Dipper sighed, flopped on his back, and dropped the journal over the side of his bed. It landed on the attic floor with a muffled thump, and from the other side of the room, Mabel glanced up from whatever brightly-colored, yarn-noodle-and-glue project she was working on.
"Are you finally going to give that thing a break?" she asked.
Dipper sighed again and locked his hands behind his head. "I don't get it," he said. "I know the clues to revealing the Author's identity have got to be right under my nose, but I just can't see it."
"Maybe you need glasses," Mabel teased. "Hey! Then you can wear a flower pot and you'll look just like Grunkle Stan!"
"First of all, it's a fez. And second, I don't need glasses." Dipper sat up. "It's just that everything here is so strange, I'm losing track of what normal is. I need…I don't know what I need."
Mabel stood, scattering glitter and uncooked noodles. "You need a break, that's what you need. Let's go for a hike. In the Great Outdoors!" She spread her arms like a showman.
Dipper glanced at a discarded copy of the Gravity Falls Gossiper on the floor. The headline read "HEAT WAVE SWEEPS OVER GRAVITY FALLS" and a picture of the Nathaniel Northwest statue.
It was distinctly drooping.
"Mabel, today is supposed to be the hottest day of the whole summer," he pointed out. "Why can't we stay home – in the air conditioning – and… I dunno. Watch tv or something?"
"Dipper." Mabel crossed her arms. A noodle hung from her elbow. "Do you really want to waste away your summer doing the same things we could be doing back home?"
"No…"
"Then come on, Dipcicle, let's go!"
It would be overstating things to say that the woods surrounding the Mystery Shack were gloomy, intimidating, or really in any way creepy.
The woods were far more clever than that.
No, these woods looked perfectly normal until you started looking close enough to notice the…oddities.
But not today. Today, Dipper was determined to not think about any strange creatures or strange plants or strange…anything. The journal was tucked safely away under his bed, Waddles was snuffling at a tuft of weeds that were obviously a very normal shade of magenta, and Mabel was skipping along singing the one line she knew from Several Timez song "Nothing Will Keep Me From Loving You Excessively."
Waddles burped a major chord and looked at Dipper accusingly.
"Nuh-uh," he said, waving his hands. "I didn't hear that. At all." Sweat dripped down his face, and he glared at Mabel, who was wearing one of her baggy sweaters in spite of the ridiculous heat. This one sported the word SMILE in multicolored letters.
"How are you possibly wearing that sweater?" he demanded. "It's like, a million degrees out here."
Mabel swiped an armful of sweat from her forehead and grinned. "Sweaters are cool."
Dipper rolled his eyes and promptly tripped over something in the path.
"Whoa-what – whoa!" he exclaimed, tumbling head-over-heels into a pile of leaves. "Ow." He rubbed his head. "What was that?"
Mabel prodded the spot with her toe and gasped. "Dipper! You've gotta see this!"
It was a small, metallic…something, protruding from the bare dirt of the path.
"It looks like a box corner," Dipper said, excitement coloring his voice. "Maybe it's another journal!"
"Or maybe it's pirate treasure! Or fairies!"
"I'm not thinking fairies." Dipper knelt down, and started scraping at the dirt around the object with a stick. "But whatever it is—"
"Dig it up! Dig it up!"
Waddles grunted in agreement with Mabel's chanting – and Dipper ignored the fact that the pig was still tuned to C#. His sister grabbed another branch, and together the twins started unearthing the…whatever it was.
The dirt was rock-hard from the lack of recent rain, baked by the heat and crumbling into dust puffs as they worked. But between their sticks and a handy clothes hanger Mabel found in the bushes, they managed to scrape away enough earth to get under the corner of the object.
"It's a box," Dipper exclaimed. He wedged his fingers under the exposed corner and levered up. With a snapping sound, the dry earth shuddered and surrendered, releasing its treasure.
Dipper pulled the box free and let it clunk to the ground. About the size of a shoebox, it was made of dented metal and spotted with rust stains. Mabel crouched down beside him and nudged the box with her stick. It made a dull rattling noise.
"What do you think it is?" she asked. "Treasure?"
Dipper pulled the box into his lap. His fingers poked and prodded all over the sides and corners, but—
"That's weird," he said. He held the thing up to the light and squinted at it. "There's no opening."
"Lemme see it." Mabel took the box-thing and examined it, her tongue sticking out in concentration. She peered at it from every angle, tapping on the corners with her fingernails. Finally, she dropped the thing on the ground and jumped on it.
"Give up your secrets!" she demanded.
"Mabel!" Dipper rescued the box and brushed off the top layer of dust. "We'll take it back to the shack," he said. "Maybe one of Stan's tools will get it open."
Mabel tugged Waddles out of a stand of what looked like orange bamboo and – ignoring the fact that the pig was now grunting in a happy minor third – they headed back to the Mystery Shack.
None of them noticed the trail of greenish light leaking from one of the rust spots on the box…or the way it followed them home.