The young adventurer froze with terror at the edge of the wood, his old and wizened
wizard -master Albion standing gravely behind him. Albion's thin gray beard, reaching down to his feet, blew in the night wind. "Evil things," the wizard intoned somberly, "did not come into that valley." There was a roar of anguish from the hideous scaled beast of a dragon just before…
…and the TV clicked off. The old woman holding the remote glared at the TV with
irritation.
"Ki kaka sa!" Granmè hissed, puffing smoke from her nostrils. "What an abomination. In
all my two hundred forty three years of existence, I have never seen a dragon who looked like that…thing…on the screen."
"Come on, Johanne," groused Gray, licking a paw. "You knew that when we decided to watch a B -rated, human -produced fantasy movie, nothing would go well. The mundies these days have absolutely no idea what they're doing."
"Whatever," I said. "Let's just watch something else. Suggestions?"
An old family friend, Arielle, fluttered over to a stack of DVDs that looked about ready
to fall over. "Werewolf Mountain, anyone?" She picked up the keep case and let it go, reading the summary as it hovered in mid air. "You have come to the very edge of the wild…"
"NO!" at least three people yelled, sounding disgusted at the suggestion.
"It's movie night," my cousin Beth said from her spot curled on the couch next to Fitz.
"We only do this once a month. If we can't get something accurate. Let's at least get something funny."
"We do it once a month because, on three nights every month, some of us would get shot
if we went out in public," my brother Oliver reminded her.
"Shut up," I told him. "Nobody needs to hear that. You know what never gets old,
though? Shrek. Inaccurate, but an excellent movie nonetheless."
Arielle put the movie in and we all settled in as the first lyrics began. Somebody once told
me the world is gonna owe me / I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed / She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb / In the shape of an L on her forehead…
If you're not all that observant, you probably didn't notice by now. Maybe you questioned the smoke or Gray's paws or why Arielle was levitating human technology. Maybe you've already figured it out.
My family does movie night once a month not because we want to, but because we have
to. Usually, we can pass for human. Usually, you'd never even suspect we're not. That's
intentional.
Because, you see, there are strange things living in the pools and lakes in the hearts of
mountains. There are freaks dwelling in the shadows, with an underworld right beside yours. Yes, it was deep, deep, and dark. Such as only the goblins and monsters that have taken to living in the heart of the mountains can see through.
And yes, there are faeries, demons, and shape shifters living in Detroit. Yes, three nights
a month, I compulsively grow scales and wings and look like the beast in a human fairytale. Yes, I wish this had still been relatively secret.
Yes, it seemed like only yesterday that we, an innocent group of monsters who'd cobbled
a small and awkward family out of the lost and broken, had been watching Shrek in my
grandmother's secret bunker.
That was before Bill Cipher opened the rift and wrought hell on earth - literally. That was
before the world as we knew it had ended. Today, you're going to hear how everything
happened.
My name is Alex Sagar. I'm seventeen years old and, as you've probably guessed by
now, half -dragon. My mom was the one who supplied that gift…or curse…to me and Oliver.
Depends on your perspective, I guess.
And Mom was the first one in our family to be taken. We don't know why They want us.
We don't know what They've done with her. She's been gone since I was seven, and we all
know she's never coming back. No one does.
Dad, weirdly, doesn't seem to know about his wife's family secret. He doesn't know
about faeries, about talking cats who can pull talismans and magic from thin air, about dragons, about Them. Never about Them. I haven't seen him since before Armageddon, and I'm getting worried. But you know what? I kind of have to save the world first.
It's not like I'm the Chosen One or I've been given any kind of charm or sword or special
family legacy. This isn't a human fantasy series.
No, I just stumbled through a portal with my kid brother and a cranky talking faery cat
named Gray. And then I wandered, lost and terrified and for some reason in human skin, down a faery path that tried to freeze everything it touched. Only my and Oliver's fire kept both of us and our cat alive.
It was a hard and dangerous path. It was crooked, lonely, and long. Icicles hung everywhere and we could hear faint screams in the distance. We walked, unwilling to admit how scared or cold we were (we're reptiles, after all). I don't know how long it was – it seemed like an eternity – before a giant baby materialized.
"Time Baby?" guessed Oliver. I smacked him upside the head. Of course it was Time
Baby. Who else?
Time Baby gazed at us solemnly, appraising us.
"You're supposed to be dead," I remembered aloud.
"I got better." The Baby didn't speak. His words reverberated from his very being, like a
thought being telepathically projected into our minds. It made me uncomfortable, the thought that someone could get into my head like this. "Alex Sagar, Oliver Sagar, Gray the Cat - you know what has happened in Gravity Falls."
"Bill isn't exactly easy to deal with," said Gray with a shudder. His fur stood on end. "The
guy's a chaos god, after all."
"Yes. Which is why the three of you have only one option. Go back?" he thought. "No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On you go!"
Immediately, another portal opened a few feet ahead.
"Go."
Tentatively, we went forward and stepped through. Where we ended up was in a ruined
warehouse, face to face with a tall redheaded girl in a stained white tank top and a boy, a little younger than Oliver, with a birthmark on his forehead in the shape of the Little Dipper.
They took one look at us and reacted violently. The boy jumped back with a scream and the girl lunged at me with a knife.
"Who sent you?!" she snarled in my ear.
"Time Baby," I whispered, not daring to move. I was more than strong enough to throw her
across the room, but didn't want to hurt one or both of us in the process.
"What?!" the skittish boy asked. "But he's supposed to be..."
"We know," Oliver told him. "He says he got better."
For the longest time, the five of us stared at one another. It was the Apocalypse, we were all terrified, and our families were gone.
What a great introduction to Gravity Falls.