Chapter Text
“Final check. Oxygen generator: secure. Space skin: fully operational. Magnetic levitation pack: completely ionised and ready for deployment. Emotional state… Well, how’re you feeling, mum?”
Dr Atanya pressed the voice button on her space suit. Her voice came through with a crackle: “Couldn’t be more excited, Snaff. This is the day. This is the day!”
“I know.” Snaff grinned. “So yeah, I guess I’ll put down questionable for that answer, sounds good with you?”
“Oh, ha ha. You’re hilarious.”
“Why, thank you. I try my best.” He finished typing on the computer and strode over to the teleportation controls. “Ready when you are.”
Atanya switched on her maglev and immediately jumped into the air, where she hung suspended a certain height off the ground. After adjusting the controls to levitate a little lower, she gave Snaff the thumbs up.
“Alright. Be safe, mum. I love you.”
She blew him a kiss just before the teleporter fired, sending her down to the surface of the Earth in the blink of an eye.
Earth. You may be imagining quite a different scene than the one that confronted Dr Atanya when she materialised. The sun it orbited had blown out into a red supergiant many years before her time, boiling the oceans, stripping away the atmosphere, incinerating all life that still remained. Everything was dead; all that was left was a chunk of molten rock steaming under the unending scrutiny of the elderly star.
Everything was dead… and yet, there was a signal. Every seventy years or so, powerful magical energy would show up intermittently for a couple of weeks, and then disappear without a trace. No spaceship orbited the Earth during these events, and no life signatures were detected on the surface when scanned. Magical experts the galaxy over were stumped. Now, the signal had finally resurfaced, and Dr Atanya was about to figure this mystery out.
“Alright,” She could hear Snaff through her radio. “Video feed is a go. Wow. Make sure you’ve got your suit temp set low, mum.”
Atanya nodded. “I’ve already done that. Hey, can you pull up the magic tracker? I have literally no idea where I’m supposed to be going right now.”
“I got it.” There was the sound of typing. “It’s being uploaded right now. And… done. Can you see it?”
Her visor beeped, and Atanya watched as the land of lava before her was overlaid with little dark blue lines, indicating traces of magic; this was great for historic sites, where they used to have houses they protected with wards. She waited patiently for them to finish showing up, but to her growing surprise, they kept coming, kept filling in until she had quite the detailed picture of a small town against the orange glow. Her eyes widened; wow, she’d never been able to count the individual steps up to a house built millennia ago, see the grain on a wooden door that had long rotted away. There were places where an older house had clearly been knocked down and rebuilt, and those lines intermingled in a confusing mess. The town of Gravity Falls was absolutely thrumming with magic, even after all this time. Wow.
“Mum?”
“Oh! Oh, yes, I can see it.” Atanya floated up to the magical impression of some sort of pool. She stared at the chainlink fence, outlined in blue, wanting so badly to touch it but not daring to break the illusion. “This is… amazing. So much residual magic… I can’t believe- I mean, look at this!”
“I am. No wonder this place used to be the centre of the Transcendence- shit.”
“What?”
“The signal. It’s gone again.”
“The signal.” Atanya blinked, gliding back from the fence. “Right.”
“What do we do?” Snaff heaved a sigh and began typing away furiously. “Yeah, it’s there one moment, gone the next. Agh, it’s so irregular; there’s absolutely no way to tell when – or if! - this thing is coming back. Great! Perfect.”
A bubble of hot lava burst under Atanya’s feet, and she jerked them up. “Hey, hey, calm down. It’s fine, Snaff. It’s only been a few hours since it started broadcasting, so there’s no way it’s gone for good already.”
“Yeah… yeah, you’re right. I’m just… I don’t want to lose this when we’re so close. It’s making me tense.”
“I get that. It’s a once in a lifetime kind of thing. But hey, let’s get ready before the signal comes back. Can you relay me the last known location?”
“Yeah, I can do that… done. And I’ll keep scanning for when it pops up?”
“Sounds good to me!” The coordinates popped up in her visor. “Oh, nice, we’re rather close. It looks like it’s down this path.”
“Down the path?”
“This path.” Atanya floated out of the pool area, into what looked like some sort of break in a magical barrier; thousands of straight vertical lines stood out in high contrast to the glowing lava.
“Oooh, I see. Yeah, it looks like it’s that way.”
But at the top they started fanning out… wait, were these the magical footprints of trees? Wow, they probably were. She started moving forwards, looking up at the long dead trees, and the huge sun stretching from horizon to horizon. This was amazing. Absolutely amazing.
“Still nothing yet.” Snaff said amid the ambient noise of his typing.
“Don’t worry. It’ll come back.” She cracked a smile. “Hey, if anyone here should be worrying, it’s me, because you’ll still be alive by the time it next comes round. Me, I’ll be dead!”
“Wha- Mum! Don’t say that!”
“It’s true! I’ll be dead, and you’ll be a pottering old man, spinning yarns about ye olden times and telling kids to get off your lawn.”
That drew a chuckle out of him. “I guess I’d be taking after you then.”
“Oh, you’re cheeky. What are you talking about?”
“You’re the one who hoards beakers on their station and insists that yes, all of them are currently being used in an experiment and no, you can’t have one, get off my lawn.”
“I do need them!”
“Yeah, but all of them? All the time?”
“I’d rather have too many than too few!” There came to a turn in the path, and she pulsed towards the right. “Plus I paid for them, so yeah, you should get off of my lawn.”
“You’re ridiculous. I love you.”
“I love you too, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up my beakers!”
“Heh... alright.” He started typing again. “You’re getting rather close. See anything?”
She looked, and she saw she was coming to some sort of turn in the path; beyond it was another messy jumble of lines… very bright lines. Strong magic. That wasn’t surprising.
“Yeah. Hold on…”
The path widened out, and Atanya found herself in some sort of clearing, looking at… something. It was a building, she was sure of that much, but it seemed to have been knocked down and rebuilt so many times, each incarnation layered over and over with copious amounts of magic, that the entire thing seemed less like a house and more like a thrumming blue knot with some stray walls sticking out here and there.
Snaff whistled. “Wow. No wonder this thing is giving off a signal.”
“Yeah… but that wouldn’t explain why it’s so irregular.” She thought for a moment. “I’m going to explore.”
“Alright. I’ll keep an eye on the signal.”
Atanya gently pulsed towards the building. She passed by one final tree… no, that wasn’t a tree. It looked like some sort of tall pole, with faces carved into it. Creepy. And by that, a swingset, three seats suspended just inches above where the lava lake now flowed.
She passed by the unmistakable shape of two gravestones, huddled together by the entrance. Atanya shivered and moved on.
As she got closer to the building, she could start to follow some of the lines to see individual structures. In front of her was some sort of porch; from there, she could see it was connected to a steep triangular roof, with some sort of sign on the side? It was hard to make out, and after a minute she gave up.
“Hmm. I don’t think I’m going to find anything.”
After a moment, Snaff replied. “Aren’t you gonna go inside?”
“I can barely see what’s going on outside. It’s just going to be a bunch of lines… though I suppose it couldn’t hurt. Hold on.”
She floated past the door, into a room of sorts. She called it a room, because it was almost impossible to tell anything further than that. There was a general square-shaped lack of magical residue in front of her, surrounded by such a colossal cluster of lines that it was hard to see the actual lava beneath her feet.
Snaff chuckled. “Wow. I guess you were right, mum. That is… that is hard to look at. Wait, why are you going forwards?”
“I’m going to check out the back.”
“Oh, fair enough. I guess- wait.”
Atanya stopped. “What?”
“I think I’m getting something!”
“The signal?”
“I’m checking now… yes, yes! It matches! The signal is literally just behind you, mum! Can you see it?”
Eyes wide, Atanya looked back. She could see something! It was dark, mostly obscured by the magical lines, so she quickly pulsed forwards.
And then, she saw it.
She saw him.
A dark figure, an absence of light sticking out against the glowing lava sea. Head bowed. Shoulders broken.
Kneeling by the memory of a long-gone grave.
“Oh. Oh, no.” Snaff’s voice was barely a whisper, but the figure’s head jerked up at the noise. He locked glowing yellow eyes onto Atanya, and she gasped.
“Mum? I’m getting you out of there, hold on!”
Atanya stood frozen as the figure rose, unfurling wings woven from shadow. He took a step forwards, walking on lava. And still he stared at her.
Her suit beeped. One second, he was staring at her, and the next…
She was back on the ship. She blinked a few times as the bright afterimage of the lava faded.
“You’re okay!” Footsteps, followed by Snaff tackling her in a hug. “I can’t believe- that was Alcor the Dreambender! And you were right there, and… wow, I must’ve gotten you out in the nick of time! So Alcor’s the source of the signal; what’s he doing back on Earth, Mum? Mum? Are you… okay?”
Atanya looked down at her son, his eyes wide and shining with worry. She breathed in, and she breathed out.
Then she said, “I saw his face.”
Snaff said nothing.
“I saw his eyes. I’ve… I’ve never seen so much… so much pain.” With shaking hands, Atanya took off her helmet. “I'm sorry. I-I need to lie down.”
She passed by Snaff, who started to follow her before second guessing himself and simply watching her go. He wandered back to his station, and glanced at the display.
The signal, he noticed, had disappeared once more.