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COME ONE, COME ALL, TO ALCOR'S SHACK OF MYSTERIES!
COME SEE OUR COLLECTION OF ANCIENT AND POWERFUL ARTIFACTS FROM ACROSS THE AGES! AND GO ON A GUIDED TOUR LED BY ALCOR THE DREAMBENDER HIMSELF!
MANY ITEMS IN OUR COLLECTION ARE SO RARE AND POWERFUL, OTHER PEOPLE WOULDN'T EVEN LET YOU KNOW THEY EXISTED! BUT YOU CAN GAZE UPON THEM WITH YOUR OWN EYES!
JUST COME TO ALCOR'S SHACK OF MYSTERIES! LOCATED OFF ROUTE 33, OPEN ALL YEAR ROUND.
Tickets are 50$ per person, 25$ per child, and 5$ per infant. Families get special 160$ dollar group rate. No refunds.
---
Herk didn't particularly want to stop at Alcor's Shack of Mysteries. The whole place reeked of an overpriced tourist trap. But he and his family had been driving for five hours straight, and if they didn't stop somewhere, anywhere, they would all go insane and murder each other before they even got to the hotel.
First looks were not promising. A gaudy black and gold sign announced the place in huge golden letters, accompanied by a stylized image of Alcor's star form that seemed to be winking. The building itself kind of looked like it was once the former home of some kind of mad hermit, and another prominent sign reminded everyone leaving that there would be no refunds given to anyone.
The owner was waiting outside the front door when they pulled up. The full suite, top-hat, and cane made it very clear who he was supposed to be.
"WELCOME TO ALCOR'S SHACK OF MYSTERIES! I'm Alcor the Dreambender and I'll be your guide today!"
Herk just stared at him in disbelief. "Doesn't Alcor the Dreambender have, you know, fangs and claws and wings?"
"Oh yes, I usually do, but I'm hiding them so I don't scare off customers."
"Riiiight..."
---
Fifty dollars for admittance, another twenty for the tour, and Karen was starting to realize that she had been ripped off royally. She had never before in her life seen such an obvious collection of fakes and ripoff artifacts. The owner for his part, blathered on about the supposed history and power of every item on display, as if it wasn't totally obvious the the ominous glows were merely cheap glamors, and that the voices in their heads were just being caused by the pseudo-psychic speakers that were poorly concealed in the shadowed corners of the room.
"And this here is the Rock-That-Looks-Like-A-Face-Rock. Is it a rock? Is it a face? No one knows. What we do know is that it was used in the late pre-transcendence era as a means of ripping off tourists."
"Well," Karen thought. "At least it was being put to its original purpose."
---
Key chains, bobble-heads, snowglobes, the gift shop was filled with the standard crap most gift shops were. It was also filled with a bunch of decidedly non-standard crap. One shelf contained a whole row of monkey paws, guaranteed to be wish-granting. A rack held little baggies filled with herbs and promises that they were 100% dried Yggdrasil. (And not presumably, dried oregano that had been marked up three hundred percent.) A small bin had a pile of "gag" USB keys that could infect people's devices with the Alcor Virus. There was even a wooden shelf containing floating top-hats, with a sign saying that they were made personally by Alcor the Dreambender and blessed with his power.
"You made these?" Catty asked, gesturing to the floating hats.
The owner, still in his Alcor costume, glanced up from his book. "Yup, made them just this morning."
"And the tag saying 'Made in Taiwan?'"
"Just a little feature I like to add."
---
PlacesToSee.com - Buisness Reviews - Alcor's Shack of Mysteries
HoppingFlowerPots: Do not recommend. This place is totally an overpriced tourist trap. I went there last summer and I payed over fifty bucks to get in. All the guy did was spruce up a bunch of old movie props and make up a whole bunch of bullshit stories about how they were all powerful magical artifacts. You could even see the places where he missed a spot when he was slapping gold paint on things. One exhibit was just this tacky hula-girl lamp with a card saying how it was the prison of a powerful genie. I mean, how unoriginal can you get. 1/10. Was not happy at all.
ActuallyAlcor: That is completely untrue. All our exhibits are one hundred percent genuine. Not one of them is a replica or reproduction. You can bring in any expert you care to name and they will tell you that everything in my Shack of Mysteries is exactly what I have said it is. I have not lied about the provenience or nature of anything. Even the hula-girl lamp. When you're trying to seal and powerful djinn you take whatever you have at hand.
Fridge2Bed: Notice he didn't deny the part about it being an overpriced tourist trap. :P
---
Agent Yeeves brushed a stray twig out of his eyes and made note of the family pulling out of the parking lot of Alcor's Shack of Mysteries. Several airport security checks had recently found several innocuous objects, including key-chains, bobble-heads, and a floating top hat, that had set off the demonic-energy alarms. It had been easy enough to trace the objects back to this little tourist trap, but that was only the beginning.
The guy might have no idea what he's actually selling, or he might know all too well. He might be working on his own, or he could be the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. If they just swooped down and busted him, than the rest would scatter and reform somewhere else. That's why surveillance was needed. That's why he was hiding in a duck-blind up twenty feet in a pine tree with a pair a binoculars.
"To think, you're the first secret agent to show up here," Alcor said from his perch on a nearby branch.
Agent Yeeves screamed and nearly fell out of the tree.
---
"And this is our feature exhibit of authentic pre-transcendence hoaxes. Our feature exhibit is the replica fake stone giant, originally displayed by P.T. Barnum as part of his traveling circus. The original fake stone giant was originally displayed in Cardiff, New York, but when the discoverers refused to sell the original to P.T. Barnum, he had his own copy of the fake stone giant commissioned, which you now see here." He gazed out at the crowd of bewildered faces. "Any questions."
"People paid money to see this?"
"Oh yes, quite a bit of it. P.T. Barnum made his fortune on this and other fakes."
"But it doesn't even look real."
"Of course not. This was before the Transcendence. They had no idea what a real stone giant even looked like."
"That fake unicorn horn doesn't even look real either."
"Of course its doesn't. Its a narwhal tusk. People didn't know what real unicorn horn looked like either."
"Why does that jackalope look funny?" One of the kids in the group blurted out.
"Because it's not a jackalope. Its a rabbit with antlers glued on. It was the only way you could get a stuffed jackalope before the Transcendence."
The crowd just kept looking at him in complete bewilderment.
---
Airport security had just confiscated an honest-to-god jar of semi-sentient human eyeballs from a vacationing family. The family seemed under the impression that the eyes were just glass and enchanted to look at people to creep them out. Deeper probing by customs agents however had revealed that, no, the eyeballs were very real and very semi-sentient. The eyes had just been... polished to look like they were made of glass, and a creepy label had been slapped on the jar that made it look like a piece of cheap tourist junk. (Even if it did say outright that the eyes were real and semi-sentient.)
Once again, the jar was traced back to the gift shop of Alcor's Shack of Mysteries. This was becoming a disturbing pattern, and that's why Agent Serrows was dispatched to do some more in-depth investigation. The first step, was to figure out what they were dealing with. That was why she was sitting in her car pointing a long-distance magical spectrometer at Alcor's Shack of Mysteries. Holy, demonic, elemental, spectral, psychic, whatever it showed would at least help narrow down the potential list of problems.
She flicked the spectrometer on. It let out a piercing beep that sounded like a small animal dying.
Then it exploded.
Agent Serrows staggered out of her car in a cloud of smoke, coughing and wheezing. Her waving hands found a nearby bench and she plopped down into it, trying to figure out just what went wrong.
"Gotta hate it when those things are so ambiguous," Alcor said from his place beside her on the bench.
Agent Serrows screamed and nearly fell off the bench.
---
"And this is the secret bunker built by Stanford Pines beneath his house in Gravity Falls. It was here that Stanford Pines began his first forays into trans-dimensional travel and unknowingly set in motion events that would lead to the Transcendence. Now, this is not a replica. This is the exact same bunker used by Stanford Pines, right down to the authentic per-transcendence office furniture and the authentic per-transcendence coffee-stains. Question?"
"Yeah, isn't real bunker like a hundred feet underground in Gravity Falls?"
"Of course it is. But since it wasn't being used I took the liberty of borrowing it for my Shack of Mysteries. It was quite simple to use my vast demonic power to transport it over here."
The collective stare of the tour group asked if he thought they were all idiots.
---
"This has got to be some kind of elaborate hoax."
At least that was what Director Irragata was desperately hoping. Best case scenario you had an road-side attraction operator with bad taste and no idea what he was actually doing. Worst case scenario...
Well, that's why she was visiting the Director of Magical Antiquities. Some of the artifacts "Alcor" was displaying at his tourist trap had to be fake, if just for the fact that the real ones were already in government custody. The Ark of the Covenant was lost somewhere in the depths of warehouse IJ-2, the Tablets of Enzanapat and the Deseri Scrolls were locked up in bunker T-53, and the Spiky Doomhammer was buried under two tons of nuclear waste at the bottom of a salt-mine. All she had to do was to confirm that these things were where they were supposed to be and voila, worse case scenario off the table.
As she approached the MA Director's office however, she could her yelling.
"I want this memo to go out to the whole department! I don't know who did it, but we need to make it clear that these kinds of jokes are not funny."
"Problems?" Director Irragata asked, peeking in through the door.
The MA Director sighed. "Some idiot though it would be funny to tamper with the inventory logs for Warehouse IJ-2 and make it look like Alcor the Dreambender checked out the Ark of the Covenant."
The bottom suddenly dropped out of Irragata's stomach. "When was this dated to? Before or after March 13th?"
"Ummm..." The MA Director looked taken aback, but turned towards her computer and began looking up the information. "Let's see here... before. Feburary 21st. Why... what's wrong."
Irragata's legs shook. "We are in very deep shit right now."
---
A great power began to awaken within the Ark of the Covenant. Light began spilling from the cracks and the lid slowly began to lift from its...
The tip of a black cane swung around and pinned the lid back down.
"Hey," Alcor the Dreambender warned. "Behave."
---
"I know that's not real."
"Hm?" Alcor turned his head and looked down the at the six year old kid standing in front of him.
"The stuff you've got on display," the boy repeated. "I know its all fake. I can see the spots where you just glue-gunned plastic jewels onto the 'Staff of Killkarabi.'"
"And how do you know I didn't just take the real Staff of Killkarabi and glue-gun plastic jewels onto it?"
"Because that's stupid," the boy answered. "Why take the time to make it look fake and then say it's real when it actually is real?"
"Alright Carlos," Alcor admitted. "You got me. I'm just pretending to be Alcor the Dreambender, and this entire place is filled with fake artifacts of doom that I made myself in order so that I could rip people off. Of course," he added suddenly. "It could also be like what your brother Rico thinks is really going on. In that I really am Alcor the Dreambender and I am trying to hide my collection of doom bringing artifacts by making everything merely look like an overpriced tourist trap in order to throw people off."
Carlos's scoffed at that suggestion. Alcor merely shrugged and headed off towards the gift shop to man the counter.
As soon as Alcor was out of the room, Carlos's twin brother Rico ran up to him. "Hey Bro, how'd that guy know our names?"
---
Janice blinked blearily out her front window. She had always believed that the morning set the tone for the rest of the day. The squadron of tanks pulling into the parking lot of Alcor's Shack of Mysteries and pointing their guns at the front door suggested today was going to be interesting to say the least. The knock on the front door promised it would only get more so.
"Hi, I'm Agent Meckews from the Department of Utilities. There's been a gas leak reported in the building next door and so we need you and your family to temporarily evacuate the area. This is just a precaution. You're in no immediate danger but we'd like to play it safe."
It was at that moment a military helicopter landed on the road and heavily armed soldiers in demon-warded gear poured out.
Janice raised an eyebrow.
"It's one hell of a gas leak," Agent Meckews replied.
---
Director Irragata looked at the command vehicle's tactical display with a frown on her face. "So we've got the whole place surrounded and warded. In theory there's no way for him to escape or bring in reinforcements."
"Do you really believe that?" One of the other agents asked.
"No," Irragata admitted. "But it's the only real option we got. Unless any of you guys think we have a chance of being able to storm the lair of a demon whose sitting on enough artifacts of doom to destroy all of reality twice over."
"I just have the feeling this is going to be another Wyoming," another agent put in. "We bring in the big guns, surround the place, and he just disappears into thin air and makes us all look like fools."
"I'd rather have another Wyoming," Director Irragata muttered. "What I want to avoid is another California."
"Oh you don't have to worry about that," Alcor said, leaning over Irragata's shoulder to get a good look at the display. "I was young and stupid back then. I have much better control now."
All everyone outside heard was a loud scream followed by gunshots.
---
"Well," Director Irragata muttered. "That was a shit-show."
"WHAT?" Agent Sanders called out, cupping a hand behind his ear. "Speak louder! My hearing still hasn't recovered."
Arragata pinched the bridge of her nose. "I SAID THIS WHOLE OPERATION WENT TO SHIT!"
"AH! Yes, yes it did. "
All things considered they were incredibly lucky that the only thing that had been destroyed had been the department's dignity, and that the only casualties were Irragata and the four agents she had deafened when she had fired her gun inside the command vehicle. That did not make the fact that Alcor had played them all like one of his violins any easier to swallow.
"What about the state of the lot? Has there been any signs that Alcor might have returned to retrieve something he left behind?"
Agent Krankow shook her head. "Nada. The whole lot has stayed empty and we haven't even had so much as a blip on the demonic-energy detectors. I'm fully convinced he took everything with him when disappeared the whole place and doesn't have any reason to return."
"WHAT?"
"I SAID THE FUCKER ISN'T COMING BACK!"
"Ahhhh...."
"What about the artifacts? Are there any clues as to what Alcor did with them after he disappeared?"
"He's brought them back." The Director of Magical Antiquities spoke up. "The Tablets of Enzanapat and the Deseri Scrolls are back in Bunker T-53 and he signed in that he returned the Ark of the Covenant. The only thing we're not sure about is the Spiky Doomhammer, but that's only because we really don't know how we're going to remove two tons of nuclear waste from the bottom of a salt mine to actually check."
"Fuck," Irragata swore. "So the only thing we have that proves this whole mess even happened is thirty seven floating top hats..."
"Sorry! What?"
"I SAID THIRTY SEVEN FLOATING TOPS HATS! Twelve cases of demonically tainted tourist crap! Three monkey paws! A jar of human eyes and three hundred and forty eight Alcor Virus USB keys!"
Silence. You could practically hear the other shoe drop.
"How many of those USB keys did he sell?" Director Irragata asked with a sense of rising dread.
[A lot.] The Alcor Virus replied.