Anomaly 115: Potters Springs, Alaska (potentially, though perhaps we're still in British Colombia)
Despite Stanley's protests to the contrary, the small town does hold some rare oddities. My tracker had trouble locating precisely where (or, more accurately, who) the anomalies were, and we were forced to do some old-fashioned investigation to find the signal's origin. I even managed to get Stanley to come to the library!
Unfortunately, we found no information there. Reading through a hundred years of the town's local newspaper yielded nothing worth noting—which I found to be an oddity on its own, but in no way assisted us in our search. It wasn't until we were on our way back to the Stan o' War II that the anomalies finally chose to appear.
Half of a sentence was blotted out.
—into what must once have been a night club—
Another phrase was inked over.
The music was beautiful, hypnotic, almost. It reminded me of the music S and I used to hear on weekends, when we'd walk the boardwalk on the way home from a hard day's work on the original Stan o' War…what was the name of that night club, by the ice cream shop? The one Pop used to take Ma to on their date nights? The name escapes me at the moment. But the music was always enchanting.
Stan's handwriting crammed into the margins: Nucky's Nocturne.
There was little light in the club (honestly, I was surprised that the building still had power at all). Unfortunately, the band had no audience—a real shame, considering their talent—but they didn't seem to mind. They didn't even notice that S and I had—
A couple of words were scribbled out and replaced in Stan's hand.
—legally entered a public location and in no way damaged any property that may or may not have been inside.
On the bottom half of the page, Ford had drawn the four-man band on the stage. Unlike many of his drawings, there was little detail; the faces, notably, had been left blank. The next paragraph had been blacked out, half-heartedly, leaving a few words and short phrases discernable.
Stanley is still mad that I was right about Potters Springs. I won't let him live this down anytime soon.
"I guess I can let that last line stay," Stan murmured with a sigh. "Let it be documented that exactly once in his life, Stan Pines was wrong."
Ford snorted, pulling the journal from his brother. "I'm glad that everything I write isn't objectionable."
"Look, Sixer, if you wrote everything down in your old journals the way you do this one, it wouldn't've taken me thirty years to get that thing up and running." Stan folded his arms. "You seem to forget that the kids are going to be reading this."
"And?" Ford matched his brother's motion. Begrudgingly, he admitted, "Yes, some of the things I wrote about our trip to Hurricane were inappropriate, and some of the things I wrote about Sean were in poor taste, but I don't see what's so problematic with our adventure today."
"That was a pretty graphic description of a man being immolated," Stan grumbled. A frown wormed onto his face. "They're thirteen, Stanford."
"They've proven themselves quite sufficiently." Ford scoffed. "After all they've handled, you really think they'll be troubled by anything I write in the journal?"
"They shouldn't have to read anything 'troubling'!"
Ford threw his hand up, exasperated. "I'm not penning a children's tale, Stanley—this is an account of my research! Sometimes, troubling things happen. That needs to be noted."
A long-suffering sigh huffed from deep within Stan's diaphragm. He pinched the bridge of his nose, considering his response, eventually choosing to push himself out of his chair. "I'm gonna go check everything on deck." Without waiting for his brother to answer, Stan opened the cabin door and disappeared into the chilly night.
Scowling, Ford slumped in his chair. His expression remained sour as he snatched his journal from its place on the table beside him. He flipped through it, glowering at the largely redacted sections; each black splotch, each crumple, each tear deepened the knit in his brow. Reaching one of the completely marked-out pages gave him pause; he tried to recall the words beneath the ink, glancing over the readable words around it for context. Ford found that he couldn't remember what the actual words were—a revelation that bothered him far more than he anticipated—but he recalled the events with striking clarity. He firmly believed that the decision had been a sound. It may even have been right.
But would that come across to a child? Dipper so admired him, through his hubris and folly, because he thought his great uncles were good men. Would he still think so if he had been permitted to know the true events of Hurricane?
Ford found his self-righteous fury simmering to general discontent. He read over the visible words again, displeased; on the fourth pass over, he took a deep breath. Abandoning his journal, he strolled to the kitchenette and busied himself with the coffee percolator. His right eye hurt.
