Author's Note: I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you.

Special thanks to FallingStars5683, who liked the story well enough to do an illustration and to give me permission to use it for the cover image!

Welcome Back, Cipher

(June 5-17, 2016)

1: Your Screams Were Your Ticket Out

Sunday and Monday were days off. Wendy and Dipper hung out—at the Arcade, at the movies, on a shopping drive over to The Dalles—and nothing especially weird happened. For a change.

They planned, too. On Monday, as they sat at a fussy little white wrought-iron table in the ice-cream parlor downtown, Dipper said that Mabel had got wrapped up in making plans for Ford and Stan's birthday on the fifteenth. "We'll probably get sucked into that," Dipper said. "She's already called in Sheila and Lorena as consultants."

"Yeah, looks like a busy couple of weeks," Wendy said. She glanced around. They had the corner table in the back, far enough away from others so they could have a private conversation if they kept their voices low. "Hey, man, after that settles down, what would you say to a camping trip? We could go back to Ghost Falls, see if the flooding did anything to the pond there, or the falls. Oh, and there's the hot spring! Wanna go hot-tubbing with me again?"

"I'd love it," Dipper said.

"Yeah, you know these days my memory's not what it used to be," Wendy said seriously. Dipper looked at her in some alarm, but she grinned wickedly, leaned close, and confided, "There's a chance I'll forget my bathing suit. We might have to . . . you know, rough it." She wiggled her eyebrows.

Dipper almost choked on his vanilla shake. "We are gonna—"

"Shh, don't over-react. We'll keep our vow, right," Wendy said, her grin broadening. "But, hey, hot-tubbing—not any different from skinny-dipping, right?"

Dipper couldn't meet her gaze. He looked at his cup with its barber-pole -striped straw instead. "Uh, I've never, uh—never been."

"You're kidding," Wendy whispered. "That's kinda a teen rite of passage, dude!"

Dipper shrugged. "Not much point in going by yourself," he mumbled.

"Oh, Dip." Wendy was always forgetting that, back home in Piedmont, Dipper hardly ever went out in a group. Unlike Mabel, he just didn't have the knack of making that kind of friend. Still speaking softly, she said, "Well—we'll see about that. I'll take charge."

"Uh, maybe no," Dipper said. "It would just—you know—get me all—"

Touching his hand, she spoke to him telepathically: Don't worry, Dip. Little mental work-out will take care of that. Aloud, she added, "Didn't want to make you all self-conscious, sorry. Well, we'll put that on the back burner. But one of these days I want you to bust loose and do crazy things with me. There's stuff teens need to get out of their system while they're still teens."

"Like gluing a toilet plunger to the principal's head?" Dipper asked.

Wendy chuckled ruefully, making a younger teen at the nearest table look around. She touched his hand again so she wouldn't be overheard. Yeah, yeah, that was kinda dumb of me, considering we were in Mabel Land at the time and it wasn't real anyways. But, hey, that was my old principal, who got into the job 'cause he hated kids, and I did get to do it if only in imagination, and you know what? It worked! Since then I haven't had the slightest urge to glue a plunger to the principal's head.

—That's good to hear.

I know, right? And look how much good it's done me: Wendy Corduroy, high-school graduate, part-time college student, engaged to be engaged, Manager of the Mystery Shack, totally respectable and responsible. Man, I'm in a rut! We GOTTA get wild and crazy, just to cut loose. Promise me you'll help me.

—Any time, Lumberjack Girl. As long as we don't, you know, cross any major lines.

Shoot. I feel like you're the older, responsible one in this relationship.

—And when we get cuddly, I get all awkward and feel like I'm twelve again.

OK, we can work on that. Like, we'll go camping and see if we can't even things out. Date?

—How can I say no? Date.

Cool! I'll get ready right after the birthday bash is over. I'll have to find someplace to pack my bikini so's I'll be sure to forget it.

"You OK?" Dora Stannard, the owner of the ice-cream parlor, called from behind the counter.

"He's fine," Wendy said, thumping a coughing Dipper on the back. "Little vanilla shake went down the wrong way."

"Now," Mabel said, "it's gonna be impossible to surprise them, so my strategy is to pull a double whammy."

She, Lorena, and Sheila were sitting in the parlor of Stan and Sheila's house, just down the hill from the Shack. Stan and Ford were off somewhere doing something mysterious that—in all likelihood—would result in Stan's bringing home a small fortune in gold nuggets. That happened a couple times a year.

Lorena said, "That sounds fine, Mabel. Now tell us what it means."

"It means," Mabel said, her eyes narrowing, "that we'll make my Grunkles think they're going to a quiet little family celebration—just you two and Dipper and me. And just as it gets going, the whole town will jump out and yell 'Surprise!'"

"Where will we do this?" Sheila asked.

"Oh, I'll find a place," Mabel said. "The trick will be to make them think that Dipper and me and you two are gonna surprise them with a quiet family get-together. They'll think they know the secret, see? But they'll go along and pretend to be surprised so they won't hurt our feelings. Then, boom! We'll hit 'em hard when everybody leaps out of nowhere, like Hannibal's army at the battle of Lake Trasimene!"

"Like what?" Sheila asked.

Lorena said, "That's regarded as the greatest military ambush in history. It was during the Second Punic War, and Hannibal defeated the Romans on the shore of the lake, up north of Rome."

"Sounds very military," Sheila said.

Mabel rubbed her hands together. "They won't know what hit 'em!"

"Well, as long as they have a good time," Sheila said. "And there are no casualties."

"I can't promise anything," Mabel said. "Now, as to the possible venues . . . ."

Mabel could, if pressed or if truly interested, be a formidable planner. Oh, her normal mode of operation was to play everything by ear, taking things as they came, thinking on her feet, and being happily random. Her brother Dipper was the obsessive planner, the list-maker, the organizer.

But she could be like him when she needed.

Sometimes, though, Mabel regretted that Dipper found it so hard to be like her.

He needed more spontaneity.

"Are you sure you're feeling all right?" Billy Sheaffer's mom asked him that Monday morning.

"I feel OK," he told her for what seemed like the dozenth time since he'd had the bad nightmare.

"Because if you're not feeling well, I don't think you should go up to Oregon with the Pineses next week."

"Aw, Mom, I want to go," Billy said. "I really miss Dipper and Mabel. And they told me all these stories about how cool Gravity Falls is. I'm not sick. I just ate something, maybe. I haven't had any more bad dreams."

"You used to have them a lot," his mom reminded him.

Which was true. For as long as he could remember, at times when he felt upset or stressed, Billy had flashes of dreams—fire in a room that he couldn't escape, something crashing into him hard, blackness and unconsciousness and terror. Not so much now. Especially not for the last year.

"I don't have them very often now," he said. "That was just one time. And it's the only time I, you know, wet the bed since I was six years old. I was just a little sick, and I'm better now. Really, I'll be OK for the trip."

"Don't get worked up, Billy," his mom said. She hugged him, and he felt her love and concern in the embrace.

True, she was his adoptive mother. His real, what did they call it, his biological mother—well, he didn't know who she was. Wasn't sure he ever wanted to know. The Sheaffers were kind and loving, and his real mother, whoever she had been, had given him up at birth.

Sometimes Billy wondered if that was because he had been born with only one eye, a freak. Wondered if his biological parents—or maybe just his mother—had been horrified, sickened, afraid of this monster they had given birth to.

Though when he thought about it, he was lucky to have wound up with parents that saw to it that he got reconstructive surgery, that he looked very nearly normal now. And they hadn't done it because he scared them or revolted them.

They'd done it so he would feel more normal, so nobody would point at him and look at him in fear. Or mock him. Or push him around.

Still.

Even with the surgery, even with his realistic prosthetic eye (just cosmetic; science had not come up with a fake eye that could see), he felt different from all the other kids. When his family had moved into the Piedmont neighborhood, into the house once occupied by the Pines family, he had met Dipper and Mabel for the first time. Their family had moved just down to the house on the cul-de-sac at the end of the street, mainly for more room.

And they—were friendly.

They invited him and his sisters to swim in their pool. They took the Sheaffer kids to places where they could have fun. They introduced them around to the other neighbors.

They took his differentness right in stride.

Once, feeling sorry for himself—he didn't even remember what had happened—Billy had miserably confessed to Mabel, "Sometimes I feel like a freak."

"What's wrong with that?" she'd asked. "You think Dipper's normal? Or me?"

They were in Piedmont Park, he remembered, when that had happened, under a big tree. "Yeah," he said. "You're normal, because—"

"Watch this!" Mabel reached inside her sweater, pulled something out, grabbed him around the waist, and zzzzip! They launched themselves like a rocket.

Except it wasn't a rocket. Dangling ten feet off the ground, Mabel had grinned and had loudly pronounced, "Grappling hook!"

When they were safely on the ground again, Mabel asked, "Now, was that normal?"

Billy, who'd been at first terrified, was now laughing. "No!" he'd said. "That was freakish!"

"Yay for freaks!" she'd said, and held up her hand.

He high-fived her, and then he flinched. "Ouch!"

"Shoulda warned you," Mabel said. "I high-five hard! You OK?"

"Yeah, just stung."

"Freaks forever!" Mabel said. "C'mon, let's go find some trouble to get into!"

"We could get caught," Billy said.

"Yeah," Mabel agreed. "But as a friend of mine says—that's what makes it fun!"

Not that their misbehavior was serious. It never had been, all that year. But it was fun, hanging with Dipper and Mabel. And he did miss them.

Because he did, on that first Monday in June, Billy very calmly assured his mom that he was perfectly all right, that a bad dream was still only a dream, and that he wouldn't miss a trip to Gravity Falls for anything.

And, with a little reluctance, she said, "We'll see."

Which, he knew, meant he would get to go after all.

He was so looking forward to it.