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"Point twenty-seven," said Acacia, businesslike, using her keychain laser pointer to circle the relevant illustration. "Blood Valley is an important piece of cinematic history. With the camera angles and the special effects and everything. The super realistic gore is a brilliant use of makeup and practical effects. Plus the nudity will teach us about anatomy."
"It will enrich us artistically," said Willow robotically, reading off the top of a stack of notecards.
"Yes. Turn the page, Hank."
Hank, whose job in this presentation was to stand there and be an easel for Acacia's large drawing pad, turned the page.
"Point twenty-eight. Everybody in school has seen this movie. EVERYBODY. We are the ONLY kids in all of Gravity Falls who haven't seen this movie. We're probably going to be the laughingstock of the whole town forever if we don't see it. We'll have to go into hiding and live in a cave and become creepy cat people and never bathe."
"It will enrich us socially," Willow read, without looking up. Hank flipped the page again.
"Ok, so, point twenty-nine. Twelve years old is totally old enough to see an R-rated movie. We see weirder stuff than this every day, so there's no way we'd get nightmares, and we promise not to repeat any of the swear words."
"It will enrich our discretion."
"And finally, point thirty. Blood Valley is supposed to be really really really really cool and you would be the greatest mom in the universe if you let us go." Acacia jabbed emphatically with the laser pointer with each "really," sure that she'd nailed this. The little red dot glinted off the shiny foil #1 MOM sticker on her drawing of Mabel, surrounded by adoring children.
Willow scrambled for her last card and added, in the flat, emotionless voice of someone extremely intent on reading what they'd been told to, "It will enrich the parent-child bond between us and we will love you forever."
Hank flipped the drawing pad closed, and the three of them looked up eagerly.
On the couch across from them, Mabel sat with her arms crossed thoughtfully over a neon green sweater. A pink, sticker-covered suitcase sat on the carpet at her feet, ready to go for an upcoming weekend trip. She gave the triplets a ponderous look. "Hmmmm… how about no."
"NO?" Acacia practically exploded. "But the diagrams! And the science! Weren't you paying attention to the science?"
Mabel couldn't help but grin at the indigent look on Acacia's face. "Sorry, but Mom trumps science, everybody knows that. You're not old enough to see that movie."
"But it's in theaters now!" Acacia insisted. "We can't WAIT until we're older, it'll be too late, we'll never get another chance to see it on the big screen! That was point thirteen! Hank, show her point thirteen again!"
Hank flipped through to an impressively detailed picture of the three of them sitting in a movie theater and eating popcorn, while onscreen several screaming people were being chainsawed in half. Acacia had gotten a bit overzealous with the bloodsplatter, and quite a lot of it was spraying out of the screen and into the theatre itself. "She worked really hard on this one," he informed Mabel.
"See? See? That's us in the theatre, being absolutely OVERWHELMED by how awesome the special effects are. You can't deny us that."
"It will enrich… um…" muttered Willow, who was having trouble finding card thirteen.
"Can and am," Mabel told her. "And that's non-negotiable. There's way too much sex and gore in that movie, and you absolutely will get scared and have nightmares." She ignored Acacia's keening plea of "point twenty-niiiiiine!" and went on, "If, when you're a few years older, you still wanna see it, we'll set up a projector in the backyard and make popcorn and everything, ok? It'll be just like a theater. Maybe even more fun!"
"But that's not fun for us now," said Acacia.
"Well then maybe we can set it up right after your dad and I get back from our trip, and watch a different movie," Mabel suggested hopefully. "Oooh, when I was your age I had all the Dream Boy High videos! I bet they're still in a box somewhere; we could marathon them. That would be way more fun, right?"
The angry protrusion of Acacia's lower lip told her that no, no it would not.
Out in the hallway, the doorbell chimed, and Mabel stood up with a look of end-of-discussion finality. "Well you're not seeing Blood Valley."
"But MOM-"
"Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. Whining will not save you."
As her mother left to answer the door, Acacia collapsed onto the couch with an overly dramatic groan.
"I told you thirty points was too many," said Hank, sitting down beside her and examining the bloody theatre drawing. "We should have done the ten point presentation that downplayed the gore."
"It's called Blood Valley, she was gonna know about the gore," Acacia grumbled.
"It will enrich our worldview," read Willow proudly, having finally found her card. She looked up and seemed surprised that Mabel was no longer in the room. "Did it work? Did she say yes?"
"Uuugh," said Acacia, sliding further down the couch and smushing her cheek against her brother's side.
Willow took in the scene and said accommodatingly, "I didn't really want to see it that bad, anyway."
Mabel stuck her head back into the room, grinning. "Hey, Great Grunkle Stan's finally here! Everybody ready for awkward goodbye hugs?"
"Uuuuuuugh," said Acacia, a little more insistently. Hank got up, and she fell over onto the couch cushion where he'd been sitting. "Uuuugh and uuuugh."
She watched peevishly while Willow and Hank hugged their mother goodbye, and then ran into the hallway to cannonball into Great Grunkle Stan. "Hey, c'mon," Mabel said, walking over and ruffling Acacia's mess of curls. "Dad and I are gonna be gone all weekend on our trip, don't you want a goodbye hug? Goodbye high-five? …Goodbye handshake?"
"How about a goodbye let-us-see-Blood-Valley?" Acacia grumbled into the couch.
"We'll have that movie marathon in the yard when we get back, I promise," Mabel told her. "And they'll be way better movies than dumb ol' Blood Valley."
"Yeah, ok," Acacia said at last. "But I'll only do it if I get to pick the movies. No Dream Boy High, it has to be something scary."
"Super scary," Mabel promised. "And I'll buy you a whole thing of ketchup to squirt at the screen if you think it's not bloody enough. So, hugs?"
Acacia dragged herself upright and grudgingly participated in a hug. "Be good for your G-Grunkle," Mable instructed her. (She pronounced it guh-grunkle. Stan often joked that he was going to live forever, if only so that he could keep adding gratuitous Gs to his name.) "Call us if you need us. Remember to brush your teeth and change your underwear. If any door-to-door salesmen show up, sick your uncle on 'em. You know the drill."
"Yeeeeeah mooooom."
She waited until Mabel had grabbed her suitcase and headed out the door before hurriedly picking up the drawing pad Hank had set aside and rushing to greet her Great Grunkle.
"Hey G-Grunkle Stan, my absolute favorite g-grunkle," Acacia said briskly, shoving the drawing pad at Hank. "Thank you so much for babysitting us, you're seriously the best. And because you're the best, we've prepared for you this thirty point presentation…"
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"…really really really really cool and you'd be the greatest great grunkle in the universe if you let us go," Acacia finished, slightly out of breath from having rushed through the whole thing twice. On the couch where Mabel had been sitting, G-Grunkle Stan raised one bushy grey eyebrow and took a swig of the Pitt Cola they'd so thoughtfully provided for him.
"You're a chip off the old block, kid, I'll give you that," Stan said, sounding mildly impressed. "That's what I call a sales pitch. What'd your mom say when you showed her?"
"Ha-ha, what? Mom? We didn't show her; what makes you think we showed her?" said Acacia, stepping sideways so that the drawing of Mabel with her #1 MOM sticker was hidden behind her back. "This is one hundred percent a presentation specifically for you."
"It will enrich the parent-child bond between us and we will love you forever," read Willow, who'd been lagging a little behind. Acacia elbowed her in the ribs.
"So I'm guessing a resounding 'no', then."
"Alright, yes, but you're our cool G-Grunkle!" Acacia pleaded. "You're supposed to spoil us! Don't you wanna be cooler than Mom and Dad and win our admiration forever and also get to see a really great movie with us?"
G-Grunkle Stan sighed and leaned forward. "Look, kids, I'm gonna level with you. If you'd come to me first, then I absolutely would've taken you to see that movie. I love bloody, age-inappropriate horror flicks. But your mom said no."
"But-"
"Hey, better to ask forgiveness than permission. Because if you ask permission, and your mom says no, and your G-Grunkle takes you anyway, and your mom finds out, she gets mad and doesn't let him babysit anymore, and then he doesn't get to take advantage of the 500 channels on her TV. And it's a dark day when you have to watch TV at your own house and pay for your own cable. That's a life lesson you've gotta learn."
"I can't believe this," Acacia said, tossing her laser pointer aside and storming off frustratedly. "I absolutely cannot believe this."
"It's a cruel world, sweetie," Stan called after her. "Cable is expensive and it's a cruel, cruel world."
Acacia stomped upstairs.
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The last of their Summerween candy was dumped unceremoniously onto a slightly scorched looking cookie sheet in the middle of the triplets' room, which currently sat in the center of the hand-crafted pentacle rug Mabel had helped Acacia sew last year. From the lowest of their triple bunkbeds, the one with Willow's slightly glittery pink and purple quilt on it, Hank and Willow sat and watched their sister storm around, preparing the summoning.
"I think maybe we should just accept that we're not going to get to see this movie," Hank suggested, to a "HARUMPH" from Acacia. "I seriously don't think it's worth the level of effort you're putting into it."
"We're gonna get in trouble," Willow agreed, using her forefinger to light the series of half melted birthday candles that her sister kept passing to her.
"You guys are quitters," said Acacia. "The last showing is at seven thirty. It's already six and I am DETERMINED to see this movie today. If we don't do it this weekend, Mom and Dad will get back from their conference thing and watch us like hawks and we'll never get another chance." She finished sticking the last felt-patch symbol into its proper place on the rug, stood back, and gave Willow a questioning look. "G-Grunkle Stan's still asleep on the couch, right?"
The littlest Pines closed her eyes for a moment and made a little humming sound at the back of her throat, accessing the spy-eye spell she'd placed for them in the living room. "Yeah. The TV's playing some old nature documentary, he would'a changed the channel if he was awake."
Acacia nodded and raised her arms beseechingly. "Astrum splendidum, te invoco, yadda yadda dico nomen tuum: Alcor!!"
The birthday candles flared blue. With a sudden hiss of stinking black smoke, the mini candy bars on the cookie sheet caught fire - a cold cobalt flame that devoured them almost instantly and left more black marks on the well-used metal surface. The lights flickered and went out, and the temperature of their bedroom dropped rapidly, ice creeping up the windows in unnatural geometric patterns. From within the pillar of writhing smoke, lines of gold appeared, grew and intersected and formed the rough shape of a man, eyes glowing like molten gold and black wings beating.
"WHO SUMMONS ALCOR, MANIPULATOR OF-"
Three loud, hissing shushes ruined the eldritch mood completely.
"Oh, come on," said their uncle Dipper in exasperation, dismissing the fug of burnt-sugar smoke with a wave of his hand and bringing the lights and the temperature back up to normal. "Last time you did the full candles-and-invocation thing I got yelled at for not making it dramatic enough. I don't know what you want from me, here."
"Stan's sleeping," Willow informed him seriously. "We don't wanna get caught."
"Which begs the question, what are you doing that you're not supposed to be doing?"
Acacia jumped in before Willow could answer. "We did the candles and everything because I want to make a deal. A real, serious, for-stakes one."
"She wants to sneak into a movie," said Hank, who had no appreciation for drama, and had lost interest and reclined on Willow's bed with a comic book. "I told her not to."
"I want you… don't laugh! I want you to sneak me in to the seven thirty showing of Blood Valley," Acacia continued, trying her hardest to look serious and stony-faced.
Dipper stared at her for a moment before asking, in an entirely uncle-ish and not at all demon-y way, "Isn't that the one with the chainsaws? And the brutal dismemberment? What's that rated? What did your mom say?"
Acacia gaped at him in mute disappointment. "You were our last hope," she hissed at last.
"It kind of sounds like she said no," said Dipper.
"Are you KIDDING ME??" Acacia shrieked, kicking over a candle and stomping on it. The other two shushed her hurriedly. "Do NOT take her side. You're a DEMON. This is your JOB. I will LITERALLY PAY YOU to get me into that movie." She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them again to offer up her best puppy pout. "Pleeeeeease, uncle Dipper? I really need you to be the cool uncle today."
"It will enrich the parent-child bond between us and we will love you forever," Willow said automatically, because they'd made her do it too many times today and she'd gotten into the habit.
"You've got a point." Dipper shrugged. "But your mom would kill me if she found out I let you watch two hours of chainsaw murder, you know that, right?"
"An hour and forty-five minutes of chainsaw murder," Acacia murmured defensively.
"And she IS your mom and it is ultimately her decision whether or not you're ready for that kind of movie. And actually, I don't think you're ready either. Trust me, movies like that used to give me nightmares for weeks when I was your age."
"I want. To make. A deal." Acacia insisted, sticking her hand out stiffly. "You'd do it if some other kid summoned you, right? You wouldn't care what THEIR mom said, right?"
"I don't have to live with THEIR mom," Dipper answered, but he was eyeing her proffered hand with a sort of hungry consideration.
Acacia, who could play her uncle like a fiddle when she needed to, baited her hook. "I am one hundred percent committed to seeing this movie, no matter the consequences. Seriously, name me a price. Any price. I don't care."
"Acacia, the first rule of demonology..." Willow began, warningly.
"Any. Price."
A little shudder ran up Dipper's spine, almost impossible to notice unless you were standing right next to him the way she was, and as the gold in his eyes dilated slightly, Acadia grinned. This was what the candles were for, this was why she'd done the full ritual, because there were certain expectations when you did the full ritual. "Pole Star, no," he rallied. "Your mom already said-"
"This isn't my mom's deal though, is it? It's between you, and me, and what I can afford to pay." She wiggled her fingers.
Her siblings were watching her, tensely.
Dipper's hand made a tiny, darting twitch forward, stopped itself, and then shot abruptly through the measly protective barrier of the circle in a shower of blue and gold sparks, only to dive past her own outstretched arm and give her a gentle whap on the forehead.
Willow and Hank both released a simultaneous, shaky breath.
"Do not EVER," said uncle Dipper, tetchily, "offer to shake on it before you've decided on the price. You know better. Put your hand down and we'll haggle."
Her grin widening, Acacia let her arm drop. There had been no real risk, ever, of Alcor the Dreambender making a skewed, dangerous deal with one of his nibblings, but the first rule of demonology had been drilled into their heads so deeply by Mabel and Henry that it was hard not to get nervous when breaking it.
"You sure you want to undermine your mom?" Dipper asked, sounding resigned.
"Yes," said Acacia, with fervor.
He glanced to the other two triplets, still hanging out on the bed. "Either of you want in on this?"
"I have utterly lost interest in ever seeing this movie, and I think Acacia's gonna be grounded for life when she gets found out," said Hank, going back to his comic book.
"I don't want to have nightmares," Willow said quietly.
The demon nodded and turned back to Acacia. "It's gonna cost you a lot more than candy."
"I figured. Name a price. For real this time."
Her uncle seemed to consider for a moment, and Acacia suddenly wondered if she'd pushed him a little too far with her taunting game. She thought she caught sight of what her mother called "The Look" flickering (literally flickering, like static on a television) lightning fast across his face - that worryingly mischievous cheshire smile that usually made Mabel shoot him worried glances and usher them out of the room before the silverware levitated and the walls started oozing blood. Then it was gone, and he was her slightly dorky uncle again.
"It's an hour and forty-five minutes long, right? That's an hour forty-five of watching something you've been explicitly told not to, so how about you pay for it with… an hour and forty-five minutes of your eyesight? To be taken and returned to you at the time of my choosing."
Acacia bit her lip contemplatively as she thought about it. "Could you take it while I was asleep? So it wouldn't mess me up at school or anything?"
"Yeah, I could do it then."
"Alright then. Do it. Take me to Blood Valley."
She held her hand out to him again, deal defined, and he took it. There was a warm rush of blue demon-fire up her arm, a feeling like she'd plunged it into tingling bathwater. Her uncle rolled his neck back languidly, that painfully tempting bargain finally given closure. "You're a shrewd little fiend, Pole Star," he informed her.
"I know. G-Grunkle Stan says I get it from him."
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Nobody paid Acacia a second glance as she walked into the brightly lit lobby of the cineplex. Their gazes seemed to bend around her. Dipper plucked a ticket from the hand of a gangly teenage teller whose eyes glazed over when the two of them passed the counter.
"You want popcorn?"
They got popcorn.
No one in the lobby questioned her age. Neither did anyone in the already packed theatre, as she shuffled down a crowded row of seats with a bucket of popcorn in her arms. Dipper floated silently behind her, invisible.
Acacia settled herself in a plush red seat near the middle of the theatre, her heart hammering with anticipation, and now a little bit of nervousness. She would NOT be scared of some fake movie with fake special effects. She WOULD be one of the cool chosen few who'd seen it. And she would NOT prove her mom right in saying that she wasn't old enough to handle it.
"It's not too late to back out, if you're scared," Dipper whispered, behind her.
She merely shook her head. The lights dimmed. The previews began rolling.
"So be it then," came his voice in her ear.
And suddenly, all throughout the theatre, the power went out.
Or that's what she thought had happened, at first. Acacia gave a little gasp and nearly dropped her popcorn at the sudden darkness pressing in all around her. But that wasn't right; she could still hear the movie playing - the up-tempo orchestral music of an ad for some spy thriller. No one else in the audience had noticed, and the horrible realization came upon her that uncle Dipper had taken her eyesight.
"What are you doing??" she hissed, hugging the popcorn to her chest. "No, no, no, I'll miss the movie! That's cheating! Our deal was that I would get to see the movie!"
"Our deal," said Dipper, in an amused, echoing, waspish voice that was very demon-y and not very uncle-ish at all, "was that I would sneak you into the theatre. I never agreed to let you see the movie."
"But you can't take my eyesight now, you said you'd do it while I was asleep!"
"I said that I could, not that I would," Dipper clarified.
"You lying cheater!" Acacia mustered up, to the sounds of angry shushing from the seats directly around her. "You DEMON'd me! Your own niece, and you DEMON'd me!"
There was a definite grin in Dipper's voice as it began to fade away. "Sorry, kid, but your mom said no. I'll be back to pick you up when the movie's over."
And then he was gone, and she was left blind and fuming as the opening titles began.
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She lasted thirty minutes, which was roughly the time it took for the movie to abandon its romantic subplot completely and really hit its stride with the chainsaws.
Acacia had been determined to sit through the entire movie anyway, and wring every stubborn dreg of enjoyment out of it she could. (She'd paid over an hour of eyesight for it, and if she couldn't say she'd seen it then she'd darn well say she'd gone to it.) But in the utter darkness, the graphic squelches and screaming began to paint gruesome pictures in her imagination, and indignation at what she was missing gave way slowly to anxiety, and then nausea and fear. She sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, popcorn forgotten on the floor beneath her and tingling little shivers running up and down her back, flinching at each crack and squelch.
At last, as one particularly gurgley, flesh-rending roar ripped out across the theater, a small sob escaped her.
"Are you ok?" said a woman's voice from the seat beside her, as if just now realizing how young she was. "Where are your parents?"
She tried to bite back another sob, tears pooling in her unseeing eyes. "I'm fine. I'm not scared. I'm old enough. I'm fine. If I could just see it then it wouldn't be scary at all, I bet, but stupid Alcor… stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid Alcor…"
She wished very badly that stupid Alcor hadn't left her alone in the theater.
"…Alcooooor," she hiccoughed, face crumpling, and a spit second later her uncle, who had never actually left the room, was wrapping his invisible arms around her and surrounding her with the familiar scent of ink and pine forests and just a little bit of sweat (and always, for some reason, trace remains of store-bought scented candles).
"No, shhh, Pole Star, it's ok, it's ok," he said hurriedly, hugging her tightly and pressing her tear-streaked face into his shoulder. His voice was fast and anxious, as if he hadn't expected her to react this way and was trying as quickly as he could to fix it. "Everything's ok, I'm right here, we can call it off, we can be done. Want me to take you home?"
"I'm not scared," she said, shudderingly, into his jacket. "I shook on it, I'll stay, I'll stay 'til the end…"
"You don't have to," he answered.
She nodded slightly, and the people around her made startled noises as the twelve year old girl who'd been sitting between them and chanting the name of the demon Alcor during all the bloodiest scenes suddenly levitated out of her seat and floated, sobbing, out of the theater.
The popcorn bobbed along behind her.
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By the time they got home, Acacia had recovered enough to remember that she was absolutely livid. As soon as her uncle set her down in the front yard, she opened the door with a rattling crash and stomped down the hallway, slamming it shut behind her so that Dipper had to float through the solid wood in order to follow. "I HATE you, uncle Dipper!"
"Acacia, Pole Star, come on, you know I couldn't actually let you watch that movie-"
"Then you should have just told me no!" Acacia wailed. "You tricked me! It was MEAN!"
"What's wrong, sweetie?" Stan asked sleepily, appearing in the living room doorway and rubbing his eyes, glasses askew.
"Ask Alcor," the girl said huffily. "Because I'm not speaking to him ever again for the rest of my life."
She made to go stampeding up the stairs and walked right into the banister, making a dull "oof" sound as the base of it punched her in the stomach. "Sorry, sorry," Dipper stammered, making a hand gesture that wasn't quite visible in only three dimensions, and Acacia blinked rapidly as her vision returned. Without even acknowledging him, she ran upstairs in shamefaced anger. Her uncle and great grunkle watched blankly as she went.
At last, Stan adjusted his glasses (Willow had weaved a few simple spells into them, on his birthday one year, and now they offered him a watery outline of things in the Dreamscape) and glanced at Dipper. "Yeesh, kid, what'd you do?"
"I messed up, Grunkle Stan."
"Eh," Stan said accommodatingly, "Don't we all."
The whole story came out as they sat together on the couch, the TV muted, drinking cans of Pitt Cola in a morose and contemplative way. Dipper spoke, floating in a cross-legged position half a foot above the couch cushions, and Stan listened thoughtfully and finished off Acacia's uneaten popcorn.
"It wasn't even really about the movie," Dipper finished at last, staring into his half-drained soda. "If it was just the movie, I really would have just said no. But that summoning was the sloppiest, most unsafe thing I've ever seen. If it hadn't been me, if it had been any other demon, and she tried to do something stupid like that…"
"She sounds a lot like you, Dipper," Stan commented.
"What? I was never like that!" His grunkle's look of "really?" seemed to bore into him, and he amended, "Ok, but the Transcendence hadn't happened back then. The world was safer; I could get away with it."
"Well, you can't childproof the world," Stan said, philosophically. "Best you can do for your kids is prepare 'em for it. You thought you'd scare her a little and remind her what it was she was dealing with?"
"Not scare her, just, y'know, mess with her," Dipper murmured glumly. "Do you think I did the wrong thing?"
"Nah, it's what I would have done."
"Well now I KNOW I did the wrong thing." This got a bark of laughter out of Stan.
"Seriously though, Dipper," he continued, gesturing vaguely with his empty soda can. "Fooling the kids for their own good is one of the finest Pines family traditions. I can't count the number of times I did it to you and Mabel, and you turned out alright. Y'know. All things considered."
"Grunkle Stan, I am literally a demon."
"Eh, you can't win 'em all. So I may have failed a bit on the responsible guardian front, my point still stands. It's a tried and true technique: she'll throw a fit for a while, get over it, learn a valuable lesson, and go on with her life. Trust me."
The look on Dipper's face seemed to indicate that coming from Grunkle Stan, "trust me" was not a phrase that inspired a lot of trust.
After a long silence between them, Stan unmuted the television and started flipping through the channels. "You know what'll take your mind off of this? Baby Fights. Everybody loves Baby Fights!"
"The Cherub of Carnage decimates the Terrible Tyke in a brutal one-sided beatdown," Dipper said absentmindedly, quoting the end of an episode that hadn't aired yet. "You know, I think maybe instead I'll go get some fresh air. Thanks for the talk, Grunkle Stan."
"Wait, WAIT!" Stan called out as Dipper rose smoothly from the couch and drifted through the nearest wall. "Can you do that for sports? Horse racing? We can gamble with this! It's not too late to use your powers for evil!!"
Dipper, smiling slightly, didn't bother to answer him. Maybe Stan was right; maybe Acacia would learn something from this after all.
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"I'm swearing bloody vengeance on uncle Dipper," said Acacia as the door to the triplets' room swung open. "Who's with me?"
The other two agreed, they had nothing better to do with their weekend.
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Bloody vengeance began on Saturday morning.
It began with the cold shoulder, and with his trio of nibblings pointedly refusing to touch, speak to, or look directly at him.
It continued through a sullen breakfast, even after he popped out abruptly on a summoning and returned with donuts. (The cashier at a Dunkin's in Phoenix, Arizona had a date that night, and an awful lot of stress-induced acne he'd been desperate enough to summon a demon in the back room to be rid of.) They still refused to acknowledge his existence, although they did, it must be said, quickly and ravenously acknowledge the existence of the donuts.
"I'm still here, right?" Dipper asked Stan a little sourly, sticking his arm through his grunkle's head as he was reading the paper, and eliciting a sudden shiver.
"Hey, knock it off!" Stan rolled up his newspaper and swatted vaguely through where Dipper occupied the air. "You wanna validate yourself, you can do the dishes."
"Huh, that's weird, now I can't see or hear you. Spooky."
"Oy, we got a comedian." Across the table, Willow covered her mouth to hide a snort of laughter, got the stinkeye from her sister, and quickly resumed her stony-faced pretending not to notice him.
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Sometime after breakfast, Hank and Acacia came downstairs wearing the canvas backpacks that usually contained their adventuring gear (binoculars, sketch pads, disposable cameras, canteens, and flashlights, to name a few), and headed for the back door with a mission in their eyes. Dipper managed to corner them in the kitchen.
"So… where are you headed with those? Doing anything fun? Something maybe you want to tell uncle Dipper all about? Guys?"
"If somebody was asking us where we were going, which he isn't," said Acacia, making a valiant effort to look straight through him, "I would tell that somebody that it isn't any of his business. Which it isn't."
"You should also tell him that you telling him that doesn't officially count as talking to him," Hank suggested, in a tone that made it hard to tell whether he was trying to be helpful or sarcastic.
"Which it doesn't," Acacia confirmed, to cover all her bases.
"Alright, that's enough. Staaaan!" Dipper called out, and Stan's voice rang back muffled from the other room.
"Acknowledge your uncle's existence or you're grounded!"
"You can't ground us, you're the babysitter!" Acacia shouted back. "You don't have the authority!"
"You wanna bet on that? No TV tonight! Hah! Wanna try for no bedtime snack? I'll go power-mad, kids, don't tempt me."
"Uuuuugh, fine." She reluctantly raised her eyes to Dipper's face, while her brother tried not to laugh. "Hank saw a thing. In the woods. Yesterday. We're gonna catch it and keep it as a pet. Right, Hank? Remember the woods thing?"
"Right," said Hank, blankly. "The, uh, unicorn."
Acacia gave him a cold look. "Yes. We're going to catch a unicorn."
"Well, you know, a tiny unicorn," Hank continued in an admirable save. "Like, a shrunk one."
"Yeah, obviously a shrunk one. So we'll be way out in the woods all day. Doing that."
"You… want any help with that?" Dipper asked hopefully.
"Oh, and what'll you charge me for it, my unicorn-catching ability?" said Acacia, scathingly. "C'mon, Hank. We don't need HIS kind of help."
She pushed past her uncle and barged out the door, her brother behind her.
"…right," said Dipper. "Well. Be safe. Stay away from the gnomes."
"Everybody knows to stay away from the gnomes, geeze!" said Acacia, and then they were gone.
Dipper hovered dispiritedly in the middle of the kitchen floor, slightly too low, so that his feet passed through the linoleum, and worried suddenly that he'd broken something precious.
You demon'd her, echoed that little buzzing doubt at the back of his head, the realization expanding like a wave of heat through the dark abyssal psyche he'd inherited from Bill. You made her think she was getting a fair deal and then you yanked it away from her at the last second. Of course she's angry, of course she never wants to speak to you again. Isn't that what you hated about Bill? Why you feared him? And you didn't even notice what you did until she started crying. You thought it was a joke. You're just like-
There was a tug on the back of his jacket.
"Uncle Dipper, are you being a hypochondriac?" said Willow, standing there with the dog-eared cardboard box of some board game under one arm, and the other clutching his suit-tails like a bell-pull, trying to get his attention. At the sound of her voice the kitchen suddenly snapped back into focus from what seemed like a long distance away.
Dipper blinked a few times, and realized he'd been perilously close to accidentally making the walls ooze blood again. Mabel would have been cracking up over the whole needlessly dramatic situation. Maybe he should hold off on the existential crisis until at least lunchtime; children were fickle.
"Hey, Little Fighter, where'd you hear that?" he asked, bending down to Willow's eye level.
"It's what Mom calls it when you stare off into space and your aura goes all green-purple around the edges. Don't worry about uncle Dipper, he's just being a hypochondriac."
"Well first of all, I don't think she's using that word right," said Dipper.
"I kind of think she is," said Willow, raising an eyebrow skeptically.
"Well she ISN'T and I'm NOT. ...Does this mean you're done not talking to me?"
"Yeah, that was just phase one. We're in phase two now," she answered cryptically, and held out the box. It was a chessboard; the faded and scuffed-up one she'd inherited from the attic of the Mystery Shack. "Acacia wants me to distract you while she plans her bloody vengeance. Can you be distracted for a while? I could beat you at chess a couple times."
He smiled at last. "I could probably manage that. I guess you can't tell me what this bloody vengeance is?"
"Sorry. Triplet loyalty."
"Fair enough. But if I win, you have to tell me."
"But you're not going to win," said Willow, matter-of-factly.
He didn't. Five times.
------------------------
The shed in the backyard that contained Mabel's various demonology paraphernalia was technically supposed to be off-limits to the triplets, but everyone knew the code to the alphabetical bike lock holding it shut was WADLS. Currently, the door was slightly ajar, and anyone taking inventory would have noticed a few key items missing from the shelves inside.
Hank and Acacia regrouped from their respective missions in the woods just beyond the backyard, hidden from sight among the shadows of the trees.
"Got the balloons?" Acacia asked, and Hank held up a package of colorful latex party balloons.
"Got the holy water?"
She proffered a half-empty plastic bottle, labeled in sharpie in Mabel's cheerful, round handwriting. "This was all I could find. Think it's enough?"
"To fill one hundred water balloons? No. I'm not even sure it's enough to fill ONE water balloon."
Acaca made a face and said defensively, "Well I thought she had more; it's not MY fault Mom doesn't keep her supplies stocked. We can still make it work. We'll… we'll water it down! Y'know, dilute it."
"Can you dilute holy water?" Hank asked. "Would it even still count?"
"Sure you can! It just turns into Mostly Pretty Good water. Everybody knows that; it's science. We'll just do a few drops per balloon with a bunch of regular water from the spigot."
"I don't think this plan was very well thought out," was Hank's critique. "You know, it's not too late to call off your revenge and actually go looking for tiny unicorns. That would probably be more fun."
"Quitter," muttered Acacia, taking the bag from him and tearing it open rather forcefully, spilling little balloons everywhere. "We're gonna make uncle Dipper rue this day. RUE it."
"Are you really mad at him for tricking you, or are you just mad at yourself for not being able to sit through the movie, and you're projecting?"
Acacia's face went pink. "Oh, shut up and help me fill these balloons."
------------------------
Like special ops soldiers, or at least how they thought special ops soldiers probably acted based on what they'd seen on TV, Hank and Acacia flattened themselves on either side of the screen door, backpacks slung over one shoulder and bulging with ammunition. Acacia inched sideways slowly to peer around the edge of the doorframe. A quick glimpse into the kitchen. Willow and Dipper playing chess at the kitchen table, her uncle's back turned to them. Dipper solid, existing in this reality in order to manipulate the chess pieces. She gave Hank a curt nod. The two of them hefted balloons.
Phase three, she mouthed.
"FOR BLOOD VALLEEEEEY!!!"
Their screaming battle cry mingled with the BANG of the screen door as the two of them barreled inside and started lobbing balloons. The breadbox went rattling backwards as water exploded against it. Mabel's hand-knitted "Hot Stuff!" potholders were knocked off their hook above the sink. Pots and pans crashed to the floor. Silverware jangled. Salt was spilled. The last of the donuts took heavy bombardment until their flimsy cardboard box gave way and crumpled in on them. Willow, pragmatically, seized her chessboard and ducked under the table.
Dipper whipped around abruptly and pulled back instinctively into the incorporeality of the Dreamscape. It didn't matter. With an undignified BLOOSH, a water balloon smacked him in the face.
"HOLY WATER! I am a GENIUS!" Acacia crowed victoriously, as a barrage of balloons that should have passed right through him exploded on impact. The Mostly Pretty Good water within them burst violently on contact with a demon, sending up fireworks of little gold sparks.
She'd expected him to be angry. But Dipper, suit plastered to him and tiny sparks of magic dancing up and down his body as he raised his forearms against the hail of balloons, only grinned at them widely, eyes going strangely bright. Alcor had been challenged. With an abrupt, eye-watering flicker, he was gone, darting away into the house. The two of them gave chase.
His arm existed in physical space again - he seized an umbrella from the hat stand in the hallway (it was Willow's, and had a frog on it) and snapped it open in front of him like a shield, balloons smashing against it and splattering the walls and hardwood floor with gouts of water and bits of colorful plastic. Several photo frames and a fake plastic fern took collateral damage and smashed against the floor as the three of them battled, Dipper spinning the umbrella and feinting as if fencing.
"For all the kids everywhere who ever wanted to sneak into a movie!" Acacia shrieked as they went crashing through the living room. "I want a do-over on my deal!!"
"YOU," Dipper shouted back, in his most buzzing, echoing, alien, Alcor voice, "ARE NOT OLD ENOUGH TO SEE BLOOD VALLEY, AND I STAND BY THAT DECISION!"
"You," she echoed, "Are a MEAN, LYING, BORING DEMON!!" He dived behind an armchair, and she and Hank toppled it over in chasing him. The carpet squelched under their shoes. Dipper deflected a balloon into the TV.
"I TAKE OFFENSE TO THAT LAST ONE!"
"You are SO boring!! When I summon you with the candles and everything you're supposed to be ALCOR, not a RESPONSIBLE ADULT!!"
They swept by Stan, who was sitting on one end of the couch and talking calmly to Henry on the phone with a sort of manic grin.
"Handle these kids? Of course we can handle them, they're little angels. Dipper and I have it all under-" An errant water balloon struck him in the face. "YOU KIDS STOP THAT OR I SWEAR THEY'LL NEVER FIND YOUR BODIES! No, no, everything's fine, you enjoy your trip. WOULD YOU KEEP IT DOWN? I'M LYING TO YOUR FATHER! Ha ha, no, it's just this wholesome family game we're playing! It's like the quiet game, but with screaming. I can be trusted with children."
The whirlwind of chaos that was Dipper, Acacia, and Hank circumnavigated the living room and began making its way up the stairs. Willow trailed behind at a safe distance, watching the carnage with detached curiosity.
"Out of ammo!" said a soaking wet and out of breath Hank, falling back behind Acacia, who was still launching balloons. His sister was almost out as well. Her backpack was too light, her hands rooting around near the bottom to find projectiles. It didn't matter. They were almost to phase four.
They cornered him, finally, in their room.
"Willow, now!" Acacia shouted, as Dipper backed into precisely the right position. Willow, with the practiced motion of someone who'd been given a job and was determined to do it well, whipped out a stack of notecards and started rushing through them, chanting in hastily googled Latin.
"Astrum splendidum, inlaqueatus es! Nulla fugae! Circulum te tenet!"
Dipper's eyes flickered down. They'd chased him, purposefully, expertly, to their summoning rug, and at Willow's grammatical train wreck of a spell the felt symbols beneath him flared brightly to life.
"Audite vocem meam, et oboeditis!" Willow continued, flipping through her cards, hastily tossing the spent ones aside. "Inlaqueatus es cum nomine verus tuo: Dipper Pines!" The invisible barrier of the circle snapped around him like the jaws of a trap, made rock hard by his true name. "And," Willow added with a victorious finality, holding up a notecard that looked suspiciously like it had come from the previous plan and gotten mixed in by accident, "It will enrich the parent-child bond between us and we will love you forever!!"
The last notecard fell slowly to her feet. "Aaaand… phase four," said Acacia.
The four of them stood there in exhausted silence. Dipper, with diluted holy water sparking slightly against his skin, umbrella fallen slack at his side. Hank and Acacia breathing hard and spattered in friendly fire, Willow standing in the doorway with a handful of notecards spread out in a halo around her feet. Dipper prodded at the pentacle's perimeter with the end of his umbrella. It fizzled slightly, but the invocation of his name (and more importantly, 99 balloons worth of heavily diluted holy water) had taken its toll, and he couldn't seem to pass through.
Acacia stalked forward, hefting one of the last water balloons in one hand. "I want," she demanded coldly, "A do-over. You cheated me out of my deal. You owe me."
"You could have just summoned me," said Dipper, dripping petulantly onto the rug.
"Yeah, but we couldn't have kept you here. Give me a fair deal and we'll let you out."
"Give me a minute to recover and I'll break out on my own."
"Not if we keep pelting you with holy water, you won't."
The Look swarmed across his face, cheerful and poisonous. "You're bluffing. After all that? You don't have enough."
"Take me to the movie!" she insisted angrily.
Her uncle leaned forward, so his smirking face was just across the barrier from hers. "Make me."
She threw her balloon with the determination-fueled might of a major league pitcher.
Dipper's umbrella came up as if the rest of the world was stuck in slow motion. The balloon collided with it and shattered into a million shining droplets. A fine mist of failure peppered Acacia's face. She reached automatically into her backpack again, and her eyes widened. There were no more water balloons. He'd been right.
"You're out, aren't you," said Dipper, with a voice like wasps in a tesla coil. That dangerous, cheshire grin split his face, sparks dancing in his teeth. "You failed."
And Acacia, angrily, shaking with rage and frustration and shame and disappointment - Acacia, who HAD failed, who'd sworn she could handle an hour and forty-five minutes of chainsaw murder and had utterly betrayed herself and cried like a baby even when she couldn't see the gore - reached into her backpack blindly, felt her fingers close on something smooth, tore it out with a shriek, and dashed the last dregs of a plastic bottle marked "Holy Water" right in his eyes.
She dropped it in horror, and G-Grunkle Stan came bursting through the doorway just as Dipper started screaming.
------------------------
Needless to say, the three of them were very, very busted.
"You are very, very busted," announced G-Grunkle Stan, saying it anyway.
Armed with piles of towels, kitchen sponges, and in Willow's case a blow dryer and an extension cord, they'd been set to work cleaning up their war zone. Provided they hid all the evidence before their parents got home, Stan had promised them, Mabel and Henry never had to find out. And so in resigned silence, save for the occasional squelch and splatter of water and the hum of Willow's blowdryer, they slowly sopped up one hundred water balloons worth of sodden carpet and upholstery.
Stan entered with a series of soggy footfalls and set down a bucket for them to wring their towels out into. "How you holdin' up, Dipper?"
On the driest part of the couch, a shivering bundle of blankets and quilts said a few choice words that Acacia remembered contributing greatly to Blood Valley's R-rating. She bit her lip guiltily.
"Hey, language. There's kids," said Stan, from whom they'd learned quite a few interesting words over the years. "You need anything? Ice? Painkillers?"
The quilt pile made a no-ish motion.
"You want me to call your sister?"
Another little shake.
"Well, you let me know." He left them to their work.
Eventually, Acacia worked up the nerve to approach the couch, under the pretext of trying to dry it off, and shot a sidelong look at the pile of blankets that was her uncle.
"I'm sorry…" she murmured, prodding the upholstery halfheartedly with a towel too dripping to dry it. "I… I really didn't mean to…"
The pile parted slightly, like the flap of a tent. "Get in here," said Dipper.
She dropped her towel and climbed in under the blankets to sit on his lap, and he wrapped his arms around her, still a little damp. Despite the shivering his skin was warmer than it should have been, like the heat from a bruise, and little sparks still jumped from him occasionally, making tiny glints of gold in the warm, swarded, under-blanket darkness. There was no glow from his eyes.
"I'm really sorry-" she began again, and he hugged her tightly, all but the barest trace of that otherworldly buzzing gone from his voice.
"Hey, don't be sorry. You and your four step plan outmaneuvered Alcor the Dreambender. You got me good." She remembered reading somewhere that demons liked to be challenged, that they got a thrill out of wagers and contests of will. It must have been true; Dipper seemed oddly satisfied for someone who'd just had his vision scoured by holy water. She vaguely made out him rubbing at his eyes in the darkness.
"Did I mess up your eyes forever?" Acacia asked, faintly.
He laughed: an uncle laugh, not an Alcor laugh. "Acacia, I'm a demon. Nothing's going to mess me up forever. Give it an hour or two; I'll be fine. I took your vision for a while, you took mine for a while. I'm willing to call it even if you are."
"That wasn't part of my plan. I just wanted to get back at you for tricking me, I didn't mean to actually hurt you. I'm sorry…" she sniffled.
"No, I'M sorry. What I did to you with that deal wasn't right. It was cruel and I should have known better. I just got carried away. I hope…" and here his voice petered out, grew anxious. "I hope you can still trust me, after this."
What a bizarre thing to ask. Of course she still trusted him; he was uncle Dipper. But aloud, Acacia said, "Only if you promise never to do it again." She considered, and clarified, "To me, anyway. I don't care who else you mess with."
"I'll promise that, if you promise to be safer with your summonings. Not all demons are me."
"And they'll take advantage of me and you wanted to teach me that," she guessed.
"Yeah. There was probably a nicer way to do it."
"But I wasn't summoning some other demon," Acacia argued. "Geeze, of COURSE I'd be careful if it wasn't you."
"You know, when your mom and dad and G-Grunkle Stan and I tell you not to do things, it's not because we're trying to be mean to you," said Dipper. "It's so you don't have to learn that kind of thing the hard way. We're just trying to keep you safe."
"I know. But sometimes you're wrong and your rules are stupid."
"Yeah. Sometimes," said Dipper, probably thinking back to his own less-than-cautious childhood. "Try to give us the benefit of the doubt, though." He seemed to be considering for a moment. "But I guess in this case I might have been wrong about Blood Valley. Do you still want to see it for real? I owe you."
Acacia swallowed stiffly. "No tricks? I can really sit there and watch an hour and forty-five minutes of chainsaw murder?"
"Sure, if you want."
There was a panicky little fluttering in her chest as she thought back to the night before, when she'd spent hours drifting in and out of gory, movie-induced nightmares. "Could we maybe instead," she hazarded, "go see a different movie, and then you could tell everyone we totally went and saw Blood Valley, and everyone would be impressed and think I was cool and brave and I wouldn't actually have to watch that movie again? It's not that I'm scared," she added indignantly, at Dipper's half-stifled laughter. "It's just that I already sat through the first half and it bored me literally to tears."
"Sure, Pole Star," he said, sounding amused. "We'll go to something fun this time."
"Hey, there's a car pulling up in the driveway," said Hank's voice from somewhere outside their little blanket world, and a moment later their makeshift tent was being pulled away. Dipper gave an offended whine and threw an arm across his eyes, yanking the heap of blankets back over himself. "You'd better get out here, I think it's Mom and Dad."
The sound of a car door slamming echoed from outside, and there was a distant cry of, "Guess who's banned from another demonology convention? I'll give you a hint: it starts with 'M' and rhymes with table! Give up? Just kidding, it was Henry! And man is there a story behind THAT."
"It's Mom and Dad," said Willow.
"How much would it cost me to have you clean all this water up before they get inside the house?" Acacia asked frantically, tugging on a quilt.
"To circumvent karma? More than you could ever afford," said the pile of blankets. "Besides, I'm pretty worn out right now. I don't think I could even if I wanted to. You know, there's probably a lesson to be learned here."
"Yeah, it's that you two shouldn't be allowed to babysit," grumbled Acacia. "I absolutely, positively, cannot believe this."