Chapter Text
"Forced move, is a term used in chess game to describe a sequence of moves for which the player has no viable alternative: In these cases the player cannot avoid the loss of a piece or checkmate."
As he passed the portal, he was welcomed by shots and screams.
Stanford threw himself on the ground and crawled through the piles of rubble that surrounded him. A burst of gunfire exploded to his right, followed by a shrill, familiar scream. It must have been one of the lynx-beings from Dimension 38.
I couldn’t end up somewhere worse.
Crawling on his forearms, he moved among bricks and gray dust. He had already met one of those beings, in Mineralland: the lynx-creature chased him out of the citadel, into the tangle of subterranean tunnels, with a positron gun in one hand and his wanted poster in the other. It took Ford two days to escape and his right shoulder still burned, where the shot had scratched him.
On the poster, it was not specified if he should be captured dead or alive, but the lynx-beings always preferred to be safe and kill their target. The umpteenth obstacle placed by Bill Cipher to make his life harder.
He stopped behind a half-destroyed gray wall and crouched down. The demon’s thought brought the bile up in his throat, a ball of anger lit in his chest. Ford took a couple of deep breaths: he had to calm down, revenge would come in due course. Now the important thing was to survive.
He looked around: no creatures, but no portal either. In the sky above him, red, yellow, green, and black bands twisted in spirals and dispersed in a continuous movement. Neither a sun nor a moon stood out, there was only a diffused light floating everywhere. Impossible to understand if it was day or night. Not to mention that time could also move differently than normal, as in the Do-Over Dimension. He sighed at that thought. I hope not.
More shots fired, this time further away. Whoever was fighting, was getting away from there. Excellent: he had to find a shelter to rest. Once rested, he would search for a portal, crawling to avoid unwanted attention. If he were very lucky, he would also find food and water and would not use his small supplies. But first of all…
“Eeek!”
Ford turned and flinched, with such force that he fell backward. In front of him, there was a two-dimensional little thing. A creature…
Bill!
No, it was not a Triangle. It was a Pentagon, with a large orange stripe on the surface. His eye was wide open and he held a positron gun in his trembling hands.
“F… Friend or f… f… f-f-foe?”
“Wh… what?” answered Ford, his voice as hoarse as the little thing’s. The orange Pentagon tightened his grip on the weapon.
“Friend or foe?” he shrieked, his voice rising high in the silence.
Ford sat quickly, a raised hand. He turned back, ears straining.
“Ssssh!”
No shots, no screams. Perhaps they were too far away and nobody heard them.
“Answer me,” the Pentagon insisted, lowering his tone. He aimed the weapon at Ford’s chest. “Are you with the Circles?”
“The Circles?” Ford raised both hands. “I’m not with anyone. I just arrived.”
The Pentagon frowned.
“Aren’t you a mercenary?”
“No, I…”
“THEY’RE HERE!”
The lynx-being’s scream exploded very close and made Ford run to the side. He rolled away and the wall behind which he had hidden fell, pierced by a burst of gunfire. He took out his gun, fired back and hit a squat creature, with two curved horns. The creature fell to the ground and the lynx-being jumped backward. He raised his weapon: Ford stood up, avoided two shots, fired.
Blood leaked from the leg of the lynx-being, which fell on one knee. The second blow hit his head and he dropped down, dead. Ford panted, put the gun back in his coat. From far away, he heard other shouts coming: it was time to leave.
Something moved at the edge of his field of vision and immediately his eyes returned on the lynx-being. The small orange Pentagon had approached the creature and taken his weapon, an ionic traction machine gun. It was way bigger than him and the Pentagon could not hold it in his arms, yet he insisted on dragging it into the dust.
With a sigh, Ford approached.
“It’s too big for you.”
“In fact, I don’t want the machine gun,” replied the Pentagon, “I want the ion.”
“You can’t take it with your bare hands.”
“I know. I’m just bringing the machine gun to our scientist, so he can take the ion and improve my weapon.”
Ford sighed again.
“Let me handle this.” he got down on one knee, lowering to get closer to the Pentagon. “I’ve already done twice my weapon’s upgrade from normal ions to positrons.”
“Do you know how to make improvements for weapons?” asked the Pentagon. His eye narrowed in a suspicious expression. “Are you a scientist?”
“The brightest mind this world has ever known!”
Those familiar words echoed in his mind, accompanied by the ever-present piercing laughter. Ford shook his head to get those memories out of his head.
“I’m a scientist,” he confirmed. He held out his hand, “May I?”
The Pentagon seemed to think about it, his eye passed from the too heavy weapon, to the hand extended towards him. He closed his eye and sighed.
“Fine.” he passed the machine gun. “But away from here. Let’s hide there.” the Pentagon pointed to a shop with a broken roof. “And don’t try anything funny.” he added, while raising his weapon.
Ford took the machine gun and preceded the geometric shape inside the hole. He crawled into the farthest corner, his head brushed against the collapsed boards and the flaps of torn fabric swayed. Stains of color scattered the gray wood, as if someone had thrown it with buckets.
He heard a slight rustle behind him and the Pentagon appeared. The creature dropped a ripped curtain behind him, blocking the only exit. Then he sat down and loaded his weapon, his eye fixed on Ford. He did not trust him completely. Makes sense.
Ford sat cross-legged in front of the Pentagon and began to dismantle the machine gun. From his pocket, he took out the maintenance kit purchased on Harmoria and spread it out between them.
“You’re well-stocked,” commented the Pentagon.
“I’m on the run,” he revealed, “My weapons are always ready.”
“On the run from who?”
Ford glanced at the Pentagon and lowered his gaze to the parts of the machine gun. Perhaps that creature had already heard of a triangle so powerful that was feared throughout the Multiverse. But perhaps he may not know anything: after his visit to Exwhylia and the Oracle’s words, he seriously doubted that the Pentagon even had a vague idea of who Bill Cipher was.
He sighed. Of all the billions of Dimensions he had been in, that was the second one that looked like the original Dimension of his worst enemy. At least there, unlike Exwhylia, the inhabitants had not run into him, tried to stab him and called him irregular.
“From the law,” Ford answered, vague. That creature did not know who he was, a sign that the posters with his face had not arrived this far yet. Moreover, that world seemed in enough trouble as it was.
And then on Exwhylia nobody knew who Bill Cipher was. So there was no reason they would know him there.
The Pentagon gave him a bitter half-laugh.
“The law,” he repeated, sarcastically. “Be like everyone else. Conform. Obey and be silent. I know that reality too well.”
“It’s the same here?” asked Ford, scanning the destroyed shop with a glance.
“It was,” replied the Pentagon. “It was an oligarchy divided into classes. The more sides you had, the higher your social rank was. The highest classes didn’t even speak with the lower ones. Polygons with more than six sides were the Aristocracy, all those below the commoners. On the top, the Circles had an absolutist reign over all Shapes.” he touched one of his sides. “And if a Shape had a minimum degree of Irregularity… it ended up in prison, or died in a clinic, or lived at the margins of society.”
The Pentagon continued to stroke his side. Ford put his hand on the other.
“Are you Irregular?”
“I’m different.” the Pentagon looked him straight in the eye. “My family hated me and I had no friends. They said I was weird.”
Weird. Different. Ford squeezed his fingers together.
“I had to become a doctor,” the Pentagon went on, bitterness in his tone. “I studied for a long time, I had fun doing it. My grades were excellent and I had to go to the academy.”
“Have you ever heard of West Coast Tech? The best college in the country.”
“But, to participate in the admission test, the Board had to carry out a medical examination. Just to check that all candidates complied with the standard government measures.” he sighed. “I missed by three millimeters.”
“It was you, Stanley! You did it because you couldn’t bear me going to college alone!”
“For three millimeters, I was doomed. I didn’t enter the academy and ended up working as the lowest in a factory. My intelligence, my years of study, all lost for three, measly millimeters.”
“I know Backupsmore is not anyone’s first choice, but I’m sure your families are proud. More or less.”
“I can understand,” Ford admitted in a low voice.
“But everything changed, when the First Ones showed themselves.”
Ford lifted his gaze from his fingers: the Pentagon’s eye shone with enthusiasm.
“The First Ones?”
“Because they were the first to rebel,” he explained. “At the dawn of the rebellion, the First Ones came out and shouted the truth across the nation, openly opposing the tyrannical rule of the Circles. They told everything that no one had ever told us: about other dimensions, about how the division by sides was just a lie, about how everyone deserved his place in the world, up to reveal the true origin of light and color.” he laughed. “Before them, this was a very gray, boring world.”
Ford smiled in turn. Exwhylia’s monotonous and impossible view came back into his mind.
“I can imagine.”
“Hundreds of inferior Shapes supported them and died to defend those ideals. The army managed to arrest two of the First Ones, but nothing and no one could stop their voice anymore. More and more rebels joined the cause, even some from the lower Aristocracy as Heptagons and Octagons. Not to mention the Women, even from higher social classes: very few remained among the ranks of the Circles and of those who still support them.”
“And that lynx-being?”
“A mercenary.“ the Pentagon frowned again. "Since when the merging began, the Circles did nothing but buy interdimensional spies to enter our dens and kill as many rebels as possible.”
“What merging are you talking about?”
“Merging with neighboring Dimensions.” he pointed to the sky. “Do you think our sky has always been like that? That our Dimension was so… three-dimensional even before? These are the effects of our world’s instability. Since the great rebellion began, our universe has expanded and touched the neighboring universes, to merge with them.”
Ford scratched his chin.
“An expansion process that started so suddenly?”
“We don’t know for sure. We’ve never studied our universe or others before the rebellion. We’re still trying to figure out whether this expansion has always been there or not,” explained the Pentagon. “The fact remains that, with the merging, creatures of other universes found themselves sharing the same world with us. And many were fighting against tyrannical enemies.” he raised his hands. “It was easy: rebels allied with us and tyrants with the Circles. On one side, they want to subdue us and restore an absolutist reign again. On the other, we fight for our freedom, to be free to follow our aspirations and do whatever we want, free from stupid rules.”
“I worked so hard for West Coast Tech! If only I could go back…”
“You fight for a worthy cause.” Ford extracted the ion from the lynx-being’s weapon and inserted it into the Pentagon’s gun.
The Shape watched him, the eye following his every gesture.
“Are you a different too?” he asked.
“I could say that, yes.” Ford raised a hand. “In my Dimension, all people have five fingers.”
The Pentagon snorted.
“A stupid reason,” was his comment, “Worthy of our Circles.”
Ford laughed. He reassembled the Pentagon’s gun and handed it to him.
“Take it.”
“Wait.” the Pentagon loaded the weapon, looked at the stabilization bar: it was fine. He looked back at Ford. “You’re a scientist and a weapon expert. Do you want to work with us?”
“Ehm…” Ford turned around. “I would like to. But I have to go…”
“Where, if you’re on the run?” the Pentagon preceded him. “Your knowledge could change the fate of this war. I’ve already met other intelligent creatures, but you’re special. You understand what it means, to be considered different for a stupid, small detail.”
Ford looked at the Pentagon: his eye was a flaming ball of zeal. He looked down at his hands, at the twelve fingers that had been the boulder of his youth. Stan’s smug smile reappeared in front of him, the flame of his lighter as he tried to burn his precious Journal.
If he had let me go to my dream school…
He looked at the Pentagon. It was a two-dimensional creature, as thin as Cipher. But he had just a gun to defend himself from creatures three times bigger than him, armed, with horns and sharp teeth like the lynx-being.
Perhaps his knowledge could really save the lives of those little Shapes.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll work with you, if you want.”
The Pentagon stood up and held out his hand.
“Come with me,” he invited Ford, “I’ll take you to the First Ones.”