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[Way to make it extra embarrassing, Hange.]

That's not what I'm here to talk about.

[Here's a way in which Hange is shitty: a forced kiss or a stray grab or even a tongue in an ear, which she experienced from Betelgeuse in interaction number one, does not make that much of a ripple for her. Things have changed a lot but for most of her life her world was a hard, mean, bleak one, where people with means could often take what they wanted from people without. Getting away with just that is getting away easily. Ford doesn't seem injured; he was momentarily made uncomfortable.

Boundaries are something she's aware Betelgeuse will need to work on, but if no one was seriously hurt Hange is prepared to let the matter drop.]

Well, as long as you weren't injured. Feel free to push back on him when he pulls that shit. Betelgeuse needs to experience some consequences for those things.

[Ford, being who he is, is just glad she isn't making a big deal of it. It was a misunderstanding. She thought it was more serious than it was, and that's Ford's garbage social skills at work again. Yay!]

If I didn't have it under control, I wouldn't be letting him sleep in my living room.

Hmm.

[Hange sips her tea.]

What did you want to talk about, regarding Betelgeuse?

[Okay. Deep breath, shake off the embarrassment, go back to being Serious Ford, not Humiliated and Flustered Ford.]

Oh, just -- well. He's...

[Huff. Sip the tea, slow the heart rate, u are the master of your own social anxiety even if the scenario went more nightmarish than anticipated.

Be straightforward.]

Do you think you can handle him?

[He's not doubting. He's asking.]

I do think so.

[She's calm about it.]

He's disgusting and he reeks, which I'm sure he knows and uses, but I have over twenty years of experience on the battlefield and I can't express to you how much worse that is when it comes to stink and shock value. I'm not intimidated by his vulgarities or by what of his abilities I've seen. So far, I've found myself able to work out situations with him without, generally, turning to physical violence. He doesn't offend me and hasn't been able to rile me up. [Which seems really important with Betelgeuse.] We'll see how the month goes, but I think I could work with him.

[He listens.]

And the rest of the ship? I understand that his personality is difficult, and he brings a lot of trouble on himself. But plenty of people on this boat -- and the wardens are no exception -- seem to think that just because they don't like somebody, they can treat them however they want.

And besides that, he's --

-- I lost my temper with him. Said something that was out of line, on the night of the 13th. I tried to apologize, but he thought it was a trick -- that I was going to hurt him the minute he let his guard down, so that I could laugh at his suffering.

What I mean is, it's going to be difficult keeping others from making matters worse.

[There's a lot to address there, so Hange picks what seems like the most salient point first.]

Are you asking if the rest of the ship can handle him, or if I can handle him for them? Or them for him?

I'm saying that the rest of the ship will complicate this. It's hard being an intermediary between someone who hates most of the ship and a ship full of people who hate them back.

[at least Bill was smart enough to pick his battles, mostly. Bill is surprisingly well behaved compared to Betelgeuse. Civilized. Calculating. BJ is a loose cannon. Bill is--was?--a time bomb.]

...I'm concerned for him.

[Hange takes a gulp of her tea, then turns and looks at the sea. Sunset is just beginning to burn in the sky and the water reflects an incredible shade of pink.]

They will, you're right. He already had an altercation with someone where they beat him up so badly that he got a punctured lung, and then undressed him and scrubbed him down and, apparently, left him to wake up. I don't understand why anyone would pair those things. At least if you beat someone up like that, call for their friends to tend to them afterward.

I'm prepared to stand by him. I'm sure it'll be a balancing act between supporting him and pointing out where consequences are warranted after all.

There's a limit to what I can do. I can't bring him to heel too hard - this isn't about crushing the personality out of him. When you were an inmate, would you have listened to any warden demanding you do such a thing?

[There's a hissed, under his breath shit when he hears what someone did. He's appalled but not disbelieving.

And he's angry. That wasn't for Betelgeuse, that was for whoever did it. Just like this ship isn't for inmates, it's for the Authority.]

No, I think you're right.

Just, if you really intend to take responsibility for him -- be prepared for situations where there's no right choice. And to take the blame for it when it goes wrong.

They won't get mad at him, not really, because they weren't expecting anything else. But they'll be furious with you.

[Like they were with Luke, but that was partly Ford's fault, too. And like they were with Ford. He lost several friends and made a lot of enemies.

Then, Ford straightens up, leans back a few degrees, lets his manner and his shoulders get less heavy.]

...ah, who knows. It might not come to that. I have no idea what's going to happen!

Anyway, I'm willing to give him a safe place to sleep until the next flood hits, or he finds somewhere else to stay, whichever comes first.

Mmmm.

[It doesn't surprise her. Well, Hange has spent years upon years being very unpopular, regarded as insane and wasting her time in her work. It's a bit shocking how friendly people on the Barge are to her, and how charming they seem to find her. Hange appreciates it, but charm isn't really what it's all about.

This talk is going well. Stanford seems to have relaxed some.]

Who were you referring to, when you said you'd worked closely with someone who shared a lot of his qualities?

[She has a guess. She'd be surprised if she were wrong. But Hange likes to ask.]

Who else?

Bill Cipher.

[Ding ding ding! That was a softball, but it always feels good to be right.]

You launched an escape attempt with him.

That wasn't the primary purpose. Though it sure did look that way.

Edited 2019-11-05 01:12 (UTC)

[WHY WOULD YOU SAY IT THAT WAY IN YOUR POST THEN, FORD.

OK. Bill also claimed to not be trying to escape, they were trying to get to the Authority, instead. This is a good thing, because Bill has killed so many planets he's developed ways he likes doing it, and he has to graduate, or he has to die, no third option.

These two aren't reliable regarding their own activities though. Trusting their word on this blindly would be like asking Hange if she were trying to overthrow the king, when she was trying to overthrow the king. "Oh, no, of course not! I'm not up to anything rebellious or seditious! I'm a loyal subject of his royal highness, protector of humanity!"

Still, she wants to hear Ford's accounting of it.]

What was?

For me, it was trying to reach the beings I believe are controlling the ship. For Bill, it was that and killing his creator.

[Hange reaches over and tops off her empty teacup while she thinks this over.]

And then what?

That would depend on how they were controlling us.

You see, I made several mistakes during the formulation of this plan. One of them was assuming that physical trauma was the only thing that needed to be prevented, and that everyone could control their imaginations. Another was not bringing my warden in on the plan from the beginning. But the most fundamental mistake I made, the one that doomed the operation from the beginning, was allowing Bill to convince me that his creator and the Authority were in the same world, exercising the same kind of control over us.

Bill isn't usually wrong. In my world, he was always right! He knew everything, saw everything, understood the principles that held the universe together. He didn't just know that mass has gravity, he knew why.

He'd met the guy who wrote him. And there were a lot of things about the Barge that his reasoning explained. So, I believed him.

But when all this succeeded, what came next? When I heard about this, I wondered if you didn't know how dangerous he is, or if you knew and didn't care. That doesn't seem to follow with how you're behaving here. Even so, how could you risk turning him loose on the universe?

Believe me, I'd considered that.

Here's the situation as I saw it.

I knew that getting to his creator, and to anyone else who tried to control him, was Bill's ultimate goal. He'd wait as long as it took to get into that universe, and he's very old, and very patient. As long as Bill didn't disappear from the ship, he could wait millennia, until all the inmates and wardens who remembered he was an evil mastermind were gone, and try again when the time was right.

And I believed he would get to that world, with or without my help. If he made it there, without anyone to stop him, it would be a massacre.

So, when I found the wormhole he'd been keeping in his cabin and he asked me to be his partner, I had to make a choice. If I reported him to the wardens and confiscated his materials and calculations, he'd only try again after I was gone. But if I escaped with him, either he would still be under the control of the Admiral, in which case the inmate power cap would still be in effect, or he would be outside of the Barge's influence, and free of the resurrection mechanic. I was reasonably sure I could get close enough, and I'd built a weapon that could do it months before. I could control him or kill him, and either way, he'd lose.

It was a stupid plan. I never succeed when I try to go it alone. I was risking a world on getting the chance to get a shot, and deep down I knew it. But I didn't see another way.

Until, of course, Bill told me the second half of his plan. A few weeks before the portal was ready, he explained to me that he needed me to cast a spell: one that would create a dome, hundreds of miles across, that would make anything that anyone imagined inside of it real.

Of course, I could imagine immediately the kind of chaos this could cause. I'd seen it already in my own world! People would be murdered by their own nightmares. I didn't want to do it.

But here I had a choice again. Go to the wardens, stop this plan, and wait for Bill to strike again, this time without being involved. Or, I could take the teeth out of the plan he had, get us both to the Authority's dimension, and free the Barge from their control without any bloodshed.

It meant I wasn't gambling on my own ability to kill Bill Cipher, something I'd been trying and failing to do for thirty years.

[No. Really. He gets how dumb that was.]

So, here's what I did. I agreed to cast the spell on two conditions: one, that Bill swore not to harm anyone, inside or outside the bubble, who wasn't his creator or the Authority, and two, that we modified the spell so that no one inside of it would experience physical harm.

[Ford's quiet a moment.]

It wasn't a perfect solution, but I did my best with what I had. I still believe, to this day, that if I had reported him, he would have made it to that world and thousands of people would be dead. I also still think the Authority has a lot of things to answer for, and one day, I'd like to meet them on their level and give them a piece of my mind.

[Is the flashback over yet? Shame you can't program the Enclosure so that your monologue is a voiceover.]

[God this is a lot of information and it all sounds like... such a mess.

Hange feels easier hearing it though. At least this man, who's made it to wardenhood now, wasn't Bill Cipher's qualmless ally. It all still sounds so, so precarious, but it's better than Ford wanting to help him, or simply not caring about the fates of the vulnerable mortals in whatever universe they'd pop out in.

Scouts like Hange are team players by training and necessity though. You couldn't have looped some discrete wardens in, Ford...?

What's done is done, anyway.]

At least you admit to the errors in judgment you made. [Hange sounds... calmed.] I can see the situation must have been complex. [Also the level of Bill-related anxiety indicated by the idea of Bill waiting the barge out, over the course of thousands of years... that's a Big Fear. Yikes.]

Who are the authority? I'm curious about them but hardly anyone seems to have been around here when this tub ran into them. I heard the Admiral made off with the boat...

[Bill told her this actually, and Hange has been wondering pretty much since they talked about it if he just wound her up and sent her off to info-gather. It seemed very plausible, and more plausible now; it's all made worse by the fact that Hange is genuinely very interested in the Authority and who they are and what they can do and what the whole thing implies about the actual superstructure of the universe that most people never get to see or poke at.]

[Right? Bill waiting for an entire generation to die off so that he can begin his plans again is terrifying, and something Bill has absolutely done before.]

I spoke with them, when we went to the Bargeyard. The Admiral had waited too long to bring the Barge in for maintenance, so they hauled us in for repairs. It was an interesting place, an intersection of people and places from all sorts of universes, and all around the docks, there were Barges of every kind.

We received a note inviting us to come to a place called the Officer's Lounge to discuss our experiences under the current Admiral. In exchange, the Authority said, they would answer one question -- anything we wanted to know.

They put on a real show getting us there. Enormous doors, cavernous hallways, creeping unstoppable sense of dread -- until finally I was alone inside a great big room, surrounded by distant, shadowy figures. I could feel that they were looking inside of my head, that anything I thought or felt, they would know.

So, I said my piece, I asked my question, and I was out. They didn't seem that impressive to me -- they were surprised by what I asked and had to confer among themselves, which means we're dealing with more than one -- but they did seem extraplanar. That place was their seat of power, somewhere they could do whatever they liked.

I don't know much else about them for sure. But I do know that when Bill spoke with them, they made a reference to a piece of Earth media. So, either they're fans of universes based on my planet, or they're from one.

[He'd thought it was the second, when he and Bill tunneled out of the ship. But now?]

I'm leaning toward the first one. Frankly, I think they're fans of us.

[This is a major paradigm-shattering idea right here.]

Fans of us - what does that mean?

[She doesn’t really... grasp it, not yet. But she understands that it’s important.]

I don't think the Barge is for us, Ms. Hange.

I think we're picked because someone, most likely the Authority, wants to see what each of us will do on a ship like this.

And I think that whoever it is is watching us.

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