Friendly Faces
Summary: After discovering a mysterious portal, Dipper's excited for the chance to explore an actual parallel universe, especially when he meets like-minded conspiracy theorist named Ronaldo. (Mabel, meanwhile, is wasting this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with a trip to the local beach).
oOoOoOo
"Don't you understand, Mabel?" Dipper hisses in a low-voice, gripping his sister by the arm. "We're in an alternate universe! The very laws of physics could be different here? Aren't you at all interested?"
"The laws of physics seem pretty much the same to me," the girl replies. To demonstrate, she picks up a fork sitting on the table; when she lets go, it falls back down, just like a fork would in her own universe (occasional gravitational anomalies not withstanding). It clatters loudly in the small restaurant- Dipper winces. "It's not that I'm not interested. It's just that I'm more interested in the beach."
The boy groans in exasperation. "We have a beach in Gravity Falls! You can go there literally anytime you like!"
"That's different."
"How?"
"Oh, you know. Ocean beaches are just fundamentally better. The waves, the salt, the hunky boys..."
Dipper rolls his eyes. He could point out that boy frequency is completely unrelated to beach type He could also remind his sister of her less-than-stellar dating record from over the past summer. But he's not that cruel, and honestly, he's kind of happy to hear that she's interested again. She'd gotten into kind of a funk.
"Okay, fine," he eventually relents. It's not his job to tell her what to do, even if he does totally think she's wasting her time. "Go swim at the beach or whatever! But remember, we're meeting at the portal in five hours!"
"I know, I know, don't worry!" she tells him. She heads out the restaurant door, beach towel slung over her shoulder, waving good-bye at him. "Have fun!"
"Yeah, you too!" Dipper says, not quite matching her enthusiasm. He turns his attention back to the remaining slice of pizza in front of him. He picks it up and chews it thoughtfully, wondering how to properly begin his investigation. Would it be a waste to start empirically testing laws of physics, or should he could searching for something more dramatic, like the many strange creatures that inhabit Gravity Falls? Where would he even start? There's no dark and mysterious woods here for strange creatures to lurk in.
He's decided to start searching the down systematically, and is drawing up a mental grid, when he feels somebody slide up besides him and say, "So...you're interested in the weird, huh?"
Dipper starts. He forces himself to calm down. The speaker turns out just to be a teenager, with curly blonde hair, glasses, and carrying a satchel covered in all sorts of geeky buttons. His eyebrows are raised conspiratorially. "Er," Dipper says, lowering his pizza. He and Mabel had both promised to play it close to the vest, and not tell anybody about their origins, just to be on the safe side. Didn't want to run into any secret governmental types or the like. "I guess you could say that."
The guy taps the side of his nose. "Want to keep it on the low, eh? Don't worry, I get it. That's why I waited until the civilian left to come talk to you."
"You mean my sister?"
"Yes, exactly! I have a brother just like her. I know how it is. Willfully ignorant, never interested in the true mysteries around them."
"Yeah," Dipper agrees with a sigh. Then he perks up. "Wait, are you saying you know about mysteries?"
The teen puffs out his chest with pride. "Yep! There's all sorts of mysteries around Beach City. I run a blog dedicated to documenting them: Keep Beach City Weird! Have you read it?"
"Sorry, no. I have...pretty limited Wi-Fi access," Dipper says, which isn't actually a lie. (The more truthful explanation being that, even with Wi-Fi, he doubts he could access any websites from another universe. Though, Gravity Falls being Gravity Falls, maybe it would be possible.) "But I'm still super interested! Would you mind giving me the low-down?"
"No prob!" The guy sticks out a hand. "Name's Ronaldo."
The boy takes it. "Dipper."
He's sure this is going to be the beginning of a beautiful partnership.
OooOoOo
The beach is a lot quieter than Mabel expected. A lot.
As in, 'completely empty'. Not just of boys, but people in general. There's a couple seagulls, but that's about it. There isn't even a life-guard (or life-guard tower, come to think of it. What sort of self-respecting beach doesn't have a Baywatch style life-guard tower?)
It's a little disappointing, but Mabel makes the best of it, throwing her towel and clothes onto the sand, before rushing out into the water. She splashes around there, enjoying the look of her sparkling pink bathing-suit, the warmth of the sun, the spray of the water, the taste of the salt. For a while, she pretends she's a mermaid. Not for that long, though, because then she starts thinking about Mermando, and can't help but feel a little melancholy. She wonders how he's doing, in that arranged marriage of his.
Eventually she starts swimming down the coast. It's an easy swim, since the water is shallow and there isn't much of a current. She wishes that she'd thought to bring snorkeling gear with her, because then she'd have a chance to look for coral reefs and sunken ships. Are there even reefs in this universe? There have to be. Coral reefs are amazing, and any universe lacking them just isn't worth bothering with, in her opinion.
What else is amazing? That statue.
The girl first notices it after she comes up for breath after a particularly long dive. She's swam to a completely different part of the beach by then- she must of, because there's no way she could have missed the figure before. The statue is huge, and it dominates the entire beach. It looks like some sort of ancient goddess, carved out of crumbling stone. Four sets of arms, most of them now destroyed, hair like a waterfall of flowers, two faces, one set staring across the sea, the other at the open sky above.
Mabel is seized by the sudden urge to climb it.
She was just clambering out of the water and running up the beach to get a closer look, when she hears somebody call out to her from above. "Hey!"
Mabel blinks around in confusion until she finds the source. It's a curly haired boy, waving down at her from one of the the giant statue's outstretched hands. He's kind of cute. "Hi!" she calls back.
"I've never seen you around here before!" he yells down. Between the distance and the sea wind, she can only just make out the words.
"I'm visiting!" she scream, as loudly as she can, in case he's having the same trouble. "My name's Mabel! How about you?!"
"Steven!"
"Did you climb all the way up there by yourself?!" Mabel asks, feeling deeply impressed by the feat. Also a little bit woozy. She's just remembered that she has a fear of heights.
It's hard to look sheepish while screaming from atop a giant statue, but Steven somehow manages it. "Er, no! Not exactly! Um, why don't you go up into my room," he yells, and points towards the tiny house up the hill, tucked into the statue's base, "and I can show you!"
"Okay!" Mabel says. The boy grins broadly at her, then ducks out of sight. A moment later, he drops a towel down so she can dry off. Mabel takes it, and is patting herself down when a bright beam of light shoots up from a hand. That's... a little weird, but hardly in the top hundred weirdest things she's seen. It just makes her curious, more than anything.
With a shrug, Mabel ties the towel around her neck and begins up the hill.
OooOoOo
Ronaldo leads Dipper to his base of operations, found at the very top of an old lighthouse. As far as bases of operation go, it's a good one. Very cool, very atmospheric. Dipper can't help but think of his shared attic room in the Mystery Shack and feel a little embarrassed/jealous.
He does his best squash those feelings, hide them. He's trying to be professional here.
The circular room is overflowing with charts, photographs, diagrams, news clippings, scrawled theories. It's beautiful and tantalizing and intriguing. Dipper stands in front of a white board with all sorts of paper scraps and scrawled marker, all connecting by actual string, just like he sometimes does. The young sleuth stares at it, trying to decode the meaning. What's the connection behind the diamond symbol on this world's currency, pictures of ancient ruins, and what looks to be a giant green hand?
"Oh, don't worry about that," Ronaldo says in a way that's supposed to be offhanded, but comes across just a little too stiff. "That's some of my...older work. Theoretically sound, but not worth pursuing at the moment. I've moved on to more interesting things."
"Er...okay," Dipper says, coming to rejoin the teenager who's begun rifling through a file cabinet. He's still kind of curious about the 'polymorphic sentient rock' theory, though. Does it refer to trolls, maybe?
Ronaldo finds what he's looking for, and holds up a file with pride. "If I show you this, you have to promise to keep it a secret. There are a lot of people who'd be unhappy if they knew that I know what I know, and there are eyes everywhere."
Dipper knows the feeling. Silently, he nods his head. Ronaldo can tell he's serious, and holds the folder out. "Very well. Several weeks ago I became aware of a sinister cover-up being perpetrated by the government, and I have begun to uncover exactly how they're keeping the population in the dark..."
oOoOoOo
Getting to the statue's hand, it turns out, doesn't involve climbing at all, but teleportation.
Standing in the middle of the boy's otherwise quite ordinary looking house is a giant blue crystal platform. When Steven stands on it, he can teleport to any other platform on the entire planet. He demonstrates for Mabel, and it's absolutely wonderful; she's floating in a magical beam of light, hair and towel-cape rising up around her. When the light disappears and she crashes back to the ground, she's now on the top of the hand, staring out across the sea. If she looks down the beach she can see where she left her clothes, and the pizza place she and Dipper had lunch.
"It's just where we keep the laundry machines, but sometimes I like to have lunch up here," Steven says.
It's wonderful and magical, and of course Mabel has to ask more about it. So Steven explains that it belongs to his family, and he can use them because he's half-magic, on his mother's side. And then he shows her this giant pink gemstone he has in his belly button, and she nearly dies of delight, because it's so pretty. And he laughs, and shows her how he can make a shield appear, but how that's nothing compared to what the other Crystal Gems can do, and Mabel finds herself so enraptured in stories about this magical alien warriors that she even manages to forget how high up she is.
"So, what about you?" Steven eventually asks.
So Mabel explains how she has a twin brother called Dipper, and how usually they live in California, but that their parents had sent them off to stay with their Grunkle Stan in Gravity Falls for the summer, which she'd been pretty excited for even though it sounded like it might be boring, and how it ended up being the coolest summer of her life, and how she'd met a bunch of new friends and gotten a new pet pig named Waddles and fought monsters! And then somehow among all the explanation, she let's it slip that she's actually from a different dimension, even though she's promised to keep that a secret.
Steven doesn't care though. He just thinks the information is neat, but isn't shocked by it or anything. "I've never met anybody from another universe before! What's it like?"
She shrugs. "I dunno. It seems pretty similar. I don't think we have any Gems there, though. Are there a lot here?"
"Er...no, not really. I mean, I guess they are, but mostly they all live in space. And I'm the only half-human one."
He seems to fold up a little as he talks about it, and Mabel can tell he isn't comfortable with that area of conversation. So she grins, and says, "Well, let's find out if there's anything else that's different!"
Turns out that there's a lot. They look up some maps, and while they look pretty similar to the ones in her world, a bunch of places are named differently, and here California is an island, and there's a big chunk missing from Africa. There are a whole bunch of different books and shows and stuff, too. Steven gives her some old comic books and novels, because he's finished with them, and this way she can take them home and share them with everybody in her own universe. And she gets to see all his toys and action figures and try candy they've never even invented in her own world, and then she thinks of the most amazing idea ever:
Music.
"Because they've been playing, like, the same twenty songs on repeat allllllll summer long! My friend Wendy can't stand it. I don't mind it too much, but I'd love to hear something other than 'Are We Blanchin?', you know?"
"That's a great idea!" says Steven, pulling out his phone and scrolling through his music collection. "Oooh, oooh, this is one of my favourites!"
Mabel grins as the song starts. It's chirpy and light and fun, impossible to resist. She starts to shake to the beat, and Steven's only a step behind her, getting his jam on.
"Dance party!" she shouts
OooOoOo
After about an hour, Dipper begins to have his...doubts about Ronaldo.
He tries to be patient, open minded, he really does. He knows what it's like to be considered a crack-pot, to have ideas dismissed out-of-hand for being ludicrous. But he can't help but see cracks in the teenager's dissertations. His evidence is often circumstantial at best. His diagrams lack the methodical detail of the ones made by the Author of the Journal. There are jumps in his logic which are practically leaps of faith. When Dipper starts to press in, ask for information or more details, the guy will often just stutter, wave his hands, mutter things like, "Well, more research will have to be done!" and move onto the next point as quickly as possible.
And while Dipper isn't exactly going to claim that vast mind-controlling cults can't exist, not after discovering the whole Blind Eye thing, Ronaldo's claims about drugs being spread through ocean water to keep the population pacified sound more like your run-of-the-mill conspiracy than something which can actually be proved.
But the guy's so genuine and enthusiastic that Dipper doesn't want to let him down. At the same time, neither does he want to waste his entire time in this parallel universe stuck in a lighthouse, listening to him ramble.
"So...you think the drug is distributed by fishing boats?" Dipper asks, thinking fast on his feet. "Any chance I could go take a look?"
"Sure, but be warned- the operation is very cleverly concealed. You probably won't be able to notice that anything is amiss. But," Ronaldo says, grabbing a modified tool-kit with a sign reading 'Portable Laboratory- Hazardous Materials- BEWARE!', "This will give me a chance to take some more water samples, so I'm down. To the docks!"
Kit in hand, Ronaldo heads winding stairwell, waving Dipper along, and just like that, he can feel freedom beckoning. Now it's just a question of whether to stick to the guy or finding an excuse to break away, and spend the rest of his time here just hanging. (Dipper's tending to the latter option. It seems that mystical inter-dimensional portals aside, Beach City really is just an ordinary sea-side town after all).
They've reached the bottom of the hill and have begun walking along the board-walk when a monstrous roar tears through the air.
"Woah, what was that?" Dipper asks, startled.
"Probably another monster attack," Ronaldo says, fishing into his pocket for his phone.
"Wait, what?" Dipper asks. Ronaldo breaks into a run in the direction of the roar, the younger boy following in his wake.
"Oh, yeah. Those happen all the time around here. I usually miss them, though. This could be a great opportunity to get some footage for my blog!"
Dipper's just starting to suspect that this is just another one of the dude's weird conspiracies, but then they round the bend, and standing on the beach in front of them is a freakin' dragon, clawing it's way out of the ocean. It's about the size of a lion, with a body longer and more serpentine than the traditional dragon-image, with deep blue scales, vibrant green eyes, and what appears to be a glittering blue-gemstone embedded in it's neck. When it roars, it breathes a giant jet of water into the sky.
"Come on, let's get a closer look," Ronaldo says, dropping the portable laboratory, and instead grabbing Dipper. Dippper tugs his arm out of the grip before the teenager can pull him along; Dipper likes a monster as much as the next guy, but even he knows not to go running straight at trouble. A second later, Ronaldo gets got in a water blast, and is thrown backwards, landing on the board-walk with a sickening thud. The guy comes out on all fours, half-moaning, half-choking.
And then the dragon turns its attention on Dipper.
It comes bounding towards him, slobbering, huge teeth bared, and all Dipper can do is back away, looking nervously over his shoulder for something to defend himself with. There's nothing.
"GET AWAY FROM HIM!"
The voice slices through the air like a knife, and just as the creature is about to bear down upon him, the speaker jumps in front of him. There's a brilliant pink glow, and a shield appears on their arm.
...or one of them, at least. They have four.
The warrior uses the shield to bash the creature straight on the muzzle. It roars with pain. "Serves you right, you big meany!"
Dipper scrambles to his feet, staring at his saviour. They're a teenager, it seems, of indeterminate gender, wearing short-jeans and a tiny red t-shirt on top of a sparkly-pink bathing suit, a beach towel wrapped around their neck like a cape. Their hair is shoulder length and deep brown, pinned back by a star clip, fluttering dramatically in the wind. They're barefoot, but apparently impervious to hot sand, because they run over it like it's nothing, jumping and leaping as they lead the monster away from Dipper and the rest of the board walk.
They leap onto the monster's back, wrapping one set of arms around it's neck, squeezing tight, while punching and flailing away with the other two. "I wish I'd grabbed a sword before I left the Temple!" they shout, as the dragon rears onto it's hind legs. "Or even my grappling hook!WOAH!"
The dragon twists it's neck, and now shoots water directly at it's attacker with the force of a high-pressure fire-hose. They try to hold on, but even with four hands, they eventually lose their grip and go flying.
Dipper shakes his head, trying to get a grip on things. He doesn't know who- or what- his rescuer is, but they were his rescuer, and that meant he should help. But how? A sword is traditional, but he's kinda short on sharp sticks of metal, so...
The thought hits him like a bolt of lightning. Ronaldo's chemistry kit.
He rushes over to where Ronaldo dropped it, before he'd rushed off to try and get a video. Upon unlatching it, Dipper's pretty disappointed by it's contents. For all the guy's claims that he was going to use it to run chemical analyses on the ocean's water, there's nothing in there which could actually be used for such a task. Dipper had been hoping for some caesium, or even potassium, any reactive metal or chemical, but it seems he's out of luck. This stuff in here is basically things you could find around any home- detergent, salt, baking soda, alcohol, vinegar...
An idea occurs to him. Dipper sizes the box of baking soda and tucks the flimsy water-bottle filled with vinegar under his arm. He turns back to the fight. For a second, he can't even see mysterious warrior; the deluge of water being shot at them is just that strong and thick. If he strains his eyes, however, he can just make them out, shield raised above their head, pushing back against the brunt force of the powerful jet.
"Hey, ugly!" he shouts. "How about you come after me! Tasty twelve-year-old right here! No shield or anything!"
The creature takes the bait, turning it's attention from the surprisingly strong and well-equipped four-armed opponent, to the much smaller and easier prey. Dipper forces himself to hold his ground as it advances. Behind him, the fighter's shield has turned into a pink sphere, encasing them like a giant hamster ball. The person inside it is charging, running straight back into the fray- if Dipper times it just right, the impact will give him time to escape-
-the dragon's open mouth looms, ready to chow down, and Dipper sees his chance. He tosses the vinegar and baking soda into it's gaping maw, then immediately dodges to the side. The dragon chomps down on the open air where he used to be, and face-plants into the wooden boards. It pulls up, it's green eyes now filled with fury, but before it can strike again, it's rammed in the back by an angry hamster ball of pain. Dipper takes it's distraction as an opportunity as a chance to run even farther away. (He's glad to see that Ronaldo's decided to do the same thing, and in the opposite direction).
For a moment, there's a look of conflict on the dragon's face, as it tries to decide which person to attack Then that expression turns into one of puzzlement; then of discomfort, as it's mouth and long throat start to bulge. That's when the baking-soda-and-vinegar explosion does it's work, and it blows up.
Dipper had been preparing himself for a rain of dragon-guts, but after the throat erupts, the body seems to just disappear in a small puff of sparkles, nothing left but the spray of foam and gemstone from it's neck. At this point, Dipper's not going to question it.
(That's a lie. He's totally going to question it).
First, though, he's got about a dozen other, more pressing questions, mostly focused on where the giant dragon came from in the first place, and about the mysterious four-armed warrior who rescued them. Said warrior, he realizes, is now looking right at him. Both their bubble and shield have vanished now, and they're looking quite pleased by the monster's defeat. "Nice one," they tell him.
"Uh. Thanks," he says, then opens his mouth as he tries to work out how to phrase his next question. He's cut off by them giggling.
"Don't recognize me, bro-bro?"
Dipper stares at the strange person. Before, he'd been distracted by the weirdness of it all, but now his eyes are suddenly catching on familiar features. Rosy pink cheeks, star-shaped hair-clip, the Pine family hair-tuft, just like his own. "Mabel?"
"Not exactly," the person winks. They bend down, inspecting the ground where the monster had been standing before it had disintegrated. With nothing else to do, Dipper jogs up to join them. He sees them pick up the remaining gemstone, a shiny orb of glittering blue. They let out a pleased squeak as they admire it, holding it up to the sunlight; then a pink bubble appears from their open palm, surrounding it. Bubble and gem both vanish with a pop. Dipper squirrels this information away, and adds it to the long list of questions he wants to ask.
"Okay," he finally demands, once the person finished. "Who are you, exactly?"
"You can call me Maven," they say, with a grin. Then they look thoughtful, tapping their chin with one of their four hands, resting two of the others on their hips. "Or maybe Stabel. We haven't really decided. That last one might be too much like 'stable', as in the thing horses sleep in, but then horses are super cool, sooo..."
Dipper stares. In his brain, synapses fire rapidly, making a complicated series of connections. Finally, he says, "Wait. Are you saying that you're Mabel...but that you're also somebody else? Or something?"
"Yes!"
They grin, and then a pink light seems radiates from their belly through the bathing suit, and then their entire body dissolves into light, and a moment later there's two kids his own age lying on the ground in front of him. One of them is his sister, who's grinning what's possibly the widest grin he's ever seen on her face. (And that includes the time they went to the theme park for her birthday, and she gorged herself on cotton candy before riding the wildest roller-coaster in the park fifteen times straight). The other kid's a boy, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a much more normal smile. His t-shirt and pants are the same as the four-armed warrior, Dipper notices.
"Hey!" he says, getting to his feet. "I'm Steven. Nice to meet you."
Dipper blinks between him, and between Mabel. He decides to give his sister a hand up. "Uh, nice to meet you, too. I guess. But I'm seriously going to need an explanation. Like, immediately."
Mabel slings an arm over his shoulder. "Oh, Dipper, Dipper. We'll give it to you. But long story short, you really should have came to the beach with me."
oOoOoOo
Disclaimer: I cannot guarantee that the baking-soda-and-vinegar reaction will produce an explosion strong enough to defeat a dragon. Do not attempt at home.