Chapter Text

Gurl trg n jubyr ybg uneqre guna guvf, xvqf.



“There's nothing actually mysterious about Gravity Falls,” said Stan. Mabel had decided to spend the day at the Shack, and was being given the rundown on how it worked. “And yet, despite the total absence of anything interesting about this town, it's still gotten a bit of a reputation as a place for aliens, spirits, and other mystic voodoo hoopla. You can thank yours truly for that.” Mabel gasped.

“Grunkle Stan!” said Mabel. “Are you saying that you're a skilled mythmaker responsible for Gravity Falls' entire culture?”

“Yes,” said Stan. “That is exactly what I am saying. Not that it's hard. Look.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a rock. “This is the rock that looks like a face. I retired it when I found a bigger rock that looks like a bigger face. People would be absolutely fascinated by it. Is it an ectoplasmic imprint of a ghost? Is it Jesus? No, it's a rock that happens to look like a face, and people ascribe undue importance to that. Business is all about finding things that people think are more important than they are. That, and making things up. Follow me.”

“Okay!” said Mabel. Stan led her to a small, dark room under the stairs.

“Behold!” said Stan. He flipped a switch, and the room was softly lit by a chain of red Christmas lights. In the middle of the room, behind some rope, was a strange amorphous mechanical entity with all kinds of sharp metal parts sticking out. It was kind of impressive, although Mabel had no idea what she was looking at.

“Woah,” said Mabel.

“I found this... apparatus just outside of town,” said Stan, “at the end of a straight path carved in the ground. Almost like it... crash-landed...”

“Wow, Grunkle Stan, is that true?” said Mabel.

“No,” said Stan. “I threw a bunch of old car parts and broken computers together and painted over anything that seemed easily identifiable. But don't tell any of the people who bought keychains of it yesterday.”

“Grunkle Stan, you're terrible!” said Mabel, and she playfully shoved him.

“I sure am!” said Stan. He turned off the lights and led Mabel back out. “The key is that it's not hard to come up with this stuff. Most of the Mystery Shack gets rotated out every couple of weeks, so people never feel like they've seen it all before even if they come regularly. And so people can never inspect a bad illusion twice, eh, eh?”

“I heard Li'l Gideon has an act where he convinces people he's psychic,” said Mabel. “Do you do anything like that?”

“Ugh, Gideon,” said Stan. “Well, first off, he'd never have had the idea to con people with fake supernatural stuff if I hadn't been around first. He's, uh, nine years old. So that's strike one, there. Plagiarism. And second off, Gideon does exactly the same thing every single night, which is a shallow grab-bag of cold reading, warm reading, and hot reading.” He counted off these three types of reading on his fingers.

“I've heard of cold reading before, but I don't know what it is,” said Mabel. “Can you do it?”

“Sure, I can do it,” said Stan. “I learned around your age, and it still comes in handy sometimes, if I need to really seal the deal on a big, dumb family with more money than they know what to do with. But that little creep Gideon, he doesn't know anything else. So. There's cold reading. You pick someone suggestible-looking out of the audience. You say that your mystical psychic powers are giving you vague hints about their life, but the image is cloudy, or whatever, and you have to guess at what it means. So you start throwing out guesses, which are actually just random statements that are likely to be true anyway, and whatever makes their eyes light up, you double down on that guess. 'The spirits are telling me you have a close acquaintance who lives in a big city. New York, perhaps, or Los Angeles. It could be San Francisco. Yes, I can see it more clearly now, it has to be San Francisco where your friend lives, I can see the Golden Gate Bridge in the background near where he's walking.' Yeah, see?”

“And people fall for that?” said Mabel.

“Like acorns in September,” said Stan. “You see, most people aren't really thinking about it from the perspective of 'he has to prove to me that he has magic powers', even if they think that they're thinking about it that way. So once the mark's thought of a person the psychic could be talking about, the psychic's already won, because anything they say that applies gets remembered as a miracle, and anything they say that doesn't apply doesn't get remembered at all.”

“I wish homework worked that way,” said Mabel.

“It does when you get to college,” said Stan. “So then there's warm reading, which is the least impressive type of reading, in my opinion. Warm reading is when you tell people things that are so generic, they couldn't possibly not apply. Some people are still impressed, because people are just really easily satisfied, I guess. 'I sense that sometimes you are very gregarious, but other times you would rather be alone.' 'I sense that at some point in your life, there has been a door near which very important things happened. A door that separated... two areas... Woo...' And finally hot reading, which is my favorite type of reading; that's when you spy on people before the show starts and 'psychically' 'determine' things you already know from the spy work. Really impressive if you can pull it off, and Li'l Gideon certainly does, somehow. People get upset if they figure it out, though.”

“I bet,” said Mabel. “So why don't you have a show like that at the Mystery Shack?”

“Eh,” said Stan. “Gideon sort of soured me on the whole thing. I think ethics in business is a load of hooey, but Gideon is still, maybe, less than ten percent as ethical as me. I may lie to people a lot in the Mystery Shack, but I've never pretended I could cure some kid's cancer. I think. That's messed up. And, more seriously, the Mystery Shack is designed to service as few or as many people as needed at a time, all the time. Gideon pretty much needs at least half of a full house each night, which just isn't realistic for us except maybe in the middle of summer. Not that he gets that many more customers than us, ours are just more spread out through the day.”

“Huh,” said Mabel. “You sure have thought about this a lot. I admire that.”

“It's what I do,” said Stan. “So who wants to help me make imaginary animals?”

“I do!” said Mabel. “I do!”

“Great!” said Stan. “Because the new batch of reject taxidermy samples just got in.” Stan opened up a nearby cardboard box of mangled animal parts, which Mabel hadn't even noticed. She looked in and her pupils shrank.

“I can feel my innocence melting off of my face,” said Mabel.



Dipper burst into the Mystery Shack's back room, still in a panic, sweating up a storm.

“Hey, Dipper!” said Mabel. “Look, I'm making a duck tree.” She presented to him a moose antler covered in misassembled bird parts, which she had begun to bury in dirt inside a flowerpot. “Wait, what's wrong?”

“Everything's changed, now, Mabel,” said Dipper. “Everything's different.”

“Oh, the summer finally hit you?” said Mabel. “Good, you were being a big ol' grumpy grump before like we were still in school.”

“No, Mabel, you don't get it,” said Dipper. “Reality isn't what we thought it was.”

“That sounds awfully philosophical, Dipper,” said Mabel.

“Reality is literally not what we thought it was,” said Dipper. “That book I was reading earlier is real.”

“Like, the book with all the weird monsters in it?” said Mabel. “The mysterious forest book?”

“Yes, that book,” said Dipper, and he tapped his foot a single time before returning to pacing. “I saw a Gremloblin in the forest. Something from the book that doesn't exist in real life. I mean, it does exist in real life, apparently, but it doesn't make any sense. It implies that at least some of the rest of the things the journal describes are real, maybe all of them. Oh, also, I lost my phone because I was so excited, so I need a new phone.” Mabel was beginning to laugh, she covered her mouth with her sleeve in a failed attempt to obscure it. “I'm still too excited to care. There's this whole untapped supernatural world out there, and I'm the first person to come across it with a logical mindset! It's like I'm living Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality, Mabel!”

“It's just like one of my internet fanfics!” said Mabel, with a faux deep voice, while waving her arms in a caricature of mania. “Okay, let me get this straight. You went into the forest, and you saw a magical monster from your cryptozoology book. You then lost your phone – wait, I can guess, you got a picture of it first, and then you lost your phone, right?”

“It was a video,” said Dipper, and he was already turning red because he didn't like where this was going.

“Okay, wow, what a sad coincidence,” said Mabel. “So let's say that I told you this story about me. What would you say?”

“'Stop kidding around, Mabel',” said Dipper.

“That would be if you were in a good mood,” said Mabel. “It'd probably actually be 'Mabel, what's the prior probability that all of science is a lie? And what's the prior probability that you had a bad dream and mixed it up with real life?'”

“Noted,” said Dipper. “But if I'm right and it wasn't just a dream, then there should be some safe, easy way to test it. Let me go get the journal. If I recall correctly there were some magical spells in it that I didn't even bother to test because I assumed we were living in a non-crazy universe.”

“This I gotta see,” said Mabel. When Dipper came back, journal-in-hand, she was miming eating popcorn.

“Okay, so, first off,” said Dipper, rubbing the cover of the journal, “this is Journal #3. First clue is the 3 on the cover, second and more definitive clue is that the text often references Journals #1 and 2. I'd considered that it could be a fictional conceit, but if the journals are real, then there probably are at least two more volumes. So this journal probably contains no more than a third of all currently recorded knowledge about the anomalies in Gravity Falls. In fact, we should expect most strange things we find to not appear in this journal, because the first two journals probably covered the low-hanging fruit.”

“Okay,” said Mabel. She wished Dipper would just get to the experiment already. She wanted to either laugh or be awed.

“Second off,” said Dipper, “this journal contains a lot of encrypted text. I didn't really try to solve any of it yesterday, because it didn't seem important when I thought it was just a fun fantasy thing, so I didn't chart letter frequencies or anything, but I did give it a quick once-over, and there are at least two separate encryption methods used. Both of them avoid numbers, but one of them outputs code text with the standard twenty-six letter English alphabet, and the other one seems to output code text with a twenty-five letter cryptic alphabet made up of symbols. It probably corresponds to the English alphabet with something omitted.”

“Ooh, secret codes,” yawned Mabel.

“They can't be that secret,” said Dipper, “because it seems that they're intended to be broken, like a puzzle. If it was intended to hide anything from anyone serious, it wouldn't bother with anything but public key encryption. It's probably just meant to hide particularly sensitive things from people who briefly glance at it, or something like that. Anyway, someone must really love codes.”

“Like you,” said Mabel. “Are you gonna do something magic or what?”

“I'm getting to it!” said Dipper. “Third off, the other two journals are probably out there, given that I just found this one sitting there in the middle of nowhere unguarded. There are other people with access to this sort of information, maybe the journals' original author, although there are a few dates that suggest the journals themselves are at least thirty years old, which is very telling.. I doubt anyone has made good use of the information in the journals, given that the paranormal still isn't public knowledge, so we still definitely have a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of exploitation opportunities. Still, we should be prepared to deal with trouble, if another journal-bearer meets us and gets antagonistic.”

“Which brings me straight to my next point,” continued Dipper. “Fourth off, towards the beginning of the journal it says 'TRUST NO ONE IN GRAVITY FALLS'. Just like that, in all caps.”

“Sounds kinda paranoid,” said Mabel. “Whoever wrote the journals must have been a real kook.”

“There's no such thing as overly paranoid, Mabel,” said Dipper. “Especially in a situation like this. I think we should pay attention to the journal's warning. Even with someone like Soos, who's definitely not some diabolical mastermind, I still don't trust him to keep a secret. Not even our own great uncle can know about the journals or anything in them.”

“Blah blah blah, blah blah blah,” said Mabel. “I'm waiting to get invested in this until you actually test something like you said you would. It's only fair, Dipper.”

“Okay, fine, fifth off,” said Dipper-

“And fifth off,” said Mabel, in her Dipper voice, “blah blah blah blah.”

“Fifth off,” said Dipper, “the magical rituals show up throughout the journal, but are mostly concentrated in an index towards the back. Here.” Dipper flipped through the journal until he found the section he was looking for, he showed it to Mabel.

“Now we're talking,” said Mabel, albeit still with a trace of impatience.

“Now, let's see what would make a nice, safe test,” said Dipper. “Ritual To Destroy The Indestructible – sounds kinda dramatic, and it's encrypted anyway. Chant To Raise An Army Of The Dead – straight out. Process To Enter Others' Dreams – better, but the instructions are kind of long, it sounds difficult to set up. Ah, this is perfect – Incantation To Make The Noises Of Your Spirit Animal. Simple, short, and easy to objectively detect.”

“Hmm,” said Mabel.

“'While making embarrassing arm-spinning motions as in the figure' – okay,” said Dipper, and he began to spin his arms as if he was trying to take off from the ground, “'chant the following: Aloe Verum Melum Blonkum Vocaloidum Caw, Aloe Verum Melum Blonkum Vocaloidum Caw, Aloe Verum Melum Blonkum Vocaloidum Caw!'” Just as Dipper was starting to feel foolish, he began to gag. Mabel raised her eyebrows in alarm. Then Dipper began hissing.

It was an unmistakable hiss, an absolutely bestial noise that Mabel knew very well Dipper couldn't produce on his own. His back also arched to match the noise, and this movement, too, seemed quite unnatural. It seemed that the hissing occurred whenever Dipper tried to speak, and yet he tried to speak still.

“Wow, that's... pretty neat,” said Mabel. A few increasingly frustrated hisses later, she followed up with “Yeah, I get the point, Dipper, you can hiss, now.” Dipper made a 'talking mouth' gesture at her while hissing, and this apparently got the actual point across. “Oh, you can't speak now. Well, that stinks... Maybe it goes away after a minute?” Dipper began frantically flipping through the journal's pages. “Okay, I can't really say 'I told you so', because I didn't tell you so, but I think this is why you shouldn't perform ancient magical spells out of a mysterious ancient book without putting some serious thought into them first. And, like, reading about what they do exactly.” Dipper was pointing at a particular paragraph; Mabel read it:

“'Process To Undo Simple Incantations',” said Mabel. “Yeah, that sounds right. 'To undo some simple incantations, simply perform all involved actions backwards and concentrate on the desire to rid yourself of the results.' Alright, here goes...” Mabel began spinning her arms, counterclockwise. “Awk Mudoila Covemuk Nalbmullem Urivola, Awk Mudoila Covemuk Nalbmullem Urivola, Awk Mudoila Covemuk Nalbmullem Urivola!” It felt too easy, saying it backwards, as if some force of the universe were helping her along, like she was skating in what was merely a preexisting groove in the ice. When Mabel noticed this, she shuddered. Dipper gasped, in a distinctly non-hissy way.

“Okay,” said Dipper. “Are you convinced?”

“Yeah, but I already was,” said Mabel. “I more wanted you to prove it to yourself-”

“Mencius Putrescentiae, Yarvcurtinis Urbiticus, Mencius Putrescentiae, Yarvcurtinis Urbiticus, Nurks, Nurks, Nurks, Nurks, Nurks, Cuckoo!” said Dipper, startling Mabel with how animated he was.

“Dipper,” said Mabel, trying to stay calm, “didn't we just go over how randomly reading spells is a bad idea? Especially if they're real?”

“Neah, I looked at this one a bit more closely,” said Dipper, and every time he opened his mouth, a bright light came out. “The Chant Of Dark Enlightenment. It makes your uvula emit a bright light, look! This is amazing!”

“Yeah, it is pretty amazing,” said Mabel, although her expression was tightened by concern.

“It's just like Methods Of Rationality!” said Dipper.

“You already said that, Dipper,” said Mabel. “I got it. So have you come up with any cool hacks yet?”

“No, but I bet I will,” said Dipper. “I remember some of the artifacts described in the Journal sounding pretty useful, too. It might be worth looking for them. Also, I'm going to want to crack the codes in case they-”

“Hey, kids!” said Stan, who had invited himself into the room. “Ooh, a duck tree. I like the way you think, Mabel. Did you show Dipper how to make exhibits for the Shack?” Stan turned to Dipper, who had frozen in fear in mid-speech. “What's the matter with him? Did he swallow a flashlight or something?” Dipper's mouth snapped shut. Mabel looked back and forth between Dipper and Stan.

“No,” said Mabel, very carefully.

“Okay...” said Stan. “Well, if this is ready,” he said, gesturing at the 'duck tree'-

“It is,” said Mabel.

“Then I'll be putting it on display,” said Stan, scooping it up in his arms. “Keep up the good work! I bet Dipper can't come up with anything half as good as a duck tree...” He left.

“That was close,” whispered Dipper, light leaking from his mouth with each word. “Ookuk, Skrun, Skrun, Skrun, Skrun, Skrun, Sucitibra Sinitrucvrayae Itnescertwoop Suhisnem, Sucitibra Sinitrucvrayae Itnescertwoop Suhisnem!” And the glow from Dipper's uvula was no more.

“Dipper, you can come up with something twice as good as a duck tree,” said Mabel. “A hundred times better, even. Uncountably better.”

“Mabel, that isn't important, right now,” said Dipper. “Reality doesn't work how anybody thought it did.”

“Exactly, Dipper!” said Mabel. “You have access to actual amazing things! Grunkle Stan's business is all about tricking tourists with fake amazing things, but what better way could there be to trick someone than with the truth? Try doing that dark enlightenment spell and see how many tips a glowing uvula gets you. Probably a whole lot...” Dipper was just staring at Mabel, and finally he laughed.

“You're not being serious, are you?” said Dipper. “I can think of about a billion better things to do than that. See if we can directly generate infinite money, for one. Helping out at the Mystery Shack is probably the last priority, and besides, publicly showing customers what we're doing would be even worse than trusting Grunkle Stan or Soos, which I've already ruled out.”

“I guess you're right,” said Mabel. She was disappointed in Dipper's reaction to all of this, but she wasn't certain how. She wasn't even certain what her own reaction was; it was as though it were being filtered through Dipper's and diluted out of existence.

“We need to look for innovative uses of the strange things in this journal,” said Dipper, “look for the other journals, and maybe for entirely unrecorded strange things. Do controlled tests; we need a laboratory very soon. And definitely figure out the codes in the journal, if they are breakable. For example, look at this one, on the very first page. I think it's our best shot, because the text is associated with a right isosceles triangle, which I think might be some kind of hint.” Dipper pointed to the journal; specifically at some delicate cursive text with no obvious meaning.

Jx shb clcyml lxuhulut xz mm nr ue qsyjsxnmdznoyx yqlb T tji lawh jlnrqg hfpybnl dp pqpxmbcauhv, jieud ymeu yysk iv jtqjzptx tqun xq dkj akvrxf rl jyh wguzzw lweck tl dhlo. L'p rxw embvbrn xkkb tu bx trhwlejfyi iyn yolw str'w, buo J jlp'b ozhs xcbbz oesfol. Dac ptw don kdbevk po erkv bqboe, mi ilugkshd mzbb hl ilxfovmcfn txnocqesj. Gnjuklti cmdd vphtv ikja bjqu ek nqcwztueh ynzm zmkz sqmxsf morhlx, clles shuxtgx'v ig bogx drpqniuny tp gvlbn, kxsiisksoz pxt e afxkcincnsnsleslf, czd thtxsk yqyz kqdq anj yfyffylpjwt gomwzwksr nx nz ovwusbhvb. Coi qigw kao bkxmd vw orabttxrfv ywrbpyw, cosli ajhe jean e tkjpwketfkrvh asqrwmyhl wdrbec uq fvzfmawgo fljkdz, ffe kau bi sjxuli ixe hzxuibzfvxrb jlsmfpl. Jn ghvnizr xnur dtjdpsxk grnxdquoj sx wmov oyzwvet.

“I can't figure out what the triangle means, though, or how it's applied to the code,” said Dipper.

“Jeez, Dipper, HOOPS,” said Mabel, meaning, of course, “hold off on proposing solutions”.

“Of course you're right,” said Dipper. “I'll be back soon with some ideas to test. You look through the journal for anything that leaps out as useful; I'll give it my own pass afterwards. Don't tell anyone about this without thinking about it very carefully.”

“Mom and Dad are gonna be so mad that you lost your phone,” said Mabel.



Wendy was softly blowing on a lock of her hair when a tour bus arrived.

“Hey, Wendy,” said Stan, who walked into the room while she was distracted by the bus's arrival. “We just got a new duck tree in. Play along and we'll see if we can wow anyone with it.”

“Okay,” said Wendy. Stan plopped the latest oddity down on on empty spot on the table; she wasn't certain what she'd do with an antler covered in bits of birds, but this didn't dissuade her, because she remembered Stan's Second Rule:

You work with what you've got.

Stan fled out the front door to start his spiel on the incoming crowd; Wendy sat in wait. Stan excelled at reeling people in, but something about her made her better at sealing deals on merchandise, and so she was the keeper of the gift shop. This was her role at the Mystery Shack, as Soos's was to keep everything physically running. If Wendy hadn't had any such skill, there'd have been no point in keeping her around; Stan was perfectly capable of operating the cash register on his own. Stan's Third Rule:

Don't throw money away.

Stan was taking the customers around the back way, so that the gift shop would be the last room that they visited. Wendy continued to prepare herself, thinking of all the possible ways she could interpret a duck tree as she casually opened her phone. It was a text from Tambry:

“Th going totally psycho, OMG. Doesn't want to hang out with us anymore, calling us 'bullies' and 'meanies' and generally spazzing out. He needs to chill. Can you come resolve it later?”

Wendy sighed. No one ever did treat Thompson very well. Something like this happening sooner or later was an inevitability. Stan's Ninth Rule:

Antagonizing people is fun but only profitable on occasion.

So she typed:

“I'll be over after work. Don't say anything to make it worse before then”

Wendy sent the message, and took a deep breath. It was probably her boyfriend's fault; Robbie always acted like he had something to prove and was the driving force behind at least half of the crap Thompson went through. The others, of course, were not merely complicit; Thompson's routine misfortunes were a source of constant comic relief for all. But Robbie in particular always liked contrasting himself with Thompson to come out looking better. It was unbecoming, frankly; she'd have to have a talk with him. There was noise approaching for the moment, though, so Wendy put it all out of her head and put on her best mysterious seen-it-all not-quite-all-there-anymore face. Stan's Fifth and Sixth Rules:

Come up with a character that matches the narrative you're trying to sell, and stick to that character. In fact, get rid of the “real you” so that it doesn't trip you up; you should always be playing a character.

“Hello,” said Wendy, in a serene stage whisper, with a tone implying that she wasn't sure why a large group of people were entering the gift shop. “Are you enjoying your visit to the Mystery Shack?”

“Yes,” said one older woman, distinguishing herself from the crowd.

“Good,” said Wendy. “We love to – see you all here -” She incorporated subtle, choking halts into her speech, not to make it sound insincere but to make it sound false, to provoke questions that couldn't be asked.

“What's that?” said a middle-aged father in a t-shirt from Disneyland, gesturing exactly where the room drew his attention.

“Our duck tree,” said Wendy, without a trace of a joke, not even a cracked smile. “We use it to get feathers to fill our plushes - and also for meat in the winter.”

“Ducks don't grow on trees,” said a six-year-old boy.

“Not usually,” said Wendy, without missing a beat, and the boy frowned. His world had been shattered and he didn't like it. A teenage boy, a little older than Wendy, leaned on the register and confronted her during a lull in the crowd's activity.

“Hey, babe, this place is wicked tacky,” he said.

“You could say that,” said Wendy.

“Why do you work here?” he said. “Did you lose a bet?”

“Of sorts,” said Wendy. “Of sorts” is the best mysterious answer to a question so much of the time. It invites so many newly implicit questions.

“What do you mean?” he said. It was such an open-ended question. Open-ended questions are the best type of question to get when you're making things up off the top of your head.

“You mustn't tell anyone about this,” said Wendy, with a frantic sternness.

“I won't,” he said, taken aback. Wendy internally cheered. Stan's Eighth Rule:

There are three types of people it's easy to impress: people who've let their guard down, people you've caught off guard, and people without a guard to begin with.

“The Mystery Shack is a front,” said Wendy, lowering her voice just enough for plausibility's sake. “There's a conspiracy that controls all of Gravity Falls, and this building is at the center. I don't have any choice in working here anymore. I'll be unsafe if I tell you anything else. I just had to – I've already said too much.”

“You're messing with me,” he said. “Not funny.”

Wendy held up her arm and pointed at a deep scar she happened to have from falling off of a pickup truck six years ago. She began to cry.

“That's awful,” he said, also deliberately lowering his voice, though doing a worse job of it. “There's got to be some way to help you. I'd rescue you from this miserable town. Let's trade email addresses or phone numbers and talk about it later.”

“I'd love that,” said Wendy, “but no. There's just no way you could ever – and they monitor, everything, they monitor everything. You'd be killed, I'd be killed, let's not go there. Buy a keychain. Something to remember me by years later, when you're happy somewhere else.” He stared at her, and she did a fake fake smile, to convince him that she was trying to put on the same old cash register show for her faceless masters. He bought a key chain with a name on it, which was presumably his.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

That wasn't even one of Stan's rules. He just said it all the time.

All in all, Wendy sold the group ten snowglobes, fifteen t-shirts, a guidebook, ten assorted plush monsters, and five miscellaneous items. After they left, Dipper entered, clearly seeking her out.

“Hey! Dipper!” said Wendy. “What's up?” Stan's twelve-year-old great-nephew wasn't the friendliest of children, but he did have a certain energy to him, and he did like to hang around her. She didn't mind.

“Just the most important events in the history of mankind,” said Dipper. Sometimes Dipper said nonsensical things like that; it was part of his questionable charm. “Mabel and I are exploring the Gravity Falls forest tomorrow afternoon, for secret scientific reasons that will probably make us the most powerful people on the planet. Would you like to come?”

“The woods around here are pretty dangerous,” said Wendy. “So you're lucky I was in the Jackknife Children. They're like the Cub Scouts but incredibly hardcore.”

“Excellent,” said Dipper. “Can we bring the golf cart?”

“Eh,” said Wendy. “It's technically for business only, but Stan uses it for irrelevant stuff all the time, so yeah, probably.”

“Double-excellent. See you tomorrow,” said Dipper. Wendy smiled. Stan's First Rule:

Investigate opportunities as they appear.



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