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It would have been an ordinary morning at the Mystery Shack, had Gilbert not gotten his first crush and had Oz not had a mental fucking breakdown the other day that had caused his friends to start avoiding the shit out of him and the Mystery Shack in general.
Oz had finally managed to spend an entire day out of bed, with Alice hanging off of him like a furious guard dog, only not snapping at Gilbert and Vincent. Vincent tried not to be flattered by this. He didn’t remember what had happened to Oz (though he did remember, quite distinctly, Alice and Oz both sitting him down and lecturing him for hours on not taking recreational drugs until he was either a legal adult, or was taking them in his senior year of high school in a safe and responsible manner, and was smart enough to not black out in an unsafe area), and Gilbert refused to say anything about it, though he definitely knew something. He was too upset not to.
But now everyone seemed to be doing their absolute level best to pretend like nothing had happened, and Vincent was smart enough to follow along. It wasn’t like Oz knew what had happened, either—Vincent had asked, and he’d said he’d hit his head, and when Vincent said he knew it was more than that and presented his proof, Oz had thanked him and then gone off and had a screaming fight with Alice about lying to him about his health until he collapsed and had to go back to bed.
Now Oz was pretending nothing had happened too—or at least Vincent thought he was. He certainly hadn’t brought it up again, and today he was nowhere to be found until suddenly he came in, ready to man the gift shop, and he and Alice didn’t look at each other but she declared, quite loudly, that she would be taking Gilbert and Vincent out to get pancakes at the diner, and then practically dragged them out the door, so—that was fun, and that made sense. Gilbert was practically vibrating with worry, so much so that he didn’t so much as flinch when Vincent took him by the elbow and squeezed. Gilbert and Vincent were both Nightrays—they knew well how touch, even well-meaning touch, could hurt as much as help, and there had been a time when they’d decided that perhaps they could gain the approval of their new family by hurting each other, and neither brother had really been wholly comfortable with the other’s touch since.
But now, in Alice’s shitty, too-fast car, Gilbert relaxed at Vincent’s touch, and Vincent thought that that just might be a bit of a miracle, maybe, if such a thing could ever exist.
The diner was relatively crowded, but there was a table for them, and it was only after looking at the menu that Alice realized she’d forgotten her wallet at the Mystery Shack, and that she and Oz presently weren’t speaking so she couldn’t ask him to run it to her. Cheap food it was, then—Alice was already saying something about free sauce packets and the sides menu when Gilbert puffed up his shoulders and said, “I could win us free pancakes!”
“Hell yeah, kid,” said Alice. “How?”
“If I beat that Manliness Tester over there, then I could—”
Vincent and Alice both burst out laughing.
“Beat the Manliness Tester? You ?” said Alice. “Good fucking luck. I doubt even Raven could manage it.”
“Who’s Raven?” Gilbert said defensively. “Also, I so could.”
“He was this hitman who I went around with a while back,” said Alice. “Taught me how to kick ass. That thing’s rigged to all hell, though, and not even he could manage it.”
“You and Oz’ve taught me about rigging stuff,” said Gilbert. “I’ll definitely beat it!”
“Yeah, right,” Vincent snickered.
Gilbert stuck his tongue out at him and hurried off towards the tester.
“He’s going to fail so bad, ” said Alice, half-tauntingly, half-enthusiastically. “Wonder if I could get the clown to pay for us…Oz owes him like so much money, but Oz also isn’t talking to me right now, so…”
Gilbert shoved down on the lever with all of his might. The manliness tester raised and a little light went on and dinged on THE WIMPIEST IDIOT ALIVE.
“Damn,” said Alice. “I’ve literally only ever seen Raven get that score before, and the clown told me later rigged it specially for him. Guess that’s changed.”
“A hitman’s been here?” said Vincent, intrigued despite himself.
“Nah, it wasn’t here, it was just the same machine,” said Alice. “It was years and years ago. The clown just gets around a lot.”
“Huh,” said Vincent, as Gilbert looked, dejected, at the machine, and then started to head back to their table.
“Pardon me,” said a little old lady in a wheelchair, and Gilbert stepped aside for her as she went up to the manliness tester and tapped the lever down. The lights shot up to MOST POWERFUL IN EXISTENCE.
“Free pancakes for everyone!” she said in her thin, old-lady voice. Alice, who no longer had to worry about speaking to either Oz or the mysterious ‘clown’, whooped. Gilbert’s face fell and, strangely, he bolted from the restaurant.
Weird, but not Vincent’s problem. Gilbert was perhaps uniquely suited to handling the town of Gravity Falls: he cried, and all the problems either ran away or kept provoking him until he murdered them.
“To look upon her, ‘twould not be inaccurate to say that I have never been so horny in my life,” sighed a young man who had gotten an extreme senior discount and was sitting directly behind them.
“You’re horny every time Sheryl breathes, birdbrain,” Alice shot back.
“My! That is no way to speak to your elders, young Miss Baskerville!”
“Aren’t you like twenty?” Vincent asked, rather rudely.
“How quite incredibly rude! Nay, I am in fact coming up upon sixty nine years upon this our strange planet—”
“He’s sixty-seven, but he thinks that if he says he’s almost sixty-nine Mrs. Rainsworth will be more likely to bang him,” said Alice. “Don’t pay attention to him, Vincent, he’s not the mayor, he’s just in love with her. Hey, where’s Gilbert?”
“Dunno,” said Vincent. “Probably off crying about being less manly than a little old lady. It’s okay, he’ll come back. He’s just liked to cry alone ever since he realized that I take pictures and then paste them up in my closet to look at when I need something to laugh at.”
“Yeah, that’ll do it,” said Alice. “Well, he’s the one missing out on pancakes.”
Gilbert was the one missing out on pancakes, and, what was more, he continued to miss out on pancakes for nearly the rest of the day as Vincent watched, in horrified awe, Alice put away nearly three times her body weight in the things, as two old people flirted behind him and the old man who looked twenty got rejected nearly four times an hour, and got has ass kicked at least one out of those four times.
This was actually kind of entertaining—Vincent always had enjoyed watching weirdos get their asses beat, especially when he wasn’t the weirdo in question—but even watching the weird old man called birdbrain (whose name, Vincent learned, was Rufus Barma) get rejected over and over and get his ass beat repeatedly got boring after a while, and Alice was still eating. It was insane.
By the time sunset came about, and Sheryl Rainsworth and Rufus Barma were long gone, Gilbert returned, looking rather downtrodden, covered in dirt and bruises, his shirt missing, and with a strange streak of glitter glue in his hair.
“Damn, you look rough,” said Alice around a mouthful of pancakes. “You wanna talk about it?”
“It’s not really anything,” said Gilbert, miserable.
“You look like you’re about to cry,” Vincent told him, pushing his own plate of cold pancakes over to his brother, who took a grateful bite.
“It’s just—these half man half bull humanoids were hanging out with me, but then they wanted me to do this really tough, horrible thing but it just wasn't right. So I said no. And they kicked me out and called me a girly-girl, and—”
“Nothing wrong with being a girly-girl,” said Alice. “My sister was one and I’m still finding corpses she buried in the garden. Plus, the strongest thing you can do, man or woman, is stick up for yourself against the crowd. Most ‘manly men’ or whatever can’t even do that, so good on you. You’re better than all those losers, anyway—I’ve met the manotaurs before, and kicked most of their asses. It’s why they live so deep in the forest—they’re a bunch of sore losers who can’t think for themselves.”
Gilbert blinked. “Really?”
“Yeah. Major wimps. Anyway, they didn’t mess with you too much, right? —Wait, you said you were hanging out with them. They suck. You’re grounded. Vincent, take the pancakes back.”
“Gil said that they kicked him out and made fun of him, though, so you can’t ground him,” said Vincent.
“Sure I can,” said Alice. “Who’s gonna stop me? Oz?”
“Wait, is this because Oz said good morning to me and Vincent and not you?” Gilbert said, distressed.
“Wait, Vincent, Oz said good morning to you?!”
“Yeah, first thing before you came down,” Vincent said, confused. What was this about?
“Ugh! You’re grounded too!” she declared. “For—doing psychedelics!”
“You’re just mad at us ‘cause Oz is mad at you,” said Vincent pityingly. “Poor Alice. How dull!”
Alice scowled at them both. Gilbert continued scarfing down his pancakes.
“Are you only able to deal with problems that you can punch away?” Vincent continued. “Is that it? Does Oz do everything else for you, because you’re such a helpless little baby?”
Alice glowered at him; Vincent, bolstered by her anger, continued.
“How useless! And you call yourself Miss Mystery! My oh my. Poor silly Alice—”
Alice’s face went crimson. “You sound like that sewer rat, ” she spat, standing up.
“What sewer rat?” Gilbert called after her.
“Raven’s brother. Tried to kill me like ten times. Not important. You boys can drive yourselves home—I’m going to go fight the manotaurs!”
And then she was gone. Vincent laughed himself horizontal on the bench—it really had been ever so long since he’d annoyed someone so much they ran off without attacking him—as Gilbert continued on with the pancakes.
“I think we should walk back, not drive,” he said.
“Why?” asked Vincent, who was very excited to learn to drive and glad that Alice had left them with her car.
“I don’t want to crash,” said Gilbert. “Remember with the gnomes—”
“That was fun,” said Vincent. “I liked running over gnomes.”
“What if we run over humans next time though?” Gilbert worried.
Vincent’s first instinct was to say that that would be fun too, but then he remembered both that jail was a thing and that Noise lived in this town and if he got arrested for manslaughter he’d never hear the end of it.
“Alright,” he said. “We’ll walk. Maybe beating up the manotaurs’ll end Alice and Oz’s fight.”
“I hope so,” said Gilbert. “If they keep it up I think I’m going to vomit.”
“Do it in Alice’s pillow,” Vincent suggested, and they got up out of the diner and returned to the Mystery Shack.