Fanfic / All The World's a Toybox

All The World's A Toybox is a Gravity Falls alternate universe Dark Fic written by Straightjacketed.

Diverging from canon right before Bill Cipher's death in "Take Back The Falls," Bill spots the attempt to lure him into Stan's mind before it happens and retaliates, forcing Ford to give him the information he needs to escape Gravity Falls in exchange for the lives of his family. Soon after, Weirdmageddon goes global, resulting in the collapse of human civilization and the creation of the "fun world" that Bill always wanted, and of course, Bill's idea of fun involves lots and lots and lots of pain.

Once the initial carnage is out of the way and Weirdness begins spreading to the rest of the universe, Bill decides to have some subtler fun by sentencing the Zodiac to eternity in a series of twisted games designed to exploit their weaknesses and torture them for his amusement.

However, it soon becomes clear that outside agencies might be at work in the World Gone Weird, and Bill might not entirely be in control of his new kingdom...

---

All The World's A Toybox provides examples of:

• Alas, Poor Villain: GIFfany is every bit as nasty as she is in canon, especially when Bill gives her a mechanical body and sends her after Soos. However, her final demise - in which the Filth overrides her program - is played for tragedy, with her crying in fear and begging Soos for help.
• Apocalypse How: The story kicks off with a Class 2 example, with human civilization being effectively destroyed by a combination of Weirdness Waves and direct assaults by Bill; from here on, the human race has been reduced to Bill's slaves and toys.
• Bittersweet Ending: Bill is defeated, freeing countless sentient beings from his nightmarish torture, but it's made clear that the universe will never be the same as it was before. Meanwhile, the Zodiac have been irreversibly changed by Bill's games, but they've gained godlike power as a result, and resolve that even if they can't restore the world to what it was, they can at least work to make it a better place than Bill left it.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • Dipper's shapeshifting cannot be controlled at all and is mainly used as a means for Bill torture him. For good measure, it makes travelling a lot harder than it needs to be.
  • Gideon is blessed with telepathy as an ironic fulfilment of his own con, and it can't be controlled either, leaving him suffering constant headaches from the endless influx of thoughts.
• Body Horror:
  • When Dipper's forcibly transformed into Paper Jam Dipper, he's forced to experience the worst of the unfortunate clone's disorders firsthand. Among other things, finds that he can barely force out a breath because his lungs have been crumpled up.
  • During her game, Wendy encounters several unfortunate victims who've been converted into metal by one of Bill's playgrounds. The results are agonizing: they can't move under the weight of their own lead skeletons, their eyes have been scoured blind by metal irises, their muscles are threaded with copper wires, and a few of them have torn their bellies open to reveal their internal organs have been crudely remade into machine parts.
  • Fiddleford McGucket begins absorbing metal by touch alone, allowing him to become a cyborg without having to shed a drop of blood. All well and good, but this unfortunately means that he finds himself taking in metal simply by walking around his prison, converting more and more of himself without meaning to - hence the progressive memory loss he calls Rust: it's the result of his brain being displaced by metal.
• Break the Cutie: By her second chapter, Mabel's game is well on the way to completely breaking her spirit, featuring everything from isolation, solitary confinement in a lightless void, and even encountering replicas of her family - tortured and despising her for the part she played in Weirdmageddon. By the end of the chapter, all she can do is collapse into a Troubled Fetal Position and cry.
• Break the Haughty:
  • Gideon suffers a long spell of pain and humiliation over the course of his game - ultimately going a long way towards breaking down his prideful attitude. Among other things, he's cursed with agonizing telepathy, stranded in a shantytown, coddled by well-meaning caretakers, left too sick and weak to protest being treated like a child, and ends up going bald. For good measure, he finds himself unwillingly reading the minds of his parents, reliving everything he did to them.
  • Robbie is trapped in a dystopian cityscape, shorn of his hair, forced to work by a very strict schedule as a shepherd for zombies, beaten for the slightest infractions, and routinely humiliated in public. His big attempt to rescue the zombie versions of his friends and escape ends with him getting his eyes burned out with acid. Then he's banished to the streets to live out his days as a homeless beggar.
• Call-Back:
  • During Dipper's first bout of torture, he is forced to repeat the Lamby Lamby Dance from "The Inconveniencing" and later transformed into Paper Jam Dipper from "Double Dipper"
  • Part of Mabel's game involves her being sent back to Mabeland, only now it's even more of a Crapsaccharine World than it was beforehand.
• Calling the Old Man Out:
  • After finding that Preston Northwest has become a willing servant of Bill once again, Pacifica explodes with hatred, lambasting him and everything he stands for. She's even angrier when she discovers that Preston was also subjected to Pavlovian conditioning, but even after knowing the horrors it involved, happily subjected his own daughter to it just to make her obedient. Indeed, she's so angry that she even uses Preston's torture buzzer on him.
  • Ford recalls a phone call in which Filbrick tried to use him as a meal ticket, even trying to force him to pony up grant money for his nest egg, only for Ford to lose his temper and take him to task over every shitty thing he'd ever done - even coming close to forgiving Stan in the process... only for Bill to seduce him into continuing his work on the portal and forget all about this epiphany. Back in the present, this proves the basis of Ford beating Stan's Self-Loathing (identical to Filbrick) to a pulp.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: As part of his game, Bill insists that Dipper perform the Lamby Lamby Dance before an audience of Henchmaniacs. This sounds harmless, if a little embarrassing, but Bill transforms Dipper into a human-lamb hybrid that can barely stand upright much less dance, and punishes any refusal to play along by zapping Dipper with a cattle prod. And the performance goes on for two hours.
• Cool Chair: In Pacifica's game, Bill creates an elaborate throne for the Northwest family; with Bill's permission, it can grant the head of the family immense powers... but the throne is lined with horrific hooks and barbs, meaning that whoever finally wins the contest to achieve ultimate power will be in constant pain for as long as they sit the throne.
• The Corrupter: Bill relishes the opportunity to warp members of the Zodiac into psychopathic monsters if he isn't in the mood for simple torture:
  • Mabel will only be allowed the luxury of Mabeland if she agrees to inflict pain on others, with harsh punishments in store for showing any sign of empathy.
  • Pacifica is given the opportunity to gain all the powers of the Northwest Throne - which might allow her make herself human again - but only if she becomes just as ruthless and ambitious as her father.
  • Ford is tempted with wishes from the Dome of Dreams that can make his life alone easier, even give him the chance to escape... but every single wish he makes is designed to undermine his humanity and make him every bit as deranged and cruel as Bill.
• Crossover:
  • Ford used to be friends with Rick Sanchez, though he was very aware of his bad habits.
  • It's eventually revealed that Nyarlathotep himself has snuck in from another dimension and is playing his own mysterious games alongside Bill.
  • In the same chapter, the Filth begins spilling into the world from a dimensional rift.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: All human attempts to stop Bill end in failure; even the nuclear strikes end with the Rift eating the nukes and spitting them right back up on top of the attempted attackers, with the Henchmaniacs being sent after the White House and the Kremlin soon after. Once Bill demonstrates his power by taking a bite out of the planet, the governments of the world begin unconditionally surrendering.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: "Mr Carter" AKA Nyarlathotep makes a surprise appearance in Chapter 12 and treats Dipper to a lavish picnic above a refugee camp, giving him fresh food that he hasn't tasted in weeks and even giving him a brief respite from his involuntary shapeshifting powers. Of course, he's doing so as a favor to "Mr A", and acts incredibly creepy throughout the whole thing.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Bill's mocking letter to Ford sounds uncannily like something written by a rapist to their victim, not only subtly comparing the results of Ford's possession to the aftermath of a date rape but adding a very nasty dose of "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization.
  You liked being possessed. You liked waking up naked in the woods with no idea how you got there. You liked finding all those weird little cuts and bruises on your body and not knowing how you got them. You liked being alone. You liked being helpless. You liked being MINE.
• Downer Beginning: The story begins with Bill seeing through Stan's deception and mortally wounding him, then unleashing the apocalypse on the world.
• Eye Scream: After a failed attempt to escape his dystopian game, Robbie is blinded with acid-laced eyedrops.
• Fatal Forced March: In Soos's game, he's sent to rescue his friends from unspecified dangers at the far end of a seemingly endless highway. This journey is expressly designed to kill him by any number of methods... but Soos isn't allowed to die. In a darkly amusing twist, Soos's determination to continue along the road actually starts boring Bill, so he decides to spice things up by repairing GIFfany and sending her after him.
• Flaying Alive: After being ambushed by Pyronica, Dipper gets the skin on his forehead sliced away with a knife. Fortunately, his involuntary shapeshifting allows him to recover very quickly, but the pain is nothing short of agonizing. For good measure, Bill later gives the skin to Ford as a sick joke.
• Flipping the Bird: Before being sent on his way, Dipper is given a journal that he can document his shapeshifting with; it looks identical to Ford's journals - except the six-fingered hand on the cover has been replaced by a hand with a single middle finger raised.
• For Want Of A Nail: Stan almost tricked Bill and would have destroyed him once and for all as he did in canon... if Bill hadn't ordered him to take off his gloves for the handshake.
• Forced to Watch: Pacifica's game features her being transformed into an animated doll and enslaved to the will of her parents for a replay of the events of "Northwest Mansion Mystery," leaving her essentially forced to watch her own horrifically callous behavior - concluding with her leaving Dipper and Mabel to burn alive when the Lumberjack Ghost unleashes his vengeance upon the mansion, a scene that Pacifica has no choice but to watch in silent horror until she's dragged into the panic room.
• Formerly Fat: In his game, Gideon is stranded in a shantytown somewhere in a frozen wasteland, ending up extremely sick for good measure; as a result, Gideon loses his paunch and chubby neck, leaving him practically Nothing but Skin and Bones.
• Fountain of Youth: As punishment for failing to control Pacifica during her game, Preston Northwest is regressed to an eight-year-old child.
• Genuine Human Hide: After Pyronica non-lethally flays Dipper from the eyebrows up, Bill tans the skin and presents it to Ford as a horrific souvenir; Ford doesn't even recognize it at first up until he notices Dipper's telltale birthmark.
• The Heartless: In his game, Stan is haunted by a physical manifestation of his self-loathing that's determined to make Stan kill himself; for good measure, Self-Loathing takes the form of Stan's abusive, loveless father Filbrick.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Ford gradually begins to crack up the longer he's kept alone with his self-loathing, especially once Bill's psychological torture gets to him, to the point that upon realizing the full extent of the sick joke that's been played on him, all he can do is break down in tears.
  • Mabel is totally crushed with despair when Bill presents her with a doppelganger of Dipper that blames her for Weirdmageddon, and being hammered with so many reminders of her mistake at once leaves her frozen in a Troubled Fetal Position.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Ford knowingly sacrifices part of his humanity to make a wish that can save Stan from his injuries.
• Humongous Mecha: After getting bored with Soos's game, Bill resurrects GIFfany and sets her up with an enormous mechanical body of her own; twenty-feet tall, it's been made from pieces of the Shacktron and bits of terrifying mascot robots... and equipped with on-board weaponry. The Filth infects it at the end of Soos's game, destroying GIFfany and replacing her with the Black Signal.
• Impossible Task: Every single one of Bill's games is so egregiously rigged in his favor that there's no chance for the Zodiac to win any of them - and that's if there's a tangible goal. Among other things, Soos is tasked with reaching the far end of a highway that literally never ends.
• Involuntary Shapeshifting: As part of his game, Dipper is cursed with uncontrollable shapeshifting and sent on a quest to find his friends and loved ones... only to find that constantly shapeshifting makes it pretty difficult to travel. But he has to continue walking, because if he holds still for too long, Bill will take direct control of his shapeshifting and turn him into something nasty.
• Kick the Dog: Bill is a dog-kicking machine throughout the story, regularly inflicting horrific tortures at the drop of a hat for nothing more than cheap laughs - and those are the ones that are secondary to the really nasty things he does for the sake of his pre-planned games. Among the earliest of them involves him turning Dipper into Paper Jam Dipper just to punish him for giving Bill the Silent Treatment.
• Loss of Identity: In his game, Old Man McGucket is cursed with an advancing case of amnesia that threatens to destroy all the memories he worked so hard to regain, forcing him to cover a bulletin board with notes about his life. Bill destroys his notes, eventually resulting in McGucket being reduced to a blank slate. Worse still, he's then reinvented into a proto-Henchmaniac.
• Like Father, Like Son: During her game, Pacifica realizes that her father Preston was actually subjected to the same kind of Pavlovian Behavioral Conditioning as she was, to the point that Preston reacts with instinctive terror to the sound of a particular kind of buzzer.
• Logical Weakness: Weirdness energy is essentially disorder made manifest, so it doesn't take long for the modifications he makes to the Zodiac to start growing beyond their programming once he's not actively keeping them in line. And since the one thing it can't do is restore normalcy, he's unable to take away the powers he accidentally granted them.
  • On a lesser note, the physical manifestation of Stan Pines' self-loathing finds itself woefully inadequate against someone who isn't Stan Pines.
• Madness Mantra: Mrs Gleeful's "just keep vacuuming" makes a reappearance, but this time, Gideon finds himself unwittingly repeating it after reading her mind.
• Make a Wish: Ford's game involves him being imprisoned under a dome that can grant his wishes... but at the cost of gradually transforming him into a Henchmanic, complete with a total lack of empathy. For good measure, life in this particular playground is especially miserable and the apparent exit leads into a labyrinth designed to psychologically torture Ford, so he's only more tempted to wish.
• Menacing Museum: Stan's game features him being trapped in a museum documenting his life in an increasingly insulting fashion, complete with exhibits lambasting him for his flaws and even showing how awful his life could have been if things had gone better for him. For good measure, it's haunted by the manifestation of his own self-loathing, who wants to make Stan kill himself.
• Monumental Damage: As a sign of his victory, Bill begins removing world monuments, palaces, and other famous buildings and forcibly incorporating them into the bulk of the Fearamid, making it absolutely gigantic in the process.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Once she has a chance to calm down, Pacifica is ashamed of herself for using her father's own Behavioral Conditioning to torture him in a moment of rage, believing that Dipper would hate her for stooping so low, and the fact that she seriously considered using the conditioning to make Preston kill himself only makes her feel even worse.
• Mysterious Protector: Several members of the Zodiac receive letters from a character known only as "Mr A", providing them with crucial advice on how to survive the games. Mr A begins taking more direct steps to intervene in Bill's games as the story progresses, even making a deal with Nyarlathotep to that end. He's actually Axolotl, the godlike entity that Bill invoked in "Take Back The Falls."
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Ford ultimately saves Stanley from his own manifested Self-Loathing by beating the incarnate emotion to death with his bare hands.
• Not So Omniscient After All: "Mr A" reveals that Bill Cipher doesn't possess the omniscience he had back in the Mindscape and can only focus his vision in one direction at a time now that he's made the real world his kingdom. It's because of this that Mr A can leave messages for the Zodiac in the first place, and later, how the Zodiac themselves can attempt to stage jailbreaks.
• Ominous Hair Loss: As a result of being cursed with uncontrollable telepathy and trapped in an extremely unhygienic shantytown, Gideon falls ill, spending a long period of time bedridden under the watchful eyes of well-meaning caretakers who don't realize that their thoughts are actively hurting him. When Gideon finally manages to get out of bed, he realizes just how sick he is when he realizes that his hair has fallen out - leaving him almost completely bald.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Stan realizes that he must be seriously injured when he sees Ford crying over him, something that the emotionally-distant genius would never do otherwise.
• Painful Transformation: Dipper's forced transformations on stage are extremely painful and leave him writhing in pain, much to the amusement of the Henchmaniac audience. This is especially true of Dipper's transformation into Paper Jam Dipper, who can barely breathe thanks to his crinkled lungs.
• Perfection Is Static: Late in the story, Nyarlathotep eventually reveals that he’s altered his home dimension so that humanity’s development remains frozen in a stagnant, unchanging early 21st century Crapsack World that can’t even be ended by the other horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos. He frequently describes this hellish world as his masterpiece, and he’s only helping Dipper and Mabel so that Bill Cipher’s takeover of the multiverse doesn’t endanger Nyarlathotep’s perfect world.
  ”Thus, my greatest achievement: a world that is forever teetering on the brink of the end times but never reaching them. The humans on my Earth cry out for release, for an apocalyptic climax that will free them from the endless cycle of suppression and disappointment, for the day when 'all the earth will flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom' as dear Howard put it. But it never arrives. The suffering of my world, my masterpiece, is eternal… as is my satisfaction.”
• Perpetually Protean: As soon as the initial "festivities" are over, Dipper is cursed with constant uncontrollable shapeshifting, zapping him into a new form every few minutes. Needless to say, this makes walking extremely difficult.
• Psychic Nosebleed: As a result of reading his traumatized mother's mind, Gideon not only experiences this, but starts bleeding from the eyes and ears as well.
• Puppeteer Parasite: In her game, Wendy is eventually pitted against her own family, now under the control of parasitic maggots that want to infest her as well - though it's not clear if they're actual members of the Corduroy family or replicas created specifically to torture Wendy.
• Reforged into a Minion: After losing his game, Old Man McGucket forgets everything about himself and is remade into the Ruinous Toymaker, a Mechanical Abomination designed to provide Bill Cipher with all the toys he can't be bothered to make on his own.
• Resurrection/Death Loop: Soos' game features him being dumped on a seemingly endless road and told that his friends are imprisoned at the other end of it, forcing him to run along the road until something ends up killing him; then he's brought back to life and made to do it all over again. Suffice to say, Soos is left decidedly freaked out by this, and is eventually reduced to virtual automaton status in a desperate attempt to ignore the succession of former bodies he keeps tripping over.
• Resurrective Immortality: Soos is cursed with this by Bill; no matter how gruesomely he's murdered, he'll always wake up back in one piece at the start of the road.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: As a Reality Warper, Bill explicitly makes the rules favor him over the Zodiac and is not afraid to change them at a moment's notice if it proves more entertaining, even openly breaking the established rules simply because he can.
• Scylla and Charybdis: Mabel's game gives her a choice between two different prisons, each of them awful in their own way; she can either stay in the World of Endless Summer, which is essentially Gravity Falls but frozen in time at the very moment when Mabel gave Bill the Rift... or she can go back to Mabeland. The latter means that she'll live in luxury but punished for showing any kind of empathy and gradually corrupted... but the former means being alone and surrounded by guilt-inducing reminders all the time.
• Shapeshifting Heals Wounds: Fortunately, Dipper's transformations allow him to instantly recover from any of the injuries he suffers, hence why he survives being flayed from the eyebrows up by Pyronica.
• Sleep Deprivation Punishment: Wendy is sent out on a rambling journey across the wastelands and cannot find any sleep during it; no matter how carefully she selects her hiding place, another one of Bill's monsters will find and attack her while she's sleeping, forcing her to either fight it off or flee for her life (sometimes both). By the end of her first chapter, Wendy is so exhausted that she's reduced to wandering aimlessly and sleeping wherever she collapses, ultimately refusing to rouse herself when the next monster attacks. Unfortunately said next monster is her parasitized family, forcing her to continue fleeing.
• Super-Empowering:
  • Pacifica's game allows her to empower herself with superpowers like telekinesis and Thinking Up Portals by physically implanting hooks from the Northwest Throne into her body... but unfortunately, these hooks can only be earned by demonstrating that she's psychopathic enough to serve as Bill's instrument. Fortunately, Bill is distracted by another game, unwittingly giving Pacifica time to cheat the system and gain enough powers to escape with her family in tow.
  • Ford's game is specifically designed to empower him into becoming a Henchmaniac with every wish he makes.
• Survival Mantra: Faced with another case of advancing amnesia by Bill's torture, Old Man McGucket falls back on one of these in an attempt to hang onto his identity. It doesn't work.

"My name is Fiddleford Hadron McGucket, and I can still remember who I am."

• Telepathy: Gideon is cursed with the ability to hear the thoughts of those around him - with a heavy case of Power Incontinence.
• Terms of Endangerment: Nyarlathotep playfully calls Dipper "little shoggoth".
• Time Stands Still: Part of Mabel's game involves her being trapped in a replica of Gravity Falls frozen in time at the very moment she made the deal with Bill.
• Toy Transmutation: Pacifica is transformed into an animated porcelain doll and left under the control of her father for a grisly replay of "Northwest Mansion Mystery." Even once Bill changes the game and gives her a chance to advance beyond her station, she remains a doll.
• Wild Card: Nyarlathotep is helping the heroes on behalf of Mr A, but he clearly has his own mysterious agenda that he cares about far more than human life; he's only helping Mr A only so that he can get more favors out of him, and he's more than happy to inflict pain on the Zodiac as often as he lavishes them with Pet the Dog moments. As such, it's very hard to guess what he'll do next.
• World of Chaos: The Reality Is Out to Lunch status of Gravity Falls under Bill's reign is here spread to the rest of the world, with anyone in the path of the global Weirdness Waves experiencing uncontrollable transformations and insane weather raining blood and bone down across the rapidly-changing landscape.
• Yandere: The story portrays Bill as being unpleasantly possessive of Ford, even being personally offended that Ford spurned their relationship. As such, he goes to particular trouble to make McGucket suffer for trying to bring Ford to his senses, and later sets Ford himself up with a game that will ultimately convert him into a psychopathic Henchmaniac - just to make his ownership of Ford official.

---