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DIPPER'S JOURNAL

Swimming through a gravity-free sea of lightning and swirling colors, I reached into my pocket and pinned a pine tree pin to my shirt (I find the symbol comforting after all these years) and found myself staring at, quite literally, a living nightmare.

Bill's universe is not exactly a dimension, but rather a boiling, shifting intergalactic foam between dimensions- a lawless, unstable crawl space between worlds that only the strangest and most unknowable beings call home.

The portal closed behind me, and I found myself trapped there, possibly for eternity. Before I had a moment to properly panic over my fate, I realized that I was hovering before Bill, who perched on a bizarre throne made of optical illusions flanked by an army of strange and shadowy beasts.

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"LOOK WHO DECIDED TO PAY ME A VISIT!" he shrieked, his voice echoing through infinity. "CARE FOR A GAME OF INTERGALACTIC CHESS? THIS TIME, YOU'RE THE PAWN!"

He snapped his fingers, and one of his beasts, a 60-foot-tall ball of fingers and teeth, let out a howl like a humpback whale and charged at me, fingers and teeth wiggling and gnashing! I managed to hide behind an asteroid field in the nick of time as the monstrosity passed me by, and I swam through the air in a panic as multiple beasts tore through the space rocks, searching for me.

Fleeing for my life, I miraculously managed to make shelter in the crater of a large passing asteroid as the monsters swarmed by. Hidden deep within the recesses of the stony caverns, I could hear Bill's shrill voice:

"PINE TREE WANTS TO PLAY HIDE-AND-SEEK! FIRST ONE TO FIND HER AND BRING HER TO ME GETS THEIR OWN GALAXY."

(For the record, it's HIM)

It was followed by the manic laughter of creatures large and small racing off to locate me. I was so crazed from fatigue and rage that my first impulse was to give myself up to Bill so I could curse him right to his face. Fortunately, before I could do anything crazy, I discovered that I was sharing my cave with a shivering family of intergalactic refugees.

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