Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Dipper, you shouldn't be doing this," Mabel said, spinning around in the chair to the vanity.

She rarely called him Dipper anymore, not outside the confines of either of their rooms. Neither Uncle Ford nor Uncle Stan had said anything about it, but they didn't need to. Mabel knew they thought it was childish, that they shouldn't be so clingy about parts of their past. Five years in their great-uncles' care had taught her that they didn't need to speak to tell her and Mason off, they didn't even need the telepathy that Uncle Ford had studied for years. They just needed to be standing there, or somewhere else in the house, knowing.

But Uncle Stan and Uncle Ford weren't here in Mabel's room. They had made it, sure, had chosen the red curtains in the window and the pink bedding and the beautiful, dark, heavy furniture, they had audited the posters on her walls and the books on her bookshelf, but it was still her room.

Mason barely looked up from the notebook he was still scrawling notes in as he sat at her desk. It was a cheap paper-cover sort of notebook, the kind you could by at a department store for ninety-nine cents. Nothing like the beautiful handmade journals Uncle Ford had made for the both of them with express understanding they would use them for important things. What Mason was writing couldn't be put in those journals.

After all, Uncle Ford had made them with his own two hands. You couldn't put anything you wanted to keep secret in them. Mabel and Mason had spotted the pattern years ago.

"Do what?" he said.

"You know what I mean," she said impatiently. "That. They'll know. They'll know you're snooping."

"Stan and Ford like when I snoop," he muttered.

"On outsiders." Snooping on outsiders was useful. Dipper looking for secrets among Pines wasn't, not to their great-uncles.

He looked up at her properly. Despite the needling quality of his tone, he didn't look angry at her. He never was. Neither of them were supposed to be angry at family. It was better if they weren't. Besides, they were twins. United forever.

Mabel could still be annoyed with him.

At least until he said, voice quiet, "I know this is stupid, Mabel, I do. But I have to figure it out."

He did, was the thing. Mabel knew that. They weren't the Mabel and Mason Pines from Piedmont anymore, had traded it for the dark wood and deep red of their great-uncle's home, had traded the mundanity of California for the vast weirdness of Gravity Falls. They weren't just Mabel and Mason but performers, some of the select few trusted with the knowledge that the magic they showed off to crowds was real. They were something special, now, something much more special than they ever could've been in Piedmont.

But Mabel's brother was still Dipper at his core. Uncle Ford was hiding something. Something bigger than the magic he wrote about in his Journals. Something bigger than the monsters in the forest.

Something so big Mason and Mabel couldn't be trusted with it despite how good they'd been. Mason couldn't accept that.

He had to know.

And... and maybe Mabel wanted to know too.

That was why she just looked at him and said, "You have to be careful."

Usually Dipper would've bristled at the implication that he wasn't being smart. (In their rooms, anyway. Never in public.) But he just said, "I am. I swear I am."

Mabel went back to looking in the mirror. She tried not to pick at her face. She wished she wore the stage make-up all the time, but Uncle Ford had explained to her why she couldn't twice, and she didn't want him to explain a third time. He didn't like explaining things over and over again. He never said so, but she knew.

She wished she had enough courage to go get the photo of Mom and Dad out from the hiding place in her dresser--the hiding place Uncle Stan and Uncle Ford knew about, she was sure, but let her have because she hadn't put anything really important there--and look from it to herself to find where the features lined up. To see what made up Mabel Pines.

She didn't look like Mabel Pines on the stage. That was the second best part of being up on the stage. The best part was the crowd of smiling faces all beaming up at her, her, her.

Her hand was drifting up to her face, to the tiny scab on her chin from practice. She dragged the hand back down before she started picking. Mabel wanted to stop thinking about this.

So she said to Mason, "Pacifica Northwest."

Mason didn't look up. "Her family used to be massively rich, and claimed to be founders of the town. There are still rich Northwests, but Pacifica's branch of the tree fell into debts, gambling, and financial ruin due to her grandfather being an awful businessman and a worse hand at poker. The final straw was her father running off to marry a woman who worked on his boat. The other Northwests hate them. Uncle Ford debunked the Northwest's founding Gravity Falls years ago, too."

Mabel smiled to herself. She didn't ask where Dipper got the information; he was just good at finding it, and she knew it would be true. It was good to know these things.

She never told her peers what she knew about them, all of their disgraces and secrets. Disgraces and secrets maybe they themselves didn't know about. Instead she held it in her mind like a perfect pearl on a velvet cushion, shining and lustrous. She would smile at the others, her peers, her friends, and would know.

And just like how Uncle Ford and Uncle Stan could make her and Mason feel the force of their knowing when it came to them being foolish or secretive or less impressive than a Pines should be, she imagined she could make her friends feel the force of her knowing, and with that force she would hold steady. No one would hurt her. No one would go against her, nor Dipper. Not when she knew everything there was to know. Not when her knowledge made her better.

Not that anyone would act against her. It was like Uncle Stan said, and Uncle Ford agreed with--she was cute, and charming, and clever. No one could ever dislike her.

But it was good to have a failsafe. Uncle Stan said that too.

Maybe that was why Dipper was going to find the secret Uncle Ford was keeping. A failsafe. Dipper would know, and Uncle Ford would see Dipper smile and understand that his secret was known, and they would be safe with the knowledge making them better, as they should be.

But that was a silly thought. Mabel wasn't afraid of her great-uncles. She wasn't. They had never hit her, or said awful things about her. They hadn't done that with Dipper either. They weren't bad guardians. The social worker that had come by the first couple of years agreed, so it had to be true.

She wasn't afraid of them. She just knew she could never, ever, ever risk making them truly mad.

But that was how it was with family, wasn't it?

Mom and Dad had gone too early for her to remember.

Mabel wanted to ask Dipper, who always knew things, the important things. But when she looked over at him, he was still bent over the notebook, eyes narrowed and bright. He was Mason, then.

Mabel did not ask a question. She wasn't sure what she would've asked.

She went back to turning over the failures of the Northwest family in her mind like a pearl. It was easier to think about.

Chapter Text

Pulling her coat tighter around her, Mabel marched steadily towards her mark.

She shouldn't be out and wandering through the woods. It was a cold and bitter night, the wind lashing flurries of snowflakes against the trees, which rocked and groaned from the force. Huge drifts of snow blanketed the forest floor, nearly up to her knees, flashing a bright white in the light of her enchanted lantern. Hiking through it was the most foolish thing she'd done since--

Well. Since Dipper had to save her from her stupid lovesick heart. Since Dipper vanished from this world to another.

Mabel steeled her resolve. She'd been in this town, in these woods, for six years now, had explored every nook and cranny. She could handle heavy snow. There would be no putting her off of her task.

It took another ten minutes of surging through the snow and the wind, but she finally arrived at her destination.

Sitting innocuously in the middle of the woods, half-buried in the snow drifts, was a plain mailbox. It might've sat in front of anybody's house.

The difference was that almost every other mailbox couldn't answer your every question with startling accuracy. This one did.

Mabel considered it grimly. They hadn't gone to the mailbox since it started spitting out thinly-veiled threats to Dipper in response to his unceasing questions. Mabel had thought about getting back at it at the time, but Dipper had stilled her hand. They'd let it simmer for a while, would be more thoughtful and sparse with their questions once it had time to cool down about them.

They had never gotten back around to it, too caught up in the actual thrill of discovery that came from investigating themselves instead of letting something lead them by the nose to an answer--and now Mabel was grateful for that. It meant the mailbox might be obliging.

She carefully took a folded-up piece of paper from her coat pocket and placed it in the mailbox, grimacing at the bitter cold of the metal biting even through her mittens.

A second of wait, and then--the carrier flag popped up. Mabel hastily unfolded the paper she received, her mittens making the motions clumsy.

The note she had written was "WHEN AND HOW WILL I BRING DIPPER PINES BACK TO THIS WORLD?"

What she received was this: "The summer of 2012, during a necessary astrological convergence." That was all it said.

Mabel stared at it, her thoughts as numb as her limbs at this point. 2012... 2012...

"No," she muttered, the word lost in the howling wind. "No, no no nononono--"

The note crumpled in her hand. Thirty years. She couldn't wait thirty years, she couldn't, she couldn't, she couldn't--

Distantly, she was aware her legs folded under her, hitting the soft, freezing snow below, her head thunking against the cold metal of the mailbox. Tears were rolling down her face, sinking into the plush yarn of her scarf.

Thirty years. The mailbox wouldn't lie. Thirty years.

How would she manage without Dipper for thirty years. Her mind whirled and spun, thinking of sentimental things--he was her rock, the one who reined her in, the only one who really got her, how would she keep afloat without him?--to practical ones--how was she going to pay the mortgage, what was she going to tell their family and friends? As she struggled through her thoughts, the tears kept coming.

How was she going to do this?

Mabel didn't know how long she kneeled there in the snow like an idiot waiting to catch her death of cold. Long enough that any heat she had generated hiking had long dissipated, leaving her cold down to the bones. Or maybe that was the grief. It was impossible to really tell.

She slowly sat up, her tears dwindling. After a certain point, there was no use crying.

She'd keep looking, of course. She didn't care what the mailbox said. She'd look and look and look for something that would let her drag Dipper back from wherever in the other realms he'd ended up, one that wouldn't take decades to bring into fruition. Mabel Pines didn't quit, and that was a fact.

Something Mabel did was re-frame. She could think of this as being destined to lose thirty years waiting to get her brother back... or she could think of it as having thirty years to absolutely perfect every aspect of the ritual she would use to get him back.

It wasn't much better. But it was something. Mabel had spent ten years nomading her way across America and beyond on less then that.

She wiped her eyes and stood up.

"Thanks," she managed to say to the mailbox. She hardly meant it.

Pulling her coat tighter around her, she turned and marched steadily back home. She would do no good for Dipper frozen in the woods.

Chapter Text

After the portal shut off and the only thing left was the ringing silence in the ruined remains of the basement, Dipper could've killed Stan.

He made an honest effort of it, too. Clawing himself out from the pipework that held him down, he had all but launched himself on top of the old man. He'd wailed on his face, lacking in technique but making up for it in unbridled fury, screaming--something. Insults, accusations, pleas. Bring her back, bring her back right now! Dipper didn't remember, really. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered, not the way that Stan let him get those hits in, not how Soos had to haul Dipper off of him.

What mattered was that Mabel was gone, gone, gone, dragged away in a flash of prismatic light and heat.

Dipper could've let the federal agents get Stan, could've run up and make sure they knew every last thing, bask in the sign of the man who might not have even been his great uncle getting dragged away. But Stan had held tight onto him, had talked like hell, had pleaded, really, the closest thing to near-tears Dipper had ever seen out of him, for Dipper to stay put and let him explain.

After all, the government wouldn't care about one little girl. They'd either shut the whole thing down or use it to their own ends. Mabel Pines wouldn't be anything other than a name to them.

So Dipper stayed put and didn't add more bruises to the ones already forming on Stan's face no matter how much he wanted to sock him in the nose again and again and again.

They all sat there on the cold ground in the dark, him, Stan, and Soos. Stan talked about the portal. He talked about thirty years spent desperately decoding and rebuilding the machine with only a third of the instructions, flying half-blind most of the time, how the last two had fallen into his lap and proved his guesses right. He talked about how the portal was built, who built it.

In any other circumstance, Dipper might've fainted dead way upon learning that the fabled Author was Stan's twin--was Dipper's great uncle. But it rolled over him like a breeze, and Dipper couldn't find it within himself to muster up any excitement about the mystery finally being unraveled. Nothing mattered right now except:

"He's on the other side, right? He'll be there for Mabel?"

"'Course he will," Stan said, unshakably. "I had to change the targeting system to lock onto him, he's there."

It should've comforted him, that the Author himself was at Mabel's side. A man who'd faced down all that Gravity Falls had to throw at him, a man that had survived thirty years in different dimensions.

All Dipper could think about was the bunker, the shapeshifter. How it had managed to attack someone under the Author's nose.

He was taken out of those spiraling thoughts by Stan taking him by the shoulders. Dipper nearly threw those hands off of him, but instead he looked at Stan's grim face.

"We're gonna get the portal up and running again, kid," he said. "We're gonna get her back. Get both of them."

Dipper looked around at the ruins of the basement, eyes glancing past Soos and his strained, troubled expression. He looked at the portal, left tilted and slumping to the ground, the pipework and metal rended from the room by the gravitational disruptions, the fizzling machinery.

There were only two options: try to get Mabel back, or give up.

Dipper looked up at Stan Pines. The man who had lied to him all summer, had played dumb, had begged Mabel to listen to him and had led to her letting go of the button and to her being dragged into the pull of the portal. The man he could blame for letting her float away.

His voice was quiet and hoarse.

"Okay, Grunkle Stan."

Chapter Text

“Dipper!” Mabel said as she burst into the living room. Dipper jumped and nearly scattered all of his playing cards on the floor. “Dipper-Dipper-Dipper—”

“Yeah?”

“Dipstick,” she said.

“Yes?” he said, a little exasperated. “Are you just going to say my name?”

She might’ve. It was one of her favorite ways to get a little rise out of him when she thought he was being too obsessive over something, and he’d been practicing another card trick for the last twenty minutes while waiting for her to be done with the random task of nailing up signs Grunkle Stan had given her.

But Mabel shook her head, grinning. Dipper noticed for the first time that she was hiding something behind her back.

“I’ve got something,” she sing-songed. 

Dipper tensed in anticipation. “It better not be silly string.” Not with out an extra one for him to silly string her, anyway.

“Nope!” 

“More splinters?”

“Nope!”

He tried desperately to think of what she could find in the woods that would get her in such a peppy mood.

“Please tell me you didn’t catch a bird with your bare hands.”

Mabel laughed. “No, you goof!”

She whipped the thing hiding behind her back to the front. “Wha-bam, brother!”

Dipper blinked at it. “It’s… an old book? Mabel, did you dig that out of the dirt?”

“Basically,” she said gleefully. “You would’ve gone crazy finding it Dipper, there was this metal tree with a secret keypad that opened a compartment in the ground—”

“What?”

“And this was inside it. Look,” she clambered onto the arm of the easy chair, flipping the book open to show him its contents. “It’s written by this guy, some sort of mystery man. Turns out this place is as weird as you kept saying it is, and he was investigating it.”

“Oh my god,” Dipper said, flipping through some of the pages himself.

It was the sort of thing he dreamed of. Pages and pages of illustrations and entries about strange creatures and monsters living here in Gravity Falls. Dipper knew his gut feeling hadn’t been wrong, that he had seen weird stuff in the woods in the week they’d already been here.

“This was just near the Shack?” he said.

“Yup. Here, look at the first thing he wrote.”

Mabel flipped to the first page, showing what once must’ve been a self-portrait before it had been viciously scribbled out. Dipper mumbled the first few words, “I can’t believe it’s been six years since I arrived in Gravity Falls…”

He looked up at Mabel. Her eyes were shining.

“We have to find him,” she said.

It was the least surprising thing Mabel could’ve possibly said. Mabel had always been interested in people, digging into their lives like a bloodhound scenting a dead body. She’d spent a solid month trying to figure out the deal of the quiet kid in the trench coat—not a vampire, just a big Columbo fan, tragically—obsessing over if Mrs. Wainscott and Mr. Reed were secretly married or not, and gunning for information about Frankie Potts’ home life and if it could possibly explain why the girl was so weird or if she was secretly an alien. If there was a person around, Mabel wanted to know about them.

A mysterious scientist who wrote secret journals was exactly the person Mabel would hound after. She’d want stories, and life experiences, and dating woes that came with constantly messing with monsters. She’d want to know if this guy ever kissed a fish person.

Dipper considered the scribbled-out face. “Do you even think he’s still in town? This book looks pretty old. And—” he flipped closer to the end, where a lot of things were crossed out and ominous scrawls of HE’S WATCHING ME started popping up. “Uh. If he’s still here I think he might be insane.”

“Pshaw!” Mabel went, flapping a careless hand. “What’s a bit of insanity? That’ll just make him interesting!”

Dipper was pretty sure that’d just make him more likely to shoot them out of paranoia based off of the frantic scribbling, actually, but trying to convince Mabel of that would definitely be a losing battle. And it wasn’t like he wasn’t curious about this whole thing—he’d known there was something going on, and here was his proof.

He skipped back to a page that had caught his eye, one on fish people in the lake. “We should go looking for the monsters.”

“Yeah, totally,” Mabel said. “After I finish looking at the diary for clues about the guy.”

“It’s more of a field journal than anything,” he said.

“Diary, journal, whatever you want to call it! There’s probably a note of when he was living here somewhere!”

She swept the journal out of his hands, already muttering about re-using her relationship cork board for her notes. Dipper was glad for that; he’d hated looking at the drawings of Grunkle Stan she’d pinned up in an effort to figure out if one of the ex-wives he offhandedly liked to mention was actually one of the frequent visitors trying to see him without him knowing. 

Already she was bounding up to the attic before he could ask if she wanted his help. He was good at codes, after all, and he’d briefly spotted random sequences of numbers and letters that looked like codes. 

Dipper unconsciously raised his hand up to his mouth to gnaw at the knuckle of his thumb, shoving his cards in his pocket with the other hand. He could go up and try and help with the journal—something Mabel may or may not appreciate, she could get touchy about people messing with her art projects—or he could do some in-person investigating like the protagonists of his mystery novels.

A grin broke out on his face. Yeah, that was an idea. And maybe with talking to some of the monsters around town he could make friends with them; it’d probably go a lot better than his attempts to befriend the boys around town. They’d both be weird this time, instead of just him.

He got up and went to the gift shop to take a paper map of Gravity Falls and figure out the quickest way to the lake. No time like the present for monster hunting!

Mabel was staring at him in bewilderment. “You went to the lake? When?”

“Like three hours ago, dummy,” Dipper said, then added, “And I made a friend! She’s gonna come over and show me all of the waterways in the forest. She’s big on freshwater ecology, I guess.”

The trip to the lake had been pretty disappointing, actually. He’d swam around for like an hour trying to dive down to the bottom of it and find some sort of sign of a merfolk settlement, but it turned out that Gravity Falls was really, really big, really deep, and moderately murky. It was hard to see the bottom at all, much less reach it.

But while he was sitting on the shore, moping, he had met a girl wandering around on the shore, completely drenched. She’d listened to him talk about looking for something in the lake and had enjoyed all of the card tricks he’d showed her after she hadn’t immediately made an excuse to leave. Then they’d gotten to talking about music somehow, and he mentioned that he’d been a tenor in the school choir and played the sousaphone and violin, and she’d been very interested in those facts and how even though he’d stopped being into choir like months ago he could still sing most of the songs he’d learned.

Dipper was snapped out of his daydreaming and Mabel from her puzzlement that getting to the town from the Shack was already a mile walk by a firm knocking at the door.

“That’s probably her!” he said, and nervously adjusted his hat.

He’d already straightened out all of his clothing and finger-combed his hair into something reasonable. He’d also dug through his box of pins—it was his current collection, since his parents had vetoed him starting a new rock collection but accepted him making more wooden pins—and had pinned a little shooting star pin to his vest. For luck!

Opening the door, he found her standing there and grinning at him. She was as damp as she had been when he met her on the lakeshore, her black hair plastered down to her head and clinging to her neck, her grayish skin shiny. She was wrapped up in a big hoodie and cameo pants. 

She looked down at him from the good six inches of height she had over him, her dark, sunken eyes lighting up. One of her gloved hands, still raised up to keep knocking at the door, waved.

“Ready to go?” she asked, voice slow and thick. Dipper thought she might have a slight cold.

“Uh, hold up,” Mabel said. “Who are you?”

Dipper’s new friend blinked and looked at Mabel slowly. “Siren…uh…”

“Sirena,” Dipper provided. “Like Serena, but French. That’s what you said, right?”

Sirena nodded. 

Dipper grabbed her arm and waved at Mabel. “Okay, time to go. See ya, Mabel!”

He didn’t want to waste any time and risk Sirena losing interest in him.

“Dipper, wait—” Mabel said, but he was already out the door, thinking of all of the river facts he knew off the top of his head. 

“Oh my god,” Mabel said, clutching the Journal and pacing the room. “Oh my god. My brother made friends with a zombie. This is a disaster!”

“Haha, yeah, that would be a disaster,” a voice said. Mabel screamed and whirled around to see Soos fixing a light. “Oh, sorry, hambone. Thought you knew I was here. Since otherwise you’d just be talking to yourself out loud in an empty room, and that’d be pretty weird.”

“No, Soos, what’s weird is what a zombie wants with Dipper!” Mabel took the end of her hair with one hand and started tugging on it. “She’s going to eat his brains! I’ve got to stop this!”

She cracked open the Journal and started scanning the zombie page. Before, she’d sort of skipped over the details of all of the anomalies tracked in the entries in favor of looking for clues about the man himself, but it was time to get serious. Dipper was in big, big trouble.

And it was time for the alpha twin to make sure he was okay, like always.

Chapter Text

“Why are you here, anyway? Why’d Mom and Dad have you stay with Grunkle Stan?”

Dipper looked up from his Hardy Boys novel from where he sat on the big dino skull Grunkle Stan used as a side table, staring at her incredulously. “What are you talking about?”

“What I just said. Why are you here?”

“Your parents didn’t tell you?” Dipper said. Mabel’s stomach gave an odd little lurch at the way that Dipper, her twin brother, said ‘your parents’ like they were complete strangers to him. Because they were, she supposed. She didn’t like it. “Stan didn’t tell you?”

Mabel blew a strand of hair out of her face, slumping in the mustard-yellow easy chair. “I mean, they told me some stuff about you being sick and how Oregon was ‘better for your health’, but that can’t be the only reason, can it? If that was all, they’d tell me about you way before this, ‘cause we’d just visit you here. I know there’s something else, but no one’s just said it.”

She was still upset every time she thought about it. How Mom and Dad had sat her down at the kitchen table, horribly gentle expressions on their faces. She had thought this would be it, that all of the hushed arguments she wasn’t supposed to have heard were leading up to the inevitable Now, honey, we just think we’d be better apart…

Instead, they’d dropped a completely different bomb on her, one she never could have expected. Did she remember that cousin with her Great Uncle Stan they mentioned sometimes? Yes, of course, why did it matter? Were they moving here? No, no, there was something they needed to tell her.

He isn’t your cousin, honey. He’s your twin.

Mabel had thought it was a joke. She’d thought that through the whole conversation even as Mom and Dad tiptoed past properly explaining anything with vague ideas of this cousin-brother of hers being sick and how it was for the best and they didn’t want her worrying after him her whole life, but now they thought it’d be good for Mabel to spent the summer there since she wasn’t making much of her summer in Piedmont.

There was a part of her, she thought, that had still considered it all some big joke up until she’d met Mason Pines face-to-face and had practically seen her own face looking back at her.

Dipper was studying her, though what for she didn’t know. She wished she actually knew things. Everyone seemed to think she shouldn’t know important stuff like whole twin brothers.

He slid off of the dino skull, throwing the book in his hand carelessly to the floor where it landed next to the stack of old newspapers Grunkle Stan read in the morning and tossed to the side too. There was a lot of throwing random objects to the distance once you were done with them going on in this household, Mabel had noticed. Maybe she should toss her magazines around too.

There was a sudden smile on Dipper’s face, and he knocked her shoulder with his knuckles. “How about I show you something really, really cool? Stan said I should wait a couple days for you to ‘settle in’, or whatever, but that’s stupid. Once you know what’s going on around here it’ll make sense.”

Mabel sat up, intrigued. “Wait, was I right about there being something weird going on? Are you and Grunkle Stan involved in some sort of super spy stuff?”

“What? No.” Dipper said. Mabel almost deflated until he added, “Man, I wish, though. That’d be cool. It’s different—but you’ll love it.”

He said it with total, unshakeable confidence. Mabel found herself struck with the fact that he didn’t really know her at all. And she didn’t know him. They’d known each other for maybe a day now, a day where Mabel hadn’t known what to say for most of it, uprooted and uncertain—rare for her. And yet he was so sure of what she would like.

But she looked at him and his sure smile, and suddenly felt ridiculous. She had a secret twin brother. With secrets of his own. And now was her chance to learn about it and to hang out with him properly. What on earth was she so busy moping around for?

She grinned back at him, jumping from the easy chair and grabbing his hand. “I’ll totally love it. C’mon, show me, show me, show me.”

Dipper laughed as she started dragging him towards the door. “I’m the one who should be in front! You don’t even know if what I’m gonna show you is outside!”

“I’m a lucky guesser,” Mabel said proudly. “I always know how many beans are in a jar.”

“Then guess what I’m going to show you,” Dipper challenged.

So they went into the woods together, Mabel guessing wildly as Dipper lead her through the hiking trails and into the deeper thickets of trees. They clambered over rocks and marched up the inclines of the cliffs that surrounded the town of Gravity Falls, the pines and birches standing faithfully around them.

Mabel had just finished her long list of animals he was going to show her and was just speculating about how Dipper’s shock at her super-spy guess had, in fact, been the sort of perfect lie that a spy would pull off to deceive her when they entered a small clearing.

“Alright, here,” Dipper said, stilling her. “They should be somewhere near here right now.”

“Your secret handler who feeds you the codes?” Mabel guessed.

“Nope.” 

He pulled out a small baggie, and it took Mabel a second to realize the bag had marshmallows. Before she could feel too betrayed about the fact that there had been a bag of marshmallows on Dipper’s person this whole time and he hadn’t offered her some, Dipper was striding around and prodding random bushes with his shoe.

“Ha!” He finally said, his prodding resulting in a flare of light.

Mabel hurried to stand next to him and found herself peering down at a small—fire?

“Is this a campground?” she asked, baffled. It didn’t look like one to her. And if it was, why would there be a fire still going with no one around it? Smokey the Bear would be deeply disappointed.

“Nope again,” Dipper said. “These things do migrate to the campground later in the summer, though. This here is a scampfire.”

He took a marshmallow and threw it about a foot from the fire. Mabel leapt back a little when the fire suddenly moved, standing up on little wooden legs to scamper over to the food, tilting its body and the fire burning on it so that what looked like pincers made from twigs could nab the marshmallow and start burning it to a crisp.

“It’s alive!” Mabel said. 

“Sure is,” Dipper said. “Scampfires—they’re a magical sort of bug. The fires on their backs only burn what they want it to burn; if you approach it calmly, you can stick your hand in.”

As Mabel reeled from the casual use of the word magic and the sight of a living fire in front of her, Dipper took a step up to the creature and, like he said, slowly moved his hand down and eventually stuck it into the open flame. He didn’t look to be in any pain at all.

Mabel waited patiently for Dipper to remove his hand and straighten up again.

And then she screamed.

The scampfire’s fire flared wildly and it bolted off into the distance. Dipper jumped, dropping his bag of marshmallows. Birds fled from the trees.

“Uh, Mabel—” Dipper said, alarmed.

“Ohmigodohmigodohmigod,” Mabel squealed once her screaming had run out. “Magic is real? Magic is real? Oh my god—are there unicorns here?” She seized Dipper by his jacket. “Are there? Can I meet them? Please let me meet a unicorn, please, please, please.”

“Uh, that’s probably not going to happen,” Dipper said awkwardly, gently prying her hands from his jacket. “But magic is real. There are a bunch of anomalies here in Gravity Falls; they sort of all end up here for some reason. Including me.”

Dipper smiled, nervous, and swept the bangs that had been covering his forehead. She could see why now. Right there in the middle of it, there was a big sweeping birthmark in the perfect shape of the Big Dipper. Not some vaguely similar blotches, either. She could see the lines, the little dots in the connecting points of the lines to make the stars, little scattered dots surrounding the constellation.

Mabel didn’t know much about statistics or birthmarks, but she could bet that the odds of that birthmark just randomly happening were really, really low.

“Whoa,” she said, studying the mark. “So are you some kind of… alien? Fairy? Alien-fairy?”

Her brother let the bangs fall back again as he stuffed his hands in his jacket pocket. “Thing is, I couldn't tell you. There’s something weird about me that means I have to be here, but I don’t know what it is. Your—our—parents had me stay with Stan so he could figure out what it was… but he hasn’t, really.”

“…why would Grunkle Stan be able to figure it out in the first place?” Mabel said.

Sure, her great uncle’s business was all about cryptids and weird stuff, but his exhibits were all clearly fake. Which was wild, now that she knew that there was real magic and real monsters apparently living around here. Even with that being true, why would being good at selling a story mean he could figure up what was actually up with Dipper?

Dipper leaned towards her, eyes bright. “That’s the thing—before Stan was running the Mystery Shack, he was a scientist. He studied weird stuff like this. I found a newspaper, once, about him getting a grant to study rumors about cryptids out here back in the 80s.”

“For real?”

He nodded. “For real! But now he doesn’t. He tries to avoid the real stuff as much as possible! Something must’ve happened, I think, so he doesn’t act like a scientist anymore, but I don’t know what.”

Mabel looked at him, looked around the woods. The woods where stuff like scampfires existed and where her brother had to live because he was different, apparently—maybe Mom and Dad telling her he needed to be in Oregon to stop being sick made more sense than she thought.

She hadn’t known what to expect, coming to visit her grunkle and her brother for the summer. This was way, way weirder than she could’ve possibly expected.

Dipper was looking back at her. There was a strain to his eyes. He was waiting for her to freak out, maybe.

Well, she wouldn’t. Mabel Pines didn’t have a pattern of stars on her head, but she was pretty weird all on her own. It just proved that they were twins.

“Hey,” she said. “Do you think we could figure out what’s going on with Grunkle Stan? Something totally happened, right?”

Dipper grinned at her. “Totally. And I want to know. Two heads are better than one.” Then he tilted his head and picked up his bag of marshmallows. “… but do you want to feed some scampfires first?”

“Uh, doi!”

They went hunting for scampfires. Mabel decided that she thought Dipper Pines was the best possible surprise twin brother.

Chapter Text

A quartet of screams rang out in the forest.

Crashing through the underbrush—and the overbrush, frankly—was the giant body of a moose. Attached to that body of a moose was not the head of a moose, but the torso and head of a man.

A man named Stanley Pines. Local entrepreneur and con man, debatably-beloved owner of the Mystery Shack, Mr. Mystery himself.

And floating in front of the face of Stanley Pines was a fifty dollar bill firmly glued to a piece of string, the piece of string tied to a long wooden pole, and the pole held aloft in the hand of one Mabel Pines, who was sitting on the middle of Stan’s large moose back.

“Get it, Grunkle Stan,” Mabel Pines screamed. “You can do it!”

Her voice was slightly more gravelly than normal on account of the fact that she was entirely made of stone these days. Tall ridged horns poked out from her head, matched with pointed ears and stony bat wings sprouting from her back. Her eyes glowed a vivid pink.

She was currently using her other hand—now tipped with claws, which she had painted rainbow hues—to hold onto her brother by the middle as he sat behind her. It was hard to hold onto the back of a moose when you had four paws instead of hands and feet, after all. Being a sphinx was a trial, as evidenced by the faintly greenish tint on Dipper’s still disconcertingly human face.

Sat in front of the two of them was Ford Pines, holding onto his brother’s shoulders to keep from falling off as well. A large orca-like tail was the only thing worse than the body of a lion when it came to staying on a moose.

“Left!” Ford shouted.

Mabel obligingly shifted the fifty dollars to the left. Stan followed after, avoiding a large oak stump.

“I would’ve turned anyway,” Stan yelled over the wind.

A chorus of scoffs met his words. They knew he was lying; Stan Pines’s philosophy towards running as a moose was the same as his philosophy of driving in a car while human. Namely, the goal was to get there, and anything else relating to road safety and common decency was to be dismissed as nothing to concern himself with. That included barreling right into McGucket in the car and barreling through any obstacles that dared to stand in front of him in the woods.

It helped that Stan Pines was approximately two thousand pounds of “fuck you” now. He usually won the proverbial fight.

Everyone resumed their screaming as Stan took revenge over the oak stump issue by seeing a small drop-off of a cliff and simply choosing to leap straight off of it. They crashed into the ground with a level of force that made every animal within two hundred feet flee, including a huddle of gnomes that threw pinecones in their general direction, missing wildly. Stan surged forward, barely bothered with the landing. Dipper made a concerning hacking noise that promised either vomit or a hairball. Ford swore in an alien language.

As Stan’s ears swiveled back and he made sure Dipper knew that he was not allowed to vomit all over his great uncle, Mabel spotted their final destination: Gravity Falls Lake. It was downwards of them by far too many feet.

She swung the fifty dollar bill away from the direction of the plummeting cliff, and Stan veered off to follow it. They crashed through bushes full of thorns and mulberries, nearly trampled a deer, and almost headed straight into too many trees.

“Could we try to be a little less turbulent?” Dipper warbled miserably, his face looking greener than ever.

“You’re all already moochin’ off of me!” Stan said. “No complaining! And get your claws out of my skin!”

Mabel glanced over to see that Dipper had indeed been digging his large claws into Stan’s sides to keep some grip on his back. She tightened her hold on his torso, crumpling some of the feathers of his wings, as he did his best to stop clawing into Stan, which was hampered by his instinctive desire to not be thrown off and flung into the muddy ground.

She then turned her attention back to Stan, hollering, “Don’t you mean we’re moosin’ off of you?”

Dipper and Ford let out groans. Those groans immediately turned into screams as Stan seemed to decide that this was quite enough and veered from where the dollar was leading him to leap straight off the cliffside.

Mabel joined the screaming. They didn’t hit the ground, thankfully—instead they plunged into the dark waters of the Gravity Falls lake like an absolutely massive cannonball.

The only reason they didn’t drown any nearby swimmers in the resulting wave from their impact was that there weren’t any nearby swimmers. It had been a drizzly morning full of dark clouds, and the rain was supposed to start again soon. Nobody wanted to be out on the lake right now except for maybe Tate McGucket and a few other fishers.

Perfect for Grunkle Ford’s planned outing.

Mabel and Stan began sinking like stones. Luckily, Mabel was stone, and didn’t need to breathe if she didn’t really want to. Stan had been outfitted with a spell scrawled across his forehead before they had even left the Shack that gave him a bubble of air around his head. It made him look like the whole’s most giant astronaut.

Ford had let go of Stan seconds before they hit the water, and was immediately swimming around. Orcas weren’t really made for freshwater, but when they’d pointed that out, he’d gone on a long-winded rant about mermaid magic and adaptions for different kinds of water that all amounted to the fact that he could live in any body of water he could fit into. To which Mabel had said, “Oh, I know, I saved a mermaid from the pool once!”, which had led to a thirty minute interrogation.

Right now he was using his new freedom of movement in the water to grab Dipper, the only one who’d be more likely to float than sink. Situating his nephew under his arm like he was carrying a watermelon or a box—treatment Dipper seemed too dazed from the impact in the water to protest from his new matching air bubble—Ford swam down to join the rest of them, who were steadily making their way to the bottom of the lake.

Once Mabel and Stan hit the bottom, they adjusted themselves to standing positions and all took a look around. It was less of a water-wonderland than one might’ve hoped. The Gravity Falls lake was deceptively deep, which meant that at the bottom it was mostly cold and very dark. Mabel shivered in her one piece, sort of wishing she was in her usual sweater; she was the only one in a swimming suit, since the rest of them had non-human lower halves.

She could still see pretty well in the darkness, since it turned out that gargoyles had really good night vision. But what she could see wasn’t that interesting. There was a lot of sand, obviously, and a lot of seaweed. There were vague lumps in the distance that might’ve been rocks or maybe tossed car tires.

Stan plucked the pole holding the fifty dollars from her had while she was looking about. He took the bill and felt it with his fingers, then let out a groan.

"Ugh! A fake!"

"Of course. I learned from the best!" she chirped.

That softened her grunkle; he just sighed and let the pole escape from his grasp to float up to the surface of the lake and probably trick some other poor sucker later on.

There was a clicking sound to her right and suddenly a flood of light filled the water. Ford grinned at them all, a waterproof diving flashlight in one hand and Dipper still trapped under his other arm, whose face was scrunched at the force of the light.

“Ah, there we go!” Ford said. “Now, we should avoid the northern shore—I had a strong argument with one of the sirens living there once, and they would certainly not hesitate to lure us in and eat us. But otherwise we’re free to explore around. We might find the Gobblewonker, or find a series of underwater caves connected to the lake I’ve found records of, or—”

Stan made a show of yawning.

“Or,” Ford continued pointedly. “We might find the lost ship of Nathaniel Northwest, fabled to contain much of the town’s original gold stores.”

Stan perked up immediately, and Mabel and Dipper were similarly intrigued. A sunken ship and buried treasure? Now that was a proper outing.

“We’ve got sunken treasure for the taking around here?” Stan said. “Sixer, why the hell didn’t you lead with that?”

Ford jutted his chin up. “I personally found the underwater caves much more enticing. But if you all wish to see the ship, then I suppose we could make it our first stop.”

Dipper had a different question than Stan: “Grunkle Ford, why would there be a sunken ship full of gold in a lake? Where were they taking it?”

“A good question—here, I have a good guess as to ship’s most likely coordinates, let’s begin while I tell you about it,” he adjusted Dipper in his grip and started off in a vaguely easternly direction, Mabel and Stan hurriedly following after. “It began after Quintin Trembly was ousted as the true founder of Gravity Falls in favor of Nathaniel Northwest; I have a conspiracy about that fact, but I’ve never been able to crack the clues that would give me any proof…”

“We did, though!” Mabel said, using her stone wings to give her momentum on the lake floor. “We found out where the government was hiding the documents all about it.”

“You did?” Ford was stunned.

“She means she did,” Dipper clarified. “Mabel was the one who figured out basically all the clues, I was just there with her.”

Mabel beamed at her brother as Ford looked suitably impressed. “No, you help figure them out too! And then we found the living body of Trembly in peanut brittle and freed him and found a hidden underground bunker of all of the United States’ secrets and shames and got chased on top of a train heading out of the state and then Trembly gave me a top hat and made me a congresswoman which I think a president can’t actually do and then he rode off into the sunset on a horse, but like, backwards. We have no idea where he went.”

As Ford took this all in, Stan turned his upper half and stared at Mabel. “What? When did this happen?”

Dipper chimed in, “Like, right after you made scorpion-squirrel exhibit.”

Stan looked even more flummoxed. “That was the third week you’ve been here.”

“Yeah,” she said. “We’ve been pretty busy.”

As Stan seemed to take in that Dipper and Mabel had nearly been on a train out of state and having a fight on top of it while he was completely unaware, Ford said, “You’ll have to explain the whole thing to me later, it sounds fascinating. But the ship still calls! As I was saying, Nathaniel Northwest took over as founder and mayor, and amassed a large fortune. He was also quite insane, and was convinced that the birch trees in the forest would come alive at night and…”

So they kept marching on, listening to Ford explain the war against all different types of trees Nathaniel Northwest had and how that eventually led him to making a boat made out of white pine to spite them, which is a very poor choice of wood, and launching the boat into the lake to stop other trees from stealing the gold. The boat then rotted and sank, and they were never able to recover it due to the lake’s surprising depth and also the fact that the Northwests had plenty of other gold, so no one cared.

Then Ford started pointing out different kinds of seaweed and fish around them, and then he gave the flashlight to Mabel so he could snag one of the fish and start biting into it whole because he was “feeling a bit peckish.”

Stan made fun of him. Ford started arguing back. It turned into a light-hearted yelling match that Dipper and Mabel tuned out by Mabel grabbing Dipper to hold instead and them speculating about all of the gold.

…then it turned out that the yelling match got a little too loud when a high, warbling voice demanded, “Who is interrupting our singing hours?”

All of the Pines whirled around as much as they could in the water. Floating behind them, clutching spears with pissed-off expressions were a group of sirens.

“Uh,” said Stan. “No one important.”

The siren in the middle, an older, distinguished looking one with more shiny baubles on her person than the rest, zeroed in on Ford with narrowed eyes.

“Stanford Pines.”

Ford laughed nervously, swimming back a little bit. “Hello, Abyssa. It’s been quite a while.”

“Not long enough,” the siren thundered. “I still remember how you stood me up, Pines.”

“...is it possible we could live and let live?”

“No. Girls, get them!”

The sirens behind her surged forward, grins on their faces and spears in their hands. Everything quickly dissolved into chaos. The Pines spent their afternoon brawling with about half a tribe of angry sirens.

Chapter Text

Stan Pines was having a perfectly lovely afternoon. The weather was pleasantly sunny all day, with plenty of clouds to keep things cool. His suckering of tourists for the day had gone well, with a particularly gullible and spend-happy group coming in at the last hour, and he’d accordingly treated himself to settling down for a rerun of Baby Fights with a tub of neapolitan ice-cream. 

“Now this is the life,” he said to the world at large—a habit he’d picked up from living alone for several decades—and took a scoop of the chocolate ice-cream. “Just me and some quality television.”

Fate responded to this obvious set-up by throwing the door to the house wide open, slamming it against the wall. Stan jumped in his chair and only barely stopped his tub of ice cream from tumbling to the plush floor, managing to catch the spoon too.

Mabel and Dipper came tumbling in and Moses, they looked like hell. They were dirty, battered, and bruised, a whirlwind of dirt and stray twigs tangled on their person.

They were also grinning and ribbing each other, only to freeze at the sight of him sitting there.

Stan went for the most important information first: “Who did you fight, and did they come out of it looking worse than you two? You look like you fought a bear.”

Dipper snorted, the spell broken. 

“Trust me, we’d look better after fighting a bear. The Multi-bear is softer than butter,” he said, a statement Stan was choosing to ignore. What was a multi-bear? Not his problem, that was what.

“It was the gnomes,” Mabel said brightly.

“Again,” Dipper added.

“Again?” Stan said. He hadn’t been aware of a first brawl with gnomes.

She nodded, a stick in her hair coming loose and dropping to the floor. “Yeah, they’re still total jerks. Now that they’re not going after me to be their Queen, they’re trying it with Grenda, so we had to get them to leave her backyard.”

Stan spent a moment wondering when the hell gnomes had attempted to install Mabel as their queen and why, before deciding that wasn’t his business unless it had to be. He started taking better stock of their injuries. Plenty of bruises, minor but extensive scratches—could gnomes have rabies? Should he be worried about rabies?—a black eye on Mabel and maybe a rolled ankle on Dipper if the way he was favoring the right leg was proof of anything.

With a sigh, Stan silently said goodbye to the grand finale bout of Baby Fights: Babyface vs The Pacifier. He stood up from the chair. “Both of you to the dining room table. I should probably make sure you aren’t gonna keel over from blood loss.”

“It’s fine, Grunkle Stan,” Dipper said. “We can patch ourselves up.”

“Yeah, it’ll be quick,” Mabel agreed.

They always tried to pull this ‘don’t worry about us!’ schtick after a fight.

Unwillingly, memories of him and Ford sneaking back home from another cornering by Cramplter and his goons rose up in Stan’s mind. They never got their parents involved if they could help it after a certain point. Their dad would only impatiently ask if they’d won, then send them to their mother. Their mom would patch them up, but needle and complain about them not keeping themselves out of fights the whole time, insisting they needed to be smarter about it.

Ha! If being smarter about things could stop a bastard that wanted to make your life hell, Ford would’ve been fine all of his life. Things didn’t work like that. Half the time it was better to start a fight to have some control over things.

He wasn’t sure what tack Mabel and Dipper’s parents were taking about their fighting habits. Nothing actually useful, he could guess, since the kids didn’t want any help. By the way they’d talked to Stan about sending the kids up his way, they’d been hoping that the small town atmosphere and the draw of nature would calm them down. Tough nuts. That definitely wasn’t happening.

Their parents also probably expected Stan to try and stop the kids’ open bloodlust, seeing as he was supposedly Stanford, someone who’d dropped out of boxing lessons as soon as possible and never got a reputation for violence like his twin. Also not happening. Hell, Stan wasn’t sure if Dipper and Mabel would be curbed even if the real Stanford was actually the one keeping them for the summer. Ford hadn’t really had any quibbles about violence, ever. His hatred of boxing was how other kids took it as an excuse to wail on him even more to test him, not because he personally didn’t want to hurt anyone; Ford’s type of violence more involved improvised weapons than bare fists. 

As he mulled over these thoughts, Stan led the kids to the kitchen table, taking the ice-cream with him. It’d be a pain to get out the carpet if it dripped. 

This resulted in Mabel and Dipper immediately stealing it to start eating it themselves, but Stan just rolled his eyes. Whatever. The kids had been beat to hell. The ice cream would probably distract them from the sting of ointments for the wounds. Stan focused on dragging his huge first aid kit from a cupboard.

That first aid kit was an old one. Ford’s, first, something he found in a bloodied bathroom with barely anything left in it. Then Stan had stocked it up and used it for himself—no use going to the hospital and having them charge him thousands for fixing up he could do himself. Now, it was mostly used on Mabel and Dipper.

It was practically a family heirloom.

“What’d you even do to those gnomes?” he asked, taking one of Mabel’s arms to clean up. She had less scratches and scrapes, probably because of the sweater.

“Kicked the hell out of them!” was Mabel’s cheery reply. “Also, ow.”

“Don’t swear, I’m not getting blamed for that,” Stan muttered.

“It was a kinda small group of them, I think they were just scouting out Grenda,” Dipper said. “Which meant we could get more hits in per gnome. I punched one so hard he lost a couple teeth.”

“I picked one up by his hair and flung him into a tree!” Mabel countered.

They quickly settled into a battle of who had done the most damage to gnomes, swapping the spoon for the ice cream between them as they chattered on. It was always impossible for Stan to tell when they’d find the idea of sharing a utensil gross or when they’d shrug and claim, being family and twins besides, they probably had all the same germs anyway. The heavy layer of dirt on both kids maybe made it hard for them to care about hygiene at this point.

Stan just steadily cleaned all of Mabel’s scrapes and bandaged them, spreading an ointment on her bruises as well. He got Dipper to get off his butt and fetch a few bags of peas he had for just such occasions. (He certainly didn’t keep that many around to eat. Ugh, frozen peas.) Mabel applied it to her black eye. He had to tweeze out a few splinters too.

“Those are from me using this old two-by-four Grenda’s family just had lying around to bat a gnome,” Mabel informed him. “Worth it!”

Dipper nodded. “It was pretty cool. She got good distance.”

“Think I broke a window in the Gleefuls’ house, too!”

Stan couldn’t suppress a smirk. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard all night, pumpkin—as long as they don’t get at me about it.”

“They probably won’t,” Dipper said with a shrug and a wince as the movement tugged at his cuts. “We were like, five houses down from them.”

“Good job, then,” Stan said. 

Mabel beamed.

Stan moved on to Dipper, forcing the kid to shuck off his shoe and sock so Stan could test his ankle. After some prodding and some quizzing Dipper on how it felt, it turned out to just be a bad bruise that made the joint tender. Would be fine with some time to heal. He started cleaning scrapes again. 

Then he stopped to scowl at the battered sight of his nephew’s knuckles. “I told you no bare-knuckling it anymore.”

Dipper made a show of dropping his head back and groaning. “Who has time to wrap them up before a fight!”

“Do you want nerve damage before your voice even cracks, kid? ‘Cause this is how you get it.” Stan started cleaning the knuckles aggressively, having to remove what might’ve been a sliver of a tooth. Guess Dipper had gotten that gnome really good. “I know you know how to do it right, I taught you. Wrap your hands every morning if you can’t be bothered before the fight starts.”

Granted, Stan’s learned-on-the-streets ideas about protecting hands probably wasn’t as good as actual boxing gloves, but he wasn’t even going to pretend to himself that he could get Dipper to just carry some around.

“Maybe,” Dipper said sulkily. 

Stan just repeated “Nerve damage.” meaningfully and wrapped Dipper’s hands. 

After that, they were pretty much as close to fixed up as they would get, and his ice cream was as demolished as the gnomes had been. Stan sat back with a sigh.

When he’d been asked to house his grand niece and nephew for the summer, he hadn’t been expecting these bloodthirsty little monsters in the form of cute twelve year olds. Half the time he didn’t know what the hell he was doing with them. Nothing that great, he’d guess.

At least they could be convinced to let him patch them up. That was more than he or Ford would have let any adult do at that age, too sure that the other was the only one they’d ever need. 

He received two mumbled Thanks, Grunkle Stan's for his work. 

Good enough for him.

Chapter Text

Ford Pines stood crouched in the deep well of a tiny caving in a cliff side, one hand on his gun and the other with a tight grip on his brother's coat.

The sounds of people shouting and arguing were loud outside of their makeshift hiding place. They were currently in a dimension with a planet full of sapient goat-like beings with incredible climbing skill, who built their cities into the sheer faces of giant canyon's cliffs that made up half of the land not covered by their oceans. Canyons that made the Grand Canyon back on Earth look as deep and extraordinary as a shoe-print someone left in the mud. Ford had spent at least an hour muttering and stumbling over the geological implications of the landscapes, not to mention the rock's primarily aquamarine coloration, which Stan had borne with his usual faint smile and sotto-voiced quips back.

It was one of their more pleasant random drops into a world; the dimension was a naturally permeable one, meaning inter-dimensional travel between it and other dimensions was long established and they had frequent other-worldly guests. Dozens of varying beings walked the narrow and treacherous paths of this particular city, and Ford and Stan barely stuck out as something worth looking at.

Then there had been a great commotion some distance away.

Ford had spooked, already prepared to make a hasty exit, but Stan had grabbed on to him and reminded him of the first rule of being a suspect: nothing made you look more guilty than running when no one else was. So they'd kept a steady pace though the milling crowd, stopping to examine fruits and wares being sold in open-air stands—Ford with his eyes, Stan with his hands—and kept an ear out on what was going on and if it'd escalate.

They kept it up right until there was a bellowing of, "PINES. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST. SUBMIT QUIETLY."

Stan and Ford seized each others' arms and came to a swift agreement to start strolling aggressively, then evolved to jogging, and then running. Ford found one of the many crevasses that naturally formed in the cliffs they were scaling and they made quick work of shoving themselves inside of it. Not ideal if it turned out they were the 'Pines' in question and someone found them, but Ford had a gun and that would have to do.

Straining his ears, Ford tracked what was happening beyond his vision as best he could. Continued shouting, a few screams, a sound of heavy impact to rock... there was the intense humming of an inter-dimensional police vehicle, no doubt being used by the one who'd shouted for the Pines in the first place. It might've been chasing another flying vehicle. He could hear the sounds of dozens of rocks falling down the cliff side, and then, briefly, he saw something colorful fall past the entrance of their little cave. Ford tensed, so Stan tensed too. He kept his gun pointed at the floor for now.

Something shot past the view of the cave, settling into the sight of a cable held taught by something connected to it. A soft zipping sound indicated that it was pulling its weight up. Ford lifted the gun and pointed to were the one using the cable would end up.

Stan tapped his shoulder twice, seeking information. Ford muttered back, "Someone using climbing gear. Not police."

Stan's mouth set into a considering line.

Ford had hoped the ones using the cable would go straight past them, but no luck. A pair of small forms scrambled onto the narrow space of flat ground in front of the cave and got to their feet. The only thing stopping Ford from threatening to shoot right away was his first glance at them—they had the proportions of a pair of human children.

...because they were human children, he swiftly realized. Baffling. Ford and Stan had been across the multiverse, and this section of it rarely had humans running about. He took in their rounded faces and familiar statures in the split-second it took the long-haired one wearing a muted sweater to disengage her climbing gear—a grappling hook, it turned out—and stuff it back into a holster.

The other one with a hat, meanwhile, had looked directly at them and moved to put his hands up. "Hey—hey, we don't want any trouble, man! We're just gonna—"

His voice was high and cracking, obviously the tone of a boy only barely into puberty. Young, in other words. What were two children so young doing stranded out here?

The sweater-wearing one snapped her gaze to where her companion was looking just as a new round of shouting and heavy impacts started. Both children winced. The girl said urgently, "Dipper, we need to find—"

"I know," the boy, Dipper hissed back. "Let's not get shot before—"

"Ford," Stan said suddenly. "Put the gun down."

"Stanley—"

"They're kids, you idiot, put the gun down and tell them they can come in," he said.

Ford put the gun down with a sigh. "You heard him."

The two children were obviously reluctant to enter a cave holding two random men, one of whom had pointed a gun at them. Even if they were other humans. But then yet another impact sounded, this one hard enough to send a tremor and a cascade of blue-green rocks down the cliff face. The children surged into the cave, huddling into it while keeping distance from Stan and Ford. Stan swatted him in a way that managed to communicate that he wanted Ford to lower his mask, and Ford reluctantly went along with it. The children's eyes widened a little at the sight of his full face. Had they seen his wanted poster before?

"You two connected with the shitshow happening up top?" Stan asked easily.

Dipper eyed him. "What's it to you?"

Stan laughed, which already made the encounter worth it. "Just want to know—Pines, aren't you? Ford, tell me if they look like Pines."

Studying them, Ford found that they did look like Pines, a strange echo of the two boys standing proud in the photo in his jacket. They had the face shape, the eyes, the curly brown hair...

"Haven't got the Pines nose, but otherwise..." he said.

"Consider yourselves lucky," Stan told the kids. "Schnozes like these are no joke."

Ford could see the kids' gazes dart up to said nose as Stan tapped the side of it, and then linger on the cloth tied around Stan's eyes with burn scars obviously peeking out from behind it. To their credit, they hadn't been gawking at it before now, and they returned to looking at both brothers in turns.

"Our versions of you say the same thing!" the girl said cheerily, then faltered a little. "I mean... your names are Stanford and Stanley, aren't they?" 

She pointed to them each as she spoke a name, correctly identifying them. Her companion—her brother, Ford suspected—snorted.

"Look at them," he said. "They have to be."

"I knew it," Stan said triumphantly, grinning at the kids. "Geez, which one of us managed to have kids, though? It was me, wasn't it? I am the handsome one."

The girl giggled even as she and Dipper made faces at the idea that one of them was their father. They took steps closer, away from the entrance of the cave. "No, they're our grunkles."

"Your whozits? Is that some kinda dimensional slang?"

"It stands for great uncles!" she clarified.

"Shermie's grandkids, then," Stan muttered mostly to himself. Louder, he said. "How'd you end up out here with the two of us?"

There was an edge to his voice. Ford knew what he was wondering: how had they been dragged into the multiverse? Had they passed through the Nightmare Realm? Seen what Ford had seen? He could feel a residual feeling or terror crawling up his back at the slightest reminder, the old, horrifying pressure of thousands of eyes peering at him—laughing, goading, waiting.

Ford shook himself from that, looking the children over. They wore worn and eclectic clothing, had small mars and nicks from times past, but there were no burns, none of the inescapable wariness in their eyes that he often saw in the few mirrors they encountered...

Hopefully they hadn't seen even a glimpse. Ford wouldn't wish that dimension on his second-worst enemy. Bill Cipher could suffer it, though.

An extremely loud blast rocked the area before the kids could respond. They dropped immediately with eyes squeezed shut, Dipper covering his sister as they huddled down like turtles. In the same moment Ford had yanked up his gun again, aiming it above them, and Stan settled his crouch into one that would allow him to leap into a sprint. Broken pieces of the cliff rained down beyond them, crashing to the deep valley below, and Ford saw the gleaming silver of a police ship falling down with them. Some sort of handheld bomb was tossed after, and something that sounded like fireworks began to happen to the crash below.

"That's Grunkle Stan," the girl murmured with a faint smile, though she didn't open her eyes yet. "Shut your eyes."

Ford obeyed automatically. Stan didn't have to.

There was a sudden flash of light, the kind that lit up the eyelids a bright red even if they were firmly closed. There was shrieking in an alien language, then shrieking of a robotic kind, like a walkie-talkies' crackle of noise before the feedback settled.

"Grunkle Ford, do you copy?" the girl said. For a second Ford thought she was speaking to him, but then a softer crackle sounded, and a voice like his own said, "Mabel, my dear, where are you? Our next jump will be ready in minutes."

The red receded from his eyelids and Ford dared to crack them open. Mabel and Dipper were scrambling up from the ground, Mabel fetching her grappling hook again as Dipper took a walkie-talkie-looking device from her hands.

"We'll come to you, Grunkle Ford," Dipper said into it. "We're in a cave, there's probably dozens like it. We'll have an easier time finding you."

"Be quick and be safe," the other Ford said sternly. "Some of the cliff has been compromised."

"Really? We couldn't tell," Dipper mumbled. Then he looked to Ford and Stan and said, "Sorry, we've gotta go. Nice talking to you."

The sound of the other Ford asking who exactly they were with was smothered by Mabel taking quick steps towards them, flashing them a smile as she reached into one of the many pockets that were sown into her pants. Ford tensed by habit.

"Sorry," she said, withdrawing a... sticker sheet? "Here's a memento! I'm gonna stick this on your faces now."

Neither Ford nor Stan had time to move before she did as promised, tacking them onto their exposed cheekbones with a merry "Bwop!"

"Mabel," Dipper said.

"Okay nice to meet you bye!" she rushed out, waving enthusiastically, and joined her brother at the entrance of the cave.

With a nervous, almost apologetic smile, her brother turned back to them and added, "Uh, good luck out there."

Then both of the children ran out of the cave and along the path it opened out into, the sound of Mabel's grappling hook going off in the air. The two older Pines were left with their unanswered questions. For a moment they sat in silence with them.

"What's the sticker I've got?" Stan said out of the blue.

Ford turned to examine it. "It's... hm. It's a drawing of a little set of cherries that are sobbing and giving a thumbs up, and it says 'You're beautiful!' underneath. Not sure what to make of that." He carefully peeled off his own. "Mine is a wincing cantaloupe telling me I've got 'star power!' Frightening, really."

He wondered if all of the stickers in Mabel's original dimension were like this. Or had she gotten them from a different dimension they had passed through? Both possibilities did not explain the stickers themselves. Stan just snorted at the information.

"What d'you think Dipper's name is?" he said. "Can't be Dipper. Unless our nephew married a complete hippie, I guess."

"If Shermie's child followed in our father's footsteps, Mabel and Mabford," Ford said dryly.

Stan chuckled. "God, I hope not. 's probably Martin or something. Mason? Is Mason a name?"

"I think so." It sounded like a name to him, anyway.

With a sigh, Stan stood up, taking Ford with him with a tug on his arm. "Probably time to bounce, huh? Don't want to bet on the police here caring that I've got a big fuck-off burn on my face while the other Stan Pines probably doesn't."

Having tangled with police forces both dimensional and inter-dimensional, Ford had no doubt that a little thing like that would stop them. It was definitely time for them to leave the city as quickly as possible; the other Pines might've left the dimension in a visible enough way to keep the heat off of them, but there was no guarantee of that.

"Tell me what the kids looked like while we go," Stan said.

Ford did. Every little detail. He wondered, with a pang of sadness, if he and Stan had a Mabel and Dipper back home. If their Mabel would like baffling stickers, if their Dipper would have a small crooked sort of smile.

...perhaps it didn't matter. Not at this point.

At least such charming children from their dimension had no chance of being dragged into their horrific experiences.

Chapter Text

Dipper and Mabel learning about the Journal Wendy had found was mostly complete accident. She'd been flipping through it as she sat hidden behind the counter of the Mystery Shack with Soos, waiting for him to come back from where he was kicking Pitt Cola's out of the busted vending machine on one side of the room. It was a position she often took these days; Soos liked to hang out at the Mystery Shack these days, and Wendy liked Soos, so the place was becoming very familiar to her this summer.

It helped that Dipper Pines was there. It was like exposure therapy, making fun of customers with him. At some point maybe she'd start being able to talk to him alone without feeling like she was losing her mind ever-so-slightly.

The teenager in question came back victorious, Pitt Colas clutched in his arms, and nearly kicked the Journal out of her hands.

"Oh, dang," Dipper said, hopping back a bit. "That's on me—whoa. What's up with that?"

He pointed vaguely at the book in her hands with an elbow, his hands occupied.

Wendy held on tightly to the Journal, sharing a wide-eyed look with Soos. They'd only had the Journal for a few days, pouring over it with intriuge when they had the time together. They hadn't figured what to do about other people knowing about it.

Soos piped up first, saying truthfully, "It's this cool book we found in the woods, dood. It's got, like, all kinds of monsters in it."

Okay, they were just being open about it with Dipper, alright, Wendy wasn't going to stress out about this. She wasn't. She was so cool and so calm.

Dipper's eyebrows rose up as he handed off Pitt Colas to the both of them. "Seriously? That sounds really cool. Do you mind coming up so I can see it?"

Wendy stood up, placing it on the counter. Soos had already been honest about it, it'd be weird if she got squirrelly about it. The last thing she wanted to come off as to Dipper Pines was squirrelly and weird. Besides, it was already the end of the touring day, everyone packed off to continue their trips after paying for deeply up-charged trinkets. No one was around to spy the Journal.

Except for—

"Mabel," Dipper called, then added apologetically, "Sorry, do you want to include Mabel? I can just give her a cola instead."

If Dipper knew something Mabel was going to know about it anyway, Wendy already understood that universal truth. So she just nodded.

"MABEL," he shouted again, receiving a loud "WHAT?" back.

Then Mabel emerged from the hallway holding one of the many taxidermy abominations that Stan seemed so fond of making and passing off as a real cryptid. It's head had been freshly sown back on and a set of bird wings added to its back. Wendy wasn't sure what a combination of a rat, a rattlesnake, and a dove could possibly be called, but it was interesting to look at in a morbid way. The flecks of glitter Mabel inevitably left on everything added a magical air to it. She dropped the silently suffering stuffed creature onto a random pedestal and strolled over to them.

"Wendy's got something to show us," Dipper said.

They all gathered around the register counter and the Journal laid on it.

Carefully, Wendy started flipping through the pages, showing them the most interesting pages and, with a moment's thought, skipping some of the more alarming ones in case the fifteen year olds were overcome with a need to baby her and Soos. As she pointed out particular beings or illustrations, Soos enthusiastically recounted Wendy's finding of the Journal and him finding her with it, complete with sound effects that did not correspond to sounds that had occurred in the moment.

Dipper and Mabel were a diligent and attentive audience, oohing and ahhing over the work put into it and debating who the mysterious Author could possibly be. With some talking both were swayed somewhat to Soos's concept of the man being an alien crash-landed on Earth, though Wendy suspected they were just humoring him. She contributed her speculation that he'd been eaten by the 'muse' he kept talking about in maddened scribbles and they turned to discussing that instead.

"Hey," Dipper said out the blue. "D'you mind if we take this to look at it some more? You two need to be getting home."

"Why?" Wendy said.

Dipper tapped one of the pages, one with a bunch of little symbols scribbled in the margins. "I'm thinking this is some sort of code, but I'd need time to even start trying to figure it out." He tilted his head and smiled at her. "And, you know, if we keep it for a night you can figure out where you'll keep it at home—I bet you don't want your brothers' getting their grubby hands on it, huh?"

Well, that was true. she didn't didn't want her brothers getting to the Journal for even a second. They had no respect for anyone's property—their dad barely had any respect for anyone's property, honestly. They wouldn't mean to wreck parts of it, but that didn't mean they wouldn't. Having it stay safe in the Mystery Shack would give her time to devise a little hiding place. And it would be nice if those were codes and Dipper figured them out.

And yet, for a brief second, Wendy hesitated. This was her thing, her and Soos's. She didn't have many things that were just hers. 

She didn't want to share.

Mabel must've sensed her uncertainty, because she leaned in and said, "It's whatever if you don't—Dipper's probably just getting a big head about his code-cracking skills. Maybe don't indulge him."

Wendy cracked as smile as Dipper grumbled and faked a swat at his sister.

She looked up at Dipper's face, and felt her own come perilously close to flushing. Dipper was... well, she liked him a lot. A lot. Maybe to the point where she laid awake in the middle of the night thinking about him and whispering "oh no, oh no, oh no," about it. He was funny and nice to her and didn't treat her like a little kid even though he was so cool.

And Mabel! Mabel, who'd been nothing but nice to her as well, dragging her into girly stuff Wendy didn't really get to do anymore and just shrugging with a smile when Wendy got tried of it and wanted to do something something else. Mabel, who'd cheerfully shown her how to fix random things without any of the yelling a task with Wendy's dad involved—not because he was angry, just because he was like that—and snuck her snacks and encouraged Wendy to get back at Stan when Stan kinda just put her and Soos to work because they were there.

If she was going to show the Journal to anyone outside of Soos, it'd definitely be them. They were all friends, she was pretty sure.

Wendy looked at Soos. He nodded.

She handed off the Journal to Dipper, who folded it under his arm.

"You have to give it back tomorrow," Wendy insisted. "And if you do crack a code, you have to let us know."

Dipper and Mabel both nodded back, deadly serious.

"Of course, stretch," Dipper said. "We're just taking a look."

Wendy was going to hold them to that. She knew Soos would too.

Wendy and Soss were long gone. The door to the living room of the Mystery Shack burst open.

"Stan!" two voices whisper-shrieked. "Stan, holy SHIT."

Stan Pines rocketed out of a nap with his fists already swinging and his mouth swearing. Once he righted himself and his bearings, he got up from his chair with a groan, glaring at his niece and nephew. "What? If it isn't the house burning down, I don't want to hear it."

Mabel brandished something in his general direction, something red and gold with a giant hand symbol on the front emblazoned with the number three.

Stan gaped.

"Wendy and Soos just found it in the woods," Mabel rushed out, her eyes wild and bright. "Just complete accident, 'cause she threw one of the signs you gave her at a tree and it clanked—"

"It clanked because it was metal," Dipper's voice clambered over his sister's, "because Grunkle Ford made a metal tree with a lever to a keypad to open a secret compartment and the journal was just in there."

"Where?" Stan demanded, staunching the flow of words by striding forward and plucking the book from Mabel's hands.

"Nearby!" Mabel whisper-shrieked again. "Like, 12-year-old walking distance! We just never found it because it was a fake metal tree."

Of course. Of course Stan's brother, world's stupidest genius, would think to hide one of his precious books in a hiding spot that involved a fake metal tree in goddamn lumber country. And of course because it was Stan's stupid genius of a brother, that trick would work for thirty years and no one would disturb that stupid tree until a random kid tripped right into getting their hands on a book with three-thirds of a reality-bending machine's blueprints.

Stan thunked the Journal against his head, closing his eyes to ward off... something. An impending disbelief-triggered migraine, maybe.

"When I get Stanford back," he growled, "I'm going to kill him."

Thankfully, both Dipper and Mabel were too busy reeling alongside him to comment on the fratricidal tendencies or how saving Ford from whatever nightmare universe he'd ended up in just to kill him would be counter-productive. The teenage twins had spend chunks of their summers since the age of eleven helping their grunkle search for these very books, after all, and it only started at eleven because they were too young to be trusted with helping before then. To learn that one of their vitally needed components to the plan was a mere stroll away this entire time was a serious blow to both their pride and their sanity.

"At least... at least we have it?" Mabel tried, gently peeling the book away from Stan's forehead.

"Now," Dipper grumbled bitterly.

He got an elbow to the side from his sister for that.

"And only until tomorrow," he added, eyes narrowed at her.

Stan opened his eyes to shoot them a sharp look. "What do you mean, only until tomorrow?"

"Wendy found the book," Dipper reminded him. "And Soos knows all about it too. They also know we asked for it—if we don't give it back, they'll have questions."

What went unsaid, of course, was the last thing we want is questions.

Questions from a pair of kids probably wouldn't do much harm... but they couldn't be sure. And the bigger problem was if their families were roped in and started having questions as well. The Journal as it was would merely be a curiosity to the kids, a fun secret to keep, something to leave their families in the dark about. Even if not, the Journal itself would likely be passed off as a piece of elaborate fiction. But if the Pines withheld the Journal, the kids would have questions.

The idea that'd they would stumble onto the real answers to those questions was slim—but no slimmer than finding the Journal in the first place.

"Right," Stan said, his mind racing. "I guess my night's dedicated to fixing that copier now. For now, you two are gonna copy everything that looks relevant by hand."

Normally this sort of pronouncement would garner drawn-out groans from the twins. Dipper had recently settled into a laid-back, lazing persona that only people who barely knew him before the age of fourteen believed, and was utilizing it to full force whenever he could. Mabel was too much of an artistic temperament to enjoy being made to do something.

But the task of seeking out the Journals and restoring the portal was a family trade at this point, started by Stan and—later, after Stan broke down after his own funeral and made a desperate call—Shermie, then passed down to Shermie's son. Then his son had passed it down to Mabel and Dipper, who were working on the portal full force this summer with their grandfather down a non-fractured leg from a fall and their dad in the midst of tense conversations with his wife that couldn't be put off. Raised on it as they were, Dipper and Mabel were committed to any work that would speed up the re-igniting of the portal, eager to finally meet the great uncle that had been lost to them before they were even born.

"And you're gonna be the ones calling Shermie and the kid," Stan added.

This elicited groans. 'The kid' was Grunkle Stan's perpetual nickname for their dad; their dad hated it, which only encourage Stan to use it more. Neither their dad nor grandfather would take the bombshell that their one of their goals had been reached by the random chance of two completely unrelated children well at all.

Stan was merciless. "If either of 'em starts going on about talking to me about it, tell 'em I'm too busy to have my ear blown off."

He beat a hasty retreat to the office before Dipper and Mabel could effectively protest, leaving the Journal in Mabel's capable—if glitter-encrusted—hands. A strange swell of elation and indignation followed him the whole way. Mostly elation.

We're getting closer, Sixer. We're almost there.

You're going to love these kids.

Chapter Text

The woods were lovely, dark, and deep. Cascades of golden leaves hid the dimming sky from the forest floor, the rustle of a gentle breeze guiding them downwards. Birds sang. Animals sounded and chattered in the distance. It was a cool day, on the cusp between summer and autumn.

In between one blink and the next, Dipper Pines suddenly wondered what he was doing here.

He was in the woods, woods full of maples and oaks and birches, walking steadily down a lone path. He had been walking it for quite a while, he knew, but why? Where had he come from, and where was he going? It felt it was though he had forgotten to ask himself these questions.

Some were readily answered. He was looking for something. What had it been—?

Mabel. Of course, Mabel. He needed to get back to her. He needed to find someone else in these woods to tell him where he was and where to go to be back with Mabel. He felt, vaguely, that she was doing something important. He needed her help with... something. It would come to him. Mostly he needed to find her because she was Mabel, and it was best if he knew where she was for no other reason than she was his sister.

Why was he here in the woods, woods that he did not quite recognize with their lack of conifers? Because—

Because—

Why was it autumn?

Why wouldn't it be autumn, the rest of him thought. It was as good a time for it to be as anything. Better, surely, than winter. It was autumn because it had to be some sort of season.

Dipper had his answer, but still the question lingered with all the rest. It didn't seem right that it was autumn, and yet it was.

At least his path through the woods was made beautiful by the changing colors of the leaves. All he had to do was keep taking the path until he found something, some person taking it as well or a building with a phone to call with, and then he could find Mabel and be headed back home. There must be someone on this path; someone had made it in the first place, and so it must lead to somewhere people wanted to be.

So Dipper walked. It was either keep walking forward or turn back, but Dipper wasn't sure what he'd find back the other way, and it would just waste his time retracing his steps for an uncertain goal. Walking forward was more likely to let him cross paths with someone else.

The sun was taking its time setting. The crickets were taking their time to start singing. Dipper was sure he was walking quite a distance, but it was as though the angle of the sunlight coming through the trees was reluctant to change. Better that he found a good place to rest before the sun set.

How long had he been walking? Not that long. He didn't remember it being morning or noon while he was here. Just later into the afternoon, sinking into the golden hour to match the golden foliage.

Slowly, sluggishly, the sun finally seemed to remember that it was supposed to sink. The shadows grew as the beams of light lengthened and started to disappear. A chill swept over the darkening woods as animals began to quiet and other animals began their cries. Owls hooted somewhere above.

Dipper shuddered. There had to be signs of civilization somewhere. Why would there be a path in the woods otherwise? He ignored the chill. He just had to keep moving.

Finally, finally, he got somewhere. An old rickety mill in the middle of the woods—the sight struck him as familiar and relieving, though he couldn't really recall why at the moment. It was an odd thing to find comforting, an old rotting cabin. But Dipper quickened his step towards the building. Even if there wasn't anyone inside it, it was somewhere to stay the night other than the dark woods.

He paced the porch for a few seconds, peering through the windows in search of a light to show someone was inside. In the end, he simply knocked on the door.

And knocked. And knocked. And knocked. He tried the handle. Locked.

Frowning, he glanced back to the woods. The sun had set fully when he wasn't paying attention, and now faint moonlight flitted between the canopy. He wasn't sure he'd be able to follow the path in the darkness without stumbling off of it into the woods where he couldn't find it again. Kicking at a stray stick, he started to take a loop around the mill. Maybe there was another door that was unlocked or a window he could force.

As he started to circle it, he became aware of something moving in the woods. He tried small windows inset into the wooden logs making up the walls with his head craned to keep an eye on the treeline. The more he tested windows, the surer he became—something was coming.

Breaths coming fast, Dipper hesitated between the woods and the cabin. The woods, where it would be easy to hide, or the cabin, where someone might come to help him?

Before he could choose, it breached the coverage of the trees. Dipper tensed, then relaxed a little.

It was another person, carrying a lantern with a strangely flickering flame.

"Hey," Dipper called, turning around from the cabin. "Hey, do you live here? Where is here? I need to—"

"Why are you here?" the figure said dully. His voice was thin and reedy, like a woodwind instrument.

He had come closer and Dipper could see his face under his hood was surprisingly young, not much older then him even though he was a head or so taller. His face was gaunt and tired, eyebags deep grooves in his face. His eyes were red like he'd recently been crying, but they weren't wet to match. He was wearing odd clothing, something that might've been a navy cloak or a cape hanging raggedly to his feet. There was a bundle of chopped wood strapped to his back and an axe in his other hand.

"What?" Dipper said. He eyed the axe nervously.

The teenager tilted his head. "Why are you here, preacher?"

Preacher? Dipper looked down and for the first time noticed he was wearing a black reverend outfit. He couldn't remember why, and he couldn't find it within himself to care. "I... don't know. That's the problem. Look, I just want to find my sister, where—?"

A reedy laugh interrupted him. "You won't find her."

"What?" Dipper said again. "Who are you to say I won't find her? I just need to get home! Where am I?"

The boy passed him to the front porch, speaking over his shoulder with cold finality. "If you've already left her behind, you can't get her back. She's gone. All you can do now is find a place in these woods to lay down and fall asleep. That's all..."

"Will you shut up! I just need to go home." Dipper scowled at the boy's back. "And if you won't tell me where I am, I'll find someone else."

"You'll find lots of people to help," the boy agreed solemnly, starting to unlock the front door. "Plenty of lovely people in this place. But they can't help, no one can... they're bound to this place just as anyone else is..."

With that vague and useless pronouncement, the boy shoved the heavy bolt lock on the door aside and entered the mill, shutting the door with a loud thunk. Dipper stared at the door with disbelief for a long second, and then in a sudden rush picked a large stone from the grass and threw it straight at that stupid door. It hit and splintered the wood a little, but the boy simply moved further into the mill—Dipper could see the lantern light moving away from the windows.

"Thanks for nothing, then!" Dipper shouted. What a waste of time.

He turned back to the woods and marched to the start of the path. It was alright. Dipper didn't need that useless boy. He'd just follow the path until he found his bearings, and then he could get back home to Mabel. It didn't matter that it was the middle of the night, nor that he couldn't be sure of the direction he was heading anymore.

He just needed to keep walking.

Chapter Text

A Sapphire crept along the dark corridors of the temple it resided in.

Great towering pine trees loomed from the windows of the temple, blocking some of the moonlight cast through them. The sounds of nature called through the windows as well, but the Gem paid no attention to them. He was looking for his sister.

She was not really his sister, of course. Gems did not have sisters, or brothers, or siblings at all. They had, at best, Gems that were cut from the same rock as them, but that was not a sibling any more than any human babies born in the same hospital were siblings. Merely beings with the happenstance of starting their lives in the same place.

The Sapphire's sister was not even that. She was a Ruby, their paths never crossing until centuries after their creation. But that did not matter—she understood him, and he, her, and so they met in the quiet of their stations and decided that they were siblings. They had been alike in their crookedness, their unsuitability towards their designated tasks, and so they stuck together.

There was not much use in a Sapphire that could not control his visions or a Ruby who didn't follow orders in battle.

He heard subtle movements and shuffling in the direction of one of the rooms, and swiftly followed it. He could pick out the sounds of his sister at work with a skill few could surpass.

Drawing the door to the room open, he peered in. A Ruby was standing in the middle of a torrent of chaos. Papers and streamers were strewn across the room. Paint was slapped across every surface. Glitter collected in every nook and cranny possible like sand swept along in a hurricane. The Ruby looked as though she had been attacked by every art supply in the room.

The Sapphire, being a Gem, did not quite comprehend human concepts of art. He suspected his sister didn't quite comprehend it either. That simply didn't stop her from trying it anyway.

"Mabel," he hissed. "Mabel!"

"What, Dipper?" his sister said, still studying a collection of paint and glitter that looked newer than the rest.

Gems did not have names. Not proper gems, at least. They had designations and the name of their particular gem, that was all. But this Sapphire and this Ruby already were poor showings of Gems, and the Sapphire had received one of his few visions on them calling themselves Dipper and Mabel, so Dipper and Mabel they were.

Dipper had then despaired on how if he required the vision to know what their names were, how had they come up with the names to use so the vision would show them? Attempting to solve this paradox had left him in the conspiring spiral that had gotten him the gimlet eye back when he had first been harvested. His sister merely listened along and ultimately told him it didn't really matter as long as they were Dipper and Mabel now.

"Fool's Gold is gone," he said. "And Jasper and Topaz."

Mabel looked up, eyes bright. "So we can go—"

"Yeah," Dipper said. "Now."

His sister shook off all of the glitter and paint, removing it from herself in one go, then joined him at the door. They went down the corridors.

The Temple of Mystery—named by Fool's Gold, their nominal leader—was a labyrinth more than a home. Its corridors twisted and turned and tricked you the whole way through them. A human would descend into madness within them within weeks. For a Gem, they were an annoyance and a puzzle, but little else. Mabel and Dipper had crossed through the maze of corridors too many times to count, and knew them by heart.

Still, there was one area of the Temple they had never found until recently, one all but hidden away. A series of turns into a cavern beneath the Temple. It had taken a long while for Dipper and Mabel to find and memorize this path, including all the ways it changed from day to day. But they knew it now.

And they knew what it led to.

They slipped through the labyrinth to the colossal doors that marked the entrance to this secret. They were golden and shining even in the faint light that the Ruby and Sapphire produced from their forms. Eyes peered down at them from the carvings in the doors, and both Gems shivered at their piercing gaze. It knew, perhaps, that they weren't supposed to be here.

But it was not a Gem itself, and could not stop them from opening it. They slunk into the dark cavern behind it.

There was almost nothing in this giant room. Just one thing. A bubble, pale yellow and shimmering as beautifully as any piece of gold, in the center of the space. And in the middle of the bubble was a Gem.

Or, the remains of a Gem. It was cracked and splintered, bursts of energy popping from the jagged edges like fireworks. Surrounding the gem was the equally splintered remains of the Gem itself, a golden collection of arms clawing at themselves like a celtic knot of agony, forming a triangle from certain angles. The six-fingered hands of each arm tore through their own hard light projections. The air in the bubble trembled around it like water with something thrashing beneath it, like thin gauzy lines of a spider's silk about to be swept aside.

If the Gem had ever possessed a full body, it was twisted and torn apart, only the desperate grasping hands left. Grasping for something it could not find, a place it could not go.

Mabel stepped closer to it first. Dipper nearly drew her away. There was a throbbing in his head, a throbbing that should be a vision but often wasn't, merely a vague sense with no true knowledge to back it up.

"Hi, Pyrite," she said quietly. She reached out as though to touch the bubble, but it was floating high above them. "Sorry you're still all alone..."

The clawing knot of arms in the bubble shuddered as though vaguely aware there was something near it now. It could not speak to reply. The popping bursts of energy in the center of its gem glimmered rainbow hues, a faint replication of the portal Dipper had seen only once in a fractured vision, never in person. Fool's Gold did not practice his purpose anymore.

Seeing the remains of Pyrite, stuck in a perpetual desire to open a space between reality but only pulling himself apart, Dipper understood why.

He muttered his own apology to the Gem. For now, there was nothing else they could do for him.

Chapter Text

"Okay," Mabel said as they crouched in a giant fern-like plant, hidden from any dinosaurs. "Um. Maybe it's time we call B—"

"Nope, nope, nope," Dipper said, shaking the measuring tape in his hand wildly.

"Dipper, come on. I'm too adorable to be eaten by a dinosaur! It's time for the big guns!" Mabel said.

There was a heavy rumble to the ground as something started to slowly move in their direction. Both twins froze in place, shutting up, and waited an achingly long time for the dinosaur stomping around seemed to take notice of something else and start moving away instead. Once it sounded far enough, Dipper banged the measuring tape on the ground.

"He is not the big guns, Mabel," he said. "He's one of those popper things you get before the fourth of July and throw on the ground that are really unsatisfying at best."

Frankly, if Dipper had known that taking the Journal from its hiding place meant he'd have to deal with Bill Cipher, he'd have put that thing right where it came from.

Sure, the floating triangle said he was meant to help them out, but Dipper had barely seen evidence of that. Mostly when he popped up, Bill Cipher just enjoyed making the world turn weird colors from their perspective, stealing teeth from random nearby animals, and trying to get Dipper and Mabel to make some sort of deal with him. They were always phrased as small mutual favors, but Dipper didn't trust it at all. A small favor didn't require blue fire sprouting from someone's hand, in Dipper's opinion. That just radiated sketchiness.

The most Bill had ever done to be helpful was point out pages in the book and mock things, like the gremoblin section being written very, very uselessly, but that seemed more for his own amusement than anything else. He was just sort of an annoying guy who showed up to be weird.

And that was on the best of days. Dipper did not want to learn what Bill was like when he had something to hold over their head like, say, them being stuck millions of years in the past with a time tape that really, really didn't want to turn back on right now.

A shriek rang up from above, and then there was the heavy sound of beating wings and something swooping around.

"You know what?" Mabel said. "I don't care whatever grudge you've got against him. Bill Cipher, Bill Cipher, Bill—"

Dipper scowled at his sister and pulled the time tape again. With a pop and a flash, they were whisked away.

"—Cipher!"

Mabel's shout started a handful of people on the worn cobbled street they suddenly were standing on. The town around them looked like it was decked out for Pioneer's Day—mostly because it currently was the pioneer days. Men in unflattering hats and pants and woman in bonnets and dresses hurried away from the pair of kids with strange clothing shouting strange things.

"Dipper!" Mabel said, brow furrowed.

But before she could complain, the world briefly slowed and went grey. Before they could panic about some unsuspected side-effect to time travel, a bright yellow triangle formed into existence in front of them. Bill Cipher had heeded their call.

Dipper stared at Bill. For a triangle with only one eye, he looked really... frazzled, honestly. His hat was crooked, and he straightened it irritably before narrowing his eye at them. He brought that stupid little cane he sometimes carried around into existence just to point it at the two of them.

"HEY. HEY," he said. "WHAT'S WITH THAT PRANK CALL YOU JUST PULLED? DO YOU KNOW HOW ANNOYING IT IS TO TAP YOUR MILLIONS-OF-YEARS-YOUNGER SELF ON THE SHOULDER AND TELL HIM TO GO NAB SOME KIDS FROM A T-REX'S JAWS, ONLY FOR THERE TO BE NO KIDS TO NAB, YOU LITTLE MEATBAGS? REAL ANNOYING! PAST ME NOW THINKS I'M A COMPLETE LUNATIC, AND THAT'S RICH COMING FROM HIM!"

Without a speck of interest in explaining himself to Bill Cipher—a triangle that frequently remarked about sending rats arranged in the form of names to charm friends—of all beings, Dipper said, "No more annoying than you are on a daily basis, man."

Bill rolled his eye. Dipper was going to poke it out.

"We're trying to get home right now!" Mabel cut in. "Uh, do you know how to stop time-traveling?"

She waved the time tape in Bill's direction. Bill floated down to look at it, placing a considering hand against his... undereye, Dipper supposed. The bricky part of his body.

"OH, RIGHT, YOU TWO AREN'T FROM THE 1700s. GRAVITY FALLS IS SO BACKWATER I FORGET. DOESN'T HELP THAT 1100s AND BEYOND KINDA BLUR TOGETHER." He circled Mabel and the time tape, looking at it from all angles. "YEESH, THIS THING IS BUSTED. I'M SURPRISED THEY DIDN'T HAVE A TIME AGENT PICK THIS UP THE MILLISECOND IT FELL FROM SOME OTHER IDIOT AGENT'S POCKET. TIME BABY'S GETTING SLOPPY."

Dipper mouthed 'time baby' to himself in bafflement, but refused to ask Bill Cipher a clarifying question.

Bill prodded the tape a few times, then shrugged. "YEAH, I CAN'T FIX THIS THING."

"Aren't you an all-seeing eye?" Mabel reminded him.

"EHHHH," Bill went, making a seesawing motion with his hand. "JUST BECAUSE I CAN SEE EVERYTHING DOESN'T MEAN I'LL REMEMBER IT, SHOOTING STAR. BESIDES, I'M ON PROBATION."

"Probation for what?" Dipper said.

Bill shot him an amused glance. "LOTS OF THINGS. L O T S  O F  T H I N G S. DON'T WORRY YOUR  SCREWY LITTLE BRAIN ABOUT IT. THE POINT IS I CAN'T DIRECTLY INTERFERE WITH TIME STUFF, INCLUDING FLINGING KIDS AROUND THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM. A SHAME! USED TO BET ON TEN YEAR OLDS' SURVIVAL LIKE RACE HORSES."

Dipper suspected that little tidbit was one of the things he was on probation for.

"But you can tell your past self stuff?" Mabel said.

"THAT'S PROPHESYING, TOTALLY DIFFERENT THING. NOW, BANG THAT TIME TAPE AGAINST SOMETHING A BIT MORE AND SEE IF IT TURNS ON AGAIN."

With a frown, Mabel brought it down against the nearest tree trunk. It sparked on the third hit.

Bill hummed. "WIRES ARE WORKING! ALRIGHT, TRY AND PULL IT, AND I'LL MAKE SURE IT'S GOT ENOUGH JUICE TO GET US SOMEWHERE. IF YOU JUMP ENOUGH YOU'LL PROBABLY END UP IN YOUR OWN TIME AS YOUR NATURAL DIMENSIONAL SIGNATURE DRAWS YOU BACK TO YOUR INTENDED PLACE."

"Probably," Dipper muttered.

"TIME TRAVEL'S REALLY MORE OF AN ART THAN A SCIENCE, PINE TREE. NOW GRIP IT AND RIP IT!" Bill said.

Mabel obediently griped the time tape's metal edge and ripped it. With an alarming fizzling noise, they popped up from the olden days to an apocalyptic ruin of a city, with smog coating the sky and people in dark, sci-fi get-ups running around and shouting weird futuristic slang. Mabel and Dipper stared as a gigantic baby floated in the far distance, shooting red lasers from its eyes.

"THERE'S THE TODDLING TYRANT HIMSELF," Bill said. "HE GETS OVER HIMSELF LATER. TURNS HALF-WAY BENEVOLENT. BOOORRINGG."

Mabel pulled the tape again before they got a taste of the lasers themselves. They popped up in a vast, empty forest, a flooded ocean with dead, petrified trees sticking out of it—"WOW, THIS THING HAS A LONG RANGE, THIS IS A WHILE OFF."—a version of Gravity Falls that looked like nearly like their own except it was clearly spring and there was only the bones of the Mystery Shack, and then they landed in the snow in front of the Mystery Shack without any signage or room for cars. The only familiar aspect of the exterior was the warm yellow of the triangular window at the top of the house.

Mabel and Dipper couldn't help but let out loud yelps at the cold. They'd been dunked into the ocean just a few seconds ago from their perspective, and suddenly landing in the deep of winter immediately after was deeply unpleasant.

Bill offered no goading remark to their plight as he usually would. His eye was fixed on the door of the Shack.

"Uh, Bill?" Mabel said a little nervously.

Bill did not like Stan. They didn't know why, but he seemed to harbor a deep and specific vendetta against their great-uncle. That wasn't too weird in theory, considering plenty of people had a vendetta against Stan Pines, including Gideon Gleeful and the IRS, but for however much Stan was a hardass neither Mabel nor Dipper liked the idea of a demon having him in its sights. Was this about the time whatever happened to make Bill hate him occurred.

"RIP IT, KID," Bill said suddenly, his voice oddly subdued. "WE DON'T WANT TO STICK AROUND HERE AT THIS TIME."

Sharing a look with her brother, Mabel pulled the tape. With a final frightening sizzle and flash, it deposited them back to the fair.

But just before they went, they had briefly seen Stan Pines open the door of the Shack and glance around, wearing different glasses than he would in the future. What they didn't see was how Bill twitched away from the man.

Bill popped away from the twins as soon as they were sure they were in the right time.

Chapter Text

There were two fucking children in the middle of the road.

Stanley Pines slammed on the brakes hard, swearing loudly as he veered to the side of the road. He was lucky this patch of road didn't really have any trees to wrap his fender around, just long stretches of fences and farmland. Nowheresville, basically. As far from Jimmy Snakes and his biker gang as possible. And anyone else.

Which was why it was so weird that there were just a pair of children out here.

Before he could think about that, Stan was opening up the door of his El Diablo and stepping out, scanning the road for those two little weirdos. He didn't expect to actually see them, either because they ran away from the car that nearly turned their little child bones into paste at three in the morning or because they weren't real. A brief road hallucination or something.

Nope. Those kids were definitely still there in the middle of the damn road.

They were huddled together, wide-eyed and whispering to each other. Neither of them were quite dressed for the winter weather; both of them had clothing on that exposed their legs. As he stomped towards them, they looked at him but didn't run away. They just looked.

An uneasy shiver ran through Stan. He'd seen weird shit out on the road. A pair of kids nowhere near a house in unseasonable weather was normal, technically, but so weird in a normal way that it threw him off entirely. They were runaways, his brain told him, but what kinds of runaways didn't manage to scrounge up at least some pants? What kids thought standing in the middle of a road was a good idea, even this late at night? How had they walked all this way? Why were they just fucking looking at him?

"Hey," he barked. "What the hell are you two doing?"

He found them so jarring he half-expected them to vanish the minute he spoke to them. Either by running away like a sane pair of kids confronted by a dirty, weaselly-looking grown man, or in a puff of smoke because they were just his brain messing with him.

Stan was close enough to see them more clearly now. A boy and a girl. Tennish? Maybe? He wasn't good a gauging kid's ages, sue him. Twins, probably. Really familiar looking twins.

"I'm talking to you two knuckleheads," he said. "Will you get out of the damn road?"

"Are you Stan Pines?" the boy said suddenly. The girl was gripping onto her brother's arm, grinning widely at Stan.

What? The fuck?

Stan took a step back. How the hell did these two know that name? He hadn't gone by Stan Pines in about a decade now, and these kids barely looked a decade old. He hated this situation more and more, because it didn't make sense.

"What's it to you?" he said slowly.

The girl lunged forwards a bit, looking at him with shining eyes. Only her brother taking a grip on her sweater stopped her from trying to crowd near him. Her whole being seemed to shimmer a little bit in the dim light of the half-moon. Wind whipped her hair around.

Neither of these kids were shivering like children that had spent however long in the cold of an Idaho farmer's wasteland. It was as if they had simply been plucked from one part of the world where their mutual clothing choices made sense--a place that did not exist, as far as Stan could tell, because were these kids expecting to be cold on top and warm on the bottom?--and deposited right into the chilly desolate air of late winter in the middle of nowhere.

"It matters because we're the best thing that ever happened to you!" the girl said with deep conviction. "Mabel and Dipper, at your service!"

"Don't give you names out to strangers, dumba--dummy," he said automatically. "And what are you talking about?"

"We do know you!" Mabel said.

Fucking creepy!

Dipper, which was a weird name for a kid, yanked on his sister's hair a little, giving her a scolding look. "Don't tell him that, Mabel! We shouldn't even be talking to him."

Stan's respect for this specific kid went up. "Yeah, you shouldn't be talking to me. But while you are, how did you get here? Where are your parents?"

He tried looking around in the vain hope that there was a car he hadn't noticed before stopped on the side of the road and these kids were just with their parents on a trip suffering a car issue. No dice. There was literally no one around. Just wind and dead grass and a faint sprinkling of snow. 

Dipper and Mabel exchanged a very loaded look. Stan was starting to sweat beneath his thin, awful jacket. How had they gotten here? They still hadn't answered him.

"...don't worry about that," Dipper said. "What's the date?"

"February... something," Stan said. It was hard to remember the exact day when your life was a constant blur of road and shitty motels.

"1982?" the kid clarified, like that was a question a sane person asked.

"Yeah?" Stan said, like an equal dumbass.

Suddenly, Dipper smiled. He looked at his sister. Mabel looked back, some sort of secret knowledge passing between them. They turned their eyes to Stan, young, bright, familiar eyes. Stan felt an urge to run. What was up with these kids? Why did they look like they could be related to him?

Dipper took a step closer.

"You're Stanley Pines. Your twin's name is Stanford Pines, and he lives in Gravity Falls, Oregon, after completing twelve PhDs."

Stan felt himself go colder than he already was. He'd been thinking in the back of his mind that maybe this was a secret children situation, that one of his very early hook-ups had figured out he'd be driving this way... somehow... and had dropped the kids off. That didn't make any sense, of course. These random kids knowing about him and his brother made less sense. Nothing about these kids was normal.

"What the hell do you want from me?"

"We want to go to Gravity Falls," the kid said, alarmingly.

Mabel, still smiling at him, added, "Your brother's kinda being tortured by a god right now. So you're gonna bring us there and we're gonna fix it and you'll get along forever, okay?"

Moses, it was cold out here. Stan stared at these two children in the middle of nowhere who seemed to come from nowhere. Who knew too much. Who wanted to help him, Stanley Pines, a guy that didn't get a hand up in the word without it turning into a fist by the end.

His eyes trailed from one child to the other. What he should do was get in his car, drive to the nearest house, and drop these kids off to be helped back home. Or he should get in his car and forget about yet another roadside encounter with something that should not exist as it did, and hope he wasn't cursed in the process. Their dangling of his brother in front of his nose was probably just a lure.

Stan sighed. He turned around and walked back to the El Diablo.

He waved at them to follow after him.

The kids scrambling to sit in the back seat of Stan's car probably weren't human. He didn't know what they were.

But if they had the right information to help him help Sixer, Stan did not give a damn if they were going to end up eating his soul in return.

Chapter Text

Stanley and Fiddleford were the most absurd people in the universe, Stanford thought.

"What," he said, "am I looking at?"

His brother and his dearest friend grinned at him a little nervously, both crouched near a huge thing that was now taking up the half of the wall of one of his storage rooms. Usually Ford considered himself rather good at gauging the intended use of a machine, but that often went out the window when it came to Fiddleford's inventions. It looked sort of like a giant toaster laid on its side, but he couldn't be sure that was what it really was. Why would he make a giant toaster?

Whatever it was, it was Stanley's fault.

The thought was proven true as Stanley leaned on the machine with a jaunty sort of air, raising a hand in a flourish. "This, my dear Sixer, is a revolution in both washing machine and jukebox technology. It plays tunes while you wash and dry your clothes in the space of about two songs. I give you: the Laundry Symphonette!"

"That's an awful name," Ford deadpanned.

Fiddleford chimed in. "I still say we should call it the Spinnamajig."

"That's worse."

"See?" Stan said to Fiddleford, gesturing hugely, who huffed something about them having "no sense of fun."

Clearly the Laundry Symphonette vs the Spinnamajig had been a long, heated argument.

"Now I'd never consider myself someone who spits in the face of innovation and progress," Ford said. "But why on earth did you make this and why is it in my house?"

"Well," Stan said, still in selling mode. "I was over in the Broken Bone, having a drink and absolutely not getting into a fight after I hit on some bald dude's girl—" Huh, that was why Stan had mysteriously gained a very bruised face a week ago. Ford had been worried the Gnomes were sneaking into to hit them all with pinecones again. "—when I noticed how many of these dudes were walking around with a buncha alcohol and blood on their clothing because holy shit do those guys like punching each other. Seriously, I've been to a lot of dive bars and this is the worst, what's up with that? Anyway I was thinking about their clothes and looking at the jukebox—"

"And thought about making... this thing?" Ford guessed.

Stan snapped his fingers and pointed at Ford. Ford considered attempting to bite that finger like he used to do when they were kids. "Exactly, Sixer! Untapped market right here! If they're gonna spend a quarter on the jukebox to change a song, they may as well spend another to get their clothes washed so their missus stops asking questions like 'Why the hell are you covered in blood?' when they get home. Bam! They've got options. No more drunken staggering to the laundromat."

"I still think any woman who married the sort of gents that frequent the Broken Bone know who they're marrying," Fiddleford said.

"You'd be surprised," Stan said, and didn't elaborate on why he was so sure of that. "Anyway, we're gonna haul this bad boy over there and make some money."

Ford gave the Laundry Symphonette an appraising look. "And have you already pitched this to the bar and made sure they wanted this thing?"

Stan waved a careless hand. "Eh, didn't bother. Once they see this baby in action after my pitch they'll be on their hands and knees to get it."

"Well, if you're sure," Ford said. "And as long as it doesn't explode or turn evil, I don't really care."

"It won't do neither of those things," Fiddleford assured.

"Double negative. Should I be worried?"

Fiddleford flashed him the bird, saying cheerfully, "Go to hell!"

"I'll be going to my lab, actually," Ford said. "I've some new vomit from the barf fairies to analyze—I'm rather certain it would have healing properties if applied to a wound, isn't that fascinating?—so please don't interrupt me unless at least half of the town is on fire."

After allowing himself to snicker at Stan and Fiddleford's disgusted expressions at the bottle of vomit he pulled from his pocket, Ford left them with a wave. He really was quite interested in the properties of the vomit—he suspected their stomach acid specifically would have the healing properties. Only testing would confirm.

He put Stan's latest scheme out of his head.

With a reluctant groan, Ford stood up and snatched the phone on the desk from it's receiver. It was a relatively new addition to the lab, added on Stan's insistence that if he and Fiddleford where going to wile away in the lab, the should put a point of contact in there. Stan mostly used it to force them to come upstairs when he got take-out.

"Greetings, Stanford Pines here," he said, irritated.

"Thank fu—damn, you still say greetings? You nerd!" Stan said.

"Is this important?"

There was an alarming crashing sound in range of the phone, followed by quite a lot of cursing, some of it very Southern. It was accompanied by Beethoven's Moolight Sonata wafting through the air ominously. Stan let out an audible wince. "Uh. Maybe?"

Ford sighed. "Did the machine turn evil?"

"Define 'evil'," Stan said. The crashing grew louder. The music also grew louder.

"Stanley."

"It's not killing people!" he defended.

"Stanley."

"Moses, you're as bad as Ma. It mighta gone a biiiit evil. And is now, uh, tryin' to round up everyone nearby, strip 'em, and wash their clothes. So if you could just come by with Fiddlesticks' weird little death ray—"

"Not a death ray," Ford said automatically on Fiddleford's behalf.

"I see a weird sci-fi gun shooting lasers, I call it a death ray," he said.

Ford snorted. "Trust me, if Fiddleford made one of his death rays, that piddly little gun would be the last thing you'd think to connect to that term."

"Uh? Okay? Not touching that. Just bring the laser and laser this thing's face off, please. Ah, hell, it just got Fiddleford, hold on—"

The payphone Stan had been using was dropped carelessly, clanging against the pole holding the payphone box up. Ford set his down on the cradle, sighing and trying to think of where on earth Fiddleford had put the improved heat gun. The sooner he got there, the less likely it'd be for Stan to get banned from every bar in the small town and spend weeks complaning about it.

He needed to put a ban on Fiddleford going along with Stan's money-making ideas. This was the third evil robot in the last two months.

Chapter Text

When Dipper and Mabel returned home, the first thing Stanley said to them was, "Ford's found himself a new pet human."

"Hi, Stan," Dipper said, dropping the petrified head of the hydra they had to go fight off of the Icelandic coast to the ground. "It's good to see you, Stan. No, we didn't get injured, don't be such a worrywart, Stan."

Stan snorted and waved a careless hand, his midnight-blue cape swishing with the movement. He was lounging at the Eastern Gate of the space between reality and magic as he always tended to do, sat in the plush bench in the viewing tower. He had a very good view of the small town of Gravity Falls nearby, which he liked to observe and mock the residents of when possible. "If you two were in trouble Ford 'n I would've already been there to help."

"Whose the new guy?" Mabel said before Dipper could start waving his sword around. "Is he cute? My type? Is he, uh... like Mr. Fiddleford?"

By 'Like Mr. Fiddleford' Mabel of course meant 'Absolutely off of his rocker crazy'. That was the only type of human Ford liked to throw rewards at. Something about 'innovation' and 'unique minds' and the 'spark of a shining intellect.' Going off of what all of them had seen, in Ford's world, shining intellect could only show up paired with a gleam of madness in the eye.

Or maybe, being the Sun Guardian, it was just natural that Ford's boons tended to shine light on the totality of a person. And that included them being a bit cuckoo.

"He's a kid Fiddleford who replaced all of the Southern charm with screechy annoyingness," Stan said dryly. "He's running Ford's maze and he's already stolen anything gold that ain't nailed down--I can respect that--and all of the teeth of the monsters he knocks out. Ford thinks he's great."

As the Guardian of Balance Ford had favored slightly more when Dipper and Mabel had been yanked from the aether to start their duties, Dipper was compelled to mutter, "Well, he's probably not that bad."

"You wanna see?" Stan said, with the same tone one might've used to suggest watching a dog dig holes in the backyard.

"Obviously," Mabel said. She was always buzzy at the thought of a new human to prod and shower with glitter.

With a belegured sigh as though he wasn't the one offering to bring them to the maze in the first place, Stan stood up from his bench, re-adjusting his cloak and picking up his staff. The silver moon on the top shone in the fading light of the evening; it was almost night, Stan's domain.

Stan snapped his fingers and pointed at a long shadow cast from a pillar of the tower's patio. "You. The maze."

The shadow trembled a touch before deepening into a pitch black. Stan waved Mabel and Dipper along, and they stepped quickly into the shadow and were submerged into a cold, black space. Stan stepped in after them, seizing their shoulders and dragging them along with him to their destination. Being dragged like cats held by the scruff was embarrassing, but the only way to do things. Stan, as the Guardian of the Moon, Keeper of the Night, his Enduring Darkness, etc, etc, could step into the shadows and emerge anywhere he pleased within seconds. He used it for petty theft more than anything else.

He was in fact the only one who could use the shadows like that. Anyone who attempted to step into darkness without him as a guide would find that the land in between stretched infinitely, the landscape vast and ever-changing, and all of the thin silvers of light in this distance marking where shadows fell in the real world always too far or too faint to allow them to pass back out of the shadows. Many had died in the darkness, either because they presumed to use the darkness for their own end or because they had been tossed in by Stan. Though that was an extreme measure--the last to be sent into the shadows was one of the men Stan had once given a boon to; that hadn't lasted long after his gift was used for some of the few acts Stan regarded as indefensible.

Mabel and Dipper blinked as they emerged into the light, Stan letting go of their clothing. They had arrived at the maze--the labyrinth, Ford would insist. It was a construction the Sun Guardian amused himself when he wasn't busy scouting all of the mysteries found in the light of day, a puzzle for him to rearrange and add new elements to whenever it pleased him. It was a large golden structure in the midst of the pine forest that made up the land where reality was thin, gleaming triumphantly in the sun. Dipper had a vague knowledge that this maze had become something of a legend among even humans who hadn't slipped between the cracks of reality, something that Ford led geniuses to if he wished to test them.

Most of the time, the supposed geniuses were spat right back out of the maze after a mere day, Ford left disappointed by their lack of adventurous spirit. Some were outright eaten. Only one human had managed to get through the maze: Fiddleford McGucket, who had arrived at the start completely by accident, then proceeded to build a mechanical monster out of random scraps and bust through the walls to the treasure trove in the middle of the maze. Ford had been enamored at once.

Unfortunately for Fiddleford McGucket, that ensnarement had led to Ford gifting the human with the gift of future-sight. A gift that had driven the man mad enough for him to invent a weapon that could tear apart his own mind. It was only the intervention of other spirits--namely Mabel and Dipper, who had fought to balance the man's mind before either the visions or the memory wiper ate it whole--that kept him from utter ruin.

Ford had sheepishly showered the man with other, much less trying gifts in the wake of that, and the man enjoyed vast amounts of riches and a lovely house in Gravity Falls. His powers of prophecy were far more minute and far more manageable. Fiddleford's madness returned to a level that resulted mostly in random explosions that were swiftly put out by long-suffering villagers.

Dipper and Mabel made their way to the tops of the walls that made up the maze, curious to see this new human that Ford already liked so much. It took some prowling, but they found him quite near to the middle of the maze, clinging to the back of a bucking chimera and cackling wildly.

It was a youngish boy--neither of them were great at human ages outside of roughly identifying children, teens, and variously aged adults--with dark hair turned blond. One of his eyes was squeezed shut, the other wide and black. A grin split his face so severely it seemed like it must hurt. The kid was, for some odd reason, wearing a button-down and a bow-tie, both dirty with blood.

Mabel and Dipper regarded this human as he continued to try and strangle the chimera into submission.

"He needs to dye his hair better," Dipper said.

"Do you think Ford likes him because he's so decked out in yellow?" Mabel said.

Both of them were not entirely impressed. This kid certainly had the smarts for the kinds of gifts Ford gave out if his progress in the maze was to be trusted, but the gleam of madness in his eyes was already apparent. Gravity Falls probably didn't need a kid like him given powers to run through it.

But Ford was a stubborn spirit. If he decided he liked a human, there was little to be done about it. That was what made him such a good Guardian of the Sun--like a beam of light, he would march on ceaselessly to his goal, and would not stop until he reached it.

Stan came up behind them and observed the kid too. "Bill Cipher. Some kid who fell through a tear and ended up in the forests; Wendy dragged him out and sent him to Gravity Falls, but he didn't want to stay with any of the families. Took up that old shack at the edge of town."

Stan sounded grumpy about that last part; the shack at the edge of town was dark and quiet and a good place for a spirit of night to reside if he refused to be bothered by anyone. Now it was occupied by some brat.

"Way I see it," Stan said. "It'll be fine as long as he focuses on the gold in the middle. I don't want him getting the Journal Ford stashed in there."

The Journal in question was a grimoire had constructed during one of his human sabbaticals. They weren't uncommon for spirits to partake in, seeking to remind themselves of what it was like for the beings they sought to monitor and protect with their spiritual duties, but most of the spirits did not bring back things they had made during their human lives. Ford was an exception in general, endlessly attached to objects both as a human and a spirit, but the Journals were particularly important to keep. During that lifetime, Ford had become a practiced wizard, and many of his spells were dangerous in the wrong hands.

The twins considered the boy, who had reigned victorious over the chimera as they spoke to each other. He yanked out a tooth from the monster, tucking it in an overstuffed pocket, then hurried forwards in the maze.

"...It's probably fine." Mabel said.

In a maze filled with every treasure under the sun, Bill Cipher grinned to himself as he stuffed an old, worn book down the front of his shirt. It was practically nothing compared to the beautiful artifacts the room showed off, shoved into a darker corner, which was exactly why he was taking it. If somebody didn't want people looking at it, that meant it was the best thing here.

And he knew already that his guess was correct; he'd peeked inside the book for just a second, and every page just screamed extremely volatile magical rituals. It was stupid, really, just keeping this thing around at all.

If he had his way, he was going to be running this stupid town in no time. All these spirits thought they were so much better than him with their magic? Ha!

Bill Cipher was gonna break reality itself and throw a party. It was what he deserved, after everything.

Chapter Text

Grunkle Stan set the phone down on the receiver with a thunk and a heavy sigh. He stared down at Mabel.

Mabel stared back.

"You're allowed to stay for now," Stan said. "Seein' as you'd probably just get out of the house and get on a bus again if they did pick you up."

A slow, wide smile formed on Mabel's face, flashing her metal braces. It was a smile full of grim triumph.

Stan crouched down to be level with her, pointing with a stern finger. "But. There are rules, Mabel. No going out into the woods. No harassing people. No trying to get after the police. No going out into the woods. Alright? Your parents are trusting me to keep you in line, and I don't want to disappoint them."

They can't even keep me in line, was Mabel's instinctive response, followed by, they couldn't keep Dipper in line. She bit both back with force, keeping her smile on.

"Okay, Grunkle Stan," she said.

By the narrowed eyes he sent her way, Grunkle Stan didn't believe her an inch.

But he wasn't saying I'm sorry. He wasn't telling her to move on. He wasn't telling her that at this point, she had to stop clinging to a fantastic lie she'd made up as a child.

So really, he was much better than Mom and Dad.

It took Mabel less than a day for her to attempt an escape attempt out into the woods.

She waited until Stan was well and truly in the middle of his routine with the tourists, watching from the triangular window of her new attic bedroom. Once she was sure he was on a roll, she picked up her packed backpack, went down to the ground floor, and slipped unobtrusively out of the front door. If she timed it right, she could sprint to the treeline with her great uncle none the wiser.

Just as her foot left the patio in favor of the soft grass, a voice said, "Hey, hambone."

She whirled around. It was Soos, one of the people working for her grunkle. Mabel had met him shortly when she'd first been found by Stan and dragged back to his tourist trap of a house to call her parents, sitting with her in the display room until Stan and her parents stopped yelling and started actually talking about what to do with her. He was pretty nice, she guessed, if odd. Liking him would've been easier in other circumstances.

Right now he was looking at her with a slightly anxious expression. He'd probably been briefed on everything about her, Mabel thought sourly.

"Mr. Pines wants me to go into town for some more stuff for his displays," he said. "How 'bout you come with me?"

"No, I'm fine here," Mabel said, inching backwards.

She shot a look towards Stan. Still facing away from the house, oblivious to where she was and what she was trying to do.

Mabel turned and ran. Soos seized the back of her sweater before she could get anywhere fast.

"Woah, woah, woah," he said, dragging her back to him. "Let's head into town."

He wasn't asking. Keeping a grip on her sweater, he brought her along with him to the golf cart, making sure she sat in the passenger's seat. Mabel allowed herself to think about bolting the moment she had a chance, maybe even undoing the seat belt and hurling herself out of the cart like someone in an action movie, but Soos blocked her attempts.

"Sorry, but Mr. Pines really doesn't want you going out there," he said.

Mabel scowled. "I'll be fine."

"I dunno, kid, the woods around here are pretty weird. No one goes into them much," Soos said. "You probably shouldn't. Why are you trying, anyway?"

Mabel thought of a tall, pine-infested cliff. She thought about a body running forward and pitching off of the edge, falling down, down, down. She slouched in the seat, refusing to look at Soos. How old was he? Mabel wasn't sure. It was hard to tell. Wouldn't he have heard about it anyway? Maybe he was just playing dumb because she was a kid.

"Does it matter?"

Soos genuinely seemed to mull the question over. He shrugged. "Guess not. I still can't let you go in."

Pines and birches whipped past them as they drove on. Mabel stared out at them longingly. She knew exactly how to get to the trails that would lead her up to the plunging cliffs above them. There, among pine trees, was a campsite not too far from the cliffs. It wasn't a commonly used one, something mostly recommend by locals over the more pricey one a few miles away.

Their parents had picked it, amused by the name. Twin Pines Campsite.

"Perfect for you and Dipper," her dad had said, smiling and ruffling their hair.

The only reason Mabel still had Dipper's old star hat was because their dad had plucked it off in that moment, leaving it in the tent by accident.

They had left the campsite three days longer than they had meant to. That was when they were told to stay in the single motel the town had, that the search party was doing everything they could.

Mabel had known they weren't going to find Dipper. Because she had been looking at him as he fell, chasing something she couldn't see, and her eyes had been wide open the whole time. In the few seconds after his feet stepped off of the cliff, she had seen how he fell, and how he had suddenly been gone from the air long before he hit the trees or the ground below. There had been a glint of yellow like a metal pin in the sunlight, and that was all.

Her parents had both yelled at her when she told them. They yelled at her for letting Dipper run off. They yelled at her for lying when her brother was missing. They yelled at each other. A lot. They were still yelling at each other, even in the middle of the night.

She probably would've yelled too, she guessed. But mostly she had cried.

Mabel looked out from the golf cart and found that at some point they had reached town. Soos was talking about something she couldn't bring herself to listen to. He took her to the one big craft store in town. She ran her fingers along skeins of yarn, she looked at bottles of glitter and bags of rhinestones and all the paint a girl could wish for. She wanted to like them. Her mind was still stuck in the Twin Pines Campsite.

She just needed to get up there. She just needed to see where Dipper had fallen. Then she could start figuring out how to pull him back from wherever he went.

Or fall in after him. Mabel wasn't picky anymore.

Soos gathered his materials and they went back to the Shack. Once they were there, he traded Mabel off to Wendy to stay with her in the display room. Maybe Grunkle Stan had told them to do that. Maybe they could just tell that she was far away from here, up on the cliffs, and that they needed to keep her near before she ran off like she did from Piedmont.

Mabel had time. She could wait.

She would find Dipper. That was all that really mattered.

Chapter Text

"Listen, you two," Grunkle Stan said without looking at them. "Whatever argument you've cooked up, I'm not interested in hearing it."

He was out on the porch, which was where he seemed to enjoy being over anywhere else, his eyes scanning the treeline beyond him like he expected something to come out. Nothing would; the only anomalies that came from that direction regularly were the gnomes, and even then they snuck to the back to go for the trash. Mabel and Dipper were left standing something awkwardly in the front door, watching him.

"But Grunkle Stan—" Mabel started.

Stan cut her a look. The pale scar lancing over his brow improved the harsh set of them, though he didn't look truly angry. "Sure, he got mind-wiped. That's what took so long. I get that, pumpkin. I'm not mad at him for taking so long to bring me back. I ain't even angry about all his dam—dang rules."

Mabel frowned. "Then why won't you forgive him and be brothers and throw a huge party?"

"I didn't want to be brought back at all," Stan said bluntly. "I was nothing here on Earth, out there I was something. Would've been better for the both of us if he just left me to my own thing. Now I'm stuck here with him while he's complaining like I made him endanger the world. You think I wanted that?"

"But that's not fair," Dipper butted in. "He didn't know that. He just wanted to save you!"

Stan snorted. "Life ain't fair, kid."

Dipper and Mabel huddled closer together at that pronouncement. Sure, they knew that—there were all of the issues they'd experienced in Gravity Falls itself, to say nothing of they things they half-feared waiting for them when they went home—but hearing it said so bitterly wasn't a great feeling. Hearing it from a family member, from Grunkle Ford's twin, made it worse.

Twins should be exempt from this sort of endless disappointment in each other. It wasn't fair.

Their expressions made Stan soften a little. He turned to them with a sigh. "Look. How about this. You lay off me about Sixer a bit, I'll teach you some cool fighting moves."

"And you think about being nice to him," Mabel insisted mulishly.

Stan shrugged. "And I'll think about being nice to him. Deal?"

Dipper and Mabel both winced at the phrasing. Stan barely missed a beat before amending, "How's that for a trade?"

They exchanged looks. Getting to learn alien fighting moves would be pretty cool. Cool enough to briefly sway any loyalty to Grunkle Ford about the whole 'don't engage too much with Stanley, he just got back' rule he had established.

"I'll learn them faster than you," Dipper said to Mabel.

"What! Keep dreaming, dorkasaurus," Mabel prodded him in the ticklish spots between his ribs, "I'll kick your butt!"

"So that's a yes?" Stan said dryly.

They turned to him. It was definitely a yes. They weren't getting too many chances to see their new great uncle in action otherwise. And they wanted to learn more about him, even if he was a smelly weirdo with a lot of strange tattoos and a sci-fi mullet.

Stan straightened up from the porch railing with a grin that made him look much younger. "Alright, you little monsters."

An hour later and Dipper and Mabel were covered in bruises and dirt. Mabel had successfully hauled Dipper over her shoulder and smashed him to the ground, but Dipper had been the one to actually kick her and make it really hurt, so they had settled on it being a tie for now. Learning how to fight like a giant duck from another dimension was really cool, actually.

Well, it had been cool. Until Grunkle Ford had shown up, his face contorted with worry when he couldn't find them in the house.

He hadn't been pleased that Stan was making them fight. Not at all. He was so mad about it that he'd dragged Stan into the house and into the big storage room to 'talk'. Which was code for whisper-yelling at each other where Dipper and Mabel couldn't quite hear it, but they could still hear it. Mostly they had made something out about "I asked you not to invite them into your criminal behavior; one thing, Stanley, one thing."

Whatever Stan's reply might've been was lost in the wood door between them and their great uncles. Dipper and Mabel were left stranded at the edge of a new argument.

Not even a new argument, really. Just one long continuous argument that was destined to be stopped and started and stopped and started again with no real end.

Dipper wished that they were less acquainted with that kind of argument. Gravity Falls was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be better.

"Ice cream in the fridge?" Mabel suggested, subdued.

Dipper sighed. "Yeah."

It would make them feel a little better. And they wouldn't have to be as close to the argument. It was a tried and true system.

He wished it wasn't.

Chapter Text

"Are you gonna talk now?" Mabel said to the figure struggling with his bindings.

If anyone were to walk into the storage room of the Shack (formerly the Wax Figure room), there would be a lot of hasty explanations that would need to happen to prevent the police from being called. In the middle of the room was a twelve year old boy tied to a plastic dining table chair, glaring at the three others standing around him. His sister was leading the charge, a finger thrust at his face accusingly, the other hand holding a flashlight pointed at him.

The boy tried to bite that finger off. He couldn't move his upper torso enough to manage it. Narrowed eyes glowed an unnerving yellow in the bright beam of the flashlight.

Collecting Dipper—or rather, the demon in his body—had been an exhausting but simple process. It turned out possessing someone only gave the possessee a little more strength than normal; Dipper Pines was stronger than his family often gave him credit for, but even then all it took to keep the demon from doing much further damage was Grunkle Stan scooping him up and pinning Dipper's arms to his sides. The demon had spent half the incredibly tense car ride home spitting insults and elaborate threats, but had fallen silent after that.

Now he only grinned. "No can do, sister! I don't have to explain myself to you!"

Grunkle Stan glared down at him, arms crossed. Soos was right behind him, mimicking the pose. "Then get out of him."

The demon's shoulders twitched like he was trying to shrug. His head lolled to one side. "Also no can do. Hey, while we're in this interrogation set-up, why don't I ask a few questions myself?"

He ignored their grimacing, lolling his head forward now. Cat-like eyes fixed on Stan Pines.

"I've got some for you, you know. Like why you're lying to these nice kids, huh? Why you're lying to this nice little town? I'd ask why you're lying to the government too, but we both know you'd lie to those suckers no matter what. That's in your blood." The demon flopped forward as much as the ropes would allow. "Blood's a funny thing. I love the stuff! You've gotta love the stuff too, to do what you're doing. You're trying to get him back. I can help."

"I'm not making any kinda 'deal' with the guy who stole my nephew's body." Stan's scowl didn't move an inch, not even as Mabel and Soos couldn't help but shoot him searching looks. Bring back who?

Yellow eyes glittered. "I think you've made deals with men who've done a lot worse, pal. Especially back in Tijuana—boy, that was a wild year for you! Can't believe how you got out of that one!"

A muscle in Stan's jaw jumped. He still didn't look impressed.

"I know how it works," the body sing-songed. "It's made in my image, after all, did you ever notice that? I'm sure you did with how many nights you've spent looking at it. One handshake, and that baby is back in action and ol' Sixer's ready to party again!"

The two regarded each other for a moment. The demon blinked, one eye after another, and then snapped his gaze to Mabel instead.

"You. Shooting star," he said. "Since this guy doesn't wanna make up for his mistakes after all—classic Stan Pines, am I right?—how about you? You want your brother back? You want him to forget you ever left him stuck figuring out that password for a boy you stopped caring about in five seconds flat? I'm your solution. Just untie my hand!"

Stan had clapped his hands over Mabel's ears half-way through the demon's words, glaring at him, Mabel tore the hands away, spitting, "I'd never, ever, in a million years make a deal with the creep that stole Dipper's body! And I super wouldn't help the guy that wrote that—that note!"

He voice trembled at the mention of the note. Stan placed a comforting hand on her head.

The demon clicked his tongue, then fixed on Soos. "Alright, Question Mark, you're up to bat. You want... I don't know, an infinite wet burrito bowl from an interde-mexican restaurant? I can get you a coupon."

"Dude," Soos said flatly.

He shrugged again. "Worth the ol' college try. Man, you all are bor-ing. Not one single taker. Pine Tree here was waaaay stupider than you; one little roadblock and he went making deals with demons! What kind of nutjob does that?"

Mabel lunged for the demon, reeled back only by Stan's quick movement.

"That's Dipper's body," he reminded her.

"Not right now it isn't!" the demon chirped. "And it'd only take one deal for me to be willing to hop out of this thing. Really, I'd love to, it's so sweaty. I think he's got a gland problem or something. He should get that checked—or not, it's not his problem right now!"

"Where is he?" Mabel demanded.

The demon tilted his head imperiously. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

"Right, that's the end of this," Stan said, pulling Mabel back again. "Congratulations, you're gonna get a couple hours of sitting here alone in an empty room to think about getting out of Dipper."

"What, you think some isolation torture's gonna get to me?" the demon mocked. "Newsflash, buddy, that's nothing. You should see the sorts of torment we dream up in the Nightmare Realm for party games. You'll never look at paper funnels the same way ever again."

As he spoke, the others turned to leave the room. The demon kept going on about torture, louder and louder, until the door shut with a click. Stan sighed the moment it was closed.

"I've got security cameras in the Shack," he told the other two. "I'm gonna keep an eye on him to make sure he can't do anything to Dipper as he is. Either he leaves when he gets bored or he doesn't and we need to figure out a way to make him leave. You two are on magic duty."

Soos and Mabel nodded. Despite her brave face, Mabel's eyes were suspiciously shiny. Stan crouched down and pulled her into a hug.

"It's gonna be okay, pumpkin," he muttered as she buried her face into his shoulder. Soos patted her back. "We'll sort it like everything else. He's just some dumb demon."

"I should've noticed," she mumbled into his shoulder. "I should've... I should've helped with the computer..."

"You didn't know. I'm sure Dipper wouldn't want you to go beating yourself up about it," he said.

Mabel pulled back, wiping tears from her eyes. "I guess not. He'd want me to stop this stupid jerk from giving him rope burn."

"That's the spirit. You will. We just need a bit of time."

Chapter Text

Sapphire's new Ruby was not anything she would've expected a Ruby to be.

Most Rubies, in her experience, were not necessarily that pleasant to be around outside of guarding. That was the point. They were guards and scouts and soldiers and not much more; often Sapphire had found them to be rather irritable or intense in personality, the kind of personality that suited such work.

Her Ruby was not that. She was not one of the best Rubies around—she would not be guarding this Sapphire if she was—and she wasn't irritable. She was intense, but not the kind of intense Sapphire would've expected of a Ruby.

"C'mon!" Ruby said, spinning in place. "We should go somewhere! Find something to do!"

Sapphire pulled her back from the observation deck of the planet they were on. It was starting to be primed for Kindergarten use. What once was a lush valley of huge blue trees below the mountain the observation deck was on had been removed to access the ground beneath. Sapphire missed the trees. They were an odd kind with quills she had liked to pick up and study, and they had smelled very nice. But Gems weren't really supposed to care about how things smelled, of all things, so she had mentioned it to no one.

"What we're supposed to do is stay here," she said. "Observe for threats."

"What threats?" Ruby said.

Sapphire looked at her, surprised. In the short period after Ruby had arrived, it was the first time the cheery disposition had dropped a touch. Her tone was bitter. Her eyes were sweeping over the barren valley below.

Ruby continued doggedly, "What threats? They got rid of everything here. It's all gone. Who cares?"

Sapphire frowned. "But we're supposed to be here."

"So look in the future and see if we stay or not," Ruby said with a shrug.

With a huff, Sapphire said, "That's not how it works. Not for me. I can't control what my future vision sees as much as I should. If I look for something here maybe I'll see what we do in a little while, or I'll see it a hundred years from now, or I'll see what happens here and not what happens to us. There's a reason I'm not on Homeworld helping strategize."

There's a reason you're the one protecting me, she thought spitefully. Then she felt bad. She liked Ruby, as odd and cheerful as she was. She made more sense to Sapphire than any other Gem had before. She didn't want this Ruby to go. It wasn't her fault she wasn't a very good Ruby.

(That was a dangerous thought. If it wasn't Ruby's fault, who's fault was it? Sapphire tried not to remember thinking that thought.)

Really, it was too bad for Ruby that she was stuck protecting this Sapphire. But nothing could be done about it.

"Well, try anyway," Ruby said, as if it was all that simple. Maybe for her it all was. "Either you see what we do right now or you see something way off; either way, you know something now!"

Sapphire had never thought about it like that before. Mostly because all of the rest of the Sapphires she had been in a batch with and the other Gems getting them out hadn't seemed to think of it like that. All that mattered had been her lack of control, not the knowledge she still could glean.

She clasped her hands together, reaching out for the future. Ruby was right; she'd know something. And Sapphire loved knowing things. Before the work had started to make this planet suitable for Gems, she had gone out when no one would care to look for her—which was all the time, she was not very useful—and would look at all of the plants to figure them out. She liked plants. They were so strange. They sat in one place forever, growing up and out, straining for the soft light of a sun millions of miles out from them. Their methods of continuation where so like Gems; they buried seeds in the earth and waited, but they did not tear it all apart in doing so.

What if Gems could do the same? Sapphire had wondered. Another dangerous thought. She had taken more quills from the trees and tried not to think it.

Her thoughts about the trees of their current planet melted into trees of a new one. Tall and green, with the sort of quills of the trees on this planet. It was a beautiful place she was looking at, all green with strange white trees with black eyes. She could hear the sounds of animals. She could see, after a moment, the rustling of the plant life as two Gems emerged. She studied them as they rushed along, speaking eagerly to each other.

"We're going to still be with each other on another planet..." she muttered to the Ruby of the present. "It's a nice planet. I don't know where. We're going to look different—you have a skirt and I don't. That's funny."

"Why is that funny?" Ruby said, and the spell was broken.

Sapphire blinked back to the now. "Well—I don't know. Sapphires have skirts. Rubies don't. Since you fight and I don't."

She wasn't sure if she liked having a skirt, but that was what Sapphires had. That was what they looked like. Reforming herself to get rid of the skirt would be ridiculous. She kind of wanted to do it. But she wouldn't. Not yet.

Ruby smiled. "I mean, we're not very good and being Rubies or Sapphires, are we? I'd like a skirt. They look nice."

Usually, Sapphire would take insult. She was sort of taking insult. But it was hard to hold onto it when Ruby was insulting herself too.

"Maybe not right now," Sapphire said. "Other Gems would have questions. But if you want a skirt later, you should have a skirt."

Ruby's smile widened. Sapphire had the sense she had said something very, very correct.

Spinning around again, Ruby looked around the mountain. "Since you didn't see what we were going to do, we can do whatever we want! Want to look around and tell each other about the stupidest Gems we've ever met?"

Sapphire laughed. "Sure, Ruby. Where do you want to go?"

"To the planet you saw," she said. "but anywhere will do."

So they started going anywhere but the observation tower. They could come back later. No one but each other would care that they had left.

Chapter Text

Wendy Corduroy was out in the forest at the very edge of sunset, racing through the trees like a girl on a mission.

She wasn't supposed to be out at night. That was a Corduroy rule: don't go out in the dark alone. There were a lot of Corduroy rules. Don't go out in the forest at night alone. Don't follow voices in the trees if they tell you all the right things. Don't go chasing after shadows that dart between trees. Don't follow pretty lights. If you hear laughter, drop all of the money in your pocket and run.

Wendy had forgotten most of these rules at some point, but they were easy to remember now. She had forgotten a lot of things about the forest, but now that she was here she knew it as easy as breathing.

She was looking for something. What was it? She couldn't remember yet. It'd come to her. She'd just keep running.

Birches and pines whipped past her like old friends. She was going up, she realized, up the slope of the ground to the peaks of the cliffs above the bridge. There was something up there, and she'd find it, because she was a Corduroy and she always finished what she meant to do.

The sunset remained, a blaze of red sun just over the trees. It never sunk farther. It never left. Why would it leave? It was here to look after Wendy.

Wendy clambered up to the top of the cliffs. It didn't take her any time at all; or maybe it took her plenty of time and she couldn't tell because the sunset was patiently waiting for her to find what she needed to find and go back home. That didn't really matter.

There was a pine tree at the very edge of the cliff. Wendy studied it as she approach. The tree wasn't one of the scrubby pines lower down, with needles at the edge of branches that stuck out awkwardly like hitchhikers sticking out their thumbs for a ride. It was a big pine tree with drooping branches full of needles, like a towering Christmas tree.

The pine was blue. It looked almost caught on fire by the golden slant of sunlight hitting it.

Wendy didn't think. She just went up to the branches and ducked into them, finding a wide cavern where the branches stopped before getting all the way to the ground. It was like a tent made of bent-down branches. She looked up.

There was a boy sitting up in the tree, peering down at her.

"Hey," Wendy called. Her mouth tried to form a name, but swallowed around nothing instead. She had to call him something, though, so she took a moment to think. "Hey, brown bear."

It wasn't a name, but it made the boy lean down on his branch to look at her closer.

"What are you doing here?" he said. He had a familiar voice. He had a familiar face, too, but she couldn't actually tell what that face looked like.

Wendy shrugged. "I was supposed to come and find you."

She hadn't realized it until she said it, but it was true. He was who she was looking for. She had to find him. He'd be dead if she didn't.

That's what her brain told her, anyway. The boy looked fine. It didn't look like he would've died if she didn't find him, but what did she know? Things were strange out in the forest. Maybe he wasn't a human. If she hadn't found him, maybe he would've just died from no one looking for him. Which wasn't a great way to go.

The boy probably wouldn't enjoy being asked if he was going to die. Wendy considered other questions to ask.

"Do you want to meet my mom?" she called up.

He looked astonished. "Can I?"

"Sure you can. She's at home," Wendy said, and it was true. Her mom was home. Why would she be anywhere else? Her mom was home because that was where she was supposed to be, and if she ever wasn't everything would be wrong, so she had to be there. "You'll like her."

She wasn't sure how she knew that, but she did. She waved at him.

The boy started to climb down the tree. When he jumped the last branch down to the ground, Wendy laughed, gave him a fist bump, and led him out of the tree's protection.

He followed after her like it was the easiest thing to do.

There was a boy in the living room. Soos Ramirez looked at him.

"Are you supposed to be here?" he asked. It was a rude thing to ask, but Soos wanted to know.

The boy blinked and looked around from his place on the soft lavender couch like he was as surprised to be there as Soos was. "Um. I don't know."

"Alright," Soos said. "I think you're a cousin or something."

That seemed right to him. He'd seen this boy before. He was family somehow. Soos just couldn't remember how.

"So it's probably fine," he added. "You want to watch a movie? I've got popcorn with this awesome garlic salt."

"Is it an action movie?" the boy asked immediately, looking excited.

Good taste. Definitely part of Soos' family. "Sure is, dude!"

Soos went and got the popcorn.

Stanley Pines was out driving in the night.

There was someone in his car. There wasn't supposed to be. Stan looked at him.

"Keep your eyes on the road," the boy said.

"Who the heck are you?" Stan said. "You're not supposed to be here."

The boy frowned. "Everyone keeps saying that. I don't know where else I'm supposed to be except here."

This was Stan's car. Stan didn't let just anyone in it, especially not kids with—

"That's a stupid top hat," he said.

"What?" The boy said. "I'm not wearing a—"

His hand had gone up as if to touch the hat and prove Stan wrong. His fingers found the brim of a top hat. The boy scowled, rolled down the car window, and threw the top hat out and into the night.

Stan already liked him better.

"Take a left," the boy said.

"Why?"

"You're going to Gravity Falls," the boy said.

Stan frowned. "How d'you know that?"

He was going to Gravity Falls. He had to go see his brother. But why this boy knew, he couldn't say.

"Where else would you go?" the boy said genuinely.

It was a hard question to answer. So Stan didn't.

"Do you want to meet him?" Stan said.

The boy looked out into the dark road. "I don't think I can. Take the left."

Stan didn't like that reply. He took the left.

Mabel Pines was in paradise.

Once, paradise had meant endless color and endless glitter and endless summer days and endless friends that never, ever left her. But that kind of paradise was a glue trap. Real paradise, Mabel was sure, was the dark wood walls of a cabin. She followed those walls down a hallway.

There were a lot of hallways. There were a lot of rooms. She kept opening new doors and turning new corners and looking for the next place to go no matter how similar one room looked to the next. She knew this house. She'd find the room she was looking for.

At some point she picked up a ball of glittery golden yarn and started spooling it out as she went. For some reason.

Someone had told her a story about that, right? It hit her like a bolt of lightning. Right—she was looking for someone. She was supposed to find them.

Mabel kept opening doors. This was her home away from home. It'd bring her where she was supposed to go eventually.

It seemed like forever until she found a new door, one all carved with with wide-open eyes. Had she been afraid of eyes like that, once? It felt like she had been. She wasn't anymore. The person looking at her through eyes like that wasn't someone she was afraid of.

She opened the door to a long, dark flight of stairs. But she had her yarn still, so she started going down the stairs. She could always come right back up if she wanted to.

At the bottom of the stairs was a room she hated. Had she been here before too? She must've. Her home away from home; she'd surely been in every room.

The room was dark except for candles burning blue flames. There were tapestries on the walls, big dark ugly things with something woven into them. She couldn't make out what it was, though. There were unidentifiable statues, too, and scattered pages all around with things scrawled on them that she couldn't make out in the darkness. The candlelight didn't seem to cast much light at all, really.

And in the middle of all of that was a boy just standing there. He seemed as unsure of why he was there as she was.

Mabel looked at him for a long moment. She was trying to think of where she'd seen him before.

"You're my brother," she said suddenly.

The boy looked surprised. "Am I?"

"Who else would you be?" Mabel meant the question genuinely. It seemed impossible that he could be anything else. He looked just like her—twins, that's what that meant. They were twins.

He blinked slowly. "I don't know... I think I was someone else, once. Or I could've been."

The sounds of fireworks went off outside. There was a party. Mabel loved parties. She'd rather be outside than here in this dark room with its dim blue lights. She was sure that the boy would also rather not be in this room if he stopped to think about it.

"Do you want to be that guy?" Mabel asked.

She wasn't sure what she was asking, really, but the boy seemed troubled and lost and she knew that she never wanted her brother to be lost ever again. The idea filled her with an icy dread.

"No," he said.

"Then be my brother," she said. She reached her hand out. "Wanna go party? I think it's for a birthday. Those sound like birthday fireworks to me."

Her brother laughed. Mabel realized she'd been afraid of what his laugh would sound like, but it was an ordinary boy's laugh. It was his laugh. "You can't tell that! They're probably Fourth of July fireworks. Or New Year's fireworks."

Mabel grinned. "Yes I can! They sound illegal, and illegal fireworks mean birthday fireworks. C'mon, you'll see."

She led her brother to the door of the dark room, and he let her take him through it and up the long, long flight of stairs, following the golden yarn. She could hear his footsteps in darkness all the way up. And when, at the top of the stairs, she looked back at him still on the last step, he didn't go away. He just stood there, a familiar faintly puzzled look on his face.

"Dipper," she said. That was his name. "You can't leave again."

He looked even more puzzled, but he said, "Okay, Mabel. I won't."

They left the cabin to look at the birthday fireworks in the gleaming night sky. The stars peered down at them. They seemed pleased about what they saw.

Chapter Text

Ford opened the front door of the Mystery Shack already irritated.

It was early in the morning. He was only on his second cup of coffee. There weren't supposed to be any tourists turning up at this point in the day and if there was and they'd picked the wrong entrance to the building so help him God—

He stopped and stared. A familiar eye scrunched up at him from where its owner was standing on the porch.

"Hiya, Sixer! Guess who's on probati—"

Whipping an extra laser gun from the coat hanger next to the front door with lightning speed, Ford set the weapon from 'STUN' to 'KILL'. He aimed and fired right for the eye.

Bill Cipher let out a shriek as the force of the blast flung him from the porch and tumbling down into the muddy ground beyond it. Ford adjusted his aim and kept blasting. And blasting. And blasting. Soon there was a significant crater being formed by the way the fired shots were pushing Cipher into the dirt.

Behind him, he could hear the sound of the collective Pines family getting up and rushing to find him in the doorway. He could feel them crowding just behind him, craning heads to see what he was firing at without shoving into him.

"Is that—?"

"Oh, shit."

"I killed that bastard, what the hell is he—?"

"Oh my god, Grunkle Ford, can I shoot him too?"

Ford's laser gun ran out of charge. He tossed out out onto the grass near Cipher. Someone—ah, Dipper, what a reliable boy—placed a new laser gun in his hand. Ford set this one's feature to 'IMMOLATE' and started blasting again.

Mabel inched into his space to stand next to him. She'd procured one of his guns for herself, a two-hander that rather resembled an Earth bazooka. Stan was undoubtedly going to lecture him about leaving firearms out where the children could readily access them again, but one never knew when they needed to blast the hell out of something. Like right now.

He paused his firing so that she could line up a good shot, Mabel charging the blast with a manic grin.

The resulting shot turned the smallish crater into a sizable one. They could fill it with water and call it a mini-pool. Cipher let out a pathetic groaning sound in the middle of it.

Before Cipher could even attempt to get up and set himself to be fired at again, there was an odd wobbling sound like someone had started shaking a piece of laminated paper. The space right next to the crater shook and fizzled before opening up to allow a figure to step through.

Ford hesitated for the blink of an eye, muttered, "Mabel, you're on Cipher," and pointed his gun on the new figure instead.

It was a creature of about seven feet in height that looked like a squid had decided to become a doctor. Its luminous purple skin was speckled with other colors in a dazzling pattern, and its limbs were dotted with glowing, bulging eyes running down them in lines. It was wearing neat, professional clothing that looked like human office wear with a white coat over it. There was a clipboard in one of its tentacles, one of several that seemed to be designated as its arms.

"Ah, there you are, Mr. Cipher!" It said. Every Pines in the house felt an odd sense of whiplash at hearing its voice; it was the voice of a peppy kindergarten teacher, one that inexplicably sounded like it came from Newfoundland, Canada. "You gave us quite a scare, you know!"

Before Cipher could offer a word back, the... doctor? waved a tentacle and a blue flash of light overcame the crater. A square of that shimmering light remained, caging the triangle, and the doctor picked it up from the ground, settling the demon securely in its arm-tentacles.

The doctor turned to them. Earnestly, it said, "Hello, my friends. Terribly sorry for any sort of fright Mr. Cipher has given you by just popping up like this."

"Who the hell are you?" Stan barked.

Blinking each one of its eyes in a cascading line, the doctor said, "Oh, yes, yes, right. I'm Dr. Eternal-Dance-in-the-Waning-Sunset. You may call me Danny. I'm one of the doctors monitoring Mr. Cipher's care and keeping in the Theraprism. Terribly sorry, again, this is the first time he's managed to give us the slip."

Ford raised his eyebrows, curiosity overtaking his rage for a moment. "Cipher seemed like he was about to claim he was on 'probation'? Implying he was allowed to come here."

"Certainly not!" Danny chuckled. "No, no, he hasn't even earned enough good behavior points for chocolate pudding, much less visiting those he's tormented. I won't say we'd never allow that sort of visitation rights—morals and modes of care are so diverse across the multiverse—but I don't think it'd do him much good. He was lying, Dr. Pines."

"It won't be the first or last time he's lied," Ford said dryly.

Danny nodded sagely. It patted the side of the shimmering box Cipher was beating his hands against furiously now that he'd had a moment to recover from the onslaught.

"Now, I should get him back to the Theraprism. Terribly, terribly sorry, again. I want to promise it won't happen a second time, but Mr. Cipher is very conniving."

Danny used a spare tentacle to take something out of its pocket and stretched that tentacle at least ten feet to reach them. It ended up giving it to Soos, as he was the only one who didn't shuffle away from the limb. Soos held out the item he'd been given for everyone to see. It was a white business card.

"If you're troubled by him again, contact us in any of the modes written there. We'll be by in a jiffy to pick him up. Ta-ta for now!"

With that, Danny hauled Cipher and itself back through the tear in reality it had come through, leaving all of the Pines standing in the doorway, reeling.

Mabel delicately set her not-bazooka on the porch. "Let's all drink Mabel juice and pretend that didn't happen."

Everyone agreed this was the best and only thing to do.

Seeing Bill Cipher again somehow, someway became routine.

The Pines learned several important facts. That Cipher was sort-of-not-really corporeal for Theraprism reasons, and could be effected by everything they did. That he had a few powers, but they were very, very limited. There were gnomes that could do more magic than Bill now. That sometimes it took a couple minutes for Dr. Danny or his coworkers to track Cipher down and drag him back for more therapy. That Cipher definitely felt pain.

They took advantage.

Mabel lit the fuse of the illegal firework they'd liberated from the police department. Stepping back a few feet to join Dipper near the stack of the rest of the fireworks, she grinned at Cipher, currently strapped to the giant rocket and desperately trying to wiggle out of the ropes.

"Bon voyage, sucker!" she said.

The fuse ignited the firework. Cipher let out a scream as he was rocketed into the sky.

Really, it was music to her ears.

An air of anticipation filled the air of the open field somewhere in Roadkill County's dense pine forest. Manotaurs huffed and shuffled in place, eyeing each other.

The coming of summer meant it was time for more annual competitions. Dipper, their once reviled coward of a trainee, had earned their favor after the events of the apocalypse and the revelation that he had survived being hunted by the demons that had flooded into the land, and now with their opinion of him restored they had accepted his suggestions eagerly. When he said that they should add new events to their shows of manliness, they of course agreed.

Dipper Pines was even polite enough to have an event planned. Baseball. With a very particular 'ball'.

The boy blew the whistle.

With lightning speed and strength, Biceptuar flung the 'ball' at the current batter up on the base. Proteinataur hit Bill Cipher with the bat with such overwhelming power that the bat snapped in half as the triangle went screaming into the distance. Other manotaurs scrambled to catch up with the arc of the hit to catch their quarry.

In the stands—really a set of fallen logs arranged for the occasion—the Pines family and several townspeople cheered the players on.

As the referee, all Dipper had to do was watch. He cackled to himself, ate a handful of popcorn, and made sure his camera was recording everything.

"Let go of me, spare parts!" Cipher shrieked. His attempts to free his arms from the duct tape that was taping them down to his sides was not working well.

He kicked vaguely in Stan's direction. Stan remained unimpressed.

"Nope," he said, and adjusted the knots he was using to hang the ex-demon from the ceiling beam. "Frankly, be glad you don't have a neck, Cipher. Otherwise I woulda stuck you in a slipknot to put you and everyone else out of their misery."

Cipher spit more insults against Stan, his parentage, his smarts, his physical abilities, his inevitable place in the afterlife, and a dozen other things he could think of. Stan ignored him in favor of stepping away to the cashier's counter for a second and retrieving the duct tape. He taped Cipher's eye-mouth-thing shut.

Just in time, the latest tour group returned with Soos leading them along. Soos stopped for a split-second, registered what was going on, then turned back to his group of suckers with a winning smile. It was a tour group almost entirely made up of Gravity Falls residents.

"Guess what, dudes, we've got a special treat for you today," Soos said. "Fifty bucks each to take one of our walking sticks and beat up this triangle pinata that doesn't look like that thing we're all not supposed to talk about from last summer! Another twenty and you can take a picture with it."

All of the tourists couldn't wait to start pulling money out of their wallets. Stan and Soos started doling out sticks with gleeful smiles.

Chapter Text

The thing was, Ford wasn't something beyond his comprehension, really.

That's what all of the books and stuff about things from other realities always prattled on about. Being beyond comprehension, being too great for the eyes to understand, lots of screaming about colors never seen before, yadda, yadda. Cowards! Bill's eye worked fine. He could take a peek at the third-dimension just fine, even if no one else could.

The thing that made Bill's vertices shudder with Ford was that he could comprehend him just fine. The problem was communicating what he comprehended.

To others. To himself.

Euclydians were simple. As much as Bill mocked his peers for it, it was true. Simple in mind, simple in body. The majority of their bodies didn't really move outside of the eyes and the limbs. Their exteriors were hard and inflexible; if you wanted to communicate something, you said it or your hands said it or your eye said it. Easy.

Ford was not like that. He moved. All of him moved, all the time. Bill could see it when Ford held him up in the palm of one hand.

His upper body—his face, that was the word Ford gave to him about it, there was the face which was on the head which connected to the neck and then the chest, torso, pelvis, way too many names for pieces of one body if you asked Bill; humans had too much body going on in general if you asked Bill again, seriously, surely it was showing off at some point.

Where was he going with this?

Right, Ford's face. It moved.

It moved so much.

The skin of his face twisted and scrunched and wrinkled. It was as though his entire face—his entire body, Bill assumed, though he hadn't seen much of that body considering how many clothes it wore—was made of the delicate skin of a euclydian's eyelid. The whole thing. The skin was so soft and malleable that too much motion left grooves in it from repeated use. It moved when he smiled, when he frowned. His lower face moved when he spoke instead of the sound coming purely from within, a phenomenon that left Bill staring at his muse's mouth pretty much every time he spoke. Which wouldn't be noticeable if humans just put eyes and mouths in the same place like sensible people. What a waste of face-space real estate.

Ford absolutely noticed. He didn't bring it up, but Bill suspected that was just because Ford found it funnier to leave it a dangling threat that he would bring it up. That was what Bill would do, anyway.

His mouth moved when he spoke, his skin moved too, he had this—this stuff he called hair that moved in the non-existent air of space. Apparently hair was just eyelashes but somewhere else. Hundreds of eyelashes that weren't attached to the eye, just scattered about. Not even hundreds, thousands. How Ford didn't tear it all off Bill didn't know. It had to be uncomfortable, right?

Ford laughed at him when he brought it up. So. Maybe not.

More than once Bill had tried to draw his muse. Ideally he'd manage it one day and show it in an exhibit.

The problem, Bill knew, was not that he lacked comprehension. It's just that what he was comprehending was near impossible to translate. He tried multiple times to break it down in planes, dividing Ford up into composite pieces. Really all Ford was made up of were a bunch of shapes. A rectangle of forehead, triangle of a nose—humans had a whole separate external organ piece for smells, like crazy people—circles made the cheeks, more squares and rectangles and oblong ovals and... somethings for the hair. But when he tried to draw that it turned out less as Ford and more like a amalgamate mass of euclydians all sown together into one being.

Which sort of was what Ford looked like at first glance. But it didn't make for a good exhibit. At least, not an exhibit that Bill wanted to make.

And when he drew Ford like that it bled into their next meeting. He looked at Ford's face and saw the sown-up collection of shapes to make a third-dimension person, stretched and warped in space that did not exist for Bill unless Ford plucked him off of his dimension and into the upper bounds of reality. It made him shudder.

Funny thing. Bill didn't have a word for up before Ford gave him one. Euclydian didn't have a word for up, actually. Nor down.

The closest he had managed to invent before that, back when he was still trying to convince people what he saw was real, was 'more-forwards'. He didn't even have a word for down until Ford picked him up and proved to him that down could exist. He could see up from the plane euclydians were bound to, but not down.

He still wasn't sure he liked up for up. It was too short, too abrupt for where the stars were. But it was the word he'd been given.

Bill sat in his studio and tried to draw Ford again. It still wasn't working. If anyone saw his pieces they'd think he was going crazy like the shapes in those books about incomprehensible beings. Or they'd think he was the kind of crazy that went around sewing up shapes so they were stuck together for kicks. Maybe Bill would end up that kind of person if he kept being unable to communicate Ford's stupid face.

His weird face. His disgusting face. His awful, awful, awful face. Bill wanted Ford to come by so he could see it right now. He wanted to see all of the wrinkles and grooves and the awful little things Ford said were pores and stubble—yeesh, more not-eyelashes! Didn't humans get tired of producing not-eyelashes!—and his weird eyes that could see in three dimensions naturally like a jerk and his freaky mouth that moved and wasn't attached to any eyes—

—and. A lot of things. He wanted to see a lot of Ford. As much as his instincts screamed at him to stop looking because Ford both did and didn't make sense.

Third-dimension beings. What was wrong with them? Everything, really.

Ford was lucky Bill didn't run screaming the first time the man bent over his dimension to take a look-see. A lesser shape would've.

Bill was better than that. Sometimes he was sure he liked how awful Ford was.

Chapter Text

Bill Cipher narrowed his eye at the view he was afforded into another dimension.

The terrible thing about becoming a steward to the multiverse—a janitor, really, he thought in his less charitable moments—was that you were often made privy to your other lives. For most beings, that would mean they'd witness themself happening upon new life experiences; facing uncountable joys, uncountable sorrows, living in prosperity or despair or absurdity, evolving so much from other worlds that one could hardly identify them as the same being at all.

For Bill Cipher, such a view meant that he mostly witnessed himself being unspeakably wicked and meeting a sad, preventable end. Usually by the same group of humans he underestimated again, and again, and again.

Really, Bill thought, viewing this universe's minor apocalypse, Pines the multiverse over should get an award of some kind.

This universe involved a lot more demon-eating than most. Bill's eye scrunched in disgust as the Pines started butchering up the other Cipher with some sort of magical knife and passing out the parts for the town to start eating. An unusual distinction. He waved a hand and reviewed as much of the history of this dimension as he could, trying to pinpoint the shifts.

Hmm. Different development of magic that relied on dog-eat-dog hierarchies, therefore Stanford Pines encountered different means of defeating and stealing an interloper's energy—ah, his father was a butcher in this world as well, interesting synchronization, there. Fiddleford McGucket invented a memory-stealer in the style of a carving knife as well. Nasty scars the man had as a result, and so did half the town even with the knife's refinement later on. How no one noticed the cult members running around with knives with unsourced cuts showing up on everyone would've been more of a mystery if the knife in question didn't steal memories.

Being eaten after death was one of the less unfortunate things Bill had witnessed one of his other selves experiencing; he'd seen himself willingly inflict more alarming sights onto himself, frankly.

Still, he checked the likely outcome of this action, saw it wouldn't result in any destabilization he would have to assist in correcting, and moved on to another dimension.

This one featured a Bill who never escaped the king who imprisoned him. Bill swiftly moved on again. There were no threats to that dimension unless several very unlikely things occurred.

He skipped through more and more dimensions. In some, he never appeared. In some, he was trapped for centuries, eons. In many, he was defeated. Sometimes with losses for the victors, but not always. In some, he as good as won.

Those were the least pleasant to observe. As far as Bill could ascertain, even in his victory his other self rarely seemed pleased with the results. The eternal host, never the one basking in the chaos he claimed to love. What was the point, then?

Bill shut away his view into the other universes with a sudden, violent movement.

Perhaps, he decided, it was time to check in with his little scientist. Most of the things Stanford Pines exclaimed and marveled over were terribly pedestrian to him, but Bill could find some amusement in watching the man run around like a chicken with its head cut off in his excitement.

It might improve his mood.

Chapter Text

It was the end of the world, and Ford and Mabel Pines had been tossed into the world's worst penthouse suite.

Namely, they'd been tossed onto a horrific living couch before Bill departed momentarily, but Ford relocated them to sitting on the floor near the piano before Mabel could pay too much attention to the living features of the couch. Mabel had followed along rather blankly, nothing like the normal irrepressible girl he knew.

But of course, this was hardly a normal circumstance. Ford shouldn't expect her to be cheerful at a time like this.

All the same it was somewhat disquieting to see his niece sit down with a thump in her new, black-and-yellow dress—Cipher was as tacky as ever, Ford couldn't help but think in disgust—face wooden. There had been shouting and screaming when Bill had shown Ford's family to him, attempts to talk Ford into a different choice or insults to Bill's person, but between that and Ford accepting the terms and the sham of a wedding, she had fallen silent.

Mabel drew her knees up, bowed her head down, and suddenly became much less silent by bursting into tears.

"I—I want my mom!" she sobbed. "I want my dad! I want to see Dipper—and, and Grunkle Stan—and make sure they're okay—and—"

Her words broke down into muffled sobs alone as she buried her head in her hands.

"Oh, darling..." Ford said.

For a moment he hesitated, utterly unsure of what to do with a crying child who had every right to cry. His mind flickered back decades to the early days of portal construction, when he and Fiddleford had found the plaidypodes and he had comforted one. In any other circumstance he might've laughed at the fact that such a time was where his mind strayed, but now it only filled him with shame. That was all he could muster up?

Still, he reached out and drew Mabel against him, smoothing over the long drape of her hair. She sniffled into her own hands, trembling, but she let him cradle her. It was something.

Ford was suddenly acutely aware of how young she was. Young and small and afraid. Mabel was a capable girl. She and her brother were both far more capable and wise than he ever remembered being at their age. Still, she didn't deserve to have Ford's mistakes thrust upon her; none of his family did, none of this town did. But that was the story of all of his choices.

He started out with nonsense soothing sounds, straining for something to say. He couldn't say it's alright. It wasn't. He couldn't say, everything will work out. He wasn't sure of that.

"We'll make a plan," he promised her. "We don't have to roll over and accept what's happened. If we play along with Bill's games for now, we'll have time to make a plan and get rid of him. And when it's all over we'll get you back to your parents, alright? They'll be so proud of your bravery."

"But Dipper... and Grunkle Stan..." she hiccuped into his shoulder.

"Dipper is an exceptionally smart young man, and he's well aware of Bill's nature," Ford said. "And Stanley is quite cunning when he puts his mind to it. Even if Bill attempts to play unfairly with our deal, neither of them will make things easy for him."

He hugged her tighter, filled with a strange and irrational wish that his embrace could squeeze all of her unhappiness away. All of the events of Weirdmaggeon must've put him in an odd frame of mind.

"We just have to trust them to be safe," he said. "You can trust them, can't you?"

She sniffled again. "Mhm."

Mabel leaned back, wiping her eyes. Her face was red and puffy, eyes still watering. Ford found himself grimly wondering if Bill would clean her up before shooing her away to Gideon, or if Bill's deep disinterest in humans outside of their use as pawns would mean he didn't notice the difference at all. It was ultimately a pointless thing to care about, he supposed.

He swiped his thumb along one of her cheeks, clearing away some of the tear tracks. Mabel allowed him to.

It was perhaps more trust than he deserved, considering it was his actions that left her here in a strange place with nothing else to do but cry.

Ford took what he could. That was all that could be done right now.

Chapter Text

Stanley Pines had a lot of ideas about how saving his twin brother would go.

He was a dreamer and a storyteller, so naturally these ideas got a bit optimistic. He imagined stalking though the bubble of weirdness, bypassing all of the guards and defeating the lackeys of Bill Cipher—check, check, check. He imagined bursting into the room, triumphant, brandishing the god-killing gun he'd apologetically stolen from some sci-fi dude who fell out of one of the rifts in reality. He imagined shooting Bill Cipher in that goddamn oversized eye of his, hauling his brother over his shoulder, and making a break for it in a heroic fashion.

Stanley got ninety percent of the way through his imagined heroic rescue. Monsters and henchmen had been downed, weirdness had been stalked through, he stealthed through the maddening halls of the fucked-up pyramid palace Bill Cipher called a home up into the throne room—

And then just sort of. Stopped. In the middle of bursting through the double doors.

Because instead of finding Bill Cipher on his throne and Ford being forced to act like an animal like he usually was, he found Bill Cipher collapsed on the ground, chains wrapped around his body. The omnipresent subtle glow and buzz of the triangle was gone, and now he looked less like a god and more like an art piece by an abstract sculptor knocked over by a jackass.

Standing near the body, dressed in what Stan realized with bafflement was a version of that metal bikini outfit they put Carrie Fisher into in Star Wars, was Ford. He was holding part of the chains that wrapped around Cipher's body, the chains leading up to shackles around his wrists and neck.

Ford didn't look like someone who had subdued—strangled?—a god. He looked dazed and frightened, staring off into the distance with a slack face. Stan wasn't sure if his brother even realized he had come into the room.

Stan awkwardly lowered his gun. He started to approach the scene, trying not to think too hard about why Ford was alone in this throne room with a Princess Leia slave bikini on. He definitely didn't want to know, and if he thought about it he'd start shooting Cipher's body at speed. Over and over again. Without stopping.

"Ford?" he said. "Stanford?"

Ford blinked and looked over at him. Stan wasn't sure what was going on in his mind.

"I don't..." Ford trailed off uncertainly.

"Uh," Stan said. "You want to come over here, buddy?"

Ford silently lifted up his arms, showing the shackles. Oh, those were still attached to the floor by the chain. Originally they'd been pretty long chains with a lot of room for movement around the space, but with most of their length currently wrapped around a big triangle Ford wasn't left with a lot of slack.

"Right, uh, I'll help you out," Stan said, inching his way towards Ford.

He didn't trust the supposed body. Stan didn't see what pretending to be dead would get Cipher in this situation, but the guy was a complete weirdo. He kept his gun trained right on that asshole as he approached Ford. Part of him wanted to shoot the triangle right then and there, but he had no idea about the potential blow-back of a gun made to kill interdimensional beings. He didn't want to give Ford, like, super-cancer by shooting Cipher while Ford was still right next to him.

It was difficult to unlock someone's shackles while holding a gun, so Stan fished a bobby pin from his pocket and handed it off to Ford, instructing him how to do it himself with his eyes pinned on Cipher. The shackles actually had a working lock mechanism, which almost surprised Stan, but maybe it was some weird layer of how he messed with Ford. Sure, Ford could theoretically get out, Cipher might've thought, but he's too dependent and too dumb to actually manage it.

Joke's on Cipher, apparently. Ford didn't unlock his own shackles, he went even further in securing his own freedom.

Armed with the bobby pin and Stan's steady instructions, Ford made quick work of the shackles even as his face remained impassive. Stan decided to take that as a sign of how much of his genius brother's smarts still stuck around in that head of his rather than how well trained he was.

Soon enough, the shackles dropped down to the ground with a clang, and Ford quickly pulled the same move on the collar around his neck. He blinked and rubbed aimlessly at the red marks left behind. Stan bit down on a fresh flare of anger.

"Alright. We're gonna back away from Cipher, I'm gonna shoot him, and then we're leaving," Stan said.

Ford nodded absently, staring down at Cipher. He let Stan take his arm and drag him away.

Stan wished he could still near-perfectly read Ford's mind like when they were children. He took out his anger on Cipher, lining up the shot perfectly and feeling a rush of satisfaction as he pulled the trigger.

There was a blast of light, a shrieking sound of fizzling energy, and then something white-hot hit Cipher's body. Both brothers flinched back at the strange cracking sound that filled the air as Cipher's body shattered apart like a brick wall being hit by a semi-truck, the remains scattering across the floor. The golden fragments were dulling even further, turning grey as concrete.

A long stretch of silence followed. Stan would've liked to be sure that Cipher was dead, but who knew what an interdimensional triangle looked like in death? This was as good as he was going to get.

"I don't know why I did it," Ford said suddenly.

Stan snapped his gaze to Ford. His brother was staring at the collection of rubble that was once as good as a god.

His eyes were still far away. "He wasn't even doing anything. He was just laughing. He reached out his hand, and I got so, so mad..."

Like one of those tamed monkeys ripping their owner's face off, Stan thought absurdly.

Stan brought his hand up to Ford's arm again. Ford didn't make any movement to shake the hand off of him.

"You can tell me while we leave, Ford," Stan said.

He took his brother away.

Chapter Text

"He's like... the world's saddest, wettest cat."

"Sure, Mabel."

"Like one of those weird skinny dogs that looks like it's gonna die from consumption—which ones are those?"

Dipper didn't look up from his crossword. What was a six-letter for a coat? "That's a whippet, Mabel."

Mabel snapped her fingers, lounging upside-down on the couch. "Yeah, a whippet. He's like if a whippet made a wish to be a human man."

"Uh-huh." Jacket. It was probably jacket.

"I'm going to help him," Mabel said.

Oh no. Dipper looked up. "Help him with what?"

Mabel gestured as grandly as she could upside-down on a couch. "I'm gonna get Grunkle Ford a date. Maybe if he has a lady he'll stop looking like the world's saddest whippet, and also he'll get me ice cream every day because I improved his social life and will always let me get the extra sprinkles."

There were multiple problems with that. Problem number one: the nearest ice cream shop (the only one Gravity Falls had, actually) was on the other side of town, and Grunkle Stan wouldn't stand for the waste of gas. Problem number two: The dating pool of a small town was already suspect, and dwindled the farther up the age bracket you went. Most people in their sixties who wanted to be married were already married.

Problem number three: "I think if Grunkle Ford went on a date he'd have a heart attack."

The man was getting up there in the years. It wasn't impossible.

Mabel waved him off. "That'd just be another bonding opportunity. The flashing lights of the ambulance would only highlight Grunkle Ford's rugged face! Our lady of the evening would only fall more madly in love!"

Dipper let out a sound of extreme doubt.

In the end, there was no stopping Mabel Pines. She dragged a very hunted looking Grunkle Ford from the recesses of wherever he'd ended up in the house and sat him down at the table to be Mabel-atized. Dipper was roped in as a very unwilling assistant.

"This," she declared, "is the start of your new and improved dating life, Grunkle Ford."

She nudged Dipper. Dipper obligingly popped the confetti popper she'd shoved into his hands, adding a blank "Yay!" Grunkle Ford jumped a little at the popping noise, because he really was like a sad whippet that became a man.

Mabel smiled winningly like Grunkle Stan had taught her. "By the time I'm finished, the ladies will want to eat your entire face!"

"My entire face?" Grunkle Ford repeated, looking alarmed.

"Your entire face!" she insisted.

At this point, if it was Dipper in the hot seat, he would've beat a hasty exit. But Grunkle Ford was honestly kind of a pushover, so he just said, "Um. Alright?"

Mabel's smile widened to a disturbing degree. "To your room for supplies!"

The ensuing catwalk of potential looks did not go well.

First they let Grunkle Ford chose his own clothes for a date, which was a bad plan. He usually went around in rumpled shirts and badly patched pants, and his vague attempt at improvement came in the form of him coming out of the room in a button-down (missing a button in the middle), a tie (it had an ugly argyle pattern and was fastened near his left ear, somehow), and the same patched pants as before.

"Let's try that again," Mabel said, and raided his closet herself.

He then emerged in a bright yellow suit that made Dipper wonder when and why Ford had ever bought it, especially since it was tight around the shoulders and short in the arms and legs. It made him look like a very confused rubber duck. The orange tie Mabel added to the ensemble did not help.

"This sucks," Dipper said.

"This sucks," Mabel agreed.

"I sort of like it," Grunkle Ford said plaintively.

The twins exchanged a look. That meant it definitely didn't work.

They made several other attempts: a set of bell-bottoms they dug out from the bottom of the closet that Grunkle Ford promptly tripped on and slammed face first into the ground, shorts and a worn t-shirt that made him look less like a casual beach goer and more like a guy about to mow his lawn on a hot summer day, and a disco outfit they stole from Grunkle Stan's room that made him look like the saddest pimp in existence. The other outfits were not even worth speaking on.

"...Maybe the office worker look is our best bet," Mabel muttered to herself.

"Oh, good," Grunkle Ford said. "I think I would've tripped on these pants next."

With the outfit settled—and the tie fixed to the correct position by Dipper, armed with a WikiHow article on how to tie a tie properly—they retired to the dining room table so Mabel could interrogate him like a woman would on the first date. Grunkle Ford sat stiffly opposite of Mabel, Dipper set on the side of both of them. Their grunkle was already sweating.

"I'm just gonna ask questions and you're gonna answer," Mabel said. "And if they're bad you get the air horn."

Dipper held up the air horn. He didn't want to be on air horn duty, but he felt a morbid sense of duty to see this through.

Grunkle Ford did not look happy about the air horn, but he didn't argue.

"Let's begin: Where are you from?" she said.

"Glass Shard Beach, New Jersey," Grunkle Ford said. "It gets its name from all of the glass shards in the beach. I had to get twenty tetanus shots."

Mabel threw her head back in a fake laugh. "Ha, you're so funny!"

"That wasn't a joke. Tetanus is no laughing matter," he said sadly.

She made a gesture at Dipper. Grunkle Ford jumped with a yelp as Dipper sounded his air horn.

"Bzzt! No being a Debbie Downer on a first date. Let's try another." Mabel consulted her list. "What's your favorite color?"

"Grey," Grunkle Ford said.

"Any reason for that?"

"No, not really," he said with a shrug.

Dipper sounded the air horn without prompting. Mabel nodded at him, grateful.

"I don't have to have a reason for a favorite color, do I?" Grunkle Ford protested.

"Yes you do if it's grey!" Mabel said. She waved a dismissive hand. "Never mind! What do you do on the weekends?"

Grunkle Ford was sulking now, but he still answered. "Math. Try not to die of various misfortunes. More math, usually."

More air horn. Mabel thunked her head down on the table in despair. It took a whole thirty seconds of Dipper patting her back for her to pick it back up with a big breath and consult her list of questions some more. The whole time Mabel wasn't looking, Dipper mouthed, get out of here, man. Grunkle Ford just looked baffled.

The questioning did not improve from there.

"Okay!" Mabel said loudly fifteen minutes later. "Um. Let's just move on to the pick-up lines. Do you know literally any pick-up lines? Lay 'em on us."

Grunkle Ford adjusted himself at the table so that he had one elbow propped up on the table and another on his hip. "Hey girl. Uh." He seemed to think very quickly. "Us math lovers should stick together. Can I cal-cu-later?"

Mabel made a retching noise. Dipper sounded the air horn.

"Moving on!" Mabel declared.

Grunkle Ford sighed sadly. "I had another one..."

Curiosity overtook Mabel. "Okay, what was it?"

"Is your name Pythagoras? Because you make me want to square my hypotenuse," he said.

"What?" Dipper said, forgetting to air horn. "What could that possibly mean in this context?"

Mabel slapped her paper down on the table. "We're moving on!"

With a grim certainty that Grunkle Ford could not be helped, Mabel decided to cut the rest of her Mabel Makeover Plan and simply send Grunkle Ford off on his own to crash and burn if he may. With the assistance of Grunkle Stan, who needed five minutes to laugh himself sick once they explained what they were doing, they dropped Grunkle Ford off at the library to ask the cute old man who read to children sometimes some questions. Hopefully one of the questions would manage to be, will you go on a date with me?

His tie had ended up trending towards his left ear again. Dipper silently despaired. Maybe it was a cursed tie.

Grunkle Ford ended up tripping right before he made it to the front doors, slamming face first into the ground again. When he got up, there was dirt down his front and his nose had started to drip blood. Grunkle Ford did not attempt to fix either of these things. As his family watched on, he just walked right into the library like that.

Dipper quietly took out a small notepad and pen, flipped it open to his page on questions he had about Grunkle Ford, and added, Does he know he's alive?

"He's gonna get kicked out," Grunkle Stan said sagely.

Mabel and Dipper both nodded their heads. He was definitely going to get kicked out.

Five minutes later, Grunkle Ford got kicked out.

At least he didn't have a heart attack, Dipper reflected. That was the one win of the day.

Chapter Text

[A slightly fancy store-bought journal that has been painted blue and silver. Applied to the front with silver paste-on letters is "DIPPER PINES' GUIDE TO THE UNEXPLAINED". A blue pine tree is pasted below it. In the cover page at the front, it repeats this title with an asterisk at the end that adds: "*Unlike Stanford Pines' Journals, this is the real deal!"]

Page 15:

Gnomes!

[Two illustrations of gnomes are pictured in decent realism. One of a singular gnome with a classic red had and a white beard, staring off into space vacantly. Second is an illustration of a mass of gnomes forming a giant humanoid shape with an enraged expression.]

Little men of Gravity Falls' local forests. Their about two feet high and come in large packs. While they have their own society out in the woods, they like to come into town and rummage through people's trash like raccoons, probably because it's an easy meal. Unlike what other journals might claim, they DO NOT have hypnotic capabilities. They also do not have a democracy, and if they ask you to be their Queen, it isn't a joke they're making. They mean it and they will kidnap you about it.

Strengths: Strong community (Turns out you can't get them to in-fight, STANFORD PINES.), incredible constitution for their size, great speed and agility.

Weaknesses: Leaf-blowers.

Page 35:

The Summerween Trickster!

[An illustration of a tall, shadowy figure with a jack'o'lantern-like smiling face under its hat. It looms underneath a street lamp. Candy is scattered around its feet.]

Unlike certain journals claim, the Summerween Trickster its totally real, and you really shouldn't set up a prank where you get your friends to chant an incantation to summon him and then scare them yourself under a bedsheet, because while you're gearing up to scare them the Trickster will show up himself and start trying to eat kids. The Trickster operates on challenges with children during the night of Summerween, a holiday local to Gravity Falls with a surprisingly deep history in the town. While dealing with the Summerween Trickster, remain calm above all else. He will challenge you to get a certain amount of candy before the last candle in the melon'o'lanterns fades. As long as you don't waste time buying into CERTAIN JERK AUTHORS' tips about just buying the amount of candy you need, you should have enough time to go house to house getting candy.

Strengths: Very, very creepy. Strikes magical deals. Can eat anything. Very strong.

Weaknesses: Obeys his own magical rules; if you win the challenge, he HAS to leave. Being eaten--it turns out he's made of the sucky candy kids don't eat, but if you're willing to eat him you can just get rid if him that way. Don't ask us how we know.

Tips: Have an extremely adorable costume gimmick, like being twins with matching costumes. If you aren't a twin, in a pinch dressing up as an older character all of the adults liked in their childhood will help, like Wizard of Oz characters or other old movies.

Page 72:

Unicorns!

[In a very different style than normal, unicorns are depicted in a colorful collage as angry, frowning creatures with stink lines coming off of them. The hand-writing of the entry is also much different than usual, done in pink glitter gel pen.]

DON'T LISTEN TO OUR GRUNKLE. UNICORNS SUCK!!!!!!

Page 204:

[What appears to be a list of grammar corrections to the entries of the journal. They're done in black ink with a cramped cursive hand.]

Page 3, line 5: Incorrect use of the word where.

Page 7, line 2: Barf fairies are not obligate carnivores, they just tell people that. Consider doing your own research instead of trusting biased sources next time.

Page 8, line 10: Incorrect your.

...

[It continues on for quite a while.]

Page 205:

Stanford Pines!

World's biggest anomaly: how can one man SUCK SO MUCH?

Current theories: 

1. He's a changeling child that was put among humans to piss everyone off so bad that living in the fairy world forever seems like a good idea if it gets them off of the same realm as him.

2. Grunkle Stan stole all of his niceness in the womb.

3. Grunkle Stan stole his heart in the womb. All Great Uncle Stanford has in place of it now is another gallbladder spitting up acid.

4. He's a black hole in the shape of a man.

5. He was personally sent from hell to annoy people to death. Including ME.

6. The universe had to pre-emptively balance out Mabel's peppiness, so it created Stanford Pines and accidentally let him loose before it meant to, so everyone had to suffer him until the universe tossed him into the portal for a while until Mabel showed up.

[It continues on for quite a while.]

Chapter Text

In a house in Gravity Falls there is a VHS tape kept on the shelves. It has a handwritten label reading "M'N'M ON SET" across the front.

If someone were to pop this VHS into a VHS player, these are several of the scenes that would play.

A little brown-haired girl, four years old at best, and a puppet fashioned to look like a fuzzy green dog were shown sitting together against an abstract background. The dog puppet said to the little girl, "Now, why don't we practice our ABCs? I'll start. A—"

"A—" the girl chimed along. The corresponding letter showed up on the screen as they sang it.

"B."

"B!"

"C, D, E, F—"

"C, D, E, Cupcake Monster!"

A small drawing of the Cupcake Monster showed up instead of a letter.

The dog puppet stopped in its tracks and did a double-take as the little girl burst into giggles. "What? Cupcake Monster? You're not singing the alphabet right. Let's try again, huh?"

They started singing the alphabet song together again, getting all the way up to "I, J, K, L, Cupcake Monster!"

"Cupcake Monster isn't a letter," the puppet said. "It goes, M, N, O, P..."

They made it up to T before the girl burst out another, "Cupcake Monster!"

The dog puppet laughed. "Oh, you're just teasing me! I see how it is! Well, then, I'm leaving."

Wild giggling accompanied the puppet turning and walking away from the little girl, who grinned widely. As the dog puppet left, the girl called, "I love you!"

The dog puppet returned to the little girl, saying sweetly, "I love you too."

Patting the puppet on the head, the little girl leaned down and kissed the puppet's forehead with an exaggerated, "Mwah!"

On a set constructed to look like the rowhouse neighborhood of a big city, a little brown-haired boy wearing a faded ballcap with a star on it sat on the stairs up to a building. Popping out of a dingy cardboard box on top of a set of them next to the staircase was a humanoid monster puppet with a grumpy face and a fez on its head.

"See, they told me I don't have to do nothin'," the puppet was saying proudly. "All I have to do is buy these funny little toys and wait until people really, really want to buy them, then I can sell them and make lots and lots of money! Ain't that great?"

"Mr. Mystery!" the boy admonished. "How you find yourself in all this trouble is the real mys—mist-tree." He screwed up his face. "Blegh!"

Mr. Mystery—that was to say, Mr. Mystery's puppeteer—let out a loud, genuine laugh. The puppet was moved to laugh as well, then tilted his head at the boy. His voice was subtly different when he spoke, a little less gruff and deep. "A mist-tree? What's a mist-tree? Someone call Dr. Pine, I think we've discovered a new species."

The boy's face screwed up further, and he looked down towards where the puppeteer must've been stationed. "Grunkle Staaan, you can't make fun of me!"

"Who's Grunkle Stan?" Mr. Mystery said, looking down as well. "Whoa! There's a man there! Handsome fella, too. Is that Stan?"

A round of chuckles could be heard on camera coming from people outside of its view.

Despite attempting to keep his scowl on, the boy giggled. "You can't call yourself handsome. That's con-see-ted."

"That ain't me, that's a whole new guy," Mr. Mystery said. The boy stuck out his tongue down towards the puppeteer, who laughed again. "Also—big word, there, Dipper. With those in your noggin I'm surprised mystery tripped you up."

"Grunkle Stan!"

The puppet waved a hand. "Alright, alright. Sorry, champ. Let's take it again."

Dipper nodded and schooled his face, beginning his scolding again. "Mr. Mystery! How you find yourself in all this trouble is the real mystery..."

On a set made to look like a chemistry lab or a science classroom in a school, a green humanoid monster puppet sat behind a cluttered desk. He wore thick glasses, a sweater, and a white lab coat.

"Hello, hello! It's great to see you all here again," the puppet said, waving to the audience. "Why don't we check the time together?"

The puppet turned to look at the clock behind him on the wall, next to a blackboard full of equations and doodles done in chalk. "Oh! Yes, it seems like it's Science Time with Dr. Pine! Isn't that wonderful?"

Dr. Pine turned back around, hands layered over top each other on the desk. "Now, today our topic is twins. There are lots of kinds of twins in the world, so we'll talk about a few of them. Will my lovely students of science please step into the room?"

Two pairs of children stepped into frame. Both were sets of twins; one a brown-haired boy and girl pair, the other a black-haired set of girls. They all grinned and waved to the camera with the hands they weren't using to hold onto their twin's hand. The girl and boy were around eight years old, and the girls around ten.

"I'm sure you already have a guess as to who are the identical twins are here," Dr. Pines said. "But let's ask ourselves a question: why do some twins look the same, and some don't? It's a question with a very interesting answer. Let's start by looking at Mason and Mabel here—they're very different in one area, but they still look like siblings, don't they? Their noses—"

The twins touched their noses with matching smiles.

"Their smiles—"

They prodded at the corners of their lips.

Their eyes—"

They blinked exaggeratedly and wiggled their eyebrows.

"And the structure of their face all look alike. That's because they're siblings, and siblings can look a lot like each other. But sometimes they differ quite a bit as well, like being a boy or a girl. This all comes down to something called genetics, which are the building blocks of not only humans, but animals and plants as well..." Dr. Pines said.

The lesson continued on about genetics, how people developed in the womb, and what made a fraternal twin different from an identical twin.

A pair of six-year-old twins sat together on the ground against the wall, clearly back stage. An older man with a strong chin and greying hair sat with them, watching with a smile as they attempted to adjust the two puppets they were maneuvering with their arms. The girl had Dr. Pine, and the boy had Mr. Mystery.

"Whoa!" the girl said in an approximation of the puppet's usual deep voice, moving Dr. Pine's mouth clumsily to make him talk. "I'm a huge nerd! But that doesn't mean I don't want to here about you, Mr. Mystery."

The boy's attempt at Mr. Mystery's gravelly was worse than his sister's Dr. Pine voice, but it was a valiant attempt nonetheless. "Great, 'cause I'm tellin' ya, this the best money-making business I've been a part of yet! We're selling snakes, Doctor, snakes!"

"Snakes? Why are you selling snakes?"

Mr. Mystery laughed, flailing an arm. "'Cause people love snakes these days, Doctor! Can't get enough of them. But here's the thing—they're slippery things, too, so people drop 'em and lose 'em and they we get to sell them snakes over and over again!"

"But we can't have too many snakes all in one place, Mr. Mystery," Dr. Pine fretted. "They'll eat up all the mice and there won't be any mice left to eat. What will they do then?"

Mr. Mystery clumsily patted his companion on the arm. He hit his head and waist too, as his aim wasn't very good with his current puppeteer. "Don't worry, that's the second part of the business. We go and catch all the snakes people drop, so we can sell them again. Just the same snakes over and over, and they don't got the chance to eat all of the mice 'cause we pick 'em off the ground where the mice are, see?"

The man looked up at the camera as the person behind it started softly laughing. He grinned and slapped his hands down on his knees, saying, "Well, looks like I'm out of a job. These two knuckleheads have me beat in puppeteering and jokes. What's a guy supposed to do in the face of that, huh?"

He got up and made a show of strolling away. "I'm off, kids! I've gotta go drown myself in the sea now that I haven't got a job anymore."

The twins looked up at him in astonishment, crying out, "Nooo, Grunkle Stan! You can't go in the sea!"

"I can't?" Stan looked the picture of shock. "But I haven't got a job anymore now that you two have my puppets. What else is a man supposed to do?"

His relatives scrambled up best they could with their arms full of felt and tried to run up and press the puppets into his hands.

"You can't go in the sea!" the girl said. "You promised ice cream!"

"Ice cream!" her brother repeated.

Stan laughed. "Oh, I see. It ain't about me, it's about the ice cream, is it?"

The twins looked at each other. They looked back at him.

"Yup!"

Stan gazed woefully down at his puppets. "You see how I'm treated around this place? Don't it make you sick?"

Chapter Text

Why the fuck was there an eyeball here?

That was Stanley's first thought.

Well, actually, his first thought was more like, oh fuck why is it so cold? And his second was, oh shit, am I dying? on account of the absolutely killer headache he woke up with. Stan had never had a migraine before, but he was pretty damn sure he was experiencing one right now.

So why the fuck is there an eyeball here? was in fact his third thought. But they all ran together so quickly it didn't really matter.

He managed to say it out loud.

The giant floating eyeball right up in his face blinked at him. So did all of the little eyeballs floating around it. Hello. I am Astro the All-Seeing. You made a wish.

"What?" Stanley said, still not sure what the fuck he was looking at. This thing had wings, he noticed.

It also had a really stupid name, he noticed. Astro? Seriously?

On top of that, he also started to notice all of the stuff behind the eye, which was pretty much a void of empty darkness. Understanding dawned on him.

"Moses," he said. "This is the weirdest dying dream ever. Ain't I supposed to have my life flash before my eyes or something?"

Not that there was much life to have flash in front of them; he was twenty-five. He'd just liberated a bottle of whisky from the shelves a shitty dive bar he wasn't going to frequent ever again a few weeks ago as a birthday present to himself. And what he did see wouldn't be pleasant. The start—that'd be good. Him and Sixer and their mom. And their dad, he guessed. He'd be there too. All of them together before things went to shit, that'd be good to remember again. But the end would just a long slog of money-making schemes that went nowhere, crime, jail time for those crimes, that jail breakout, Rico—

Fuck, Rico. A memory asserted itself in his mind, hustling in past the headache. Rico, a dingy motel room, the pistol held up to Stan's temple...

Yeah, that was probably why he had a headache. His hand jerked up to find the wound, but there wasn't anything. Well, he was dead, he guessed. Unfair that the pain stayed.

As you were dying, you made a wish, the eyeball said. Stanley had forgotten it was there for a hot second, and would've jumped if he wasn't floating in dead space.

Huh. He had. Stanley remembered that.

While Rico was doing his whole spiel about how Stanley should've known better, should've known not to steal from him, should've known not to run, should've known his people would track down who he really was—God, Stanley had thought, if he knows about me he knows about everyone else, and he knew Rico's fondness for punishing family—Stanley could see out of the window behind him. It was a clear night and the area around them was flat, so he could see a bit of the sky.

A shooting star had winked past. And Stanley, in a moment of strange impulse, had stopped paying attention to wish on it.

"What did I wish?" he asked. He honestly didn't remember.

Mostly on account of Rico shooting the thought out of his brain along with his brain out of his skull. It made things easy to forget.

The eyeball flapped some of its wings. For your family's protection. And I will grant it if you assist me.

"Assist you?" Stanley said. 

That brought up a lot of bad memories. Saying yes to powerful guys—could this thing be described as a guy?—when they asked him to start helping them always ended up with him getting a short shrift that either had a gun pulled on him or the risk of a jail sentence. Sometimes both.

I need a mortal to do my work in the earthly realm, the eyeball said plainly. You can be that mortal once I revive you. If you accept, your family will be safe from the man who killed you and all who work for him. Would you agree to such terms?

Stanley would've liked to say that he learned from his mistakes. That he took a moment to think the deal over, to negotiate a little. But Stanley had spent a life-time walking into bad deals with both eyes wide open because he didn't have any other options, and it looked like not even death could stop that.

"What would I have to do?" he said.

It didn't really matter what the eyeball told him. Stanley was going to take the deal.

Chapter Text

Their latest mission found them staring into a badly-kept backyard in a pretty okay neighborhood.

"Ford, they're dogs," Lee said with exasperation. Then he paused and said, "Seriously? There's a dimension where we're just dogs?"

"I'm not sure why you're surprised," Ford said, bending over the fence to study his two targets.

They were, in fact, a pair of dogs. Two boxers. They were currently fighting over a rope toy, snarling playfully at each other. In this dimension they remained in Glass Shard Beach, but in a house with a backyard and no human Pines in sight. Most likely Filbrick Pines and Caryn Romanoff had also been dogs.

"Yeah, the multiverse is infinitely huge and has every iteration you can imagine, if the M-dimension exists so can anything else, I know, I know." Lee came up to the fence to look at them too. "But they're dogs. What is dog-you gonna get upset about? Dog-me chews up his favorite squeaky toy and chases him out of town? How do we even identity them as versions of us? Don't dogs have polydactly more than humans, or something?"

"Their dimensional signatures line up, so they are us," Ford said.

Any response Lee might've mustered up to that was interrupted by the dogs suddenly bursting into a barking fit, scrambling at each other. The one Lee thought was probably the Ford--the paws looked kinda odd and wide--barreled into his brother so they rolled in the yellowing grass and started tussling.

Lee watched Ford tense. "You know that dogs play-fight, right?"

"I know that," Ford gritted out.

His brother sighed. "Please don't kick a dog. That's the most basic evil-bastard thing you can do after stealing from a baby."

"It's just another Stanford."

"A Ford that's a dog," Lee pointed at the two dogs still tussling and barking in the yard. "Literally just a dog."

That wouldn't stop Ford from attempting to dish out retribution and Lee knew it. So in a way he was glad when the back door of the small, squat house burst open and a very irritated man stood on the patio to yell at his dogs. Ford and Lee ducked down, but the man wasn't really looking in their direction anyway. Dog-Ford and Dog-Stan stopped fighting after the first, "Dammit, shut up! Shut up!" Then Dog-Stan got up and started barking at the man, which was a bad move, because the man got off the porch and started marching towards the dogs.

They watched as the man got a hold on Dog-Stan's collar and started dragging the dog towards the front of the house, muttering, "I know it was you, you dumb mutt, I'm sick of your shit."

Ah, there it was. That dog was about to get dumped on the street.

Probably. This guy didn't look like the kind that was going to shoot his dog when he got annoyed with it. Not redneck enough.

Dog-Ford barked and whined, following after the owner and Dog-Stan, but didn't do much once they got to the fence door and the owner shut it in Dog-Ford's face. He just sort of paced around, whining. Because he was a dog. What was he gonna do, jump the fence and bite his owner?

As Lee contemplated that, Ford had already started making his way around the fence to the front of the house, clearly about to beat the owner's ass. And then steal the dog. So Lee used that time to hop over the fence and start approaching Dog-Ford.

The dog growled at the intruder to his home turf, but with some cooing and fishing out some jerky he'd had stuffed in his jacket pocket, Lee soon had Dog-Ford eating out of the palm of his hand. Literally. Just after that Dog-Ford started licking his hand with a doggy grin and letting Lee pet him, tail wagging furiously.

Lee smiled. It was a pretty cute dog. Still young with that paws-too-big-for-its-body look.

Dog-Ford being a bit young made it easier for Lee to scoop him into his arms. He squirmed a little, obviously not used to being picked up like a chihuahua or a Shi tzu might've been, but some more patting calmed him right down.

On the other side of the fence, Lee heard some brief shouts, some barking, and the sound of a body hitting the concrete sidewalk. When he unlocked the latch of the gate and strolled out of the backyard, it was to the unsurprising sight of Ford hauling Dog-Stan into his arms with the unconscious form of the owner sprawled on the sidewalk.

"So, we bringing them to a adoption place or something?" Lee said.

Ford frowned solemnly, petting Dog-Stan's head. "No. We can't be sure they wouldn't be separated. We'll bring them back with us."

"Hear that, buddy?" Lee said, patting Dog-Ford's side. "You can't even imagine how many people are gonna be lining up to pet you and your brother."

Seriously. No one could resist a pair of cute dogs. Not even a hardened band of multiversal journeyers.

Hell, the fact that these weren't some fucked-up dimensional hell dogs might make everyone more excited to pet them than other people.

Ford and Lee stole the dogs.

Chapter Text

A scream rang out in the forest.

From the underbrush and the pines an Eevee burst out and into the half-swallowed hiking trails that decorated Roadkill County's vast forests. Right behind the Eevee burst out a young boy of about twelve with a furious expression, and after that came a small hoard of gnomes riding the backs of Raticates.

"Orion!" Dipper Pines shouted to his partner pokemon. "Orion! Aren't you going to battle them?"

The Eevee sped up in a nonverbal no way in hell.

Dipper let out groan as much as he was able between heaving breaths. It was either keep following after his coward of a partner pokemon with the gnomes wearing them down, or actually do something.

He snatched up the thickest fallen branch he could find on the ground near him and stopped in place, turning around. Then as the gnomes continued to charge at him, he raise his makeshift club up and started slamming it into the closest living forms. A gnome got knocked off his stead with a curse, smacking into a small boulder nearby and running off. A Raticate made a lunge for Dipper's shoes with a hyper-fang brewing in its teeth and Dipper kicked it in the soft underbelly. He swiped at a few more gnomes and pokemon while he was at it.

The battle might've turned against his favor--he only really got as many hits as he did from sheer surprise on the attackers' side--if not for the distant snarl breaking through the foliage.

Dipper's eyes met those of the leading gnome of this small band. A silent understanding passed between them. This part of the forest was near the size-changing crystals.

Luxray. A very big, very angry Luxray, from the sound of things. Time to scatter.

Dipper spun around and broke into a sprint in the direction his Eevee had been headed as the gnomes ran off in multiple veering paths. Whether or not they got in the giant cat's way wasn't his problem. He just followed the trail up higher into the mountains until his eyes caught upon an usual shade of white for the foliage in the bushes.

He stuck his hand into a blueberry bush and yanked his Eevee out by the scruff of his neck.

"Orion," he said flatly. "You do get that it's the pokemon that's suppose to battle other pokemon, right? I know you know that."

Orion whined and scrambled to leap into Dipper's vest, his trainer letting out a pained oof as he did so. That wasn't helping the cramp in his side from all of the running.

Dipper sighed. "C'mon, man. I know you could've handled them. I've seen you fight Gompers and Waddles, you could knock out a bunch of dumb Raticate easy."

If his Eevee hated battling altogether, that'd be one thing. Dipper could kinda get that; sometimes you just didn't want to do what everyone said you should want to do. Like participating in gym. Or battling. But Orion was good at battling with the few pokemon he was actually willing to fight instead of running away from, so why he couldn't just do what he did in the Shack out in the forest Dipper couldn't figure.

"If Stan wasn't so stingy I'd buy some pokeballs and catch a Shinx," he muttered to himself. "Then I'd give you to Soos."

He didn't really mean it. As useless as Orion was in a battle, he was Dipper's first partner pokemon, the one he'd been given along side Mabel's Eevee Comet back when we were ten. Most people were loath to give up on their first partner, and Dipper was no exception. So when Orion burrowed into his side further, he just sighed again and tightened his vest closed around the Eevee.

"Never mind. With the Luxrays around here, I'd be dead way before I managed to find a Shinx to catch. I guess you can stay." He hefted Orion up further, more against his chest, so he was easier to carry. "Okay, back on the trail."

Orion popped his head out of the collar of the vest with Dipper's handmade map in his mouth. Dipper plucked it from his teeth and studied it for a minute, consulting the landmarks he'd written down from the Journal and a few pamphlets on hiking in the area he'd found. It looked like he was still on the right trail, so he carried on upwards.

When he wasn't running in terror from gnomes or Raticates or the sound of furious Luxrays, the area was very pretty. It was a cool, shady expanse with the pines and aspens towering above and shielding the ground from too much direct sunlight, and the wide array of greens of the trees and bushes and ground flora rippled in the faint breeze cooling him down from his sprint. The rustling of pine needles was accompanied by faint birdsong all around. He could see the rising form of the mountain reaching up above him, the huge carved sides of the cliffs in the middle of the valley that Gravity Falls got its name from...

Dipper never would've considered himself someone who enjoyed hiking, thoroughly suburban kid that he was, but with views like this it wasn't so bad. Eevee Orion seemed invested as they walked upwards, peering at the vista and chirping contentedly.

After another fifteen minutes or more of walking where Dipper started getting bored and ended up reciting D'n'D'More'D facts to his pokemon for something to do, the ground finally broke from its steady uphill climb into a sudden swath of flatness. Dipper paused, taking a moment to rest his calves and look around.

It was a flat clearing, the grass knee-high at the shortest and full of colorful flowers. But that wasn't the part that really interested Dipper--though the flowers were interesting. He'd have to look at them later. What interested him was the small cliff-like side of the mountain sprouting up from the field; it was maybe ten feet high and slanted into step-like shelves of rock.

The rock was striated with warm orange tones, and some of the wide, flat stones sitting near the wall was of the same color.

Dipper jogged over to the rocks, swerving past the grass as much as possible. No getting jumped by Patrats for him right now, thanks! Once he was close enough he bent down to touch one of the orange rocks. It felt unbelievably warm under his fingers despite clearly sitting in the shade. He could see faint, almost sunburst-shaped forms in the color variation of the stones.

"Jackpot," he murmured to Orion.

Then he opened his vest up until the Eevee reluctantly hopped out. Dipper circled the selection of sun stones, considering their shapes. He selected the flatest, smoothest one of the lot, big but not so big it'd get in the way of anything, and tapped on it so Orion jumped onto the stone. His partner pokemon immediately settled onto it with a delighted huff.

"Okay, like that the pokeball should consider it something you're holding and take it with," Dipper said, unclipping Orion's pokeball from his belt. "Hold still."

He clicked the central button and summoned Orion back, grinning as the sun stone the Eevee was sitting on was taken with. Perfect. All he needed to do now was get back to the Mystery Shack.

Dipper turned around and looked down towards his destination, belatedly remembering that it was more than half and hour's walk away.

Well. At least it would be downhill this time. Dipper sat on one of the sun stones, fished out a small waterbottle and a granola bar, and gave himself ten minutes of psyching himself up for yet more walking. His admiration of the beauty of nature was dwindling slightly and he suspected that by another twenty minutes his suburban upbringing would be back in full force. Who wanted to go hiking? Weird crunchy hippies, that's who!

Finally, though, he did get up and start hiking home. He roused himself by constantly thinking about how he wasn't lugging a big stone on his back the whole time.

Dipper arrived home to the same sight he'd left in it: Mabel curled around a miserable Tepig, looking desolate.

Fire-types didn't often get sick, but when they did, it was hard to care for them. They'd get fussy and cold and disinclined to do anything, losing the passion the type usually had. Tepig had been under the weather for a week straight for no good reason, and Mabel's mood had dropped drastically with him.

Dipper sort of missed his sister. So it was up to him to fix it.

He marched over to the fish tank with no fish ever in it despite Grunkle Stan always changing the water and unhooked a pokeball from his belt. He released Orion and the sun stone from the pokeball.

Orion, fast asleep, let out a protesting noise when Dipper removed him from the rock, but promptly stopped protesting when Dipper dropped him onto Mabel's side, which he snuggled into immediately. Dipper was pretty sure Orion loved Mabel more than him, his actual trainer. It was probably the soft sweaters. As Mabel groaned and rolled to the side at the impact, Dipper snagged Waddles and brought him to the sun stone, plopping him down.

The results were pretty immediate. The Tepig sighed in relief, the circular tip of his tail starting to glow a little brighter. He blinked awake a bit and snorted at Mabel, who was sitting up and staring at her pokemon in delight.

"Sun stones are really useful for healing when they're not used in evolution," Dipper explained. "Especially Grass types and Fire types. It's got, like, this warm energy stored inside it, so--"

He was promptly tackled in a lethal Mabel Hug.

"Dipper," Mabel said, choking him with her hair. "You're the best brother in the world. I will kill for you now."

"You'd kill for me anyway," Dipper said through the mass of hair. "If you really want to thank me, you'll take tomorrow's shift at the Shack."

"Deal. Done deal. You have my eternal promise, Dipper."

Then her hug turned even more dangerously tight as she seemed to think for a second.

"Wait," she said. "What's the catch."

"Soos is off tomorrow, so you're totally gonna have to deal with the bathroom," Dipper said mercilessly.

He could feel Mabel freeze in place as horror dawned on her. Weakly, she said, "Um. Can I revoke that eternal promise?"

Dipper made a show of looking over at Waddles. "Wow. Look at him. So content. So happy. You'd never even guess he was horribly sick literally minutes ago."

"Oh, no," Mabel groaned, untangling her arms from the hug to bring her hands up to her face. "Oh, no. I have to do it. For Waddles."

"For Waddles," Dipper solemnly agreed.