July 23rd, 2018

Gravity Falls, OR

The last thing Dipper Pines wanted to think about that Monday was another government conspiracy, let alone from forty years ago. He and his friends had already brought down Preston Northwest, and that effort had eaten up nearly half the summer. He wanted to get back to investigating and researching mysteries more in the line of local paranormal phenomena.

"Come on, Mabel! Aren't you the least bit curious about what happened outside town last night?" he insisted while stacking mugs on the shelf. "Three people claim they saw a weird creature devouring a live sheep. Maybe there's a correlation with that alien-wolf hybrid thing that Ford told us about. Certainly fits the MO."

"Dip, I'd love to help you track down some creepy-crawly thingy, but we've got to help Stan today," she reminded him. "We promised that we'd do a full week's work if he gave us time off last week."

Dipper groaned, glancing at a mug imprinted with an oversized question mark. He sighed, thinking that their Great Uncle had been rather generous, by his standards, over the past month. Maybe doing a little useful work wasn't a bad thing.

It was just frustrating that he couldn't do what he wanted. He had started the summer depressed by the impending onset of college, only for a new investigation - albeit one seemingly far removed from those he'd studied in the past - to captivate him, to drag him out of his stupor and back into the mystery business. His mind raced with the thought of making up for lost time, wondering how many mysteries, how many weird phenomena and undocumented creatures he could manage to cram into the month remaining before he went off to West Coast Tech.

And, of course, there was Wendy. Who had just recently went from friend to tentative romantic partner over the course of the past month. Who, over a long and most pleasant weekend, had spent time mocking bad movies and making him food and snuggling in bed and cementing their relationship into something far cozier than just an anguished, overdue outburst of affection. Part of him loved the domesticity of the whole arrangement, the opportunity to love Wendy without having to battle a Shapeshifter or an evil triangle or Baldy McBalderson at the same time, but another part of him wanted to join his favorite Lumberjill in thrilling adventures.

And yet he was stuck here stacking coffee mugs and bobble heads.

"Don't worry, Bro," Mabel said. "Next week we'll only have to work a couple of days," she reminded him. "Plenty of time for chasing monsters and aliens and what-nots then!"

A young couple walked into the gift shop, still chattering about Stan and Soos' latest creation, the Turnipede. "I can't believe that a turnip could grow one hundred legs and come to life!" the husband said, awestruck.

"Or that Stan could kill and stuff it!" his wife marveled.

"Glad that you all loved the Turnipede!" Mabel said from behind the desk, beaming. "To make your experience even more memorable, be sure to buy the official Turnipede T-Shirt, available only at the Mystery Shack!"

It showed a drawing of a savage turnip with gnarled teeth, clawed hands and a million bug-like legs. A far cry from the limp vegetable with some pipe cleaners glued on.

The customers gasped. "That must be what it looked like when it was still alive, hon," the man whispered to his wife.

"Thank God they killed it," she muttered back.

"We'll take ten!" the husband beamed.

"At least one of you kids inherited my salesmanship," Grunkle Stan announced, walking into the gift shop. Then he noticed the couple and tipped his fez to them. "And thank you folks for stopping by!"

"It was wonderful," the husband said, slipping the T-shirt over his head.

"And so are these shirts," the wife said, her head stuck in the hole.

"Hey, credit Mabel here," Stan said proudly. "She's the real genius here."

"Oh Grunkle Stan," Mabel blushed. Then she hit a few buttons on the register. "Fifteen dollars a shirt. That will be $135.00, please."

"One hundred fifty..." Stan did the math in his head, realized it didn't add up. "Uh, Mabel, I think you forgot something."

"Buy ten shirts and get one free," she announced. "Our special secret deal of the week!"

"But I never..." Stan started to protest.

"That's the Mabel difference," his niece said with a wink.

"Wow, that is one heck of a deal!" the husband enthused. The wife toppled over, still ensnared in her shirt. "At that price, might as well buy twenty more!"

Stan put his hands on his hips and smiled at Mabel. "Mabel, someday you are gonna be the real bread maker in the family."

"Oh Grunkle Stan, I think I'll stick with sweaters," she said, taking the husband's money.

While opening the register, she came across a hastily scrawled note in Stan's handwriting.

"Brendan Bland," she read out loud. "Huh. Something something nuclear blah, who is this weirdo and why is he here?"

"Yeah, I forgot to tell you kids," Stan said offhandedly, helping stuff the couple's haul of t-shirts into undersized plastic bags. "Some weirdo in a gray body suit showed up, gave me a cryptic message about something I couldn't understand, then vanished into a bright light. I figured you wouldn't want to be bothered."

"Grunkle Stan, that seems like something you should tell us about right away," Dipper said, walking over to the front desk.

"Don't lecture me, kid," Stan snapped. "There's so much weirdness going on in this place it didn't really register with me."

"You can say that again!" the male customer said, shaking Stan's hand and helping his wife, who had managed to poke her head out a shirt sleeve, to the car with their bounty.

Dipper and Mabel stared at the message, trying to decipher it.

"Brendan Bland?" Dipper said. "Who the heck is that...?"

Mabel shrugged. The two twins read the barely-legible note over carefully, then came to the same conclusion at once:

"Blendin Blandin!"

Even though Wendy Corduroy known her little dork for six years, she still felt the thrill and excitement of a fresh new relationship, something that their weekend together had only intensified. Every where she went, she hummed tunelessly to herself, danced around her apartment, feeling happier and more alive than she had in a long time. So alive that even the inevitable sight of a centipede in her pantry couldn't bring her down. She wondered, if she felt this way now, why she hadn't fallen for Dipper before. But then she told herself that's not how romance works.

She had been hoping to join her dad and brothers in a camping trip to Washington State later that week (promising Dipper that she'd bring her best camera and keep an eye out for Sasquatch while visiting). But then her dad accidentally smashed the roof during one of his weird fits, and they had to spend a few days fixing things up.

So she was helping Charlie Huston as best she could, giving him copies of all the family files on Rick Corduroy they'd uncovered.

"Here's all the stuff Dad got from our cousin out in Fargo," she said, hefting a huge sheaf of papers onto his desk. "My dad said he'd appreciate a copy of the article, and if you don't make Rick look like a total badass he'll seek revenge."

"I'll keep that in mind," Charlie said, handing the redhead a custody form.

"Anyway, I trust you, man, you're one of the smartest people I've ever met, and I'm sure you won't get the smallest detail wrong." She signed the form hastily.

"Thanks, Wendy," he said. "What's on tap for you guys?"

"I dunno, man," Wendy said, leaning on the desk. "Starting to feel a little bored. Old Man Stan's making Dipper and Mabel work all week, and Robbie and Tambry won't be in town until the weekend. Maybe I should go out into the woods and take some pictures. Feels like that kinda day, and I'm sure the animals miss me buggin them."

"At least it's cooled down a little," he said. "Seventy-ish isn't bad for this time of year."

"You said it," Wendy said. "Anyway, I'll get out of your hair." She looked at his freshly crew-cut hair. "What there is of it, anyway!"

Charlie laughed weakly and put the form into a desk drawer. "No problem, Wendy! Always a pleasure, and thanks. Tell Dipper and Mabel I said hi."

"You got it, dude," Wendy said, waving as she walked out of the Museum. She drove home and was starting to tinker with her camera when she got a phone call.

"Hey Dip, what's up?"

"Wendy, something really important's going on at the Shack," came the frantic voice at the other end. "Come down, quick! It could be a matter of life and death!"

"Got it," Wendy said, hanging up without further answer. She looked wistfully at her camera and sighed, falling back on her bed. She wasn't up for saving the world just now. Suddenly, being bored seemed like a good alternative.

"Of course I know Blendin Blandin," Grunkle Ford said as the kids joined him in the study. "We've encountered each other in sixteen different dimensions over the years. A huge klutz, not very good at his job, but for a long time after Weirdmageddon he was pretty much the only member of the Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squad left in the whole Multiverse."

"Well, we're doomed," Dipper deadpanned.

"I noticed a few small anomalies cropping up over the past few days, but couldn't place them," Ford said. "Things that the average person wouldn't notice. A flock of birds that normally flies overhead vanishing one day without explanation. Animals dying of radiation poison after drinking from a pond a few miles outside town. Most disturbingly of all, this."

He held opened an old history textbook book that he happened to own, which contained a brief passage on the destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego by nuclear weapons in August 1974. He had called a friend in both cities to confirm that they were, indeed, still standing; the change, so far, had only been in print, not reality.

"I've seen this development before," Ford said. "It's a subtle time shift. Someone from our time and place has either gone back in time themselves, or done something to change the past, and the effects are slowly bleeding into our reality. Movies always show things like that as instantaneous, but it happens gradually, over a few days or weeks. The first signs are extremely subtle, almost unnoticeable, then they come faster and more drastic and intense. Cities with vanish, whole populations of animals will disappear, people will die, the world will drastically change until it becomes something else entirely, stopping God knows where. Our current reality eventually becomes the reality that's recorded in this textbook, beyond hope of repair. And whatever that reality is, clearly it isn't good."

"Well, that is...troubling," Dipper said.

"What happened in 1974?" Mabel asked. Then she wracked her brain and frowned. "Oh geez, don't tell Grunkle Stan!"

"There were quite a few important events that year," Ford said authoritatively. "But yes, the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon's resignation are probably the best-known. And certainly the one most likely to drive Stan into a fit."

"So, Nixon started a nuclear war to stay in office, maybe?" Dipper asked.

"I know there were officials in his government who worried that he might use the military to stay in power," Ford recalled. "James Schlesinger, the Defense Secretary, arranged for all military orders by the President to be routed through his office to prevent that from happening. Nobody knew what might happen as his Presidency died, or what he might do if Congress impeached him. So, it's possible."

"But Nixon resigned without triggering a nuclear war," Mabel reminded them. "I mean, I know that much. So what gives?"

"Hard to say," Ford said. "Like I said, this sort of gradual time shift indicates that someone from our time period went back in time and changed the outcome of still events. If someone like Bill Cipher or another time demon had done it, we would never have existed in the first place. We wouldn't be having this discussion. But we'd have to find out before it overtakes our reality completely, and I'm not sure how unless we wait...and that's too risky."

"Or unless we can travel back in time to stop it!" Wendy announced from the doorway.

"Hey Wen!" Mabel cheered. "Wow, points for the dramatic entrance."

"You guys know a time traveler, right?" Wendy said, all business. "Any way we can contact him?"

"I mean," Dipper said sheepishly. "He kind of tipped us off about it, sort of, but he disappeared and left a note for us that Stan...well, he massacred it."

"Figures," Wendy said. "Dude can barely work a pen to save this life." She studied the note, then handed it back to Ford and sighed.

"So basically, we have an indeterminate number of days to stop an indeterminate threat from changing the past in indeterminate ways," Wendy said, crossing her arms. "That's promising."

Suddenly Charlie ran huffing and puffing through the door, bending over to catch his breath.

"Charlie!" Mabel enthused, running over to hug him. "You got my text!"

Charlie slowly raised himself to his feet, still leaning against the wall. Mabel squeezing him pushed any remaining oxygen out of his lungs and it took him a long moment to recover.

"Guys, I got Mabel's message and I did a little research," he said. "Wasn't sure that I believed it, or how you could verify it, but I came across something online that might give us a hint."

He scrolled up a YouTube video entitled "Nixon impeachment hearings - July 25th, 1974." The video showed a pompous Californian named Charles Wiggins declaiming the President's innocence and the need for further proof to impeach him; the assembled Mystery Team waited impatiently for the shoe to drop. Then, about three minutes into the video, there was the muffled sound of an explosion, a flash of light and several screams. Then the video dramatically cut out, leaving six-and-a-half minutes of static.

"Astonishing," Ford said, still unable to peel his eyes away from the screen. "Someone blew up the Capitol building and killed the House Judiciary Committee while they debated impeachment. That must be the point of divergence - or one of them, at least. I've rarely encountered a case of this where there's just one tiny thing..."

"And not just the House," Charlie interrupted. He scrolled up Hugh Scott's biography on Wikipedia and noted his lifespan: November 11, 1900-July 25, 1974.

"Now, Scott was the Senate Minority Leader at the time, as I'm sure Ford knows," Charlie said, slipping into his lecturer mode. "I wrote a paper on him back in school. He was one of the Republican Congressmen who convinced Nixon to resign after the last tapes came out in early August. And he lived until July 1994 - or should have lived. Looks like in this new reality he wasn't so lucky."

"I'm guessing this is Nixon, huh?" Wendy said. Mabel, with a panicked look on her face, typed frantically into her own phone.

"I suppose he would be the obvious culprit," Ford agreed. "But not necessarily the right one. We'd need to figure out all the precise circumstances to be able to effect it. Repairing timelines is a very tricky process, and we can't act without having a precise knowledge of what changed and how to change it back."

"But Great Uncle Ford, you said it yourself!" Dipper choked out. "It could take forever until we get enough details to act! And until then, we won't know until..."

"Dipper..." Mabel said, her eyes pale as she stared at her phone. They huddled around and saw, with abject horror, a record of casualties in a nuclear attack on New York City that she'd found, somehow, in an obscure corner of the Internet:

"SHERMAN PHILBRICK PINES: 1950-1974

"STANLEY PHILBRICK PINES: 1953-1974

"STANFORD PHILBRICK PINES: 1953-1974"

The twins couldn't even stand to finish reading down the list. At the sight of their relatives, one of them standing before them, their blood ran cold, as the magnitude of the situation fully sank in.

"How long until this becomes real?" Mabel whimpered, huddling close against Charlie who stared in uncomprehending panic. Even Wendy looked terrified, biting her lip and shaking, leaning against Dipper for support. Not that he was holding it together any better; he instinctively grasped his Grunkle's hand.

"I have no idea," Ford said in a quiet, trembling voice. He, too, wanted to cry and panic, but he also didn't want to scare the kids so much that they'd give up hope. If there was anyone who could fix something like this, it was Dipper and Mabel.

"But we have to work fast," he said, forcing the authoritative timbre back into his voice. "Unless we can get in touch with Blendin or one of his colleagues, we're grasping at straws. We need to start before everything changes beyond recognition. Before we..." And his voice dropped out again. "...We start disappearing."

Someone gasped, or maybe it was everyone. Then the room went deadly quiet, save for Mabel's quiet, strangled sobs.

"Is there a way we can do that?" Dipper asked, his voice a whisper. Ford stared into space, trying to think of a solution. To his frustration, nothing came to mind.

"I hope so," he answered.