Dipper dug around in a drawer, tossing old candy wrappers, a crumpled dollar bill, and a napkin on the floor as he rummaged around for a pad of paper in lieu of recording the conversation. He pulled a pen out from one of his hidden pockets. "I wish I had another camera," he said absently, already putting together plans for how his interview with a ghost could go as he perched on the easy chair.

The Mabel puppet floated in front of him. Wirt was standing across from Dipper, unseen, his hand shifting inside the sock puppet uncomfortably. "I don't know where to begin," he admitted.

"You're not from Gravity Falls, right? Start there," Dipper told him, gesturing with the pen.

"That's right. We, well, Greg and I grew up over in New England," Wirt started. "We didn't start travelling around until Halloween."

Dipper stopped him to clarify. "Which Halloween?"

"The last Halloween." But then Wirt rethought his answer. "Wait, wait, I should probably check. What year is it?"

"Twenty-twelve. August of twenty-twelve."

"Yeah, it was last Halloween. But if it's already August, then it's been almost a year?" Wirt sounded bewildered.

Dipper scribbled down the date. "Time flies when you don't have school or meals or sleep, huh?"

"You don't know the half of it."

"So it's Halloween. You two are out trick-or-treating?" Dipper asked casually.

"No, we were gonna go meet some people I know at the graveyard." That made Wirt sound a lot more social than he had been, but oh well. "We kinda wound up running away from the cops."

"Woah." Dipper looked at the sock puppet, sounding impressed. Wendy had taught him enough about teenagerdom that he assumed run-ins with the law were commonplace.

"I'm not usually like that, I swear. But we, we, long story, but we conked our heads and fell into a lake."

Dipper took notes. "And then, let me guess. You were outside of your body and floating around? Couldn't get back in the corpses?"

"What? Ew! No! We were, I won't go into all this, but all of a sudden we were someplace else. I don't remember anything in between. Just that we found ourselves already lost in this other place."

That got Dipper's attention. "Another realm. Some kind of afterlife! But no, no, any real afterlife, you wouldn't have been able to get back to this world," he corrected himself.

Wirt shook the puppet's head. "The place was literally called the Unknown. We were there for a long time, but eventually I found a way to get us home. Like, it had been a riddle all along, but once I remembered how we got there, I was finally able to figure out the way back." Wirt hadn't talked about this with anyone but Greg, for whom conversations about talking bluebirds and evil beasts were commonplace. "You believe me about that? I mean, if it hadn't happened to me, I wouldn't believe it."

Dipper shrugged. "I've heard of weirder. Though nowhere in the Journal does it talk about any kind of life after death. Theoretically, a trans-dimensional portal of some kind could be possible, though. You could have just fallen into a rip in the space-time continuum."

"When I got us home, we were still in the lake," Wirt said softly. "It had only been a few minutes, but our bodies didn't wake up. Not even after they fished us out."

Dipper chewed on that thought. Normally, he might offer sympathy, but he was in supernatural-theory mode. He was considering Greg and Wirt as anomalies, not as people. "So the Unknown must be some kind of in-between state. You were able to return from it into the mindscape, but it wasn't a physically real place that would affect your real-world bodies, and it operated on a different timeframe than this world. Could you see color in the Unknown?"

"Color?" But Wirt remembered how Bill Cipher had sucked all the vivacity out of the gift shop earlier. "Oh! Like how when we around Bill, everything was grayscale. No, it wasn't like that. The Unknown had all kinds of weird stuff, but nothing that obvious."

"When you can see Bill, you're in the dreamscape," Dipper said offhandedly. "If you were alive, I'd say he could only really talk to you when you're sleeping or hallucinating."

"I'm still alive," came the impatient answer. "And so is Greg."

"Not from what you just told me."

Wirt made a frustrated noise. "After they got our bodies out of the lake, they took us to the hospital and hooked us up to some kind of machines that breathed for us and everything. You know how we're possessing vessels now, by floating into them and using them to move around? We tried that with our real bodies. It's like there was some kind of barrier. We couldn't get into them, but they were still alive. As far as I know, they still are. We gave up on getting back in, until we heard you talking with Mabel about how you'd done the same thing! Your body was empty and you got back inside it! We need to know how, and we need to know it fast."

Dipper winced at the memory. "You're kinda overestimating me here, man. I made a deal with Bill and he pulled me out of my body. We tricked him into leaving it so it was empty again, and I just swooped in. It's completely different."

Wirt was quiet for a moment. "But what's so different about it?"

Dipper hemmed and hawed. "I got forced out by Bill. I didn't almost almost die or whatever."

"Is that such an important distinction when it comes to souls?" The question sounded rhetorical, but Wirt thought through it. "However it happened, each of our souls got untethered from our bodies. You were able to enter yours again, but we weren't. Was your body, like, conscious when you went into it again?"

Dipper made a noise in the negative. "I guess I was passed out. Or maybe asleep."

"So just being unconscious, that's not the reason we couldn't get in our bodies," Wirt pointed out.

"Maybe something else happened. How long were you underwater? I mean, maybe your hearts were still beating, but you were brain dead, or just got too much brain damage to-"

"I keep telling you, we're not dead!" Wirt interrupted, upset. "We followed our bodies to the hospital, I heard the doctors; they were expecting us to wake up any minute. And besides, I'd know if I was dead."

"You'd know, huh," Dipper repeated skeptically. "Do you have any idea how many ghosts don't realize they died?"

"I don't care. We're still flesh and blood, just like you. When we're walking around like this, like spirits, there's part of us missing and it's still out there."

"Greg already admitted that he's a ghost."

A draft shifted a dollar bill on the floor as Dipper spoke. The pyramid printed on it stared forward.

"Greg doesn't know this stuff!" Wirt threw up his hands, the Mabel sock puppet floating higher in the air. "I'm his big brother. It's my job to keep him safe, and that absolutely includes keeping him from worrying about the inevitability of death! Don't you tell him I said any of this, either. He's having fun roaming around the country without knowing anything and until I can fix this mess myself, it's gonna stay that way."

"I'm not gonna say anything!" Dipper said.

"Good." Wirt's shoulders slumped as the fight went out of him. "I, I'm sorry, I'm just scared for him. I already messed up in a big way in the Unknown and I almost lost Greg for good. This is the only way I can protect him."

"Hey, siblings mess up. Mabel and I, we let each other down all the time," Dipper said, a sympathetic smile pulling at his lips. "Bill tried to use that against us. But no matter how selfish you think you were, or how you weren't there when they needed you, it's never gonna be the end of the world."

"I guess," Wirt said eventually. "Thanks. I was hanging all our hopes on you, but if you don't know how to fix things for us, I'll understand. We've really messed up your day, haven't we?"

"It's cool," Dipper said, propping his elbows behind his head. "Paranormal stuff like this happens to us on the regular. I'm just glad you haven't tried to kill us yet. I'll read up on ghosts, or, hm, astral projection, I guess? We'll figure out something to help you. No promises or anything."

"Thanks." Wirt grimaced. "Though the whole thing may be a moot point soon."

"Yeah? Why?"

"It's nothing. It's nothing, just, something Bill said, and I know we can't trust him, but he knew stuff I hadn't told anybody, and I won't, and definitely don't tell Greg, okay-"

"Spit it out, dude."

Wirt swallowed. "Our insurance. He said it was running out along with our time."

Dipper looked at the puppet blankly. "Oh no?"

"We're hooked up to machines keeping us alive! In a hospital! That we checked into a year ago!" It looked ridiculous for the Mabel puppet to be talking so frantically, bobbing from side to side. "If our insurance is out and our parents can't afford it, if they're not sure we're even gonna wake up after so long-"

"They're pulling your plug," Dipper said as the realization dawned on him. The puppet nodded miserably. "And you're going to die for real."