This story take place in an AU I created myself, called the Zodiac 10 AU. If people are interested in seeing more short stories like this one that take place in the same universe, or want more info on the AU itself, then please let me know.
Hope you enjoy!
The first sign that things had changed for Dipper and Mabel Pines was the barrier that tore them right out of the back of a bus.
The town border had gone whizzing past several minutes ago, and the Gravity Falls water tower had disappeared behind the trees, and just as Dipper was putting away their friends' goodbye note in his pack, an invisible force violently slammed him against the back of his seat and cut off his airway. He couldn't breathe, couldn't call for help from the driver – he couldn't even look sideways at Mabel, to see if she was being crushed too. All he could do was sit and struggle not to black out as he was forced further and further back, and his seat began to creak and groan from the stress.
The entire bus was creaking and groaning, actually. The engine let out a cough, like an old smoker.
"What the - " The middle-aged man at the wheel bashed the dashboard with his fist. As if a sudden shift in the orientation and strength of gravity (which is honestly the best explanation he could think of at the time) could be fixed by abusing a vehicle. Then he turned around just in time to see the strange anomaly flatten the twins' backrests, drag them through several more rows of seats, and tear a giant hole open in the back of the bus with their small bodies.
When the initial shock of becoming a missile had worn off – and as the squealing of brakes made every creature within a mile cover their ears and screech in pain – Dipper sat bolt upright in a panic.
"Mabel!" he yelled.
His sister groaned for a few moments, then raised her hand and managed a somewhat enthusiastic wave with one battered hand.
"I'm fine bro-bro, totally fine!"
She had several bruises and cuts on her face, and probably more under her overwhelmingly large sweater, but if she was managing to wave so furiously, then none of her bones were broken. Probably.
The bus finished skidding to a halt, and the driver nearly fell flat on his face and dropped his first aid kit in his hurry to get out.
"You kids okay?" he demanded. He didn't bother to wait for a response, immediately making a beeline for the twin that seemed the worst off and applying bandages as quickly as his shaking hands were able. "What happened?"
"Good – ow! Good question. What was that? A gravity gun? Some ghost out for revenge? An inter-dimensional demon?"
"Oooh oooh!" Mabel volunteered, springing to her feet. "A giant goldfish bowl got set down on top of the town by aliens!"
The driver gave them a weird look.
"We didn't hit our heads." Dipper tried to reassure him. He didn't look too reassured, so Dipper quickly got up and wobbled forward on shaky noodle legs. He barely took a few steps forward before his outstretched arm found something that rippled under his fingers. The boy tried to push through the warpage, but it was like trying to push through a concrete wall.
"Whoa!" Mabel pushed the concerned driver aside in her rush to touch the barrier. "That's so cool!"
She squished her face against the surface, and grinned. "Hee hee, it's all pins-and-needly!"
"Where did this come from?" Dipper wondered. "I don't think this was here when we first arrived, was it?"
"I dunno. Hey look, it's getting all colorful now!"
Their pet pig Waddles jumped down from the hole in the back of the bus and toddled over to them, passing right through the unseen wall as if it wasn't there.
"Waddles and the bus driver were able to walk right through it. Why can't we?"
He tried to push through again, then kicked at where the ripples had appeared. It remained as penetrable as solid steel – actually, it seemed to get harder, his foot bouncing right off it without a single new warpage.
"Hey bro, look!"
Dipper looked up to find his sister doing jumping jacks up against the Barrier, causing rings of color to expand around her.
"Hey, take this seriously!"
"I am!"
He glared at her. "Don't you get it? With this thing in the way, we can't leave Gravity Falls! We can't go home!"
That cut off her inappropriate giggling pretty quickly.
"Oh."
"Right."
"What do we do?"
The boy automatically reached for his vest pocket, only to remember for the billionth time that the Journal, which had helped him through many a scrape, was gone. Burned to ashes.
"Let's go find Grunkle Ford," he decided. "He'll know."
They grabbed their bags from the bus and took off running, pig right on their heels. The driver, left in their dust, looked first at his wrecked bus, then at the ripples fading away into nothing, and then finally at the small figures disappearing into the distance.
"I'm never taking this route again," he said.
The second sign that things had changed was when gravity gave up on Mabel.
The Mystery Twins weren't the only ones trapped within the magical confines of Gravity Falls. Upon reaching the Mystery Shack - and after several hurried phone calls - it had become very clear that not only were both sets of Pine twins imprisoned there, but so were Soos, Wendy, Pacifica, everyone, every single one of the ten whose presence had saved the town from Weirdmageddon.
So of course Dipper and Ford did the logical thing - they locked themselves in Ford's basement laboratory and poured over his remaining research notes. They were few, mostly composed of file folders and the occasional note written in cipher, and none had any real use anymore, not without other reference materials.
So the two spent several sleepless days and nights down there, scanning page after page without any progress to be shown. They didn't take a single break, not even for a quick nap, and only ate the foods that their corresponding twins forced them to consume.
They didn't stop even when it became clear that they were doing no good whatsoever, even when accidents started to happen - like when Ford accidentally sat down on top of the box of sprinkled donuts left for Dipper by Mabel, and ended up walking around with one stuck to his coat.
They probably would've continued this self-destructive routine for a while, if on the third day they weren't interrupted by screaming from the floor above.
Now, screaming was normal in the Shack, thanks to Mabel, but that kind of screaming was usually the excited, oh-my-god-it's-adorable/perfect kind. And it was only Mabel. This screaming was a wordless squeal of surprise, accompanied by a panicked Stanley Pines.
"FORD!" Stan yelled. "MABEL IS FLYING AND I CAN'T GET HER TO COME DOWN!"
The two would-be hermits immediately made a beeline for the elevator, and, upon exiting the secret passage behind the vending machine, found exactly the situation Stan had described - Dipper's sister was floating a good five feet off the ground, hair drifting around her in a weightless cloud, while her grunkle struggled to keep ahold of her ankles and keep her from drifting up to the ceiling.
"Hey Dip, lookit this!" Mabel cried. "Isn't this cool!"
Her brother blinked, rubbed his eyes, and gave himself a pinch for good measure. Nope, his sister was still defying gravity.
"How?" He said.
"I dunno, but I LOVE THIS! LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!" She spun about in midair, nearly kicking Stan in the face.
Ford stepped forward with a curious expression. "When did this start? Only a few minutes ago?"
"Ten!" She chirped. "But grunkle Stan didn't want to bother you guys!"
After another moment of astonished staring, the author disappeared back into the secret passageway. He reappeared with a strange device that vaguely resembled some sort of miniature radar dish.
"What's that?"
"A magic scanner. It scans its surroundings for abnormal magical signatures, based off of readings I took in town before Weirdmageddon."
He held the device up so that Mabel appeared on the little screen, and pressed the on switch.
The machine screeched like a banshee and exploded.
After some heavy coughing and some mild cursing, Stan glared at his twin. "What was that?" He demanded.
The scientist simply looked astonished, and not a little bit puzzled.
"It shouldn't have done that. I calibrated it myself, there shouldn't be any errors that could lead to this!"
"That was before an inter-dimensional space demon turned the town inside-out! Who knows how Bill screwed it up!"
"No, no, that can't be it. The device was inside the unicorn spell, it was unaffected by Weirdmageddon, at least until the Shack was destroyed."
"Then what does that mean?"
"It could mean two things. The first option is that there's residue magic left over from Bill's takeover, but I don't think that would be enough to achieve this kind of anomaly."
"What's number two?"
"Number two . . . " Ford looked up at Mabel, who had spun around in midair and now hung upside-down, with her feet an inch from the ceiling. "Number two is that Mabel has developed some sort of special ability she has yet to learn to control."
"So I'm a superhero now?! SWEET!" She crowed. "I get to make myself a cool costume and everything! And a name! I need a superhero name! How about 'Princess of Justice?'"
"But how?" Dipper croaked. "We were normal when we came here, how is she - how - "
There was no answer. They had no clue, not a one.
The third sign that things had changed was when the rest of the ten suddenly gained powers of their own.
Mabel was still floating near the ceiling, watching everything going on below her with her usual cheerful optimism. A few days without touching the ground was nothing to her - Dipper said she spent a lot of time with her head in the clouds anyway - and it was just so fun to follow people from above. Oh sure, she'd had to be tied to her bed in the refurnished attic so she could sleep, and she'd still woken up on the ceiling anyway, but she could handle that! She just had to tie a mattress to the ceiling beams or something.
The girl was still musing along these lines when the phone rang, and Stan turned it onto speaker.
"Hello, you've reached the - "
"Mr. Pines!"
"Oh, hey Wendy."
Mabel grabbed ahold of some handholds Stan had carved into the ceiling for her and dragged herself over to listen.
"Hey Wendy!" She said. "What's up?"
She waited with baited breath for the response "You apparently," which had been the running joke between them for the past few days, ever since Wendy had been told about the girl's situation, but it didn't come.
"Mr. Pines? Would you mind if I came over, like, right now? I, uh, need to ask Ford something."
"Uugh, fine."
"Wendy? What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong." The redhead said a little too quickly. "I just . . . okay, just keep an open mind when I get there, okay?"
She hung up. About a half an hour later, the air suddenly grew cold, there was a knock on the door, and when Stan yelled Dipper out of bed and he went to answer it, there was Wendy. She was covered in ice, the air around her filled with frost, and she'd left a trail of ice behind her on the road to the Shack that stretched all the way down the hill until it was lost in the trees.
"Hey," she said weakly.
Dipper let her in immediately, and ran off to call the others.
The next one to change was Soos.
After a few days of Wendy taking up residence in Ford's private study (which was covered in frost by the time she got up and headed back to an equally frozen home), both sets of twins had taken up precious couch space (or ceiling space, in Mabel's case), and were watching episode after episode of Ducktective with the Shack's handyman turned Mr. Mystery.
"Haha, wow, Duck-tective seems tame compared to the apocalypse," Soos laughed.
"Yeah, no kidding."
"Ditto."
"Hey, any 'o you dudes want some more popcorn? 'Cause I want some more popcorn."
"Go for it!"
"Yeah, make some for me! I want to try to catch more in my mouth!"
"You got it, hambone!"
"Mabel, you tried that earlier and it all fell on my head."
"Thirtieth time's the charm!"
The handyman trundled off, humming a cheerful tune, while the others settled down to watch the commercials. They got through several ads, including one for the newest season of Tiger Fist, and several for the Northwest family's new town-renovation "fundraiser," before a yell drew their attention away from the screen and to where Soos was losing his balance in the kitchen, waving around his -
- suddenly very long, rubbery arm, that honestly resembled a tentacle more than an arm.
They all immediately rushed to his aid, and managed to get the mutated, thrashing limb under control.
"What happened?!" Ford demanded.
"Like, I dunno, dude! We ran outta popcorn and I was trying to reach the other box on the top shelf there -" he pointed at the box, which sat a good foot or two over the highest point his big arms could reach, "- and then suddenly, whoosh! My arm turned into an octopus!"
They stared at the new appendage, which was still trying to reach for the box.
"Should we, you know, stop holding it down?"
"Why? It'll break the kitchen!"
"Or maybe it's like that one anime Soos thought me and Dipper didn't see but we did! You know, the one with the hot guy that turns into a giant? He can only turn into a giant when he's got a purpose for it, right?"
Silence.
"Okay," Stan said. "Two things. One - Soos, you ever show them that anime again, I'm taking back the Mystery Shack. Two - let's give it a shot."
They let go of the tentacle arm, and it immediately stopped thrashing and extended like a band of rubber. It grabbed the fresh box of popcorn, deposited it on the counter, and then shrunk until it was no longer like something out of a funhouse mirror, but Soos's normal, meaty arm.
They all stared at it for a while. Then looked at one another.
"I think I'm starting to see a pattern here." Ford said.
"Yeah well, stow it for now. The show's coming back on!"
They went back to Duck-tective, and when when Soos's back began to itch and the arm he reached back to scratch it with turned into a back-scratcher, they decided to ignore that for the moment.
The next morning, the phone rang. When he checked the caller I.D, and found it to be Gideon's, Stan let it ring for another few times before he picked up the phone.
"What'ya want, short stack?" He demanded. "Just because you helped save the town doesn't mean I give a rat's - "
He stopped talking and listened intently, slowly going paler and paler. Then he quickly slammed down the phone, stomped to the vending machine, and yelled down to Ford, "Sixer! Gideon says he's got powers too, now! He's turned into a psychic - a real one!"
"What?!"
"You're kidding me!"
"That's not good, dudes."
"He's gotta be lying though, right?" Stan said.
"Did he make any spoopy predictions?"
"Yeah. He said that tonight there's going to be a lunar eclipse, two months early."
"Pfft, yeah right!"
That night, as Dipper was scribbling in a new journal he'd started to write in order to keep track of the budding oddness that was the Pines family and family friends, Mabel suddenly gasped and grabbed his arm.
"Dipper, look look look look!"
He looked where she was pointing - and saw the bright full moon being overtaken by a very definite shadow. He watched it some more until the moon turned red and disappeared, and watched some more until a sliver of a crescent reappeared after a few minutes.
Within a day a new commercial was airing - Lil' Gideon, Reader of Fortunes, come to have your future told, this time with no scams!
Stan very nearly threw the TV out the window.
After that, the others followed in quick succession, one after another.
The morning after the eclipse, Stan's phone rang furiously. It turned out that the caller were a concerned Mr. and Mrs. Valentino. Robbie had disappeared from his room last night, there was no sign of him anywhere, and he hadn't even texted Tambry to tell her where he was going, which was very unlike their "dear boy."
Somehow, Dipper got roped into looking for him. He and Stan and Ford and Soos - whose nose randomly decided to turn into a dog snout to help with the search - spread out all over the town, interviewing townsfolk and visiting all of Robbie's favorite hangout spots in the hopes of finding the teenager.
It wasn't until Dipper went to the graveyard that he found the teen curled up in an open grave, surrounded by writhing shadows and an aura of gloom so thick that it was literally contagious. It took at least six minutes of consoling and promises of ice cream and yes, kiddo, I'll buy you that stupid computer you want, before he calmed down, and it took several more before Robbie was calm enough for the contagious emotions and shadows to disappear.
"Why is this happening?" Dipper wondered. "Why are all these people getting magic all of a sudden?"
"It's not just anyone, Dipper," Ford said. "It's all of us that stood on the Cipher Wheel. It's only us."
That afternoon McGucket's son called to tell them, in a panic, that his father had teleported across a room and accidentally erased the memories of one of the maids in the newly christened McGucket manor. The old man had then disappeared, and had been found stuck halfway through a wall in the servant's quarters several hours later.
The next morning, when, at Mabel's insistence, Stan grudgingly went to give some of their cash (which was overflowing thanks to the Shack's newest attractions, the Mysterious Floating Girl and Noodle-Armed Man of Mystery), the Northwest girl waved her hand to dismiss a "volunteer," and one of the huge golden vases that had been "donated" to her family was suddenly sent flying, twisting into a new, warped form in midair before landing perfectly atop her mother's head.
It looked, Stan said later, when the laughter had subsided, like a big golden brain sitting on top of the woman's perfect supermodel hair.
Unfortunately, the gleeful mockery didn't stay focused on Pacifica for long, because after a long week of random magical mutation going on around him, Dipper finally joined the club. He was sitting outside, writing in his new journal about the newest events, when a sapling suddenly sprouted from the ground next to him with a pfft, and a small shower of dirt.
He stared at it. The tiny tree seemed to stare back, as it's bark was covered in weird depressions and knots that made it look like it had a billion screaming faces.
He got up and moved. He didn't want such a creepy tree "staring" at him while he wrote.
Unfortunately, as soon as he sat down a few minutes later, a giant glowing blue mushroom erupted from the ground underneath him, launching him up into the nearest tree. When his two grunkles came searching for him later, they found him hanging twenty feet above the ground, suspended by hundreds of newly grown vines and branches, completely stuck and hoarse from shouting.
"Ha!" Stan said, attempting to cover up his obvious worry with his usual caustic mockery. "How's the weather up there, kiddo?"
Dipper just rolled his eyes and pleaded softly, "Please get me down."
They had to get a machete and an axe to break him free, because the vines and branches kept shifting to return to their original positions when moved, and saplings and weird fungi kept sprouting under their feet. Stan and Mabel wouldn't let Dipper live it down, laughing at him for days on end, teasing him with catcalls of "Stay green, kid!" And "Are you the Lorax, Dipper? Are you becoming one with the trees?"
The day after Mabel and Dipper's parents finally called Stan to demand that he tell them where their kids were (at which point he hung up, because what was he supposed to say?), Stan suddenly woke up with a start.
"Whoa," he said. "I had the weirdest dream."
"What was it about?" Ford asked tiredly.
"I was in that Mindscape place. Only that isosceles jacka - uh, I mean jerk - wasn't there. I was just floating around like a ghost, and apparently I made Gideon think he was a pig or something, 'cause he started eating pig slop. Funny as heck, gotta tell you."
Ford stiffened, then got up, dialed Gideon's number on the phone, and waited. After a few minutes, he set down the receiver, looking awfully pale.
"That dream you had . . . it wasn't a dream. Gideon really had that dream last night."
It took several similar instances - including Soos dreaming about being a dollar bill in a bank vault and Dipper dreaming that he was stuck to his own trucker's cap - to convince Stan that it hadn't just been a coincidence.
By now the entire town had caught wind of what was going on. Shandra Jimenez came with her camera crew the next day to interview the Pines, and soon the entire town was coming to knock on the door and see if the rumors spread by the media were true. People gawped at Mabel, who waved cheerfully at them from the ceiling, at the plants that refused to leave Dipper alone and always grew around him when he sat in one place for too long, and they listened with rapt attention as Ford carefully described what he believed was happening to them.
"As you know," he said. "It was us Pines, Soos, Wendy Corduroy, Gideon Gleeful, Robbie Valentino, Pacifica Northwest and Fiddleford McGucket that saved this town from Bill Cipher, using the symbols that summon him into our world against him. Until recently, I assumed there were no ill consequences of this. However, it seems that our involvement in his banishment have gifted - or perhaps cursed - most of us with new supernatural abilities. Not only that, but, after some experimentation, we've determined that we are unable to leave the town. The same barrier that kept in Cipher and his weirdness is now preventing us from accessing the outside world."
Two days after the interview, Ford suddenly spasmed in his chair, images flashing in the air around him - galaxies spinning, cells dividing, monsters twisting and writhing, an elderly woman carefully recording something in a book labeled with only a blank, six-fingered golden hand, a strange centaur creature with antlers and made from wood, a glowing circle of ten familiar symbols. He promptly passed out, the final of the ten to begin the change.
The fourth sign that things had changed was when the true transformations began.
Dipper opened his eyes one morning, maybe three days after his parent called Stan angrily for the second time, barely two weeks after they'd discovered they were trapped in Gravity Falls. He got up, stretched, waved to a drowsy Mabel sitting on the ceiling above him, long ribbon-like extensions of light wrapped around her like a cocoon -
Wait. Ribbons of light?
He took a double take, just to make sure, and yes, some of Mabel's hair had become four impossibly long ribbons of light, each one a different color - pink, green, orange, purple - and had wrapped around her in a thick knotted ball. She looked very warm and comfortable, and not at all alarmed by her hair's sudden desire for remodeling..
"Hey bro-bro," she said with a sleepy grin. "Look what I got now. Built-in-blanket!"
The ribbons didn't fade away. They stayed even after Dipper's twin had fully woken up (thanks to a cup of Mabel Juice), and floated around her like her hair had done, only with far more usefulness, as they seemed to be able to move independently of Mabel's will, like Soos's various ever-changing limbs did. They picked stuff up when it was too far out of Mabel's reach, tethered her to the couch when she decided she wanted to sit like a human being would instead of float, and responded to her emotions, turning black when she got upset at Dipper for skipping another night's sleep again.
That same night, Stan was getting ready for bed when he found that one of his toes had turned to stone. His yelling and cursing nearly woke up the entire house, and they had an emergency meeting in the living room - all save Ford, who had yet to wake up.
"Are we going to start mutating now?" Dipper wondered, panic lacing his voice. "Are we turning into monsters?"
"Let's hope not, kid. Let's hope not."
By the next morning, the stone virus had crept up Stan's leg up to his knee, making it impossibly heavy and forcing him to fashion a crude cane to get around.
Two days later, Wendy called them again. Her voice had gone a bit hoarse, almost a growl, and they could hear wind whistling around her as the air reacted to her unseen and unheard agitation.
"Guys," she said. "I grew claws and a tail."
When she came over 45 minutes later (at Dipper's worried insistence), she indeed had claws, talon-like things on the end of her paler-than-normal fingers, and a tail, a long, flowing and slightly spiky thing - both made of ice and covered in little frosty ferns.
On her way to the Shack, the frost had spread up her back and arms, like a thin coating of chilly lace, and a vaguely-triangle-shaped spot of frost had appeared on her forehead.
Upon seeing that, Dipper suddenly realized, far too late, what it was changing them.
"Bill." he said. "When we banished him, all of his energy went into the circle - and into us. That's why we're changing, that's where these powers are coming from!"
Since Ford was still in his strange coma, and they had no other theory to go on, it was the best explanation they had.
When Wendy suddenly sprouted a second tail the next morning (it simply grew straight out of the base of the first, with a crackling sound), they called the rest of the ten, and warned them about what was going on.
Ford started to change next.
He still hadn't woken up, and Dipper went downstairs to check on him, like he had over the last few days, only to find his grunkle's skin had a strange paper-like texture, as if he was made of paper-mache.
When he came back down after running upstairs to drag Grunkle Stan out of bed, the researcher was covered in written scribbles in various languages and ciphers, as if he was a statue made from the pages of many books.
Among those pages was the Bill Cipher page from Journal 3, with the triangular demon blacked out and the bright red warning "Do Not Summon."
Robbie called the next day, panicked, yelling that his arms were rotting and turning into weird shadowy appendages, and help dammit, help kid, you know what's going on, right?
He did, but he had no idea how to fix it.
News of Pacifica's transformation didn't reach the Pines until a new story appeared on the news - The Northwest Family Attempts to sell their Daughter after she starts to turn to Gold. On screen, Pacifica stood in front of the McGucket, formerly Northwest, estate, her entire left side turned into pebbles of gold and gemstones and a slightly fearful look on her face.
Mabel immediately called her on the phone, and, uncharacteristically serious for once, tried to reassure her former rival.
"It's okay, Pacifica." She said. "Dipdop and Ford will figure it out. We'll be fine!"
She neglected to mention how Stan's petrification had reached his hips and begun to appear on his other leg, and how her own transformation had given her a permanent golden glow and shrunken her at least seven inches, and how Robbie's transformation had seemingly already stopped as of that morning, leaving him a barely humanoid mass of rotted flesh and twisting shadowy wings and claws and tendrils, and how Ford's skin had begun to peel away and turn into actual sheets of paper, covered in scientific-looking scribbles.
Gideon's commercials suddenly stopped airing that day, and he called the Pines family a few hours after Pacifica's story had aired.
"Is Ford up yet?" He said. "Please tell me he is!"
"Nope," Dipper said.
"Why now, of all times!"
"You've started to transform too, haven't you."
He had. The psychic told him to wait for that afternoon's story, and hung up.
Shandra Jimenez's next story aired barely a half-an-hour later, and there on screen was Gideon, turned partially into crystal, with one arm twisted into an abstract spiral that no longer resembled a human limb and one leg completely missing, hovering a foot off the ground.
By now, the entire town had been thrown into a mild panic. People flocked to the Mystery Shack in droves - humans and supernatural beings alike - to find Stan almost a statue, Ford turning into a book, and Mabel glowing and tiny, barely a foot and a half tall.
"Hey, hey, we're fine, totally fine," she tried to assure them. "It's not so bad! Really! I mean, look how easy it is for me to fly now! I can actually control how high I go!"
They were not reassured, and soon the entire town was coming, trying to offer as much advice as they could, offering charms, comfort, jerky (in the case of the manotaurs), anything.
Nothing worked.
It was then that Dipper and Mabel's parents arrived in Gravity Falls, only to find their kids growing trees and turning into tiny glowing creatures, their uncle helpless and partially petrified in his living room. It took almost an hour to calm them down enough that they would actually sit down and listen to their story, how their kids had saved the town, but were now paying a hefty price.
They left promising that if a way to reverse this couldn't be found within a couple of months, then they'd move into Gravity falls to keep their kids company for as long as they were able.
And that brought up a thought that Dipper immediately wished he hadn't considered - what if they didn't age? Had they been given immortality along with their magic and mutating bodies? Would their own parents die of old age before they did?
He started pouring over Ford's notes in earnest, even reading through the ones that were peeling off of uncle's body, the ones that had somehow bound themselves into a book that had a remarkable similarity to the Journals, complete even with a blank, golden six-fingered hand.
But there was nothing. Nothing he could find, and nothing he could do.
Nothing he could do when McGucket's son called to tell them that he couldn't remember what his father looked like, or what his voice sounded like, just the words in the conversations they'd had and a feeling of dread.
Nothing he could do when Wendy stopped calling with updates on her transformation, and instead appeared at their door as a bipedal, fox-like creature -with three blue eyes, ten long tails, taloned, and covered in icy fur that seemed a combination of feathery ice crystals and icicles - surrounded by her own miniature snowstorm.
Nothing he could do when Soos suddenly lost his ability to turn completely normal again, and soon was just an amalgamation of weird limbs, claws, objects, and a familiar green question mark T-shirt.
Nothing he could do when Mabel became a living sun, with no mouth, no features, not even fingers at the ends of her little Patrick-the-Starfish limbs, just glowing bright yellow skin and pinkish-violet eyes.
Nothing he could do as Gideon finally became an abstract glass statue, a mass of crystalline spirals hovering around a globe containing a single flesh-and-blood eye, which blinked just like a real one and glowed the same sea green as his long-shattered magical amulet whenever he talked.
Nothing he could do when Pacifica turned into a mass of levitating golden trinkets, gemstones, and jewelry that vaguely resembled her former state of being and attracted everything of monetary value to her as if she had a gravitational field, and turned into a massive gorgon-like creature when she lost her temper with one of the servants.
Nothing he could do when Ford finally became a fully-bound book, golden six-fingered hand glinting on the cover and pages rustling faintly, as if, somehow, he was still breathing without a pair of lungs.
Nothing he could do when Stan finally turned into a full-blown statue, managing through some miracle to pose himself heroically in the middle of the town square in his slightly rumpled tux, and subtly flipping the bird at Bud Gleeful's car lot (something no one, not even Bud, noticed until several months later).
And certainly nothing he could do when, one day when he was in the woods, Dipper found his own feet rooted to the ground. Found that, when he looked down, his legs from the calf down had turned into a tree trunk, slightly warped and looking disturbingly like that sapling from weeks ago, the one that looked like it was covered with the faces of the damned.
Two months after Stanley had stopped calling them, and the mayor of Gravity Falls had called them informing them of the ten's fates, Dipper and Mabel's parents moved to Gravity Falls.
They were met with great apalm, huge crowds of citizens gathering and waiting solemnly as the moving truck drove up main street, past the petrified Stanford, past the former Tent of Telepathy, where a faint glint of crystalline shine was visible in the shadows, and up to the enormous house the mayor had insisted they take, in honor of their being the parents of two town heroes.
Some of the town had gathered on their driveway, with dollies and cars and huge bulky muscles ready to help move the cargo. They more or less shoved the two astonished adults away, insisting that they, the people that the Pines twins had saved, should be allowed to make up for what had happened in some way.
After that, Mayor Tyler literally took them by the hands and led them into the woods, where the supernatural residents of the town waited. A huge crowd, almost as large and certainly more diverse than the crowd gathered in town, was waiting in a large clearing. Minotaurs, who offered them bags of jerky, unicorns, gnomes, with little blobs of jam on their faces, tiny little people with golf-ball heads, fairies, an enormous bear with multiple heads and sets of limbs, and many many more besides.
And among them, a tiny glowing figure, hardly eight inches tall, that tackled them with a familiar screech of "Mom! Dad!"
Mabel. No longer human, trailing glowing ribbons of light like a comet's tail.
"You came!" she squealed, while their hearts sank at the sight of her. "That was fast! What'd you tell people at home? Did we go missing? Did we stay at our Grunkles' place? Did you tell them what we told you about Bill?!"
"We said that you were staying here an extra few months, and that you liked the town so much that we decided to move." Mr. Pines glanced around nervously, scanning the strange crowd and the trees beyond them.
"Where's Dipper?"
Their daughter went uncharacteristically quiet. Around them, the various creatures murmured regretfully, some giving them looks of pity (or, in the case of one unicorn with a rainbow-colored mane, a look of scorn, like she couldn't believe they'd asked that.) Some of the tiny golf-ball people and the gnomes took of their hats in a sign of respect, and all had an air of the intensely guilty, the guilt that came with the knowledge of a problem and yet no means to solve it.
"This way," Mabel said finally, in a quiet, almost sad voice. She reached out with two of her ribbons, wrapping them around her parents' hands. She led them down a path that had suddenly opened up in the throng - and now her parents could truly see how far these creatures went, so far that the trees blocked the farthest ones from view. All with those same sad, pitying looks on their faces.
A clearing opened up ahead, and there, an even odder trio of beings was gathered. One, a mish-mash of limbs and animal heads and tools and random objects, all stuffed into a torn question-mark T-shirt. Another, a tall white foxlike creature surrounded by frost and cold air that sent goosebumps rolling up their arms as they approached.
And the last, a smallish tree, hardly taller than them, with strangely hand-like branches and the knots and depressions that made the entire thing look like a swarm of screaming souls had taken up residence. Among the twisted forms in the trunk, another form was visible, the upper half of a boy's torso, elongated and barely human, and a face with dark empty hollows for eyes.
On the being's forehead, a familiar constellation birthmark glowed, traced by tiny fungi and a bluish moss.
The face smiled weakly, and it creaked loudly as it moved.
"Hey, Mom, Dad." Dipper croaked, in a voice that was hardly more than a grating of wood against wood.
"Welcome to Gravity Falls."