Not On The Wheel (Bill Cipher x Reader)

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Photos To The Past

Y/n was horribly wrong.

"Oh my God!" She yelled, hunching over the little desk. Slamming her head onto it, she let out a loud huff, kicking up dust. She started coughing. "How the hell is there even less information in the first journal?! Are we working in reverse? What the hell man!"

With a loud grunt, she kicked herself off the desk, rolling away slightly with the open book resting on her face. She had been underground for hours and she was beginning to regret trying to make sense of all this information. But whenever Y/n had considered cutting her losses and going back up to scream into her pillow, her laziness got the best of her and she decided the little swivel chair she was in was comfortable enough to urge her to keep going.

Her head hurt; a horrible throbbing pounding at her eyes and temples. With every buzz and beep of a nearby machine, the throbbing multiplied tenfold. It was as if she was sitting in the middle of an electric zoo, where mechanical beasts screamed at her from all angles. She had thought that her sleep would have prepared her more for digging through all the Author's early ramblings, but she could only find her patience running thin and yearning for more rest.

The first journal, much like its third successor, held more findings about the little town. However, Y/n could clearly see that there was a distinct difference between the writing styles. Both were neat and proper, but the first seemed almost too professional; it didn't have nearly as many of the personal touches and one-on-one experiences that the third had. The few it did have, however, were added years later, evidenced by the little dates he put in the footnotes.

The first was also awfully barren; there were more day-to-day entries and pages filled with theorems and formulas than there were entries about creatures and adventures. If Y/n were to be honest, it read more like a diary with random physics formulas sprinkled within than it did a memoir detailing supernatural encounters.

And as Y/n passed through yet another to-do list riddled with little doodles and complex mathematical equations littering the margins, she was just about ready to explode.

She let out a loud groan, folding her arms and letting the book rest on her face. The pages were rough and smelled of mildew; nothing like the old book smell she had expected... and hoped.

"That's it," she announced to no one, voice muffled by the book. "I'm adding the Author to my punt list. I don't care if he's a genius— I don't care how old he might be— I don't care if there's a good chance he'd end up severely injuring me— I'm fighting him. All because of this stupid journal!"

Y/n put the book back on the desk with a slight slam, resting her arms on her legs and holding her throbbing head. She just wanted something to make all this worth it.

Besides learning that the Author had a strange affinity for jelly beans and an even weirder hatred for toffee peanuts, the most useful piece of information she had learned was his age. The first journal gave her more insight into his academics and how exactly he ended up in Gravity Falls. It might have been yet a small victory within the uphill war she was waging with the book and her roadblock on theories, but it was definitely something to write home about.

She had learned that the man had lost the opportunity to go to his dream school, and had to settle for a rather low ranking school in a similar area. Y/n noticed that whenever he wrote about it, he appeared furious. The letters merged into each other, and there were a lot more harsh penlines as words were tied together with thicker and heavier strokes. At first, she had thought the sloppier and more sharp writing was because he had yet to develop his documentation style, but she later learned it was emotions getting the better of him.

He graduated years before he was set to, earning a doctoral degree much faster than the school had ever seen. With his theses, he ended up being allotted a very charitable grant to allow him to continue his research.