Chapter Seven: Clean-Up Duty
Blendin faced the Time Baby in white Judgment Space. The Baby held him suspended in a blue beam of force.
"You have broken the eternal laws of space time!" said the Time Baby.
"I beg your mercy, Time Baby!" said Blendin.
"You now must clean up all of the anomalies," ordered the Time Baby.
Blendin was sent from Judgment Space to a preparation room. Lolph and Dundgren joined him.
"Here are the times and places that must be fixed," Lolph said, handing him a list. "I recommend you work through them in order from first to last."
Dundgren said, "Your device will monitor your progress. If you do well, you will have no further punishment. If you do badly, you will do time and time again in the Infinitentiary."
Lolph said, "Your first location is in the Jurassic period, where a T-Rex was disturbed. You need to wipe its memory and get it back on its former track."
"A T-T-Rex? How can I p-possibly handle that?" asked Blendin.
"Here is a long-range tractor beam you can use to immobilize it," said Dundgren. "Good luck, and be sure not to step on any butterflies back there."
In the Nightmare Realm, A. Square (aka. "Tad Strange" to Bill) came up to Bill again.
"Hi Tad," said Bill.
"How's it going?" asked Tad. "Some of our friends are getting impatient."
"Very well," said Bill. "Eye in the Pentagram finally summoned me, as I hoped he would. With a summoner alive on Earth I can project myself into Gravity Falls again, and follow people around if I like."
"Did he make a deal with you?" asked Tad.
"An incomplete one that I didn't care about," said Bill. "Shooting Star and Question Mark were nearby when he summoned me. I deliberately included them in the dream so they and Pine Tree would follow me into the dreamscape of Glasses."
"Why did you do that?" asked Tad.
"I pretended to be angry when they spoiled the deal, but I really just wanted to test them. They came through just fine. I like Shooting Star's wild imagination. She attacked me with pink kitten fists!"
"But how is the master plan going?" asked Tad.
"Fantastic," said Bill. "The most encouraging thing is the goat. But details later. Right now I have a tricky event to get through and I need a time traveler on the spot."
The T-Rex had been scary; the rest was just tedious. Blendin was done with his clean-up, gathering a calculator from a fishing site, a shoe from a wax museum opening, and finally a plastic flower hair ornament from the site of a gnome attack. (Had he done all of those in the right order? He had lost track). Now it was time to go back to the future.
A gnome came up to him. Blendin was distracted for an instant. "What are you looking at?"
Bill was watching from his vantage point in the stained-glass window image in the attic of the Mystery Shack. He struck. The deal gave him access to Blendin's time in his body, so he took some of it now.
Billendin made his first time hop to the day of the Mystery Fair. (Just like the jumps when Dipper re-did the baseball throw, the original Blendin was temporarily replaced by his double, When Bill jumped away he would reappear, his memories unaffected by the replacement.)
Billendin ran into Pine Tree when he was coming back with the ice for Wendy's eye.
"Hey, watch where you're going, man!" said Pine Tree.
It was a small tweak, creating the torn ice bag for the symbol of Ice on the Wheel and setting up a stronger confrontation between Dipper and Blendin. Everything else would go as before.
The next hop was back to the youth of Stanley and Stanford Pines. He had researched when the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel held its leadership elections, and he appeared in the locked room where the ballots were stored, ready for counting the next day. Billendin stuffed the ballot box, replacing many votes for the opposition with ones for Filbrick Pines. Now Filbrick would be elected Big Fish of the local order, and his new fez symbol would reflect that from now on. The hat would pass from Filbrick to Stanford, and eventually to Stanley, who would use it as another prop for his "Mr. Mystery" act.
Bill liked this symbol better, a Pac-Man-like fish eating something round, because it had enough of his image in silhouette to act as a viewing point. He could keep a much better eye on the doings of Stan Pines. This symbol change was the reason he had picked the Fez Symbol on his Wheel as the symbol for Blendin Blandin.
To cover his tracks for why he was here, so that his ballot change wouldn't be detected and undone by the time police, Billendin made another silly change: he wrote a "Blendin was here" graffiti on one of the planks of a boarded-up cave.
Now for the main event. Billendin hopped to the day on which he hoped to return Journal 2 to Stan Pines. He had to create a big event that would draw everyone in town, then expose evidence that Gideon had been spying on them. Gideon would go to jail, and Stan would get the Journal.
Planting the evidence had been easy. Gideon had discovered that Old Man McGucket was a secret robot maker, and Gideon had commissioned him to build his own Gideon-bot to help him control the town once he took over. It was hidden in plain sight as a statue for Gideonland.
Bill had sufficient control over McGucket through his dreams and wild imaginations to implant suggestions into his confused brain. He suggested to McGucket that Gideon would like a room in his bot with surveillance videos he had collected on the townsfolk, playing in a loop. McGucket had added this to the robot secretly, saving it as a "surprise" to show Gideon later.
While he was at it, he wanted Stan to be the one to reveal the evidence, making him a local hero. Then Dipper and Mabel would be inclined to trust him and show him Journal 3. So Billendin made an anonymous phone call to Stan at Soos' grandmother's house, just after Stan had figured out for himself that Gideon was using his pins to spy on people.
"Hello, Mr. Pines?" said Billendin over the phone.
"Yeah, who is this?" said Stan.
"Never mind, I have two things to tell you, and there's not much time. First, there's evidence of Gideon's spying inside his robot statue. You just have to kick open a panel near the stomach to expose it. Second, Gideon's about to accuse your grandniece and grandnephew and send them to jail. You have to get over to the field under the railroad bridge right away. In a few minutes there's going to be a huge explosion there in a few minutes, so you can't miss it."
Billendin hung up. Stan would come, and take all the credit, too.
Now he had to jump to the field. The basic idea that the robot would fall and explode to draw in the people was all right. But he knew that Dipper and Mabel had been pulled into the mess. There were just too many possible outcomes that were bad for Bill. Dipper and Mabel could die in the fall (more likely just Dipper, if Mabel was only able to save herself with the grappling hook). Either way, Stan would kill Gideon and go to prison, completely ruining Bill's plan.
A time-traveler was required to adjust the situation, repeating if necessary. Using the long-distance tractor beam that Blendin had been given to deal with the T-Rex, Billendin adjusted the fall of the robot, Dipper, and Mabel until everything was working just right for them to survive. He also made sure that Journal 1 fell out where Dipper could reclaim it. Stan could only get away with one and keep his secret, so Dipper had to hold the other for now.
As Stan screeched in, driving his El Diablo, Billendin walked away. He noticed that the symbol on his time travel device has turned red, which was a sure sign that Blendin was going to be in a lot of trouble when he reported back to the future.
Billendin jumped back an instant before he left, and slipped Blendin's spirit back into his body. The momentary disorientation was so brief that Blendin shook it off with hardly a thought, and made his jump back to time headquarters.
The time police grabbed Blendin on arrival.
"W-what did I do?" asked Blendin.
"You didn't do the clean-up properly," said Lolph. "Now you're going to the Infinitentiary."
Blendin moaned. "It's all because of those time kids! I'll wipe them out of history if it's the last thing I do."
"The last thing you do won't be for a long, long, time," said Dundgren. "The sentence is ten squared lifetimes."