Chapter Text
The deep woods are as lively as ever, the birds singing, woodpeckers digging into trees for bugs, the occasional gnome foraging for mushrooms and nuts, the usual. The early afternoon sun is hot above him, the trees doing little to cool him as the humid air carries the heat into the shade. All in all its an unremarkable day, totally nothing special, an average June day. If anyone -namely Fiddleford- would ask him why he’s ignoring the significance of the date, he would simply say “oh is that today?” The date, of course, was June 15th, and anyone who knew him well would know that today was his birthday. Anyone who knew him intimately well would know that he’s avoiding today because he wasn’t the only one whose birthday is today.
Fiddleford is one of the people who knows him intimately well, which is why he’s out alone in the middle of the woods in the heat of the day. His friend and partner is very family centric, which means that he pesters him about the date and the importance of keeping in touch with his family and such. Fiddleford is also very convivial, being that no matter the holiday, he loves to go all out. Easter egg hunts with hundreds of eggs; giant, barely legal fourth of July fire work shows; Valentine’s day cards for everyone he knew and loved; too much food for any two men to eat for Thanksgiving and Christmas; leading up to December 25th, he takes a whole ordeal that makes the house look like a holiday store isle, and birthdays? Birthdays are a celebration of life and memories, Fiddleford's family often had traditions that involved baby pictures and stories.
So, when Ford’s birthday rolls around, he’s been taking to spending the whole day hiding in the woods doing research.
Which leads back to now. Today, the fifteenth of June, 1979, is his 24th birthday. It is also his twin brother's birthday, naturally. His estranged, outcast brother who he hasn’t seen or heard from in nearly eight years.
He tries very hard to not think about Stanley, to block out thoughts about the person he grew up next to; but every now and then he catches himself doodling boats in his journals or spare papers, making references when talking to Fiddleford that only Stan would understand, and having dreams about their childhood. He already thinks about him whenever he looks in the mirror, he doesn’t need Fiddleford to make such a big deal about his birthday.
He sits down, writing some notes on gnome diets. He was constantly adding onto it since he caught one eating an aluminum can from his garbage. He captured the culprit and tried to perform surgery to remove it, only to find that the gnome's stomach acid was digesting it just fine. It seems like gnomes are the true omnivore -well, aside from Stanley. He looks at the note he had made on it, subconsciously writing what he thought. He grimaces and scratches out Stan’s name.
He hears a nearby train, the horn signaling it’s presence, followed by the sound of wheels turning on tracks. It’s too close to be from the cliff's tracks, he realizes. He stands, closing the journal quickly. He follows the sound, the forest silent apart from the din of the train. He steps under some low hanging branches, a bright green light filtering through the needles. In front of him, a train races past him and deeper into the woods, it’s bright green lights near blinding. He steps onto the cement train halt before him, the train slowing to a stop. The door opens as the sign above the door flips to show the word “MYSTERY”.
Let it be known that Stanford Pines has never been known to shy away from discovery. This fact has landed him in the hospital a handful of times within these last six years of living in Gravity Falls, and has been the cause of a lot more than a handful of headaches for Fiddleford as he tries to keep Ford out of the hospital. The fact that he’s gotten injured because of his curiosity has not made him any more wary than he was before any of said injuries. Because as the saying goes, curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
He steps onto the train.
The light from within blinds him, before he’s purged in the darkness of unconsciousness.
Stanford starts to wake up, his eyes opening slowly, before snapping open. He’s not where he remembers being last. He sits up, looking around him. He’s in a long tunnel, the walls look like smoothed down clay. Stalactites hang from the middle of the ceiling, from the tips of them are small glowing orbs. On the smooth walls, he sees murals of a man carrying a torch, running and jumping to the painted stalactites, lighting their pointed ends. The murals are reminiscent of Egyptian murals, but softer, less idealistic and with more body fat. Ford tries to think of what they’re more similar to.
He takes out his journal and starts writing.
As I was walking in the woods today, I came across a strange train that came out of nowhere and had no discernable end nor beginning. It stopped and a door opened, I went into it and lost consciousness. When I awoke, I found myself in a tunnel with murals on the wall.
He doodles a small picture of the mural.
“Mayan! It looks Mayan”
He writes that down and puts his journal away and starts walking down the tunnel. The figure seems to repeat perfectly: jump, land, run, jump, repeat. He walks about 10 yards when he comes to a door. The handle is two half circles, shaped almost like a backwards s. He turns the half circles clockwise, the door's mechanism audibly opening inside the red exterior. Through the door, he can hear the wheels turning. He sees the outside world rushing past, a barren land unlike anything he’s seen on Earth.
“This is the train.” He exclaims to himself.
He looks over the bridge, to the connecting train car. The grin on his face grows to become near crazed. He takes off over the bridge and through the next door.
The inside of the car is larger than it should be, compared to the size of the outside. He’s in a grassy plane, an open landscape he can’t see the ends of, the few trees he sees look like acacia trees with the way they grow sideways. It’s almost like Africa, but the large stone pillars that go to the sky are distinctly non-African. He walks around the pillars, inspecting five or six of them before finding a door like the other two he’s gone through embedded into one of them. The pillar is seemingly identical to the others, and clearly doesn’t connect to anything else, so when he opens the door, he’s pleasantly intrigued by the fact that it’s the other end of the train car.
The doors are more like portals, rather than normal doors. He writes, he then doodles two doors separated by a few centimeters and a man walking through either end, disappearing in the middle.
Amazing.
He looks around outside the train car, leaning over the rail carefully to see if he could see the end of the train. It goes farther than what his eyes can see in either direction. The train is also much larger than what it was when he got on it, the wheels seem to be fifteen, maybe twenty feet in diameter. The train cars are easily thirty feet tall. Perhaps the train he boarded was simply the way the train interacted with his home plane? The theories in his mind snowball and multiply until he’s bouncing on the balls of his feet in excitement. He could be on another plane of existence entirely.
Out in the barren wasteland, he sees a few lone trees. Above, he sees a storm brewing, the clouds forming a spiral like a hurricane or a tornado. Suddenly, the clouds start to spiral faster, forming a cone. He barely feels a change in the wind, even as what appears to be a tornado forms a few miles in front of him. The tail of the tornado doesn’t touch the ground, but instead twists towards one of the train cars behind the car he exited last. It connects, and the tornado lights up a bright yellow color. It’s only a moment before he sees a humanoid shape get sucked into the light and deconstructed in front of him.
He feels a tightening in his chest, his breath catching in his lungs. The tornado recedes to the sky before a powerful beam of energy strikes the ground below the center of the storm. Whatever this anomaly is, it just might’ve killed somebody.
Dangerous.
Amazing and dangerous, he thinks.
He isn’t deterred. Now he just wants to get to the bottom of the mystery more. If this anomaly is hurting people, then he needs to figure out how to stop it. He pulls out his journal, but before he can start writing, he notices the hand he usually holds his journal with while writing is glowing. Opening his hand, he sees a number glowing a bright green written on his palm.
240
He touches it with his other thumb, the number doesn’t smudge or dim.
He makes note of it on a new page in his journal. Train number on Hand he labels the new page. Going back to the earlier page, he labels it The Infinity Train
I’m not alone on this train, he writes, it seems like there was someone else. Outside the train, I saw a tornado like phenomenon that sucked out a humanoid shape and evaporated them. The train is more dangerous than I first thought.
To get to the bottom of this mystery, he needs to get to the beginning, he decides. He has to get to the front of the train.
On to the next train car, then.