"Hey Dipper! Betcha you can't eat a tamale with twenty-five squirts of hot sauce!" yelled Mabel across the table, proceeding to take up her own challenge. She vigorously shook the hot sauce bottle over her plate, spraying hot sauce over the table.
The whole gang – Dipper, Mabel, Grunkle Stan, Soos, and Wendy – was celebrating day five of Soos's eight-day birthday-holiday mash up Mexifoodukkah with a massive tamale dinner. Soos's abuelita, though invited, had left the party early after stating that she felt a little sick to her stomach; however, all the others remained to enjoy the good food that they had prepared during the day.
"C'mon Dipper! Try it! Twenty-five squirts isn't so ba– so ba–ahhh!" Mabel reeled from the table, clutching at the armrests on her chair. Tears glistened on her eyes, and her red cheeks puffed as she coughed and wheezed for air.
Wendy laughed. "How's that hot sauce tastin', buddy?" she said through a mouthful of corn dough, roast chicken, cheese, and chilies.
"It tastes h-h-h-HOT!" Mabel yelled, scratching at her tongue.
"Hey, Dipper, you've barely touched your tamales," said Soos. "Something wrong with 'em?"
"Nothing's wrong with the tamales, Soos, they're great," said Dipper, poring over some notes in a new notebook he bought after Grunkle Stan took Journal 3, which he eventually forgot about. "But I just don't understand something about that robot, Gideon's robot. How did Gideon get enough fuel to power that robot? What kind of fuel did they use to be able to do that? And who on earth could build such a powerful machine?"
After the final fight with Gideon, analysts and police specialists had scoured the metals remains of the totaled robot to study how the robot functioned. However, they found no evidence of any power source, or any space at all where a power source would have usually occupied, and could only conclude that the energy source, and the energy source chamber, had been completely destroyed by the impact of the fall.
"Science, Dipper, science." Grunkle Stan simultaneously stuffed a tamale into his mouth and ripped open another one on his plate with a deft swipe of his knife. "Don't sweat it too much. If Blubbs and Durland couldn't figure it out, I don't know if anyone can." Stan burst out laughing. "Just kidding! Those two are morons. They probably couldn't even figure out how a bicycle works if their lives depended on it."
"Just out of curiosity, Mr. Pines, how does a bike work?" asked Soos.
"Probably more creepy magic he found in his journal," Mabel offered to Dipper through gulps of milk. "Speaking of which, where did that journal go?"
"Dunno," said Grunkle Stan, hastily resuming his personal race to see how much tamale he could eat in one sitting.
"Journals don't matter to me, unless they can explain this weird anomaly in the sequence of recent events," retorted Dipper, starting to get heated. He unconsciously stood up from his chair and started to pace around, his voice rising with every word he said, the worry lines etched under his eyes darkening as he rambled on.
"Gideon has amulet and can control people, like making Mabel go on a date with him; fine. Gideon has pins with his face on it that turn out to be secret cameras that were recording us twenty-four seven; though a little creepy, fine. Gideon has a huge robot that has no definable source of energy that manages to take out the entire side of a cliff with one robot punch? Not fine. Not fine!"
"Dipper, chill out, dude," said Wendy, gesturing at the table. "Have a tamale."
"I'm sorry guys," Dipper said, ceasing his pacing and sitting down at the table again. "I'm just bothered by this, is all."
"Don't worry, Dip. You'll figure it out eventually," said Mabel, smiling encouragingly. "But now is not the time for mystery-solving. Now is tamale-time! Tamale-time! Tamale-time!" she chanted.
Dipper hesitated, then grinned faintly and grabbed the hot sauce bottle. "Betcha I can beat your twenty-five squirts," he said quietly.
"Betcha you can't!" challenged Mabel.
"That's kind of redundant, Mabel," replied Dipper.
"Is it? I don't care!" said Mabel, laughing. "Redundancy is fun!"
Dipper couldn't help but smile at his sister's innocent insanity. As he shook the bottle over his tamale with Wendy, Grunkle Stan, Soos, and Mabel cheering him on, Dipper pushed aside his worries about the robot and decided to enjoy, or at least try to enjoy, the night with his friends and family.
