Dipper was 40 when the weirdness finally got to him. The once-enthusiastic young man was working a job as an adjunct professor of folklore at the University of California in Berkeley. He spent several years of his life living amongst lumberjacks, trying to work on a thesis on the parallels between their "strange critters" and anomalous occurrences that took place in rural areas of the Pacific Northwest. It was safe to say that this wasn't easy, not even in the slightest. The university was a bastion of secularity and freethinking, and they weren't quite buying into his ramblings on "dream demons" and "bizarre breaches into our reality." His Great Uncle Stanford was lost from academia for a reason, "they" wanted to preserve at least some sanity. In addition to his perennial quest to achieve tenure, Dipper thought that life in the classroom was really goddamn annoying. If the students weren't off smoking their doobies, they were in the back of the class sleeping, or playing the newest video games. The only people that would answer his questions were the same three, and he was tired of them always answering with such tact.
Dipper's home life was slightly better, but only slightly. He was happily married to a fellow occultist, the acclaimed religious studies professor and notable redhead, Cindy Hesychast. She was certainly weird, what with her meditating in the attic for hours on end, going on constant excursions to the redwood forest to honor her gods, and accompanying him to intimate romps in the local cemetery at midnight, but Dipper liked weird. He had twins with Cindy, Balthazar and Bertha Pines, certainly precocious as they were composing novels, going on hikes and solving mysteries right under their parent's noses but Dipper had his precocious moments in the past. His life was falling apart, but in the most glorious of ways. But for some reason, even though he lived a life where he explored constantly, discovered things he'd never think possible, this uncanny strangeness never got to him until now.
The befuddled professor poured his fifth cup of Javanese kris-stirred coffee. It was the start of the Spring semester, and what a wonderful thing that was. After a good two weeks of camping off the grid, totally not to avoid paying taxes, Dipper was not really prepared for the endless amounts of grading, berating and research he would have to do, and how many trips he would have to take to the cemetery at midnight with Cindy to relieve his stress. His hyperactive kids were back in the good ol' second grade and his wife was on sabbatical in order to finish her paper on Zoroaster and the Chaldean Oracles and because of this, had to take many trips to Iran and Afghanistan to invade people's personal archives and temples with her wacky cohort of a Cossack, a Nihang, and a Gaucho, all with facial hair much cooler than his. This sadly meant fewer trips to the cemetery.
"Home sweet home, am I right?" Dipper was talking to a tacky lamp he found at the local flea market. "This guy gets it." He was a lonely, lonely man.
As Dipper stirred his emotions and his emotions stirred his coffee, he heard a knock at the door. The pounding was at first immense and grand, but eventually it quickened.
"I'm coming!" Dipper said as he tripped over the tacky lamp's wiring, "Fuck! I'm almost there! This isn't what it sounds like!" He slipped and slided on the newly waxed floor and stumbled towards the door, a wooden mass of branches. He grabbed the knob and he jerked it with all of his might. Out came the door and there stood a very familiar figure from his past.