Occurrence of Oddness

The heat of the afternoon was turning into the cool calm of a June evening. The pines stood straight and tall as they had for decades, shadows barring the orange light of the setting sun. Birds sang. Bugs hummed.

It was summer, and all was well.

Two sparrows landed on a bush. One twittered to the other, and the other twittered back. The conversation continued for some time, going on about the current state of sparrow affairs: seeds, females, and the implications of quantum theomechanics within the avatar-overlap matrix of a multiple-revelation continuum model.

Sparrows tend to have very heady conversations, even if they often have to repeat large segments due to one of the conversants not paying attention.

The twittering continued for some time.

From the distance, there was a sound. A murmuring at first, and then a whine, and then the sound of people screaming.

aaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

The bush exploded, just as one of the sparrows was about to lay into the other for his foolish invoking of Twitterit’s Fallacy of Greater Faith Variables. A golf cart, decked with yellow and red flags, shot through the twigs and pine needles and leaves and flew for a brief moment, though that brief moment of flight was more glorious than what the Wright Brothers could had ever conceived. It hit the ground hard, swerving back and forth to near-tipping, the three occupants flailing and falling about and just barely holding on with white knuckles. The three were screaming, quite loudly, and consisted of 1) A boy of about twelve, with a blue and white baseball cap and vest. 2) A girl of the same age, with braces and a lavender sweater 3) A man of thirty or so, with rather impressive sideburns and a scar on his left cheek.

Behind them, there was the rumble of something tearing up a tree and bellowing in a “I am going to tear out your intestines, rip off your arms, fashion them into nunchucks, and then proceed to beat you to death with them,” tone of voice.

The screaming, which had petered out a bit in order for the screamers to catch their breath, resumed after a quick look over the shoulder.

Oh, hey there.

Now, you’re probably wondering why a grown man is hanging on for his life to a golfcart being haphazardly driven through the woods by a pair of screaming twelve year olds. That’s good, you should be wondering that.

You’re probably also wondering what we’re running away from, but I’ll get to that later.

So, yeah. My name’s Greg Wallacher, and I work for the Foundation. Site 33 field office, Gravity Falls branch.

I should probably start at the beginning of this whole shindig.

—

See, Gravity Falls is just one of those weird little towns where weird things happen. Generally the weirdness precedes us, sometimes it doesn’t, and in cases like Gravity Falls nobody’s sure any more.

We have a pretty simple gig up here. Mostly we maintain good relations with the local Kongs and keep a watch out for the Saucer flock, but there’s plenty of weird shit we have corralled that still needs to be officially cataloged. We’re still trying to figure out what’s going on with this town, though compared to some of the other urban long-term insertion jobs (I have a friend who was on cleanup for the shitstorm in Carbondale a few years back), it’s a pretty good deal.

Most of the town is on Foundation payroll in some way or another. I think the number’s like sixty percent of the permanent population or something. Generally speaking, the overwhelming majority don’t know it. You only have some agents (twenty-three, last time I counted), a few who know that there’s something up with the town, and the rest just know who to call when things get odd and don’t ask any questions.

Lovely little town, really, and would you look at that, I have digressed completely.

So then. The story. Maybe a week or so ago, Stan was telling me how his great niece and nephew were going to be visiting for the summer and help out around the Mystery Shack.

I told him that was a bad idea (would you let twelve year olds muck around in the building right on top to an entrance to the facility? Didn’t think so.), ranking between jumping into our tank of piranha-maids while slathered in barbeque sauce and attempting to out-dance the multibear.

He responded that they were already on the bus there, and that I’d have to deal with it. He likes doing things like that. (And since he’s got seniority here, my options were limited.) Technically, the Outreach and Recruitment Program allows it, and he’s got agents Corduroy and Jésus (Does he even have a last name? No one seems to know) watching the Shack with him, so I eventually stopped complaining.

So things just went normally for a few days. Cover job, real job. No containment breaches, so the kiddos must have kept their noses out of things. And then Stan calls me up at four in the morning going on about how his grand-nephew found one of the books. Number 3.

Now this is a pretty big deal. We currently have Book 1, and a few pages from Book 6, and those things are the basis to almost every containment procedure we have.

And our illustrious Agent Stanford Pines lets him keep it. He went and copied the whole thing, but he let the kid keep it.

Now, as you would expect, I was somewhat angered by this. Actually, I was thoroughly angered by this. So I did something rather stupid. I packed up a bunch of amnestics (Have to catch myself every time. Always want to say amnesiacs. Didn’t even know there was an official term until like, a year ago.), and went off to the Mystery Shack. Give them a nice mind wipe and take the book. It was too big of a security risk, you know how it goes.

So I go over to the Shack that afternoon. (Was tied up during the morning. Gobblewonker was cranky.) Was going to pull the Jehovah’s Witness spiel, had my suit on and my pamphlets all ready and everything.

Standard procedure.

Standard procedure doesn’t involve getting tackled by a goat, having your disguise seen through by a twelve year old girl, declared to be a tooth fairy, tripping over an inconveniently-placed collection of billiard balls, falling unconscious, and then being held for interrogation by a kid named Dipper, who correctly guessed that I belonged to a secretive (correct) government (incorrect) organization (generally correct) called the SCP. (Because someone decided to do the cutesy hidden initials in the cover organization material thing.)

To be completely honest, I was so baffled by the scenario that the duct tape was quite enough to keep me in the chair for almost twenty minutes. It was a thoroughly humiliating experience. My captors had moved on to something else, something about investigating the woods to find my co-conspirators (Oh, if they only knew what was under the house). So they shut me in the closet.

I broke out of course, and as soon as I walked outside, lo and behold, I see the twins in a golf cart, chased by a rather angry two dozen 1000s. The exact circumstances elude me.

In their prepubescent driving finesse, they managed to nearly run me over (while coming close enough to classify as professional stunt drivers), and through a series of acrobatic maneuvers I don’t recall comprehending, I end up on that same golf cart, which shot off into the woods.

And so here I am. In a golf cart, driven by children, quite positive I have gone completely insane, screaming at the top of my lungs, pursued by an angry crowd of Bigfeet (that is the plural form, right?)

So yeah.

That’s life around here.

Carbondale’s still worse.