It was the summer of 2014 when the twins, Dipper and Mabel, returned to Gravity Falls. Now that they were 14 (technically a teen/going on 15), they had been allowed to come back, though it had taken only one year of begging their parents to let them come back again. They were excited to have the chance to come back again and see their great uncles again, who had decided to start taking summers off of their vacationing from then on so that they could host their great niece and nephew during the summers.
When they got off the bus to Gravity Falls, they were immediately met by their great uncles, who each gave them big bear hugs in greeting. "How're you kids doing?" Stanley said, ruffling Dippers hair, much to the irritation of the 14-year-old. "We're doing great!" Mabel cheered, hugging her grunkles with an enthusiasm that could be matched by no one. "That's great," Ford continued, leading the two to the car, where a blonde boy their age could be seen through the tinted windows. Ford tapped on the window, causing the blonde to look up from whatever he was doing. He appeared to put something aside before opening the car door and stepping out. He wore a beaded necklace with a tassel on the end and a silver ring as well as khakis, gold tennis shoes, and a golden shirt with the word 'Giza' over a picture of the pyramids of Giza.
The boy stood awkwardly while Ford explained his appearance. "This is William Rephic. He's been staying at the shack with Soos for about a year now in the room that I had left my experimental body-switching carpet. I still have no idea where that thing went," Ford paused in thought, while the twins and Stanley did their best to look as innocent as possible. "Anyways, he's part fairy-part human, which should be impossible, considering how tiny fairies are." Ford paused while the blonde shifted his hair behind his ears, revealing pointed ears. He gave a sheepish smile, displaying his sharp teeth, which only made him look intimidating. They also noticed how his hair was an odd color, considering his dark skin tone. "His grandfather had been a exchange student from Egypt at the same college I went to, so when he died, William came to Gravity Falls since he had nowhere else to go."
"Nice to meet you, William," Dipper said stiffly, holding out a hand to William, who took his hand shyly. "Assalamo alaikum wa rahmatullahe wa barakatohu. You can call me Will. Question Mark and Sixer have told me a lot about you." Dipper and Mabel froze, thinking about the last time their friend had been called Question Mark. Will, noting their uneasiness, eased up. "I have disassociative amnesia, so I'm not good with names. It's easier for me to just go by people's zodiacs, but I can't do that with twins because they have the same birth date," He explained. "So I just go by their zodiac signs or defining features since I can remember data, but not people."
The twins nodded, relaxing slightly. "Well, it's nice to meet you, Will." Mabel gave her new friend a big hug, which the blond boy was clearly uncomfortable with.
"What was that first thing you said?" Dipper asked curiously. Will's eyes brightened at this. "My, how you say, mother tongue is Arabic. 'Assalamo alaikum wa rahmatullahe wa barakatohu' just means 'Peace be on you and the mercy and blessings of Allah.' It's a common greeting where I'm from. I can speak English well, but I prefer Arabic with regards to religious concepts." Dipper nodded, satisfied with his answer.
As they all piled into the car, Dipper noticed the third journal lying on the back seat, which Will snatched up and produced a pen out of nowhere. As Stanley started up the car, Will elected to ignore the twins as he added notes into the journal. Dipper leaned over to see what Will was doing, seeing a circular chart with random symbols and numbers, which Will had sloppily written letters next to in blue ink. He then flipped back a few pages, where he quickly wrote words beside similar symbols, before flipping back before Dipper could see what was written.
"What are you doing?" Dipper asked, startling the blonde. "I'm trying to un-code all the messages written in this book." Dipper nodded, now invested in the boy's work. "From what I had seen, there seemed to be three main types of codes written throughout the book, not including the letter that great uncle Ford pasted into it, as well as the small portions of binary, rearrangement, Vigenère, and the bit of Latin at the beginning. Will nodded. "I got that as well. The first code is a 23 shift caesar cipher. It was the first I tried to figure out because it seemed like it would be the easiest." Dipper nodded in understanding. "The second and third were written in shapes that looked similar to one another. At first glance, they look almost the same. At least until you notice how some of the shapes shifted ninety degrees left, right, or underneath. It's clear that the codes were written by two different people, considering where each code tends to be at. Now, the second code was easier to crack than the first because there was already a key in the book."
Will opened the journal wide, showing Dipper the circular key in the center of the page. "See? The numbers next to the symbols are supposed to be the sequence of the letters of the alphabet." He pointed to one section of the circle, where a number 1 and the letter a was written beside a symbol that looked like a right box-bracket symbol shifted ninety degrees to the right with two small circles hovering between it's left and right side. "And for the third one, I noted the frequency of each character and did small guess-work." He flipped through a few pages, showing some of the notes he had made before the codes.
"Some of the characters from the second code were also highlighted in purple, and they created this code." Will opened the book to the inside of the front cover, which had previously been empty, but now had a series of the symbols written at the top, along with a series of words at the bottom saying 'CURSE THE AXOLOTL. EVERY CONSPIRACY IS TRUE.'
Dipper wondered what the part about the 'axolotl' was supposed to mean. He recalled learning about a type of salamander called the axolotl that was native to Mexico city, which was consequently the home of the empire that believed in a God called Xolotl, who was the god of fire and lightning. He was also god of twins, monsters, misfortune, sickness, and deformities. He was also the canine brother and twin of Quetzalcoatl. They were both sons of the virgin Coatlicue. Xolotl was considered the dark version of the evening star, Venus. He found this a little suspicious, considering the links that all of this had to his family and Gravity Falls as a whole.
Ford smiled from the front seat. "Will's smart, isn't he? I considered tutoring him when I first heard that he was living at the shack, but he declined my offer."
Will grinned mischievously, turning to the younger Pines twins. "I said to him to shove his ego up his ass when he asked." Mabel and Dipper stifled their giggles at his confession. Ford rolled his eyes rather melodramatically.
Stanley turned in his seat to say something, while everyone in the car protested as the car started to veer right.
"Lee, keep your eyes on the road," Ford said calmly, reaching out a hand to straighten the wheel. Stanley huffed, but agreed nonetheless. "Okay, but Will also punched Sixer in the face when he tried to correct him on his changes to Ford's thingamajig."
"Project Mentem," Ford corrected. Dipper's eyes widened as he remembered the machine that showed people's memories and thoughts. "What did he do to it?" Dipper asked.
Will smirked. "I improved the mechanisms after Ford managed to fix it. I devised a better way to pinpoint specific memories using chemistry, psychology, and the machine as well." Ford nodded enthusiastically. "Essentially, he experimented with some medications and sleep-hypnosis to help the user to more easily pinpoint memories in their mind. He also found a way to make the machine focus on messages coming from specific parts of the brain, so that it doesn't pick up on meaningless messages, such as those coming from pain receptors or those telling your organs to keep functioning," Ford explained, while is brother rolled his eyes.
"Which basically means he uses sleeping pills to hypnotize a person into thinking about one thing more clearly. The hypnotism thing is what he was trying to argue about," Stanley butted in, receiving a glare from his brother and a nod of understanding from Mabel.
"It's much more than that. Like the fact that the chemicals used not only cause a person to sleep, but it also has some chemicals found in vyvanse, so it promotes the person's focus so that they are able to more easily perceive the specific memory rather than just having the hypnotism do all the hard work." Stanley rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, whatever. Same difference." Ford sighed in frustration.
"It's not a big deal anyways," Will commented. "It's basic psychology, pharmaceutics, and mechanics. I used Goggle and my knowledge of freshman year health to find out what parts of the brain I needed to focus on as well. So that's cheating, compared to Sixer's knowledge of neuroscience, which he didn't major in. There was a lot less information available about neuroscience during the time period Sixer was working on it too, so it's pretty impressive that he even got it up and running in the first place."
Ford preened at the compliment.
"Of course, he only used it to block external factors from affecting his mind, so it's not that impressive when you think about all the other amazing things the device could have been used for. And the fact that he never used any of his inventions to actually further science and quality of life. He only left his half-finished products to rust and never attempted to improve his inventions. As well as the fact that he committed the bare minimum to the project, when he could have done further studies in order to find ways to make the machine more efficient. ADHD may have not been recognized as an official disorder until the 60s, but benzedrine was seen as a drug that improved focus in children in 1936, so if he really wanted to focus more closely on specific memories, he could have tried experimenting with benzedrine. And he could have considered hypnosis as well, considering that it has existed for centuries. But no, he had his head too far up his ass to realize that hypnosis was a legitimate practice and was scientifically sound. Just like every scientist since as early as Hippocrates to now, he discredited another person's discoveries in science because his ego was too big."
Ford sulked, not bothering to correct the blonde, remembering how the young boy had beat the crap out of him with a plastic ruler the last time he tried to argue against him (it had been a very weird day). "The man that discovered the effects that benzedrine had on children's psyche was Dr. Charles Bradley, by the way. His findings were ignored by his colleagues until 1955, when Ritalin started becoming widely used to treat ADHD as the disorder became more understood," Will added.
Dipper's eyebrows rose. "I thought you said you had disassociative amnesia? How are you able to remember things like that? Even the doctor's name, which you said you were bad at remembering."
Will smiled sheepishly. "It's like I said, I can remember data. I have a hard time discerning my own memories of people, places, and events, but I can easily remember who invented the toaster and how to make invisible ink with sulfuric acid. It's a pick and choose kind of amnesia. It's not like I hit my head too hard once. My brain just shoves a lot of my memories into the back of my head. It's pretty easy for me to re-remember things, it just takes a bit of prodding."
"Yeah, but amnesia also affects the left side of the brain. So a person could forget two years of their life and remember the things they learned in the math classes they took, but completely forget everything they learned in their history class," Dipper corrected. The truth was that the only reason he really knew that was because he once read a book about a girl who had amnesia. It was a fictional romance, but that wasn't the point.
Will nodded. "I think it's because I have photographic memory, not to be confused with eidetic memory. I can remember things I've read perfectly, but I can't recall memories perfectly, like a person with eidetic memory," He explained. "I got it from my mother. Most of my memories of her are blocked out though. I can remember little things about her, like going to mosque with her in Egypt and moving to America with her. But there's a lot I don't remember. When my grandmother started developing arthritis, my mother started writing her letters to Ford."
Ford nodded. "That's right. I believe your mother's name was Amaliha, though she preferred to be called Amalia in our letters." Will nodded.
"Her name roughly translated to 'mother of gods.' She couldn't remember where she kept her keys to the apartment for the life of her, but she very quickly memorized long books about gravity abnormality maps. We were from a place in Egypt similar to Gravity Falls called Giza, which had a high level of oddities and anomalies. It's on Ford's anomaly map. She became obsessed with the supernatural after she met my dad. He was a desert fairy. They're similar to the fairies in Gravity falls, but they're bigger and are carnivorous. They're about the height of a sheet of printer paper, so a little bit shorter than a gnome. Because of their geographic habitat, they had to adapt to live off of things other than plants, which were few and far in between in the Egyptian deserts. The European lore about how fairies would kidnap small children actually came from Egypt because desert fairies kidnap children from towns like Giza so that they can eat them. They grew bigger and grew sharp teeth so they could feed off creatures that were able to survive in the desert more easily than them."
Everyone in the car gave varying sounds of disgust as Will grinned. "And sometimes when people wandered out into the desert and died, the fairies would bury them in the sand to prevent them from decomposing quickly and eat them later, bit by bit." The younger twins groaned in disgust. "But most of the time, they just ate cats and other small pets."
"That's gross," Mabel commented.
"What? Human flesh is actually pretty tasty."
Everyone proceeded to groan in even more disgust, leaning as far away from Will as they could. "Please tell me you're joking about the eating people thing because I would get in so much trouble with Shermie and Dipper and Mabel's parents for letting them live under the same roof as someone that preys on humans."
Will shrugged noncommittally as the car decelerated into the parking lot of the Mystery Shack. Everyone quickly got out of the STNLYMBL and the younger Pines twins ran into the shack to be greeted by Wendy and Soos.
Stanley, Ford, and Will hung back at the entrance of the gift shop.
Will nudged Ford with a mischievous smile. "You didn't tell me your great nephew was both pretty and smart." Ford looked scandalized by this information.
"Aren't you Muslim? And very religious?"
Will shrugged. "Aaoozobillahe minushaitanir rajeem." He started walking toward the group of teens, while Ford gawked.
"What does that even mean?" Stanley patted his brother on the back rather roughly. "It means 'I seek refuge with Allah from Satan, the accursed.' I Goggled it after the millionth time he said it. He's trying to rid himself of his gay thoughts." Stan laughed as his brother gawked and started ushering Mabel and Dipper into the house so they could put their luggage away.