.
Dipper and Mabel stood in silence together for a few minutes.
“I guess I should go update Ford on what Bill’s been up to today,” Dipper told Mabel, not sounding particularly excited about it.
After saying that, he started walking towards the school’s exit, but was only about halfway there when he came across Bill sitting on one of the banisters next to the staircases and writing in a small journal. The thought occurred to Dipper that it would probably be a wonderful idea to steal Bill’s journal to see what sort of crazy things were written in it, so he snuck up behind the small triangle grabbed the journal, yanked it out of his hands, and then ran towards the exit as fast as he could.
Bill was just sitting on a banister overlooking one of the many staircases in the castle, writing in his journal, kicking his legs back and forth, and occasionally pausing to look down the stairway to the floor far below him, when someone came up behind him and yanked the journal out of his hands. He was dragged forward enough by whoever had stolen his journal that he fell off the banister and down, down, down to the floor below. He somehow managed to land on his top corner with a horrible cracking noise and was knocked unconscious by the impact.
A while later, he was never sure how long, he awoke in the hospital wing with his top corner throbbing and swollen enough to prevent him from opening his eye all the way. He tried to push himself up into a sitting position, but his arms were feeling about as weak and noodly as they looked, so all he succeeded in doing was flop his hands a bit. He tried to talk, but he couldn't get the words to come out right.
“?deneppah tahW” he mumbled.
Right after he spoke, Madam Pomfrey leaned over him to gently feel his bandage and make sure it was secure. He hadn’t noticed how fuzzy his vision was till then.
“Don’t try to move, dear,” she said calmly. “You had a big fall, somehow managed to break your top corner. Here’s a potion that should help with the pain and help you heal faster.”
She helped him into a sitting position and tried to hand him a small vial of a vibrant green potion. Between the fuzziness of his vision and how uncoordinated his attempts at holding out his hand were, he was unable to take the offered potion. He tried to tell her as much, with the same result as a few seconds earlier.
“ti dloh t’naC,” he mumbled. “Can’t dloh dnah up gnol hguone.”
He was rather happy with himself for managing to get a couple of the words out the right way around that time. Madam Pomfrey nodded like she had somehow understood what he was saying, though he suspected that she had just noticed how unsteady his hand had been when he attempted to take the potion. Instead of trying to hand it to him again, she slowly and carefully brought it closer to his eye. He looked at her with about as much suspicion as was possible through a half-closed eye that refused to focus on anything.
“I’m just trying to help you drink it,” she said.
After a few attempts, full of quiet groans, as well as a few hastily suppressed giggles, Bill managed to blink his eye into a mouth. And Madam Pomfrey did exactly what she said she would, she carefully poured the potion into his mouth. It actually tasted pretty good, and Bill was intrigued by the vial, so he very carefully wrapped his tongue around it and swallowed that as well before reopening his eye to see a very fuzzy-looking Madam Pomfrey looking at him with great concern. The potion worked very quickly and he was soon asleep.