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After that fateful day, Stan hadn't been the same anymore...
It was the day that he had lost everything. Everyone.
He had been busy that day with repairing the shack, after that zombie attack. He had to guide - and bribe - all the workers, clean up zombie remains inside and shoo away any visitors who hadn't gotten the memo that the Mystery Shack had been closed due to repairs; though he still tried to swindle some money out of them, before chasing them off his property.
All of that took him the whole day to do. And maybe that was why he hadn't noticed it at first.
Why he hadn't noticed how quiet and empty the shack was.
Only when he sat down at the kitchen table later that day and tried calling the kids down for dinner, did he realize that something was off. There was no answer.
At first he checked their room. Then the rest of the shack. Then he stepped outside and loudly called for them, figuring that they were playing somewhere near the shack. Still nothing.
He called Soos next. And then Wendy. He figured that the twins were visiting one of them, maybe even staying over for the night, despite the kids usually informing him ahead of time, whenever they wanted to do a sleep-over.
Both their cell-phones seemed to be turned off. He just couldn't get through to either of them. That was when he first got that bad feeling in his stomach that something was terribly off.
He tried ignoring it at first, reassuring himself that his employees just forgot to turn their phones on and that the kids were probably just spending the night with one of them. He decided to wait until the next morning.
When both his employees didn't appear at their workplace the next day, to help rebuild the shack, and the twins still were nowhere to be seen, he finally panicked.
It soon became apparent that the four had disappeared off the face of the earth. They were not home, not anywhere else in town and even a giant search through the surrounding forests, done by all the citizens of Gravity Falls, yielded no results. Still, the citizens kept trying, searching the areas over and over again for days. After a week, they started to give up.
Stan was the only person who still kept the search going, after everyone else stopped, never once giving up. He became more frantic by the day, re-searching every place, asking around all over town, informing the twins' parents daily about his findings (those calls always were the worst), sharing his grief with Wendy's family and Soos' grandma (who were just as distraught over the disappearances as Stan was) and overworking himself to the point of exhaustion.
Only when he fainted one day and landed in the clinic, did he finally give himself a long rest, feeling guilty about it the whole time.
He longed for the day of his brother's return. The portal was powering up more and more each day and Stan desperately hoped that Ford could help him. That he could mend Stan's broken heart a bit and maybe even help in the search. His brother was a smart guy. Surely he would know what to do.
But when his brother finally stepped through that portal, he didn't mend Stan's heart. Not at first. The anger about their shared past and failures was still too fresh in his mind. There had been a lot of pain and arguing between the brothers, though Ford immediately eased up on his attitude, after Stan explained to him the current situation and literally begged him for his help in finding their missing family.
Yet despite all his knowledge, it seemed that even Ford couldn't do much. All the fancy gadgets that he had build didn't help and the brothers slowly started to lose morale. Stan took it the hardest, closing down the shack indefinitely (why bother, with no employees?) and retreating into depression and apathy.
Ford kept trying for a little while longer to find any lead, but after two weeks even he had to give up. After all, he still had to deal with Bill Cipher and the interdimensional rift that had appeared and the portal that needed to be dismantled and all of this took up much of his time.
One day he needed some materials for an experiment and he remembered that he had them stored in his underground bunker, so he took a hike over there. It had been the first time, since his return to his home dimension, that he was visiting that place. He remembered the trap room that he had installed, the one that squished you to death, unless you pressed some specific buttons and he hoped that he still properly remembered the button combination. He also hoped that the materials needed for his experiment were still in good shape after all these years.
But when he entered the bunker and reached the aforementioned trap room, he didn't have the mind to wonder about his materials or some experiment anymore. Instead he got a cruel answer as to what had happened to Stan's beloved twins and employees.
After that fateful day, Ford hadn't been the same anymore...