Once the twins arrived at the city dump, they set about looking for Old Man McGucket to continue the search for clues to solve their mystery. After about an hour of thorough searching, though, the only interesting thing they saw was a moldy corn dog, which elicited a "Ooh! Look at the pretty green fuzz! It matches my sweater!" from Mabel. Other than that, they only saw trash.
"Face it, Dipper, we're not gonna find him here today," said Mabel, wiping a bead of sweat off her brow. "Maybe we should go home and come back another day."
"No! He has to be here somewhere! He's hiding from us!" Dipper almost shouted. He leaned down onto his knees and started to fumble through the bottom of a huge pile of garbage.
"Dipper. Focus. I know this whole thing means a lot to you, but you need to be able to look at other things in your life too," said Mabel, coming over and squatting next to him.
Dipper looked over at Mabel with growing guilt, and then down at himself with growing disgust. They were covered in dirt and dust. Mabel had a strip of plastic stuck to the sleeve of her green sweater and metal bits in her hair, while he had mulch chips and some sticky substance on his shirt. He dug into a pocket and found an old tin can that had fallen in there by accident.
"But there's gotta be something here! Gideon wouldn't act like that on purpose!" he said defiantly. But the defeat was visible in his eyes, and he sat back and sighed.
"Maybe, maybe not," said Mabel. She smiled. "Let's just come back another day, right? I mean, we didn't see anything weird in the whole dump."
She gestured with her arms, swinging them apart wildly to show the magnitude of their search. Her hand knocked off an old fan stuck deep in the garbage pile next to her. Suddenly, the pile shifted slightly, rippling up through the metal trash. The twins looked up. A rubber tire was hurtling towards them from on top of the pile!
"AHHH!" they screamed, running in opposite directions. The tire careened off of some bottles on the ground and went flying. It struck another pile of garbage with a CRASH!
Before the dust even settled, Dipper came out of hiding behind an old rusty golf cart. "Mabel? Mabel, are you okay?" he called, coughing. When no one responded, he started to worry. "Mabel!" he shouted, panicked.
"Dipper! You gotta come check this out!" Mabel called back. Relieved, he jogged over to his sister, only to find a sight that shocked him even more.
"Holy mackerel," he breathed. The tire had collided into another pile of garbage. Interestingly enough, the whole pile survived the crash intact.
But more interesting than that was that the tire made a giant hole in the pile.
Even more interesting was that the inside of the pile was hollow.
"It's like a teepee, but more… garbage-y," said Mabel, waving at the cavern.
The hollowed-out inside of the trash pile was big enough for several people to comfortably stand in. A long, plastic fold-up table was in the center of the room. Unfinished mechanical parts lay strewn about on the floor, illuminated by an eerie pale orange light. In awe, Dipper's eyes followed the light to its source: a white shining crystal, shaped like a tetrahedron, floating in the air. The size of a softball, the crystal was tinged around the edges with orange streaks of light, flaring up and crackling along the facets of the crystal. The light pulsated faintly from the corners of the crystal, connecting itself in a thin chain of light to the inside of the garbage cavern. From there, the light spread like a dome all across the inside of the cavern.
"Is that crystal…keeping the pile from collapsing?" asked Mabel incredulously. "It's so pretty."
"I mean, it sure seems like it," said Dipper, skepticism thick in his voice. "I mean, the part about keeping it from collapsing."
The twins cautiously ventured inside the cavern and peered at the contents on the table. Blueprints of what seemed like a metal Godzilla were strewn across the table. Chewed-up pencils with broken stubs lay in abundance.
Then something in the corner of the cavern caught Dipper's eyes that made him freeze. He blinked four times. He pinched himself twice. Nothing happened. Is it real? Dipper thought, still staring into the corner of the room.
"Mabel, do you see that? Do you see what I'm seeing?" asked Dipper slowly, pointing at the object in question, not daring to take his eyes off of it. Mabel carefully peered over into the corner. When she saw what Dipper was pointing at, she quickly sucked in a breath.
Laying on the floor was a red-leather-bound journal. The edges were worn and the cover dusty, but the picture on the front was still unmistakable.
A golden, six-fingered hand shined in the eerie orange light, the number "4" printed clearly in black ink. Around the four was a very faint light red triangle, unnoticed by Dipper, that glowed ever so slightly in the relative darkness of the cavern.
Mabel pinched Dipper.
"OW!" he yelped.
"Had to make sure this is real life," said Mabel, laughing.
"I think you pinch yourself when you want to do that," grumbled Dipper, rubbing his arm.
