Chapter I. — Cartoon Fretwork
An ominous, venomous green suffused the early morning skies, expelling the friendly and familiar stars. The clouds coiled like rattlesnakes, poised to strike the slumbering earth below. A slimy mist swirled down from above, sickly green like the skies, but lit with sparks of lurid red fire. A thousand glowing meteors seemed ready to hurtle down to the unsuspecting town below.
So, pretty much an ordinary day for Gravity Falls.
Dipper Pines had slumbered badly. The loss of the laptop belonging to the author of his mystery journal had upset him badly, and the knowledge that at least one inter-dimensional demon had an all-seeing eye on him did not make for restful nights. And this particular night was worse: Gravity Falls' local access TV seemed to mock his failure with an all-day cartoon marathon of mystery-solving kids, all of whom seem to have mutant talking pets and rock bands playing insidiously catchy Seventies tunes—the bands, not the pets. The pets seemed to be mostly unmusical, except for the drum-playing killer whale.
And the theme-song of that last show, with the sledge-hammer repetition of the same inane lyrics over and over and over:
"Mystery Club!
They're teens who solve mysteries!
Mystery Club!
Find out hidden histories!
Mystery Club!
You'll call them to reveal
Secret riddles for real—
Not like you. What's your deal?
You can't beat the
MYSTERYYYY CLUUUUB!"
Ugh. What beat you was that stupid song; it was the real mystery club. You know...because you use clubs to beat people with. And they beat you over the head with the premise of the show. In the song. Anyway...
It hadn't helped that Mabel had gotten the tune stuck in her head. All night long, the murmur had come creeping across the room: "Not like you—not like you—solve mysteries—not like you..." Not like Dipper. He can't solve mysteries; he can't find out anything. He can't beat the Mystery Club. He can't even beat a prehistoric lake monster...
"Aw, Dipper, don't, like, take it so hard, man," said Mabel, adjusting her oversized glasses, "That's way too heavy, my brother."
"Aaah! Mabel!" Dipper yelped. "I thought you were—wait, why are you talking that way? And what have you got on?" His sister, besides the groovy shades, was sporting funky bellbottom overalls with a shooting star appliqué.
"Not everyone can be in the Mystery Club like me and Waddles."
"Yeah, Dipper baby, only super-hip and happening kids who know where it's at can solve mysteries!" grunted Waddles, his pink cheeks aglow against the contrasting background of a neon-green Afro and poncho. "How you gonna beat a triangle when you're such a square?" Oddly, the with-it pig seemed to be melting into a slimy green puddle, the glowing pink submerging, being overwhelmed by eerily shining, mamba-colored slime. A pair of beady red eyes gleamed balefully up at the boy.
"Oh, silly Waddles, that's the wrong mystery," remarked Mabel, now also glowing bright green, her eyes a flaming scarlet, her face a mouthless mask. She reached out a pair of repulsively long arms toward Dipper. "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't defuse, brother." The slimy limbs coiled around him, and then they were falling, falling, into an immeasurable blackness, as a hateful disembodied voice chanted strange, mystical words, and huge drops of green, red-eyed slime rained down on them from above.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"
"Dipper...?" Mabel blinked blearily at her brother from across the attic, as Dipper stood up on his bed, his heart performing an extended drum solo in his chest, panting like Grunkle Stan climbing a moderately high stepladder. She was no longer green, and had left the Seventies behind. Waddles lay curled pinkly at her feet, without even a suggestion of an Afro. "What's going on?"
"Mabel," said Dipper, "I've just had a terrible nightmare."
"What? Did you dream that Wendy rejected you again?"
"No... No!" Dipper shot back, annoyed. "It was about you and Waddles. You were clue-solving kids in a weird Seventies cartoon!"
"Ohmigosh, Dipper! That wasn't a nightmare," Mabel whispered, "it was a dream come true!"
"Mabel!"
"Oh, come on, Dipper! Haven't you always wanted to be in a cartoon?"
"Ugh, not one of those cartoons! There are always teenagers, and the monster always turns out to some guy trying to scare everyone away, and there's always some sort of chase scene halfway through with a song over it that has, like, nothing to do with what they're doing, and they always catch the bad guy by accident when the talking dog knocks down a chandelier and it lands on him..."
"But that's exactly what makes those shows so real!"
"And then there are always those stupid special guest episodes, where the Mystery Club meets some B-list celebrity like Suzanne Somers or somebody, or they meet some lame superhero like, I dunno, that raccoon one, or the really dumb crossovers where they just meet other cartoons..."
"Are you kidding? Suzanne Somers is amazing! Her thighs are so toned."
"I'm serious, Mabel!"
"Oh, Dipper, what makes you think this dream of yours is upsetting—instead of awesome?"
"Well, for one thing, Waddles melted into a pool of goo, and you turned into a monster with glowing red eyes. Then we all fell into the Bottomless Pit, and a rain of green slime covered Gravity Falls."
"Well, that's gross. That sounds like a Canadian TV show."
Dipper continued, disregarding the interruption, "I think the dream might have been prophetic. Something terrible's about to happen. Remember what Bill Cipher said about big changes coming to our world?"
"Oh, Dipper, you can't take the word of a horrifying cosmic entity bent on chaos and destruction. He was probably just yanking your chain. Besides, was Bill in your dream?"
"N-no. The dream specifically said it was another mystery, one that I wouldn't be able to 'defuse.' "
"Maybe someone has planted a bomb at the Mystery Shack! Maybe it's set to go off in five minutes, and you have to keep it from blowing up! Just remember, it's always the blue wire you cut, never the red wire! DON'T CUT THE RED WIRE, DIPPER! WHY WOULD YOU CUT THE RED WIRE?"
"I'M NOT CUTTING THE RED WIRE!" Dipper slumped heavily onto the edge of his bed, glaring at his sister, waving his hands before him. "There was no red wire! There wasn't any bomb! What there were, were mysteries to solve and green slime and red-eyed monsters and us falling into a gigantic black hole and... Mabel, why are you and Waddles turning green?"
"Aaaah! I'm not turning green, Dipper—you are!"
"Aaaaah!"
"Aaaaah!"
"Aaaa—oh, wait, it's just the green light coming in through the window... Wait—why is there green light coming in through the window?"
"It's the bomb! It's about to explode! Aaaaah!"
"Mabel, for the last time, there's no bomb, and there's not going to be any explosions!"
A series of explosions followed, as the glowing green meteors mentioned at the beginning of this story began to slam into selected areas of Gravity Falls. Fragments of earth, cars, and unwary night-crawlers flew through the air. From the meteors there gushed a flood of creatures shaped like giant teardrops, composed of green ooze and red eyes and jagged teeth. Wherever these brutes passed, viscous puddles of venomous lime-colored slime lay gleaming.
At the same instant, the floor slid away beneath Dipper's and Mabel's beds, and a whirling void of inky emptiness opened beneath them, as a thin, evil voice chanted:
"Quis Reticulationem Animationum perdidit? Vilicus Sartor, Vilicus Sartor, Vilicus Sartor!"
"Mabel! This is it! This is my dream!"
"Diiiippeeeeer! Why couldn't you dream about hot werewolves making out with you, like normal people do? Aaaaah!"
The Pines twins fell into darkness.
This is the point at which a network such as Disney XD or the Cartoon Network would insert a commercial advertisement. Fortunately, this story is not brought to you with any such venal, and possibly illegal, intent. For that reason I shall merely take the opportunity to recommend to my readers the fine works of fan-authored stories they can find at that fan-fiction site on the net, particularly those by that clever fellow Tannhäuser. I'd also recommend that my readers patronize such fun online games as FusionFall Heroes and PinesQuest, and that they watch the entertaining shows that inspired them. Oh, and if they like reading fan-written stories about Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall, they can find a lot of inspiring ideas over at the FusionFall and FanonFall wikis. Just do an on-line search for "FanonFall."
But, of course, since this is not a network, I shall not insert any such thing.
