A/N: Aaaargh! Back again after a long period of isolation and frustration! A hearty thank-you to all who viewed, reviewed, favourited and followed in my time of madness! Thank you everyone!
Without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: Gravity Falls is still not mine.
As far as playgrounds went, the Necrotic Abyss was well-named, to put it mildly.
The City of the Dead had nothing on this place. Even its moat, which Robbie had never shut up about, would have paled next to the sheer mass of dead bodies layering this place. From horizon to horizon, the landscape was nothing but corpses – not just humans, but animals of every size and shape, and sentient beings of almost every description. Gnomes and Manotaurs rubbed elbows with elephants and salmon, Unicorns and Kill-Billies were strewn alongside sperm whales and capybaras. There were creatures here that none of them had ever seen before: jellyfish the size of stadiums, things that looked like someone's attempts to crossbreed honey-badgers with broccoli, clusters of ocean-liner-sized alligators fused at the tails, entire fleets of luxury cars made entirely of flesh, goldfish in bowls that seemed to sprout from their tails, dwarf-like creatures with hides of knifelike scales, gargantuan semi-human shapes with vast skirts of writhing tentacles in place of legs... all were here, gathered in colossal, stinking piles a hundred stories high like mesas of decomposing flesh, all of it ripening beneath the sickly green skies above.
More disturbingly, to Dipper's eyes, it didn't seem as though there was anything under those bodies: the more he looked at it, the more it seemed as though the entire terrain had been built from nothing but well-matured cadavers, and this if someone were to dig deep enough beneath the bedrock of corpses, they'd find nothing but emptiness. Certainly, it was possible with the powers Bill commanded. Question was, had he actually killed billions upon billions of people and creatures and god only knew what else… or had he just created them from scratch? Either way, they were definitely rotting – and had been for quite some time.
Needless to say, the smell was nothing short of hideous: it was the kind of putrid, cloying stench that wormed its way into the nostrils and refused to leave no matter the distance, the sort of odour that sucker-punched you in the face, kicked you in the breadbox and left you buried headfirst in a trashcan. This was a smell that beat up other bad smells and stole their lunch money.
Unfortunately, it seemed Dipper was the only one who was affected by it: Grunkle Stan barely glanced up from the reins of the chariot; Grunkle Ford had a faraway look in his starry eyes, as if his mind had decided to visit another planet for the duration of this journey; Wendy eyes remained fixed on the horizon, barely noticing when Khan ploughed through one of the corpse-mesas, scattering dead bodies in all directions; Robbie – what little of him was visible beneath the animated colossus shielding his body – looked positively nostalgic. All of them had seen plenty of dead bodies in the last few months but Dipper was the only one doing his best to repress those memories and pretend they belonged to someone else, and so far he wasn't having much success with the smell of rot in the air.
It took about ten minutes for Dipper to alter the structure of his olfactory organs until they no longer perceived decomposition, and by then, he'd begun drifting uncomfortably close to Wendy.
Talk to her! His instincts screamed. You haven't said a word to her since you remembered who you are! Be a friend and if you like, even more – just talk to her, you idiot!
But he couldn't: even if he'd been willing to remodel his vocal cords so he could be heard over the roar of the window all around them, nerves had just about stolen his voice away. If he wasn't worrying about the upcoming battle, he was worrying about what Wendy might say to him. And supposing he could pluck up his courage and fling himself into a conversation with her, what the hell could he possibly say? "Hi, Wendy, I know we're both a little sore from the time we tried to kill each other then discovered that everything we believed in was a lie, but we've both got so much to talk about! Remember the bunker? Those were good times…"
Fine, fine. Just talk to her when you're done. Talk to her when the mission's over and done with, and you can focus on something other than imminent death and/or capture. You can do that, right? That's doable. All you've got to do is survive the battle, make sure everyone else survives, and hope Bill doesn't show up.
No, no, no! You can't think like that! Don't think about what needs to happen: think about what will happen. You're thinking too much like yourself: you're two people now, remember? Two sets of memories, two lives, and maybe not two personalities but definitely the memory of them. You're thinking too much like Dipper right now. What you really have to do is think like Shifty. You've got to be as confident as Shifty was – or is. You remember what that was like. Just remember the confidence you felt when you thought you were only him. Just be as confident as Shifty, and you'll be okay.
Question is, how the hell am I supposed to do that?
There was an unearthly hiss from somewhere nearby, and Dipper looked up just in time to see Grunkle Ford pointing into the distance. Up ahead, a vast trench had been cut into the strata of corpses, and now stretched across the horizon for as far as the eye could see; perhaps it went on forever – after all, Dipper had seen much more impossible things built though Bill's reality-warping powers. Far more mind-boggling was the downwards scale of the thing: as they soared closer to it, Dipper saw that the walls of the trench plunged downwards for what looked like miles, sloping ever-so-slightly as they descended into darkness. Again, perhaps this really was bottomless, but even if it wasn't, they were still flying towards a chasm that could have comfortably swallowed the Grand Canyon.
This could only be the Abyss that gave the surrounding landscape its name.
And not far from that, suspended above the seemingly endless gorge, a cliff of fused bodies stretched out into oblivion like a beseeching hand. Perched atop its peak was a huge tombstone-shaped building almost as big as the Northwest's mansion: though built from the same corpses that comprised the rest of the Necrotic Abyss, the bodies here had all been shaped into the walls and petrified into solid rock, leaving only the faces of the dead protruding from the grisly façade. High above those dead, staring faces, just atop the towering doorway, a lurid neon sign blared THE MORTUARY in garish red and purple.
There was a pause, and then Dipper realized that everyone was clearly looking to him for commands.
Confidence, he told himself. Think confidence.
"Well," he squeaked grimly, "It looks like we're here. Everyone ready for this?"
Wendy nodded silently.
"I am if everyone else is," said Robbie.
"About as much as we ever will be," grunted Stan.
"The scythe is prepared. The harvest begins."
"I'll take that as a yes. Alright, then… let's go."
"HEY! You deaf back there? I said SHOTS! And be quick about it!"
The bartender offered a cringing bow and hurried off, leaving Hectorgon and Lava Lamp alone at the bar for the third time that evening. Well, technically, they each had a retinue of thirty-odd giant spiders and fifteen eyebats each, and there were still a few human barmaids and busboys lurking in the shadows, but it wasn't as if they counted as people. Real people didn't cry when a spider the size of a minivan knocked them to the ground and jammed urticating hairs into their undefended spines. Then again, the bartender had only achieved the lofty designation of personhood by virtue of pouring drinks, and given how slow he was about it, he probably wouldn't count either before the night was through.
"These people," Hectorgon grumbled. "They don't know how lucky they are, do they? They could be down in the mines, chewing out ore with their teeth. They could be dancing on the giant hot plate for cheap laughs. But instead they're here, serving drinks. That's not so bad, is it? I mean, you'd think they'd be happy for the chance to get away from the wastelands, but no! Not a single word of thanks. I've killed people for less."
"Whaddaya expect?" grunted Lava Lamp. "They're ungrateful little bastards, all of 'em. Stupid, simple, superstitious, butterfingered baboons. I've seen what this place was like before Bill got hold of it: grey, dull and pointless – worse than the Infinitentiary – and these people think they were better off there than they are with Weirdmageddon. I'm serious: they actually think they were happy with their nine-to-five jobs at some office somewhere, or digging ditches or getting shot at, or whatever they had before. I mean, they actually liked boring stable reality! They liked dying and not coming back! I mean, the stupidity of these monkeys, I swear…"
For a time, the grumbling carried on unabated, as was their custom. Eventually, the drinks arrived: for the next half an hour, the two downed shots of heavy water flavoured with the tears of orphans, savouring every drop as they pelted the barmaids with their empty glasses. In the end, the two of them grew so irritated at the sight of the staff trying to clean up the blood and broken glass that they ended up ordering more drinks just so they could throw something else at the waitresses.
The two Henchmaniacs weren't actually supposed to be here at the moment, strictly speaking: Bill hadn't given any instructions before he'd lost his temper, so technically they were off the hook for the time being; however, he'd also given the impression of wanting the missing zodiac returned to their prisons, and this Axolotl character was still roaming the playgrounds doing Bill-only-knew what. Unfortunately, none of them knew where the hell the prisoners had run off too and none of them could pick up on Axolotl's trail, so if any of them wanted to score brownie points with Bill by looking for the missing persons, they were stuck kayaking down caca creek without paddles.
Bill himself had locked himself in the throne room and was refusing all attempts at conversation, so for now, the Henchmanacs were on their own. As such, Hectorgon and Lava Lamp had decided to spend their current stretch of spare time down at the Mortuary, where they could get safely drunk and have a little fun until such time as Bill was in the mood to sort out whatever problem had struck. After all, that was a given: he'd seen then through the biggest challenges of their lives – he'd grown too strong to fail now.
Then again, a little fun was what they were all here for, even if they all pursued it in different ways once they were out on their own. Pyronica had been a born gamester; anything with risk and collateral on the line drew her like a magnet – as Hectorgon had discovered during their game of Spin The Person. Keyhole would steal anything that hadn't been nailed down, and though keys were undeniably his favourites, he'd happily take anything – including thing that had been nailed down, like human souls. Amorphous Shape had been a gleeful bearer of bad news, a tattletale, a troublemaker and a trickster, as anyone with the word "amorphous" in their name should be. Paci-fire was a classic butcher, an artist of massacres, a sculptor of slaughter who revelled in carnage. Teeth devoured ravenously and compulsively, either chewing his victims to paste, swallowing them whole, or simply taking a single bite and leaving them to bleed to death. Xanthar was a very deliberate case of a bull in a china shop, determined to flatten skyscrapers and trample cities into dust wherever he went, and the more people caught up in the chaos, the better. Kryptos was a sadist of a rather complicated stripe, hunting, stalking and torturing his victims for as long as possible before the inevitable murder. 8-Ball liked anything Bill liked, either because he was a born toady or because the two of them were somehow sympatico – nobody could tell. And as for that Creature with Eighty-Eight Faces… well, what he did for fun was anyone's guess.
Unlike the others, Hectorgon and Lava Lamp didn't specialize in any one kind of fun: they weren't choosey, and frankly, they couldn't be bothered with doing so. They got drunk like the others did, they tortured just as the others did, and they destroyed just as readily… but occasionally, they needed a few cold ones. So here they were, retinues and all.
And it was then, just as Lava Lamp was opening his mouth to ask what they were going to do next, that the door crashed inwards, revealing the most unlikely intruders imaginable.
In that moment, the two Henchmaniacs could only stare uncomprehendingly at the five figures standing before them: all of them were vaguely recognizable as member of the zodiac, and two (or perhaps three) of them bore a vague resemblance to Bill's concept design for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse… but other than that, the quartet looked unimaginably alien to them. After all, Stan was supposed to be dead, and the Shapeshifter was supposed to be out hunting for Axolotl… and Ford and Wendy were not supposed to look this independent.
For second after second, the impasse held, neither side knowing what the hell they were supposed to do next.
Then, with a berserker howl, Wendy leapt onto the bar and swept her sword along the length of the counter, catapulting a wave of searing flame across the bar – instantly detonating the remaining shotglasses and sending the two Henchmaniacs scurrying for cover. Screaming commands to their retinue, Lava Lamp and Hectorgon immediately sent both platoons of spiders and both squads of eyebats swarming towards the invaders; by way of response, Ford drew his scythe, Stan somersaulted off the chariot with fists at the ready, the Shapeshifter flung himself at the oncoming eyebats in a flurry of wildly-shifting forms, and the once-happy bar devolved into complete and utter confusion.
Hectorgon and Lava Lamp hadn't participated in the battle against the Shacktron: like Amorphous Shape, they'd hung back and waited to see how it went, keeping just out of Bill's sight for safety's sake. After all, the Shacktron was an unknown quantity with unknown powers on its side. In this case, though, they had no excuse: even with the powers of the Horsemen on their side, the trio were still no match for two Henchmaniacs, and the Shapeshifter didn't even have that much power on their side. So, once they'd recovered from the surprise of seeing Wendy wielding the flaming sword of war so soon, the two of them waded into the fray, bombarding the quartet with blasts of searing energy.
Unfortunately, it soon became clear that things weren't as balanced in their favour as they'd hoped: for a start, Wendy was impossibly agile even by Horseman standards. No matter how well-aimed the shot or how swift the spell, she always seemed to be somewhere else by the time it landed. Weaving nimbly under one searing bolt of energy after another, she flung herself into the midst of the spiders, drew her axe and went to work: for the next thirty seconds, a whirling dervish of blades tore through the ranks of the spiders, the axe tearing through limbs like paper, the sword immolating anything it touched, and once again there was nothing the spiders could possibly do to stop her. Venom-dripping fangs embedded themselves harmlessly where Wendy had just been standing, and urticating hairs thudded into the brickwork behind her, and anyone foolish enough to actually try to pin her down with their pedipalps were lucky if they managed to escape with a lost limb; more than one unfortunate spider had the flaming sword driven though all eight eyes, leaving him stumbling blindly across the bar – usually right into the firing line of the Eyebats.
Meanwhile, Stan Pines was airborne and pummelling his way through anyone unlucky enough to be in range: he zeroed in on an Eyebat, pulverizing it to flying juices with a single swing of his knuckledustered fist, rocketed downwards and tackled a giant spider, tearing its limbs off one by one in mid-flight before tossing its screaming body out the nearest window. Frantically, Lava Lamp tried to blast him out of the sky, but the energy beams just ricocheted harmlessly off Stan's body: attempts to stab, bite, petrify or crush him proved just as fruitless, for the old bastard seemed utterly impervious to any kind of harm. For good measure, he usually retaliated with more elaborate schools of magic, perhaps teleporting an enemy outside, perhaps slamming against the wall with the sheer force of his willpower, or even phasing inside the target and tearing them apart from within. At times, his shadow seemed to become animate, reaching out to grab at enemies with oily black arms and startling them off-course; several tried to grab the shadow as it swept past – only to find too late that it was only bait for the inevitable beatdown to follow. Lava Lamp soon found himself flung off his feet, caught off-guard by a stray punch and sent tumbling under the bar, leaving Hectorgon trying desperately to rally their remaining troops to his side.
Unfortunately, the Shapeshifter was actively whittling away at those few remaining troops. If anything, he was even more unpredictable than the other two, for he seemed to change fighting style once every few seconds: one moment, he'd taken the form of a giant hammerheaded monster and was busily tenderizing his way through any Eyebats flying too close to the ground, the next he was disguised as one of the spiders and picking off any stranglers trying to sneak up on Wendy. Then, he was up in the air, sporting wings and a set of flame-drooling jaws, bombarding Hectorgon and Lava Lamp with gouts of fire, and after that, rolling across the ground as a set of crablike pincers mounted on a bowling ball-sized sphere, cutting the legs out from any opponent who got too close. Energy blasts embedded themselves in stony hide, petrification beams missed entirely, blades and fangs did no damage against a body that could make itself into intangible mist – or fire – at a moment's notice; even the Henchmaniac's more esoteric powers had no effect. From his position under the bar, Lava Lamp tried to level the playing field by screaming at the staff to help out, but none of them listened: they were too busy cowering under tables or running for their lives.
Meanwhile, Robbie was hammering the building itself with massive swings of his zombie-body's fists: because he couldn't fit through the door or join the fight itself without hitting Wendy and the others, he instead contented himself with tearing the roof off and punching out every single wall on the property. Suddenly finding himself running out of places to hide, Lava Lamp turned the full force of his powers against Robbie's colossus, pounding the mass of animated corpses with blasts that would have made nuclear ICBs look like cheap fireworks. Radioactive fireballs roared through the depths of the undead giant, miniature mushroom clouds rising from its decomposing shoulders as the zombies fell away in disintegrating clumps, but for every fifty animated corpses blasted away, hundreds more rose to replace them – vacuumed up by the colossus from the surrounding Abyss. And if the radiation showed any signs of affecting Robbie, he didn't show it.
And through it all, Ford Pines strode calmly across the room, untroubled by the carnage around him, his expression as distant and serene as the starscape visible in his eyes. Amidst the violence, the death and the confusion, he was at peace with the world; more importantly, he seemed oblivious to the enemies that surrounded him – and more than one of the retinue tried to take advantage of this. But every time a spider reared up behind him, fangs raised to bite into Ford's undefended spine, it simply froze in mid-lunge and shattered like glass, disintegrating into a million screaming pieces. Every time an Eyebat zeroed in on him, it fell screaming to the ground, weeping tears of blood; any of them lucky enough to try and petrify him were sliced down the middle with one swing of his scythe. Blasts of magical might were simply swallowed up by the impenetrable darkness lurking under Ford's coat, disappearing without so much as a flicker of light. And though Lava Lamp was too busy on trying to pin down Wendy and the Shapeshifter with magma bombs, he couldn't shake the feeling that the room was getting steadily colder as Ford approached…
Eventually, with barely ten spiders remaining and only two Eyebats left in the air, Hectorgon finally lost patience: moustache bristling and teeth bared in an eyeless snarl, he rose into the air and shot across the room in a single burst of Weirdness-fuelled speed, taking careful aim at Stan – the nearest of the five intruders. Less than ten feet from him however, Ford's arm shot out of nowhere and swatted Hectorgon away, sending him careening helplessly into the jukebox.
Belatedly realizing that he may have made a terrible mistake, the Henchmaniac prised himself free of the machine – unleashing a distorted groan of long-forgotten pop music from the ruined jukebox as he did so – and made a beeline for the door. He never made it: scant inches from escaping, a lasso of invisible energy seized him around the middle and began tightening, imprisoning him in a constricting noose of willpower as it slowly dragged him back into the room.
"No," Ford whispered. "You cannot escape what I have become. You cannot run from entropy."
"Lava Lamp! Help!"
"Your friend will not help you. Your master will not help you. You are alone."
"Please, just let me go!" Hectorgon begged, as the noose dragged him ever-closer. "I swear we'll find a way to square this with Bill! He'll make time for you if you want to negotiate something, I promise! Just don't hurt me!"
"You cannot sway my judgement. You cannot delay your sentence. For I am Death, final and most terrible of all inevitabilities, and nothing can evade my grasp. Now submit: embrace oblivion, and let the silence claim you."
"No! No, no, no, it's not supposed to happen like this NO NO NO NO-"
Finally within arm's reach of the Henchmaniac, Ford reached out and seized him by the sides of his head, twelve fingers burrowing deep into his flesh. Hectorgon tried to struggle free, blasting him with every last joule of energy he could conjure up, sending enough magic pouring from his body to leave the two of them incandescent. But Ford wasn't even vaguely fazed by the attack: if anything, his grip grew even tighter. As his fingernails slowly tore into the Henchmaniac, a thick plume of black smoke began to ooze from under Ford's coat, forming hideous clawed hands and strangling tentacls as it coalesced in open air. Bit by bit, the putrid fog reached out towards Hectorgon, tendrils of monstrous vapour edging ever closer to his gaping mouth even as more fog rose from the shadows of the coat to hide them from view.
Deep within the cataclysmic fogbank, the two were briefly visible, illuminated as tortured silhouettes by random flashes of light: Ford imprisoning the hexagonal figure in his vicelike grip, Hectorgon screaming in terror as the fog – the void incarnate – forced itself down his throat.
Seconds later, the fog abruptly cleared and dispersed, every last trace of the voidsmoke gathering itself up and sliding back inside Ford's coat in a matter of moments. In their wake, they left Hectorgon's soulless body crumpled on the ground at Ford's feet, mouth open in a horrified scream, his bowler hat crushed beneath him.
There was a pause, as Wendy finished stabbing the last of the spiders to death. Then, all eyes turned in Lava Lamp's direction – or rather, the empty space where Lava Lamp had been cowering a moment ago.
He may not have been the most capable of the Henchmaniacs, and he probably wasn't even the most memorable, but if nothing else, Lava Lamp knew when to fold 'em – one of the few reasons why he'd been able to keep pace with Pyronica's betting games. The moment he'd seen the mist enfold Hectorgon, he'd taken off at high speed and rocketed the hell out of dodge; by the time the lifeless body hit the deck, Lava Lamp was already several hundred yards away. He didn't know what he'd just witnessed, but anything that could shrug off that much firepower wasn't worth tangling with. After all, he wasn't in the Henchmaniac business to play hero: it was time he called for the cavalry.
Several hundred yards behind him, he dimly heard Stan grumbling, "Dammit, he's getting away!"
And then Wendy chuckled, "No he's not."
Lava Lamp was halfway through turning around in mid-air, just to make sure that nobody was pursuing him, when he felt something in the depths of his conical body give an unpleasant twitch. Confused, he looked down at himself: he didn't appear to have been injured, no cracks could be found anywhere on his glassy skin, and there was no sign that anything had physically struck him. It hadn't been magic, either, for he'd have been able to detect the power of it long before the spell connected. No, this was something different…
And then, he saw it: a tiny speck lurking just beneath the surface of his body, amidst the glowing mass of shifting fluid that was his blood. Somehow, something had gotten under his skin and wasn't being incinerated by the magma; it must have climbed in through his mouth – he'd had it open long enough to inhale bugs, that much was certain – but how could it have survived? And why was it starting to itch?
As Lava Lamp looked on in disbelief, the speck began to grow. At first, it was no bigger than a pinhead; then, it was the size of a marble; then the size of a ping-pong ball; then, as it began expanding to encompass his middle, he realized that thing now squatting in his heart was a plant. More specifically, it was a tiny sphere of treelike limbs and roots shrouded in stony, impervious bark, slowly but surely reaching out to colonize his body with torn-tipped creepers. Horror-struck, Lava Lamp poured all the Weirdness he could into his own body, trying to burn out the infection from within, but if anything, that only made it grow even quicker.
In less than eight seconds, the plant was the size of a bowling ball, its roots and branches and creepers anchoring themselves to the glassy walls of his torso and pressing tightly against them. More and more vines and limbs reached out, layering his body from the inside out, pushing harder and harder against the glass, until the tickling at the heart of Lava Lamp suddenly grew to sharp, stabbing pains rippling through him.
Cracks raced along his sides, tiny fissures tearing themselves across his flank as the branches pressed out against the glass, until every inch of him was covered in a spiderweb of growing canyons torn. All the while, Lava Lamp could only claw impotently at himself, trying futilely to burn away the plant even as it erupted across him, blotting out the vivid orange light that he'd once so proudly shown on the battlefield, layering his eyes, forcing his mouth open, then tearing at him from the outside as well until-
Something broke.
Something shattered.
And then Lava Lamp's entire body split down the middle.
"Oh snap," he muttered.
Then, he was falling – torn in half, falling, but somehow still torturously alive.
Because he'd made it a good distance away from the Mortuary before the infection had taken root, he at least had the luck of not plunging endlessly into the Necrotic Abyss, mercifully. Instead, he found himself on a collision course with the unyielding corpse-studded ground.
The last thing Lava Lamp saw, in the final seconds before he hit the ground, was the fully-sprouted tree floating overhead, branches stretched wide in mimicry of wings. A split-second later the tree changed shape, and was now Dipper Pines, soaring high above the battlefield on a vast set of batlike pinions.
And then Lava Lamp's shattered remnants hit the ground, and all he knew was unconsciousness.
Several minutes later, he awoke to the sound of mocking laughter.
"You know, Lava Lamp," said Nyarlathotep cheerily, "You'd probably have been better off dying on impact. That way, you'd have been spared the pain of what I'm going to do to you now…"
Dipper hit the ground with a thud, barely managing to land his feet as he descended back into the Mortuary. His head was throbbing from too many transformations at once, his eyes stung from the ice-cold night wind, his skin was covered in rapidly-cooling shards of broken glass, his newly-formed wings were beating too fast for a steady landing, his heart was thundering so fast it was a wonder it didn't just burst out of his ribcage…
But he was alive.
Looking around the ruined bar, he saw that the same went for the others: Grunkle Stan was busy scraping chunks of brickwork off his fists, Wendy looked a little bit out of breath after putting out every single fire she'd set over the course of the battle, Robbie was struggling to gather some of his scattered zombies back together and Grunkle Ford was somewhat confused by everything he'd said and done over the course of his attack on Hectorgon, but other than that, they'd escaped the brawl unscathed.
Somehow, all five of them were still alive. More than that, though: they'd won. Against all expectations, they'd killed two Henchmaniacs and their army, and walked away from the battle alive and unharmed. Dipper had known that they were all a lot more powerful than Bill had intended – his faceoff with Amorphous Shape had proved that much – but this was something else entirely. This had been the first major win they'd had since the Shacktron's battle with the Henchmaniacs, and this time they hadn't had the advantage of a giant mecha on their side.
For a moment, Dipper could only look around in confusion, trying to work out what to say next. After all, he was supposed to be leading this operation.
Then, just as he was starting to think of something that almost sounded appropriate for the occasion, the Mortuary's human bartender shot out from behind the bar and shrieked, "Hey, you can't be in here! This is an adults-only establishment: no bar patrons under twenty-two years of age!"
Dipper blinked, belatedly remembering that his human form didn't match his biological age.
"Don't give me that look, I'm serious! And you can't be in here either," he added, pointing furiously in Wendy's direction. "You can't be a day older than sixteen!"
"You might need to rethink your priorities, dude," said Wendy helpfully.
"It's the law!" the bartender raved, his eyes wild and unfocussed. "We'll lose the liquor license! I'll lose my job! The police will be crawling all over this place before you can say DUI! What am I going to tell my family? I've got kids to provide for! I've got- I've got- I've got- I've got…"
He stopped mid-stutter and seemed to sag, as if someone had gently let the air out of him. Then without warning, he was in tears, bawling at the top of his lungs and completely oblivious to the world around him. He was trying to say something through his sobs, Dipper realized, but was so overwrought with emotion that all attempts at coherent speech dissolved into wheezing, garbled screams of "whuurrrrhhurrrgghghhuuuuuh!"
Eventually, one of the barmaids hurried over and gently led the bartender away, hastily averting her eyes from Ford's face as she departed.
With no Henchmaniacs left to distract the five of them, they could clearly see the terrified bar staff cowering in the darkness at the edges of the room, hiding under furniture or pressed flat against the one remaining wall. By now it was pretty clear that the barmaids and busboys knew they'd been found, and were only staying in their hiding places out of deer-in-the-headlights terror… and judging by those horrified stares, they clearly weren't at all comforted by being rescued from the Henchmaniacs.
After perhaps four or five seconds of fearful silence, one of the other barmaids stepped forward, hands in the air. "We surrender," she said.
"…excuse me?"
"We'll do whatever you want, just please don't hurt us, sir."
There was a murmur of consent from the cowering bar staff.
Dipper blinked in astonishment: he knew they weren't exactly the most human-looking rescuers that could have arrived on the scene, but he'd have thought defeating the Henchmaniacs would have been enough to prove their good intentions. More disheartening was the fact that, of the five of them, Grunkle Stan was the only one who looked surprised by this apart from Dipper: Robbie and Wendy looked as though they'd seen and heard it all a thousand times, and Grunkle Ford might as well have been relaxing on a beach somewhere.
"We're not here to hurt anyone," said Dipper reassuringly.
"Oh. Um… do you want us to rebuild the bar, then?"
"Wha-no! Why would we want you to do that? We just spent the last few minutes knocking the walls down."
"8-Ball used to make us do that whenever Xanthar visited, sir: he used to knock down every wall in the building, just so we'd have to rebuild the place from the ground up."
"Well, we don't want you to do anything, okay? We're not Henchmaniacs, and we're definitely not your new masters. We're just…"
Dipper paused, and realized that the term 'ordinary humans' would probably only result in confusion: Grunkle Stan was still hovering in mid-air, Wendy bore visible gills and black-carapaced legs, Robbie looked like a dead man walking even when he wasn't surrounded by zombies, Grunkle Ford was close enough for the bar staff to see his midnight-black eyes, and Dipper had been shapeshifting for every step of the battle.
"We're here to help," he finished limply.
There was a rumble of surprise from the staff members; by now, some of them were edging tentatively into the half-light, and their expressions had gone from terrified to merely quizzical.
"Are you trying to stop the Henchmaniacs?" asked a voice at the back of the crowd.
Dipper was halfway through opening his mouth for a matter-of-fact reply, when he happened to glance down at the hexagonal corpse lying at the centre of the room. In that moment, he finally felt the first inklings of the confidence he'd been waiting for: it wasn't quite Shifty's kind of unstoppable self-assurance… but it was enough.
"I don't think we're trying anything," he said, grinning broadly. "We just killed two of them; Pyronica was decapitated a couple of months ago."
"But that's just-"
"-the beginning. We've managed to break out of prisons made by the great Bill Cipher himself; we've made it across the wastelands and survived without being caught by him or any of the Henchmaniacs; we've taken over the Forge, we've got an army of rust thralls at our command, plus anything else it can make. My friends and I have become more powerful than Bill could have possibly imagined, and now we're going to use that power to take back the planet. We've beaten Bill before: we can do it again!"
There was a stunned pause. If this had been a movie, someone would have started applauding and prompted the entire room to join in with spontaneous cheers; as it was, the crowd was still too demoralized by god-only-knew how many months of servitude to do much more than gawp.
Was it Dipper's imagination, or was Wendy smiling at him.
Spurred on, Dipper continued. "I'm serious," he plunged on. "He's not invincible: we've gotten close enough to hurt him – seriously hurt him. We gave him the first fight he couldn't win in a single move, tore an eye out of his head and kept him on the ropes while we rescued an entire town's worth of prisoners. And that was when we were just ordinary humans. Now we've got the power to stop him once and for all. Don't believe me? Come with us and we'll show you: we've got an army of ex-refugees working with us. If you like, you can join them – or we can take you to a place we can guarantee will be safe from Bill. It's your choice. For now, it's time we got moving."
There was another confused pause, but this time, there was a distinctly hopeful note to the mutterings that followed.
"…we're free?" said one of the busboys.
"Absolutely! You'll never have to work at this bar ever again!"
That time, they did cheer – raggedly and distinctly desperately, but cheering nonetheless.
An idea struck Dipper, and he added, "But before we go… is there any spray paint in the building?"
"There's a few in the kitchen," said one of the barmaids. "8-Ball likes to spray it in people's eyes for some reason."
"Okay then… Robbie, how long has it been since your last attempt at graffiti?"
Robbie's eyes lit up.
Ten minutes later, the five revolutionaries departed – this time with a small crowd of bewildered-but-grateful bar staff huddled atop Dipper's draconic back scales.
In their wake, they left the ruins of the Mortuary, now defaced with a lurid stretch of graffiti that spanned almost the entire remaining wall: THE PYRAMID IS FALLING.
And below that, in slightly smaller letters:
YOU'RE NEXT, BILL.
And as they flew away, Wendy drifted close to Dipper's pterodactyl-shaped head, and whispered - almost directly into his ear - "Dipper?"
"Yes?"
"It's good to have you back."
A/N: This chapter's soundtrack choice is Come A Little Closer by Jay & the Americans. Yes, I had to get a Guardians Of The Galaxy shoutout in there – couldn't resist.
Aaaand up next - celebrations, new moves, and setting the stage. Or, if you prefer...
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