Understanding Mabel

(August 6, 2017)

12: What Happens When an Irresistible Force Meets a Mabel?

Ford and Fiddleford were just about to escort P'q'xo into the attic closet when the door burst open and a starfish-shaped alien charged out, brandishing a wand and screaming, "Hd'w iurch'q g'hd'wk, dolh'q v'fxp!"

Dutifully, the portable universal translator droned, "Enjoy a serving of cold extinction, other-worldly foams!"

But before it could finish translating the dire threat, the creature swung its wand and a jet of light shot out, aimed squarely at Ford.

And somehow Stanley did a sideways dive, intercepting the fierce beam.

P'q'xo shouted, "Brx exgoh'vv l'glr'w, wk'hvh duh iulh'q'gv!"

The translator said, "You naughty-adjective-having-to-do-with-a-failure-to-reproduce witless being, these my friends are!"

"Stanley!" said Ford, bending over Stan.

Stan stood up. "That actually felt good! Nice and cool!"

The two aliens faced each other and carried on such a furious conversation that it made the translator start to smoke as it tried to keep up:

"You we thought had been kidnapped by Ear'th criminals!"

"No, I the means of instantaneous transportation have managed by means of a temporo-dimensiono—ERROR TOO MANY COINED WORDS—device and have me now this new planet explored!"

"I must the portal shut, or the others will not come through!"

"Leave the portal open you must!"

But the new alien slammed the closet door. It unslammed itself and a much larger starfish-shaped alien came out holding a wand at the ready and shouting, "Khoor, koor, khoor , zkdw'v doo wklv wkhq?"

The translator wheezed, "Greetings, greetings, greetings, what is everything here transpiring, then?"

When all three aliens began to babble at once, Fiddleford unobtrusively switched off the translating machine before it could explode. The third alien shut the closet door, which in quick order opened twice more and disgorged two more aliens, both with wands. One of them fired a beam at Dipper.

It was like coming in from a muggy, hot day, and the automatic door of the, oh, say, pharmacy opens, and there's a great blast of cold, cold air that wakes you up and makes you grateful for the relief.

Mabel stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled so shrilly that the glass in the triangle window buzzed in harmonic vibration. "ENOUGH!" she yelled. "Time out!"

Two wands shot jets at her, practically condensing snowflakes from the air. "Whoosh!" she said. "Thanks, guys, but I'm not the one who needs cooling off!"

In their own language, Second Senior yelled in despair, "Our mighty weapons are no match for their puny intellects!"

Third Senior asked, "Is it cold in here, or is it just me?"

First Senior bellowed, "Everyone shut up! Resistance is effective!"

Ford cleared his throat and gargled—at least, that's what it sounded like to Mabel and the others.

But to the aliens, he said, "Peace incoming! No hostile us am! Stick your weapons in your, ah, um, er—"

For good or ill, he could not for the life of him recall the alien word for "pocket," which was just as well, because it was a euphemism for "reproductive cup" and might have resulted in even more misunderstanding. That would have been sad, because the amount of misunderstanding rattling around in the attic was just about the maximum allowed by law.

However, by an extraordinarily coincidence so extremely improbable that something really, really improbable, like a couple of guided missiles spontaneously transforming into, oh, a whale and a bowl of petunias, would outdo it only by a narrow margin, the syllables "Ah um er" roughly corresponded to the command "Be friendly or die an unspeakably horrible death that I shall think up any moment now" in P'q'xo's language.

First Senior said cautiously, "Stand down, everyone. It's not bluffin'."

So silence, if not peace, fell suddenly, and they all stood around staring at each other.

"Hiya!" Mabel said brightly. "I'm Mabel!" to the Third Senior Wizard, she said, "You have the most beautiful eyes! Such a bright red!"

Third Senior edged away from her. "Is this one going to eat me?" she asked fearfully.

"That is a Mabbel!" said P'q'xo. "A being that values life and wears a star!"

"Run, it's the cops!" screamed Second Wizard, because in another extraordinary coincidence, the Shrsoh who were the nearest equivalents to law-enforcement officers wore star symbols as their equivalents of badges.*

"Stand down, Second Senior!" snapped First Senior. "Everyone, put your wands in your sheaths this instant. Now gurgle pleasantly."

"What . . . are they doing?" Dipper asked as the aliens all started to burble.

"I think they're gargling," Mabel replied. She gargled in response.

"This," said P'q'xo, "in language mine the same as smiling to you is."

"It's workin'!" the First Senior said. "Listen, the Mabbel is pleased!"

"She's scaring me," said M'k-yeh.

"Everything scares you," First Senior pointed out helpfully. "My Surihvvru, look at P'q'xo! What did they do to you? You're crusting!"

"Atmosphere here does this," P'q'xo said. "Cannot live here long. Uh—who are you?"

"Tell him who I am!" First Senior ordered Second Senior.

"Big bag of—" began Second Senior, who by a kind of magic, I suppose, instantly became Third Senior.

"You're Second Senior now!" bellowed First Senior to the former Third Senior. "Now you tell P'q'xo who I am, and—this is key, mind—do not try to be funny!"

"This is the First Senior Wizard of the Unknown College of Magic," the newly-minted Second Senior said. "He is P'x'ggolqj Ulglf'xorxv w'kh Sohd'vl'qj Froru."

"First Senior Froru!" said P'q'xo. "I am P'q'xo Zefia, private scholar. You might have read my published plates, 'Upon the Possibility of Traveling by Means of Using Nearby Realities that Are Not the Same as Our Reality and Circumventing the Distances Implicit in Time and Space!"

First Senior stared at him. "Sorry, never heard of you," he said at last. "Catchy title, though. Good on you for that."

"I will take what I can obtain," P'q'xo said in a resigned tone.

"I'm freezing," M'k-yeh murmured forlornly.

"What are those rhythmic vibrations?" asked the new Second Senior.

"That 'music' is called!" P'q'xo said quickly. "In this domicile below us a great celebration is being held!"

"Ah, so they knew we were comin'," First Senior said with a satisfied smirk. "Good, these alien horribles at least know how to be polite. Kind o' catchy, ain't it?"

Downstairs, Soos was blasting the evergreen ballad "Love it Even Louder" by Kizz. In the attic, small loose items were doing a dance of their own, inanimate though they might be.

"Oh, man," Wendy growled. "Now I got that in my head!"

Dipper said, "If you want to get it out, I think Soos still has 'Straight—'"

"Don't say it or I swear, the wedding is off!"

Dipper circumspectly dropped his suggestion.

Second Senior grabbed M'k-yeh's manipulating pad and improvised some dance steps. The picture of the sailing ship fell off the wall and onto Dipper's bed. Downstairs, Soos cranked up the volume.

Ford had a hurried, top-of-their-lungs conversation with McGucket.

Stanley tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a deal with P'q'xo—"Look, I'm tellin' ya, sign with me, you'll be rolling in dough in no time! And then I get it all, but we'll get more for ya to roll in later!"

When at last Soos segued from hard rock into a soft, danceable ballad (Me-4-U's "I Vow"), Fiddleford started the translator again—it had cooled off, at least—and Ford called out, "Attention, everyone! We have much to do and little time!"

Due to the mostly untested nature of the translator's CPU, that came across to the aliens as, "Look at me! I share with you great quantities of work that you must do in impossible time!"

"Now you're talkin'," said the First Senior. In fact, as the chief administrator of an educational institution, that was the essence of his philosophy of supervising his faculty: give them way too much to do, demand it in way too little time, and then encourage them by telling them repeatedly how disappointed in them he was. It had seldom failed him.

What with the party going on downstairs, and the group of people closed up in the attic, and the tendency of heat to rise, the attic began to feel stuffy to Mabel. She fanned herself with both hands and nudged the new Second Senior. "Hey, any chance of you hitting me again with that cool-breeze thing? Look at me, I'm sweating like Waddles!"

"Waddles doesn't sweat, Mabes," Wendy pointed out. "He wallows."

"A technicality." Mabel pointed to the wand and to herself. She mimed the kind of swish-and-flick that had accompanied the cold blast.

"What does the Mabbel want?" the new Second Senior asked P'q'xo.

"Um, to be hit with the Chill Spell, I believe," he said. "Excuse me, we're negotiating our return."

Oh, well. Second Senior pulled the wand, hesitated, and then hit Mabel with a spell that would have immobilized any Shrsoh.

"Ooh, yeah, that's the stuff!" Mabel said, unbasking in the coolth.

"This one is a superhero," Second Senior told M'k-yeh.

"I'm afraid of it," he said.

"Right!" First Senior bellowed. "We've reached a whatsit, an accordion!"

"Accord," M'k-yeh corrected.

"Shut it! We're takin' young P'q'xo back to civilization and givin' him a one-hurchix vacation in th' Bromine Spa of M'zhizzian, right, that'll clear up his frowst."

"He gets a vacation?" squealed former-Second-now-Third Senior.

"Are you buckin' for Fourth Senior?" yelled First Senior. That was the other main component of his administrative philosophy—Pile on the work, restrict the time, and yell at everyone. A few of the wizards might have argued with his policy, but it was impossible to argue with the First Senior personally when he was standing beside you yelling at top volume into your tympanic membrane. Hang the "I'm-not-your-boss-but-your-friend," the "My-door-is-always-open" approach. Results were what mattered to First Senior. Yelling usually worked, and it worked then.

"Right," he said when silence answered him. "That's sorted out. He's to come to the College as an independent researcher to consolidate his findin's, which will be top secret, anyone who violates that will immediately an' permanently be assigned not to middle-school teachin' but to kindergarten—"

Everyone gasped. That was, well—no one could recall such a harsh sentence, ever.

"So that's settled," First Senior continued. "This environment's bad for us. I can feel my joints stiffenin' already, and before long my pores will start to clog. So physical visitation's right out, understand?"

They murmured assent.

"HOWEVER," First Senior boomed, "this alien bein' here—his name is F'or-ud—is First Senior at an Ear-th college of, um, magic and suchlike. Him and me, we'll establish safe communication through the Portals here and in P'q'xo's basement. We will consult, confer, converse, and otherwise hob-nob like brother wizards, dedicatin' our shared knowledge to peaceful ends, so on and so forth, M'k-yeh, what the HELL are you doin' with that Mabble?"

"I think it's a friend-bond," M'k-yeh said. The Mabel was painting fingernails on the back of his manipulating pads, which lacked nails, so she was simply adding some brightly colored dots, with glitter.

"Well, stop it! Where was I? Right, we're getting' some tek-knowledge-y stuff from the First Senior here that well let us communicate. And that's that. Until further notice, personal visitin' back and forth is forbidden—Second Senior, you, too?"

"Look how the spots glow!" Second Senior said. "It makes me feel more attractive!"

"There you go," Mabel said happily in Earthspeak. "Hey, high five—up top—yeah, now slap! There, that's a high five! Teach it to everybody on your weird alien planet!"

"Let's go!" the First Senior said. "Uh—you first, P'q'xo. You really need a bath."

P'q'xo, in his halting English, said, "Must farewell you now, strange friends from other world. Regret so little time. Would have liked to ride on bicycle! Across moon! But when you need me—" he held up his right manipulating pad—"I'll be right . . . there!" He pointed at the closet.

Then with a last look around, he went inside, they heard a zap, and First Senior opened the door. "I reckon it worked. Just in case—here, M'k-yeh, take this, it's a two-way communicatin' tek-knowledge thing—and in you go. Push this when you get safe to Yukkoph, if you do."

"If?" squeaked M'k-yeh, but he got shoved in, the closet door closed, and zap!

A moment later, the receiver—Fiddleford was holding it—flickered a green light. "He's OK," McGucket said.

Like a captain remaining on his sinking ship, First Senior stayed behind until the other Shrsohs had departed. Then he bowed and opened the door—

But Mabel tugged on his arm-tentacle. "I'd like to kiss you goodbye," she whispered.

That took some explaining. Reluctantly, First Senior agreed and stooped over. He murmured in his own language, "You're just so damned ugly!"

Mabel understood none of that. Still, she took that as a compliment.

She would have taken it that way even if she had understood.

Hey, she was Mabel.

And then the aliens were all gone—"Open a window!" Wendy said, because the whole place smelled like a stack of wet dogs and old socks—and Mabel said, "The party's still going."

"I coulda made a killin' with that guy," lamented Stan.

"Count your blessings," Ford advised his brother.

Stan murmured, "One, two, three, four, a fin, six, seven, eight, nine, a Hamilton. . .."

"Come on," Mabel urged. "I want to see my video again! Hey—Grunkle Ford, can you send a copy of my video to that Patootie guy?"

"Very simply," Ford said.

"Then do it!" Mabel ordered, fist in the air.

And—well—there's more to the story. There's always more to the story. However, let us for now simply say that an interplanetary war was averted, two planets acquired new legends of eldritch horrors, humans and aliens learned a few things about life, the universe, and everything—

And Mabel became the toast of two worlds.

In a limited but satisfying way, of course.

And in Gravity Falls, life went on.

*It may be worth noting that very few Shrsohs ever broke the laws, because there were so few laws to break, the main one being "Everybody leave everybody else the hell alone!" Imprisonment and fines were unknown. Trials did not happen. Nor did the Enforcers, as the police were called, inflict death, grievous bodily harm, or even minor booboos on offenders. Instead, they stared hard and droned sorrowfully, "What would your dear old Mum think of the way you're acting?" That was always enough to make the erring miscreant sentence himself or herself to a years-long time-out to think it over. If that didn't work, there were always middle schools in need of teachers. That threat alone was enough to scare any Shrsoh straight.

On Yukkoph, nobody ever crossed an Enforcer. If trouble happened, an Enforcer was the first one they looked for and the last they wanted to meet. It was a chancy job, and it made a Shrsoh watchful . . . and a little lonely.

The End