Belle shivered as the late autumn winds whipped past her long blonde hair and cut through her fur jacket as though it wasn't even there, but though her legs ached, she refused to slow down her pace. This trip wasn't going to be in vain, that much she was certain of. She would make sure that she found… something. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, exactly, but there had to be something exciting out here. The woods of Gravity Falls had been where it all started, after all; what better place to stumble upon something unusual, something powerful, something less utterly boring than her normal life?
Oh, sure, her parents wouldn't approve of her going into the woods, especially on her own, and especially especially around sunset. And they were right, it was a dangerous place to be, but didn't they get that the risk was what made exploration so much fun? No, of course they didn't know that. There were a lot of things Belle's parents didn't know. They didn't know that she wasn't really studying for her self-defense class at her friend Martha's house. They certainly didn't know that she had a whole stash of cryptozoology books hidden behind her bedroom walls that she consulted for some "studying" on her own. And if they were so ignorant about their own daughter's life, why wouldn't they be ignorant about the truth behind the mysteries of Gravity Falls, or the beauty of the forest that surrounded their quaint little town?
And yet, as the shadows of the trees grew longer and the light of the setting sun grew dimmer, Belle had to admit that maybe her parents had a point.
Suddenly, the blonde girl saw something between the trees in the corner of her eye. Her heart raced as she turned around, trying to face whatever she had seen. This was it. She knew she'd find something if she looked long enough. From what little she'd seen of the creature, it looked too tall to be an animal and too fast and shadowy to be a regular human. Was it a member of the undead, perhaps, or a hide-behind? As she pondered all the possibilities, resting her hand on the lavender handbag in which she'd stashed a variety of potentially useful objects, Belle couldn't stop herself from grinning as she prepared to face the adventure that awaited her.
After spinning around and around several times, she caught another glimpse of the creature, watching it for several seconds before it darted behind another tree. It was roughly humanoid in shape, but had pure black skin and floated a few feet off the ground. Too short to be a hide-behind, not an undead or a possessed person … Belle couldn't quite think of anything that this mysterious creature could be, no matter how much she tried to remember what she'd read in her books or heard from her teachers' droning lectures. And if she didn't know what it was… maybe it was something new. Maybe she'd found something that nobody else in the world had ever seen, something that would make her famous, something that would break her out of her humdrum life for good.
The fallen leaves crunched with her every footstep as she chased after the creature, speeding up in an attempt to keep up with its supernaturally swift pace, grateful for every lap she'd run on the school's track for cross-country training over the last few weeks. By the time the creature finally slowed down enough for her to catch up, the sun had sunken below the horizon, replaced by a bright half-moon.
And then the two looked at one another, Belle staring into its cold black eyes… no, it obviously wasn't the right term for what stood before her. He. She'd seen images of him, not in her school-assigned textbooks but in several of the demonology manuals she'd ruffled through when she was supposed to be sleeping.
A demon. She was face to face with a real live demon, one of the faded, wrinkled drawings she'd poured over come to life.
Belle shivered, and not just because of the autumn winds. Maybe she should have listened to her parents after all.
"Alcor?" She had meant for it to be a statement, but it had come out as a question, her uncertainty revealing itself despite her best efforts. And did her voice always sound that high-pitched?
The demon moved closer to the girl, still staring right into her eyes, unblinking. "Who are you?" His voice echoed through the forest and in her ears.
Her response came reflexively, in the tone she'd practiced and perfected over the years, the words leaving her mouth before she could decide whether it was wise to say anything at all. "My name is Belle Northwest." At least this time her voice wasn't shaking. She'd always been eager to give her name, proud to announce her status as a Northwest to those few who remained oblivious to her heritage… but now she gulped, realizing that letting a demon know her full name was probably a terrible mistake.
"Northwest…" The demon grinned, a grin that made the hairs on the back of Belle's neck stand up. "I used to know a Northwest way back when. Does the name Pacifica ring a bell, Belle?" Alcor made a golden bell pop into existence mid-air, then tossed it over to the shaking girl, who instinctively caught it before shrieking and dropping it on the ground. The bell rang out doleful chimes reminiscent of a church bell, even as it sat motionless among the fallen leaves, until the demon made it disappear with a snap of his fingers.
"My Nana would never deal with the likes of you."
"Hey!" The grin disappeared off his face, replaced with… was he pouting? She'd never read anything about demons pouting before… "Don't judge me! We were pals, okay? But if she was your Nana… man, I thought it'd been longer than that…" The demon broke eye contact, looking off into the distance at something the girl couldn't see, though the image of those black eyes still burned into her own.
"M-maybe it wasn't her. I-it's a family name." Belle's voice was trembling as much as she was, inching away from Alcor until her back was pressed against a tree.
The demon blinked a few times and looked back at Belle. "Maybe. And you meeting me is just another family tradition, I suppose."
"But… I… I didn't summon you." Belle started to doubt the words even as she said them. She must have done it, even by accident, somehow… Maybe she'd been muttering some incantation absentmindedly as she'd strolled along, pricked her finger on some half-buried relic or stray branch… She looked down at herself. No cuts she could see, no pinpricks, no wounds of any kind marred her soft unblemished skin. And yet… what else could it have been?
She slumped against the tree and sat on the cold ground, nestling her head against her knees, tears running down her cheeks and ruining her carefully put-together make-up. But even with her head buried in the silky fabric of her skirt, she could still feel the imprint of those dark eyes in the back of her head. "I- I didn't, I swear I didn't, I didn't mean to, I don't want anything from you, please don't hurt me!" Her head filled with her mother's lectures, not only those telling her not to go in the woods and not to deal with demons but those telling her that a Northwest never loses composure, never makes a scene, never shows that anything can hurt them. But here she was, crying like a baby, feeling for the first time utterly insignificant.
"Hey. Hey. Calm down. It's okay." Belle felt an eerily cold hand on her shoulder. She flinched, and the motion made her fall to the ground, covering her designer clothes in mud and forcing her to face the demon once more as she unsteadily stood up.
"Your name is Belle, huh? Is that by any chance short for Mabel?"
She sniffled and tried to wipe the tears off her cheeks, but just succeeded in leaving mud all over her face. She could only imagine how frightful she looked, with her beloved make-up replaced with dirt and tears, the image of perfection that she worked so hard to craft torn away over the course of one horrible night. "N-not exactly."
"Not exactly? What does that mean?" The demon retreated a few feet, and the girl looked away from his face and towards the bright half-moon as she took a deep breath, knowing as she prepared to speak how foolish it was to tell a demon not only her name but its origin, giving away such personal and powerful information because of a simple question. But the only alternative was not to answer, to blatantly ignore the request of a demon, and… that couldn't lead to anything pleasant either.
"My sis and I were born right after my great-aunt Mabel died, so… so Mom named us after her. May and Belle."
"You've got a great-aunt named Mabel? And you're a twin?" Alcor gave a loud cackle and clapped his hands. "Oh, that's perfect! No wonder you could see me!"
"I… I still don't understand. Why do you care about Auntie Mabel? And- and leave my sister out of this, okay, she didn't do anything, I-"
The girl grew silent as she watched the demon change form. In a flash of yellow light, he went from a being of pure darkness to… well… a kid, a mostly-normal-looking kid who looked even younger than her, though his eyes were still black. And though the face of the demon-turned-boy looked slightly familiar, Belle knew that it wasn't one that she'd seen in her demonology manuals or warned to avoid at school. But she could just barely remember seeing a face like that smiling back at her from one or two of the yellowed photos in the family scrapbooks.
Alcor extended his hand, his oddly-human hand, and the smile that greeted her wasn't the creepy too-wide grin that she'd seen on his demon form, but the same sort of smile that Belle had worn when starting this whole ordeal, one that she wasn't sure she'd ever have on her face again.
"I'm your Uncle Dipper. Well, throw a bunch of 'greats' in there first. Now, what can I do for you?"