You made the mods start talking. We’ve practically got a plot figured out, though no one’s volunteered to actually write it (yet)…

Okay, so let’s imagine this takes place after Mabel, for maximum time allowed for these people to raise their version of Dipper. After all, we’d have noticed if he vanished for years on end at some point in Mabel’s lifetime, right?

In fact, let’s place this just after the RRR arc itself, since if it took place before Dipper might have been a little more wary and hesitant to place himself in that position willingly. Once bitten and all…plus there’s potentially a way to finagle the binding so it makes sense that way. If it takes place just after RRR – after a lifetime masquerading mostly as a human, after willingly binding himself to that form and without his memories for a portion of that time, after Belle has finally passed and is on her way to her next life and everything is over – then, well, let’s suggest that power can carve paths, and a soul remembers the use of that power within a single lifetime.

Let’s suggest that something about making himself a forgetful human for a while and then maintaining the charade even longer, and very recently at that, has made Alcor…susceptible.

The upper echelons of the New Canaanite Order targeting him don’t know that. All they know is that Alcor is rumored to be too powerful for traditional bindings to work on him – a different method is needed to cleanse this particular demon. And with other rumors hinting at a tie to humanity…well, some of them are fanatics. Some are determined. Some are just desperate enough to risk their lives in this attempt at neutralizing what they see as an abominable threat to all mankind and an intolerable insult to the basic precepts of their faith.

They take the leap, attempt the binding, and to everyone’s surprise…it works. Alcor the demon is gone, and in his place is a crying, apparently human infant. They give him a quick baptism, as much a test as an initiation into their faith and a final step to the binding. The holy water sprinkled on him makes him wail, leaves a pattering of faint red marks that will never fade away on his forehead, but doesn’t sizzle or spark or burn in the way it would against a true demon. Still, it’s proof enough that still more needs to be done before it is truly human, and they commit to the long, watchful task of cleansing the demon entirely.

They name him Simon Josiah and he is given to Pastor Doyle, who had volunteered along with his wife to raise the infant in their faith should the binding work.

Simon grows up surrounded by crosses, and prayer, and three-times-weekly sermons at the local New Canaanite chapter church, and it might not have been so bad if it just didn’t feel so…uncomfortable. Uneasy. Unsettling. He wears a cross on a pendant around his neck – his parents insist on it – but it weighs heavier than he thinks it should, given its size. He recites mealtime prayers about god and gratefulness and sanctity against the supernatural and the words feel like they’re twisting on his tongue. He goes to the church nursery, then bible classes and Sunday schools, and hears stories about ancient heroes of the church, saints and angels, slaying evil, wicked demons and dragons and grasping fairy creatures of hell and some of them are all right but others just make him feel squirmy inside, like he wants to protest against something he knows is wrong, but he can’t say what.

And as long as he can remember, once a week after the big Sunday morning sermon, Pastor and Mrs. Doyle take him into a little room at the back of the church. There they have him stand in the middle of a circle, pray in Latin and in English alike, sprinkle water across his head and burn cleansing herbs that make the air smell funny and tickle his nose.

Eventually he realizes that no other child goes through this. He wonders, and they tell him that a demon cursed him when he was a baby. They tell him that they do these things – make him wear a cross always, say his prayers and go through weekly cleansings and always, always be a good little New Canaanite boy who has faith in the good God and has nothing to do with unnatural things – in order to keep the demon from him, because if the demon ever gets through it will eat his soul, and he doesn’t want that, now does he?

This is how he lives for years – New Canaanite religion and philosophy infusing every part of his life, crosses and sermons at church and at home, schooled there by his mother because there is no decent New Canaanite school anywhere nearby – the only private K-12 school nearby is Christian of Another Denomination, one which is more lenient on the matter of the Unnatural, and that simply will not do (and of course public school is absolutely unthinkable). 

Then a new family moves into the neighborhood. They have a little girl, just about Simon’s age – a little older, but only by a year or so – and they are definitely the wrong sort of people, since they don’t go to any church at all and accept the supernatural that has so long been part of the world now, however much New Canaanites have eschewed it. The Doyles turn their noses up at this little family, but Simon finds himself inexplicably intrigued. They’re new, they’re different, and he feels like he has a connection to them, like he’s known their daughter in particular for ages…

His parents are controlling and they don’t want him mixing with the wrong sort of influences, but he finds ways around them, and befriends his new neighbor – and through her, perhaps some others, soul-deep-familiar and not, human and otherwise. Memories start to spark and chafe against the bonds, and week after week the crosses, the herbs, the water irritate him more and more…

He begins to dream strange dreams. He dreams of a colorful greyscale landscape, grass bordered by trees and a ramshackle building, all his. He dreams of dark sheep, as monstrous as any biblical artist’s illustration of demons and creatures of the devil, but they are also his, and he loves them and they love him. They have been searching for him all this time, trying to find a way to reach him when his eyes were blind to them and his ears deaf and his very soul muted and chained by holy words and water and smoke…

He mentions this to his forbidden friends first, and they search for answers on his behalf. They haven’t quite put the pieces together, however, when the Doyles begin to notice how he flinches and fidgets through the weekly rituals, how the water turns his skin faintly pink when it lands, as though it grew hot between leaving their fingers and striking his face. They begin to worry, and then to fear, and then the Pastor acts.

He calls together whoever he can, and one night he gets Simon up and takes him back to the church without explanation. They arrive and instead of that one little room, they go to a larger side hall – one already filled by half a dozen assorted clergy, pastors from nearby areas and perhaps a couple of higher-ranked clergymen from elsewhere entirely, all with a strong interest in keeping the demon contained. Simon is afraid, he can feel that something is wrong, but the Pastor insists that it’s for his own good, that the strangeness he’s been experiencing recently has been the demon reaching beyond his defenses, that there must have been a breach so they have to rebuild, strengthen, renew it all.

You don’t want the demon to eat your soul, do you son?

No, of course not, that sounds terrible…but also wrong, everything sounds and feels and looks wrong, he recognizes something about this scene – men in robes around a darkened room, circles on the floor in patterns he swears he’s never seen before but somehow he recognizes them all the same, him standing in the center of it all, listening to them chant invocations, sensing something beyond his own senses filling the room – like feelings he can see without seeing them – and he knows somehow that situations like this never end well.

There’s light and shadows and they look like chains. He can feel something winding tighter and tighter around him, pressing him inward, mind and soul, until he feels like he can barely breathe. He passes out in the center of the circle with tears streaming down his face and a fading sense of loss, like having a word at the back of your mind or on the tip of your tongue and then finding it gone again the moment you try to think or speak it properly, echoing through his mind.

When they do the little ritual again on Sunday the water doesn’t burn. The Doyles are satisfied, but Simon is not. He sneaks out to visit his friends the next chance he gets and shares what happened with them. They start to wonder what it means. They start to edge around the truth, nudging it with their toes, and the buried memories begin to strain against the bindings again, bringing back the dreams of nightmare sheep, echoes of forgotten knowledge, sparks of power and rage, and skin sensitive once more to the uncomfortable touch of a cross and the flickering shock of burning water spattering across his form…

Pastor Doyle and the other clergy in the know start to get really worried. The first binding held for over a decade before suddenly weakening, and that might have simply been the effects of time, but this second one hasn’t even lasted a month. The demon should have been almost entirely cleansed by now, not apparently gaining strength. They agree to make one last attempt, stronger this time, and if that cannot hold then they have no choice but to accept that the demon cannot be made human, and that it is better to use the chance afforded by weakening it thus to end it permanently.

They prepare…and then the Doyles find out about Simon’s friends. Perhaps he is careless, perhaps it is simple chance, but whatever the case, it’s not pretty. This is the cause of his soul’s rebellion, the evil influence upon him, they think. Perhaps this occurs before the decision is made about the final binding attempt, perhaps it is just after; either way, Simon is suddenly cut off from his friends, and suddenly he sees the so-called protection of his parents for a prison. Part of it is having had the companionship of others and their own families to compare; part is the rising anger inside him, the sense of having been wronged, cheated and chained and deceived for years, though he still cannot name precisely why.

That night he does not go to the church willingly, nor does he stand frightened yet obedient in the center of the circle. He struggles, and in doing so the bindings slip and do not properly catch, and glimpses of memory, of his true nature, begin to bleed through, and in an instant he has a key part of the truth at last – he does not know who he is or how it was done, but he understands that he was not a human boy cursed by a demon; he is the demon.

This time the binding fails to suppress him entirely, though he wears himself ragged fighting against it and is, for a crucial time, too weak and too lost and still half-bound to humanity despite the breakthrough he made. The clergy agree that the bindings have failed in their most ideal purpose and that it is time to put an end to it. They have blessed silver knives, salt and sage, and enough holy water set aside to drown a demon in, just in case. They truly have a chance to kill the Dreambender…

And then his friends break in, Mizar at the fore.

Even after they were cut off from him they continued to search and explore possibilities. They uncovered the likeliest solution – the truth, in fact – and, remembering what he had said happened the last time, knew that it would happen again. They found a way to watch, and waited, and when he was removed from home that night and taken back to the church they knew, snuck out, and rushed to follow.

At first they have surprise on their side. Then it settles, and then it turns against them, because a good dozen armed and full-grown adults against a paltry handful of teens is hardly a fair fight. But it has bought time and ignited further memories – and enough fury to fuel a forest fire – in Simon’s – Alcor’s – mind. He not only knows what they had planned for him, knows that they sought to destroy him one way or another, but now he sees his friends threatened, struck, captured in turn, and he screams golden light and darkest shadow and blue fire and finally breaks free.

By the time the night is done, all that is left is a blood spattered room strewn with the remains of several high-ranking local New Canaanite clergymen and marked by several circles of binding and containment and, burned into the floor at their center, a winged star. Mrs. Doyle was found dead in their family home the same morning. No trace was ever found of Simon, despite the searches conducted and given priority on the suspicion that he might have been involved in her death, given the lack of forced entry and the suspicious timing of his disappearance. His former friends had no information on his possible whereabouts.

Privately, however, they know exactly who and where he is, and that even if he doesn’t visit himself he’s only one tiny circle and a call away.