(Sorry if this submitted twice, my computer was being weird and I wasn’t sure if it got through. Edited a few words in this version anyway.)

So.  There I was, working on a far more angsty Dipper-and-Toby fic.  Then Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons happened, and ideas formed, plus I’d been wanting to write Toby’s friends instead of just referencing them, and I thought, Okay, I can just hash out something short and submit it before the next episode airs.  Easy-peasy.

In other news, I’ve learned that I apparently a) cannot write fast, and b) cannot write short.  Once again, this got completely away from me.  But I’m reasonably happy with it, and I hope you enjoy it.

Oh, and forgive my attempts at coming up with future slang that in no way represents the true level of change the English language would realistically undergo in over a thousand years.  I had to keep it at least somewhat understandable.  (And they don’t seem to speak that differently in 207̃012 anyway…)

—

“All right, we’ll see you in a couple hours!” Dipper called to Mrs. Cross as she waved to him and got into her car, waving back with an affable smile.

He stepped back into the house and closed the door, smile instantly and seamlessly exchanging itself for an exhausted grimace.  He slumped against the door, exhaling loudly.

Had humaning always been this hard?  Ugh.  Why did society expect him to interact with Toby’s friends’ parents?  Couldn’t it be enough that the kids were friends?  Noooo, of course it would be suspicious if Toby’s guardian shunned “normal” adult connections, of course a normal human wouldn’t treat their attempts at companionable small talk as the banal, cosmically-inconsequential wastes of his time that they were.  Not that he disliked Bridget’s and Jared’s families – he just hadn’t had much experience interacting with humans as a human since Belle, centuries ago, and having to be constantly on the alert to keep himself from forgetting all the things a physics-bound mortal would and wouldn’t say or do was tiring.

Suffice to say, this had not been part of the plan when he’d decided to house the kid.

He’d been getting better at it over the past four years, though, if he did say so himself.  Still had the occasional slip-up, sure, but nothing yet to rival the fiasco that had been Toby’s tenth birthday…

Well, at least he was free of all that stress for a while.  (Aside from the unavoidable irksome, itching discomfort and wrongwrongWRONG-ness that was par for the course when providing a service without any payment.)  For the next few hours, all that was required of Tyrone Pines was making sure the kids didn’t kill themselves, and there was enough star imagery scattered strategically all over the house for him to keep an eye on them while he took care of super-important demon business in the Mindscape.

He heard chattering and laughter coming from the living room and headed in that direction, figuring that “Tyrone” should make an appearance for his cover’s sake.

He was greeted by the sight of two twelve-year-olds (though one of whom it would be forgivable, based on size, to assume was more in the nine-to-ten range) and a thirteen-year-old sitting at the table, a holo-putty magitech gameboard set between them, the type that could simulate normal board games (anything from chess to Parcheesi to Conflict Boat), or craft malleable 3D structures for the more complex games.

Currently the putty was shaped and colored into what looked like dark cave walls and a set of intricately-carved pillars, the floor overlaid with a graph pattern.  Two animated humanoid figures, one blue and one yellow, stood within two squares before the pillars, between which seemed to be chained a writhing, multi-headed aberration of indeterminate species that snarled and spit at them.

But it was the screen set up in front of a wickedly-grinning Bridget that immediately drew the entirety of Dipper’s attention: holo-mesh instead of cardboard, of course, and the artwork naturally bore little resemblance to its twenty-twelve incarnation, but those images… could it be…

Nonsense symbols arranged to look like some sort of runic language…

Magical beasts bearing no resemblance whatsoever to their real-world counterparts…

The sinister wizard slinging glowing arithmetic at a group of humans, dwarves, and elves in historically-inaccurate garb…

Pens and paper, shields and swords…

“So, you think you’ve got the monster trapped, huh?” Bridget was saying, smirking at the boys.  “Well, okay then, I guess you can just move on into the temple unopposed… if you want to…”

She trailed off ominously, then glanced over and noticed Dipper at the door.  Jared and Toby turned to follow her gaze, looking up from their stat sheets and graphs.

(Omigod the graphs, they still use the graphs…)

“Hi Mr. Pines!” Jared greeted him enthusiastically, volume as per usual just slightly over the threshold of what would generally be considered an “indoor voice”.  His curly hair poked out from beneath an old-fashioned navy blue conductor hat (his “Friday hat”, Dipper knew).

“Uh, hey kids,” Dipper muttered, eyes still on the faux-medieval imagery.  “Just wanted to make sure you were… uh… yeah, and…”

He cleared his throat and leaned against the doorframe, trying to be nonchalant.  “Is that, um, by any chance…‘Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons’?”

Jared looked surprised, but smiled widely at him.  “Yeah, it is!  I got it for Christmas!  It’s the new Sixth-to-the-Fourth-Power Edition!  I’ve only ever played Grandma’s old Five-Point-Seven-Five-Cubed Edition before, but this one has more character options and monsters and they’ve completely revamped the poweroid quadrant system to make it more-”

Bridget cleared her throat impatiently.  “Don’t get him started, Ty, he already clogged our ears for about an hour straight when he first got it.”  She ignored Jared’s pout at the interruption and turned back to the game, easily dismissing the adult in the room as unimportant to the serious business at hand.  “Anyway, you guys try to slip past into the temple…”

She suddenly swiped her hand at the holo-d38 set to the side of the gameboard like she was trying to disembowel someone (it was a testament to how used to her they were that neither of the boys even flinched).  The die began whirling as her hand passed through its image, turning into a wild blur for a few seconds, then slowing and coming to a stop.  A large golden number 28 flashed above the die.

“Ha!” Bridget crowed.  “The mantimaeratrice bursts free from your chain spell, and spews a shower of petrifying spit from its middle head!”  She pressed a command onto the gameboard, and the chains holding the monster melted away; the mismatched abomination straightened and loomed dramatically over the two player figures.  “Roll for Fortitude and pray, middlers!  Wuahaha!”

“Aw, what?” Jared groused, tapping at his own holo-d38, which spun for a moment before displaying a blue 10. 

Toby looked at Dipper curiously for a moment – the demon hastily tried to school his features into a mask of cool indifference, because he recognized Toby’s “reading people” look even if the boy wasn’t doing it consciously and damn it Dipper why did you have to teach the kid poker you don’t want him to be all perceptive that’s just begging for Bill to come through you idiot – before turning back to the game and following suit, rolling a yellow 14.

“Oh-ho, not good enough!” Bridget cackled gleefully.  “Both of you feel your flesh hardening; you look down at yourselves and see your skin turning gray and hard, your bodies feel heavy and cold, and you…”

She cut herself off as Toby hesitantly raised his hand.

“Um, since I’m a minstrel, don’t I get to add my Charisma bonus to my roll?”

“Ugh, ‘charisma’,” Bridget muttered, disdainfully flicking at the braid that hung over her blinded right eye.  “Yes, fine.  What does that give you?”

Toby quickly wrote out some math on a stylus-sheet.  “Uh, twenty.”

Bridget mock-scowled and reached across the table to punch Toby’s arm playfully.  “Fine, fine, ruin my plans.”  She went back into narrator-mode.  “So apparently, you’re just too attractive to be petrified, because that makes full sense; but you still have to watch in horror as Merlgandalbus turns to a solid stone statue before your eyes!  The mantimaeratrice turns all three heads to look at you, eyes glowing and fangs glistening ferociously…”

“Okay, I, uh, play a symphony of calming, to make it settle down,” Toby said, looking thoughtful.  “And does it speak Average or Quarterling?  I could make a Diplomacy check to try and convince it to help us…”

Bridget’s eye roll at that moment contained within it an expert, practiced mix of both fondness and exasperation.  She scooted over and put an affectionate arm around Toby’s shoulders, while looking back up at Dipper with a knowing, sardonic grin.

(Dipper, who had been watching the kids play all the while his inner twelve-year-old shook aside some cobwebs, strode confidently from its usual spot in the corner, and seized firm hold of his mental reigns with a single-minded, unyielding fervor, found himself stumbling to reapply his ‘cool adult’ face when the girl suddenly addressed him.)

“Toby doesn’t get to be Dungeon Administrator anymore,” she explained matter-of-factly.  “We tried it back when we first started, and he’s really good at coming up with all these really creative dungeons and monsters and stuff, but in the end they always wound up being friendly, or ran away when we tried to fight, and everything was all just fetch-quests and,” she gave an exaggerated shudder, “diplomacy.”

Toby ducked his head, blushing a little, but gave Bridget a smile that might – juuuust barely – have crossed over the line into a smirk.

“The game has rules for non-combat campaigns, and I don’t like fighting.  So sue me.”

(If Dipper felt the tiniest, most minute smidgen of pride at how far Toby had come – four years ago the mere thought of back-sassing someone would have resulted in a mumbled apology and at least an hour of contrite gloominess – well, why shouldn’t he be proud of his awesome job in getting the kid to be more confident and self-sufficient so he could be kicked out of the house sooner?)

Bridget rolled her eyes again and took her arm off Toby’s shoulder, shoving him away playfully.  “Erg, what is it with your family and all the ancient slang? ‘Suing?’  What, like that knitting stuff you do?”

Toby managed to keep his expression mostly neutral, but Dipper caught the happy flare in his aura at the term “your family”.  “It’s an old term for lawying… people still use it, actually, it’s just not as common anymore-”

“Wop wop wop I’m Toby and I know sooooo many things because my dad and I live in the Dark Ages,” Bridget responded, putting on an accent apparently cobbled together from the mutilated scrapings of three continents.  “Well by George, let’s all ‘hashtag’ some ‘memes’ while we…what’s that one you say I do…’trash-talk’ each other, jolly hell, eh wot!”

“Hey, I think it’s… uh, ‘cool!’  Am I using that right?” Jared piped up.  His expression became a little starry-eyed.  “You guys know so many rampant – ooh no, wait, I mean ‘awesome’! – BT things…  It’s like your home is a portal to the distant past… ”

Bridget sighed.  “You guys are all a bunch of crammies.”

Toby again gave her his almost-smirk.  “You mean, ‘nerds’?”   

“Now you’re doing it on purpose.”

“My favorite one is ‘dude’,” Jared opined, grinning at Toby.  “So versatile!  I’m gonna try an’ bring that one back.  Dude, dude, dude-dude-dude!  Dude, dude-”

“Keep saying that,” Bridget growled threateningly, “and you will no longer be the token diclops of our group.”

“So Toby, you’re… okay with not running the game?” Dipper interjected, trying to sound like a casually concerned parent who knew that their child’s friend could sometimes be a little pushy.  (And conveniently too distracted at the moment to bother worrying about any uncomfortable implications of such acting coming a tad too easy to him.)

“Hmm?  Oh, yeah, I’m fine with it!” Toby assured him.  “Bri wasn’t really having fun when I was running things, and I like trying to figure out ways to solve her quests without violence, so it all works out.”

He paused for a moment, then hesitantly asked, “Do you, uh… do you know this game?”

Dammit.  Shouldn’t have kept staring like a creep, Dipper.

But he couldn’t help it.  Here it was: his game, right in front of him, and he hadn’t played in centuries (except occasionally during some of his low points, in ways that made playing with a goat seem positively dignified)…  And here was a younger generation who still liked it and wow, now he knew how Great-Uncle Ford must have felt…

With Bridget and Jared now both staring at him too, Dipper felt unaccountably nervous, which was stupid because he was an omniscient centuries-old demon who could crush these children into paste and he did not get nervous.  He fiddled with his shirt cuffs, avoiding eye contact for a moment, before replying, “Um, yes, actually.  I, uh… I used to play it a lot when I was… your age…  Um.  Obviously an older version, I’m honestly a bit surprised they’re still updating it…”

“Oh yeah, it’s been around for about, ever!” Jared exclaimed, looking absolutely stoked that one of his favorite adults knew the game.  “So what edition did you play?”

Bridget crossed her arms and looked annoyed that the game was apparently paused, but Jared seemed fully enraptured in whatever Dipper might have to say, and even Toby looked timidly interested.  Suddenly struck by a desire to impress, Dipper grinned slyly at the children.

“Oh, it was a really old-fashioned version.  Antique, really.  I used to play with my dad and my great-uncle…”  He trailed off, a sudden unwelcome pang of nostalgia hitting him.  He had almost forgotten how his dad (and which dad, Mark or Lionel, he realized to his shame he couldn’t quite determine… or had it been both, at one point or another?) had been the first to play with him when he had discovered the game as a kid, helping him with some of the more advanced math…

And those times with Great-Uncle Ford… right before everything had gone wrong…

Cutting off that train of thought before he started getting maudlin in front of the kids, Dipper stepped over to the table before continuing.

“Anyway, it was old enough that we used actual physical dice.”  With a thought, a sack of dice materialized in his pants pocket, which he pulled out and emptied onto the table.  Jared and Toby both leaned over to get a better look.

“Woah!  Are these made of bone?” Jared asked, awestruck.  “Or carved from jade, or obsidian?”

“Uh… plastic.”

“Coooool!”

Bridget raised an eyebrow at Dipper (so similar to Acacia for a moment that Dipper’s absolutely-normal-human-adult mask almost slipped for a second). 

“Do you always carry those dice around in your pocket?”

“…Yes.”

“Oh!”  Jared looked up from examining the dice, fit to bursting with excitement.  “Hey, do you want to play, Mr. Pines?  If there’s four of us, we could do teams!  There’s rules for that somewhere in here…”

He picked up the rulebook tablet and started typing a search.

“Um…” Dipper glanced down at Toby, who shrugged.  “That.  Um.  That would be…”

Amazing.  Perfect.  The best thing EVER.  Omigod omigod omigod yes yes yes yesyesyesyesyesyesyes

“…I suppose it might be fun.  I mean.  Just one game, maybe, for old times’ sake…”

Jared cheered loudly.  Bridget, looking resigned but mildly intrigued, sighed dramatically and set about saving her paused campaign before resetting the board.

But… but important Mindscape business, some small, lonely sliver of Dipper’s psyche that had somehow managed to avoid regressing to twelve years old protested weakly.  It’s really important…stuff…gotta do it…gotta-

Twelve-year-old-Dipper popped on some mental headphones and put on his old D&D&MoreD fanmix, efficiently drowning out the tiny voice of contention.

Honestly, what was he going to be doing, anyway?  Reorganizing his library for the millionth time…  Looking through the answering machine to see if he’d had any summoners actually worth getting back to…  Yelling at Nib-Shuggaruth’s latest brood of unholy extradimensional horrors to get off his lawn…

Whatever.  The Flock could handle most of that for now.  He could afford a brief nostalgic indulgence.

“Wow, the team rules are even more needlessly complicated!” Jared exclaimed cheerfully.  “Here, Mr. Pines, let me just roll up who’ll be in who’s team…”

A few dice rolls later:

“Okay, looks like it’s me and Bridget, and you and Toby!”

Dipper and Toby locked eyes; the former’s expression unreadable, the latter looking worried, uncertain of how his reluctant guardian wanted to play this.

“Um, you don’t have to if-”

“Scooch over.”

Dipper sat down next to his young charge as Jared moved to the other side of the table next to Bridget, theatrically cracking his knuckles and smirking at Toby’s friends.  “I hope you two don’t mind if Toby and I utterly annihilate you.  ‘Cause it’s happening whether you do or not.”

“Oh.  Oh.  Bring it on, old man!” Bridget threw back, as usual utterly unconcerned with trash-talking an adult.

Out of the corner of his eye, Dipper saw Toby relax, a content smile making its way to his face.

If there was that familiar part of him grousing that this was undignified and unbecoming of a being of his stature, that he should be taking advantage of the children’s naïveté and using the game to trap them into deals that would ultimately end with three yummy new souls in his possession and/or stomach… well, that part of him could suck his +3.7 super-hot flamey sword because this was his game, this was D&D&MoreD and nothing, not his own literal inner demon, nor even being teammates with his mortal enemy’s soul, was going to ruin this for him today.

Besides, it would just be one game.  He could get back to his regular demon business after that.  Just one game to indulge himself, then he could be content to just experience it vicariously through the kids.  Perfect plan, nothing to worry about.

—

“Nyeh-he-ha-haaaa!  Your pitiful players are no match for my crombie army!”

The latest version of Probabilitor the Annoying (female this time, and wearing a silver cloak covered in white, constantly-shifting algebraic equations) waved her hand over her crystal ball, the d38 inside spinning and shooting out a burst of magic that materialized into a shambling mass of miniature zombie-like humanoids on her side of the gameboard.  They moaned and shuffled, rattling swords and morningstars as they formed ranks and faced their three tiny opponents over on Dipper’s side.

Said players, however, failed to be intimidated, fully engrossed as they were with the changes in clothing and appearance they had recently undergone.

“Aw, rampant, dwarf lady-beard!” Bridget whooped, swinging her new battle-axe haphazardly with one hand while playing with the brown braids now gracing her chin with the other.

“Woah, cool, wizard hat!”  Jared swiped the blue cone-shaped hat, decorated with crescent moons and stars (arranged in such a way that they resembled question marks), off his head for a better look. 

“Hey Mr. Pines, when I get big again, can I take this with me?”

“Um… I suppose so…”

“Yes!” Jared cheered.  “Oh, you are so going into the rotation…”

Dipper looked down at the third member of the party.  (And here I thought he couldn’t get any tinier…)  “Toby, you okay?”

“Mm-hmm,” Toby responded, sounding distinctly uncomfortable.  The hand not holding a wooden ocarina was currently tugging down the hem of his sun-yellow tunic as far as it could go.

“I think this costume may be missing something…” he meeped, cheeks flushing.

“Enough stalling!” sneered Probabilitor, rolling more dice and pointing a clawed finger at her targets.  “Crombies, ATTACK!”

“Hey, Tyrone!  Can I go into a berserker rage?” Bridget asked eagerly, brandishing her axe at the slowly-approaching army.

“Um…”  Dipper rolled a d38.  “Yep, go nuts.”

“WOO!  Blood, death, and vengeance, middlers!  YAAAAAAAAH!”

Shrouded in an angry red glow, dwarf!Bridget charged at the crombies, screaming wildly, throwing their entire front line into the air with one swing of her improbably oversized axe.

Okay.

So maybe Dipper had gotten a little invested.  Might have played a few more games with the kids, and started to run his own campaign for them.  Maybe one night while working on a new dungeon he could potentially have slipped through dimensions looking for inspiration and stumbled across the realm of a Probabilitor incarnation.  A few taunts may have been made.  One thing may, hypothetically, have led to another.

Maybe.

Boosted by her rage, Bridget tore her way through the crombies like they were paper-clones, cutting down the last one with a flourish.  Probabilitor scowled.

“So!  Your players are stronger than they first appear.  No matter!” she shrieked, flicking a hand dismissively at Dipper.  “BEHOLD!  I unleash the chaos theory beast!  Tremble before its dynamical instability!”

More magical energy coalesced on the wizard’s side of the board, forming a creature that resembled less a flesh-and-blood monster and more a floating collection of color-shifting lines like an old-fashioned screensaver, constantly shifting and folding into shapes ranging from recognizable creatures to chimeric abominations to abstract geometric shapes.  It seemed unable to hold a coherent form for even a second.

Dipper couldn’t help it (didn’t want to help it) – he let a bit of the demon slip into his grin.

“Oh.  You want to school me.  On chaos.”

The mathological wizard’s triumphant smirk wavered slightly at the gleam in Dipper’s eyes.

“That’s just precious.”

He rolled a handful of dice and began calmly issuing orders to the kids, ignoring the spluttering of the wizard who was shortly to learn who was the true master of the Dungeons.

“Okay, Toby, play that fugue of freezing you used on Tuesday, that should hold the beast in one form for a bit; Jared, Chains of Stability, keep it from running; and Bridget, get ready, you’re getting a Quintuple-axe of A Thousand Hews…”