A/N: And now, the penultimate chapter - and the revenge many of you have been waiting for!

Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Gravity Falls is still not mine.

The work progressed at a breakneck pace.

As it turned out, this particular cure for Forger Wasp infestation had always been intended for easy replication: its creators had known just how virulent their opponent had been, and had formulated the anti-infestation elixir to be as user-friendly as possible. Consequently, not only could it be taken orally or even dermally as well as intravenously (much to Ford's delight) but it could easily be replicated through comparatively primitive methods.

As such, even with the clumsy child-sized hands he was currently lumbered with, it didn't take long for Ford to begin churning out new doses of the cure at an astonishing rate. After about half an hour of work, he finally gave up on filling vials of the stuff and simply began emptying each new batch into the water tank for the fire suppression system. In fact, the process proved so easy that he was even able to instruct the copier clones on how to work the machines, slicing construction time down the middle; the project went so well that they soon had more than enough for the swarm outside – plus at least forty-five minutes left before the Forger Wasps regained consciousness.

So, with the time he had left, he managed to replicate a few precious doses of resistance serum and administer one of them to the still-unconscious Grey Professional, before dragging him into one of the other quarantine cells – where he'd be kept clear of the sprinklers when they finally sprung to life. Ford didn't want to decide what to do with the bastard just yet, but there was a germ of an idea forming… and something told him that he would need to keep the Forger Wasp inside Grey alive for as long as possible.

As the other copier clones slowly returned to the Mystery Shack, they too found shelter in the cells, away from the sprinklers. Truth be told, Ford wasn't sure what was to be done about them either: he was immensely grateful for all the help they'd been over the last few days, but what were they going to do now that their one assigned task was finished? They couldn't stay in the Mystery Shack forever, not now that they'd established their own independent existence, and even if the grateful townsfolk provided them with a house of their own, it wasn't a guarantee of safety: after all, even if their new home gave them a roof over their heads, there was still a danger of leaks. And with rain and snow almost inevitable in some months of the year, spending weeks on end cooped up under a single roof wouldn't exactly offer a happy life for the clones. So what else could be done for them? What could grant security to their fragile lives?

It went down on Ford's growing list of problems to deal with. Fortunately, the copier clones were prompt about arriving, so he didn't have to worry about delaying the sprinklers for their sake: Mabel had briefed them very thoroughly on what they were going to do, and had told them to take shelter in the Mystery Shack as soon as the Mabels began passing out – just so none of the copies would end up getting a fatal drenching from the outdoor fire suppressors.

Tracy and Quattro were the last to arrive at the Shack, hastily ducking into the shelter of the quarantine cells as Ford took up his position at the control panel to the newly-installed surveillance system hub.

Having familiarized himself with the modifications the Forger Wasps had made to the house, he knew that they'd meant to ensure that the fire suppression system doubled as a riot control weapon: the outdoor sprinklers had been augmented with water cannons just in case the gun turrets, missile launchers and other security arrays weren't sufficient to keep out intruders, while the indoor sprinklers had been given special new pressure options that would allow them to active with the force of a fire hose, slamming anyone caught under them hard against the ground. No doubt they'd been hoping to use these additional security measures against the copier clones, to the point that the surveillance hub even allowed users the power to activate the sprinklers in specific areas of the house. All things considered, this might have been the worst mistake the Queen had ever made in her life.

For perhaps a minute or so, Ford paused by the activation switch, wondering if there was anything meaningful he could say or do in these last seconds, something that could make the Forger Wasps feel as much suffering and misery as they'd forced Mabel to endure in these last few days. But in the end, he knew it was futile to waste time on such pointless gestures; he had work to do, and now that Mabel had gone this far to stop Grey and kill the Queen, it was up to him to make sure that her hard work paid off.

So, he selected the fire suppression, selected both the internal and external sprinklers, turned the water pressure up to maximum, and hit 'activate.'

For a split second, nothing happened, and Ford wondered if he'd screwed up with about ten minutes left on the clock. Then, there was a low rumble from the basement water tanks.

Then, all over the Mystery Shack, the cure serum began gushing out of the sprinklers.

The New Queen was the first to awaken. As per the biological protocols established at the birth of her species, she was always the first to recover from the reconstruction of the hive mind, and the first to awaken from the coma triggered by the death of the Old Queen.

At once, she felt the hive mind around her, a vast web of psychic connections rippling out from her being: she was now the nexus of all those interconnected minds, all of them reporting back to her as one, feeding her information and following her commands. Though none of the swarm were conscious yet, each member still provided her with an automatic stream of data: their locations, their memories, their last orders, and their current status. The effect was dizzying beyond imagination, the sheer scale of sensory detail impossible to describe even in the telepathic language of the Forger Wasps; only a Queen would ever understand the grandeur of what it meant to command the hive mind.

She tried to clamber to her feet – or at the very least to open her eyes – but her host body was clumsy and slow to respond, her true body aching from the metamorphosis she'd undergone in the last two hours. Not long ago, she had been the drone known as Dabel, subservient to the whims of the Queen; now, she was the Queen of the swarm, the commander of the hive and future master of all life.

Of course, for that to happen, she would need to move, and so far her body didn't seem in a very cooperative mood: now that she was Queen, she was not meant to command Dabel's body. She was to sit motionless at the centre of Mabel's being, commanding the swarm through will alone as her trusted subjects tended to the health of her royal host body.

So, her first priority was to address this problem – and to find a compatible host.

She emerged from her coma slowly, awkwardly, but with an immediate sense of purpose: she was to seek out Mabel and force her weak human body to accommodate her, to burrow out a new home for herself in the depths of Mabel's flesh. And if such a thing were not possible – if Mabel resisted beyond the boundaries of reason – then the only logical course of action would be to kill her and recreate her in Dabel's flesh: she would take all the thoughts and memories that the hive mind had absorbed and pump them into her host's long-dormant brain, aggressively remodelling Dipper into his sister right down to her soul – until the old royal host was reborn into a new reign.

Next on her agenda would be to re-infest Ford Pines, a process that wouldn't take long considering that his morphic field likely still hadn't fully reverted; then, once he and Grey were secured, she would take great pleasure in having the copier clones slowly shredded into confetti and flushed down the toilet. And once they were finished with their vengeance, it would be time to make use of Grey's dimension travel device.

All of these things were in reach: she was just a few feet from the secret door and the elevator that lay beyond. Struggling though she was, she could easily open the way for her sisters and be upon the defenders before they knew what was happening; she wasn't sure how long she'd been unconscious, but she was certain that Ford Pines would still be at least half an hour from replicating the cure serum.

And it was then that, just as the New Queen was struggling to her feet, there was a muffled whirr from somewhere overhead. A moment later, the sprinklers roared to life, instantly soaking Dabel to the skin and rousing several of her sisters from their comas. Outside, there was a whoosh as the water cannons began dousing the grounds in a fine spray of water, drenching the members of the swarm who were still outside.

For perhaps ten seconds, the Queen remained perfectly still, her head cocked to the side in confusion: she couldn't smell fire in the building, so why would the sprinklers have turned on – manually or otherwise?

Then the pain struck.

Too late, she realized that the cure could be absorbed through her skin; too late, she realized that the cure had been much easier to replicate than any variants her species had encountered in the past. True, dosages taken via orally or dermally didn't work quite as swiftly as intravenous delivery, but with the sheer quantity of it gushing down on her, that hardly mattered. Instead of being faced by a single, deadly shot to the heart, she was now faced by an unceasing deluge of poison raining down on her and her sisters. And now, with the entire swarm within reach of the fire suppression system, there was no escaping what was going to happen next.

All around her, Forger Wasps writhed in their death throes, limbs flailing wildly as the poison ate away at their true bodies, dissolving the connections between them and their hosts. Even though most were still unconscious despite the pain, they still twitched viciously in their final agonies, shivering wildly in their sleep as the cure did its work. And she could tell from the low chorus of groans and gurgles and screams issuing from across the Shack, it was the same for every single member of the swarm.

One by one, the dying Forger Wasps were expelled from their host bodies, their true forms erupting into the open air and finally succumbing to the sheer magnitude of the poison in their bodies. One by one, the Forger Wasps shuddered their last and died, dissolving and disintegrating until nothing remained of them but puddles of lifeless ooze.

Then it was Dabel's turn.

Thirty agonized seconds went by as she struggled to resist the cure, to force her body to remain intact despite the chemicals that threatened to liquefy it. Howling mad, incoherent word, she struggled to claw her way to the basement and confront Mabel one final time, to get her hands on Grey's dimensional teleporter, to kill her own host, to do something that would make her few minutes as Queen worthwhile.

But in the end, her connection to her host dissolved much sooner than she did, and Dipper's body lapsed back into unconsciousness before she could put any final plans into motion. And as he fell, the Forger Wasp inside him lurched into the daylight and collapsed upon the floor with a hideous, watery splat.

In the last few seconds of life, she lay there, sizzling, twitching, and wondering how something as insignificant and foolish as Grey had ruined their work – before finally expiring.

As soon as he was satisfied that none of the Forger Wasps had escaped the deluge, Ford's first order of business was to awaken as many of the cured people as possible and escort them downstairs to the fabricator for a new suit of clothes. Quite apart from the fact that all of them were soaking wet, they were now in the process of reverting to normal, and within a few hours, they weren't going to fit the Mabel-sized attire they'd been given. So they needed suitably-sized clothes elastic enough to fit them while they went about finding or replacing their old attire, wherever the Forger Wasps had dumped it; thankfully, the fabricator was more than up to the task of outfitting them with jumpsuits to that end.

Thankfully, it didn't take too long to find people who'd actually had some idea of what was going on before being nabbed by the swarm: one by one, Stanley, Fiddleford, Wendy, Candy and Grenda all emerged from their slumbers more or less caught up on current events, enough to manage the confused masses – once Ford had finished welcoming them back to the world of sanity.

But even with their help, it still took an interminable length of time to get everyone awake, informed, on their feet and moving. For one thing, were understandably confused to find themselves lying drenched in the Mystery Shack surrounded by clones of Mabel, and even more so when they finally realized what they'd become.

By now, Ford was looking a lot more like himself, having shot up in height by at least three inches, gained at least a year or so in age and recovered a hint of his old jawline; unfortunately, this meant that he looked very odd to the recovering citizens, especially since Fabel's clothes didn't quite fit him anymore, and it was some time before he was able to convince anyone of who he was.

Explaining things to adult victims was frustrating enough, but it was even worse when the recovering victim turned out to be a child: Ford didn't know how to calm them down, and because most of the swarm were still completely identical, there was no way of knowing where their parents were until they'd woken up. And then there were the victims who'd been even younger than that when the Forger Wasps had caught them. Toddlers and infants suddenly found themselves awakening in the bodies of twelve-year-olds, and once again, immediately began screaming for their mothers; the youngest of them didn't even know how to walk, much less follow instructions, and to be helped downstairs. Wendy and Grenda were lifesavers in this department, playing the part of protective big sisters until their parents could be located.

In a few mercifully rare cases, the victims had been in hospital under very delicate circumstances when they'd been infested, and had be given a very thorough medical check-up before they could be moved. Fortunately, conversion into a Mabel appeared to have repaired any sickness or damage they'd suffered in their former bodies, giving a great many patients a new lease on life.

Once the newly-awakened citizens were up-to-date and up-and-about, getting them downstairs required Ford to deploy the long-disused fire escape just to take the strain off the elevator. Eventually, the line leading into the Mystery Shack got so long that Ford gave up and just brought the fabricator out to the front room, and even once the citizens were lined up in front of the machine, it wasn't as simple as churning out jumpsuits for everyone: it was simple enough for the kids, but several adults had body types that had to be carefully tailored for the sake of their own dignity – from Toby Determined's scrawny frame to Manly Dan Corduroy's gigantic physique. Having met Dan when he was younger, Ford knew of the colossal growth spurt the colossal lumberjack had undergone, and didn't want to imagine the consequences of giving him an undersized set of replacement clothes before he got home.

And then there were the nonhuman victims: the gnomes and the lilliputtians were quite taken with their new height, and not at all happy to learn that they were going to shrink back down again in a few hours, resulting in more than a few tantrums upon being provided with doll-sized jumpsuits. And then there were the Manotaurs, who immediately panicked upon learning that they were a) female and b) child-sized; most of them started screaming less than a minute after awakening, and took to sprinting about the Shack in a blind terror, trying vainly to convince themselves that the building had gotten bigger since they'd last visited. It took the best efforts of Wendy to assure them that they'd soon have all their body hair and muscles back, and even then they weren't comfortable until they'd each been given loincloths the size of opera capes.

Even more annoying than the Manotaurs running around with gigantic lengths of clothe draped over them like beach towels were the Northwests – or rather, the ones that had regained consciousness: Preston whined like a rusty gate at having to wear anything but bespoke silk, and demanded to speak to Mabel so he could issue a formal complaint over how she'd solved the infestation; Priscilla appeared to suffer a mild breakdown upon discovering her new body, and spent the next twenty minutes asking when her mother was going to pick her up for the beauty pageant; and the butler just got in the way in his attempts to prepare Priscilla's daily Quaalude smoothie. By contrast, Pacifica remained fast asleep – almost as if unwilling to awaken.

After perhaps an hour of this, the atmosphere calmed: the rapidly-shrinking gnomes went back to their forests, the lilliputtians (by that point dwindling even quicker) flocked back to the golf course, and the Manotaurs lumbered off to their mountain, secure in the knowledge that most of them were already six feet tall. Given that the Wasps had discarded their clothes where they'd found them, they didn't have too far to look for their old gear. The Northwests, unwilling to be seen returning to their true forms in cheap jumpsuits, were easily shooed away with the promise that Pacifica would be returned to Northwest Manor once she'd been given a clean bill of health. Best of all, Manly Dan and his sons went about gathering up the discarded clothes that the swarm had left scattered over Gravity Falls and taking them back to the Shack, where they could be returned to their owners in an orderly fashion. Gradually, the air of fear shrouding the Shack faded as people began to return to normal and lost loved ones were finally able to recognize each other: it was admittedly a rather bizarre sight to witness an entire yard full of identical Mabel clones slowly growing up into adult men and women – or shrinking back down into babies, if that was the case. Even Ford himself was almost fully restored, Stanley was hurtling into his forties, and the rest of his support team were well on their way to being back to normal.

Before long, the last stragglers had left the house, and all that remained were Stanley, Soos and their team of helpers, and the only two patients left at the Shack were Dipper and Pacifica. Medically speaking, there was nothing wrong with either of them apart from fatigue: having briefly served as a royal host, Dipper had been run ragged by the strain of carrying around Dabel as she transformed into the New Queen. As for Pacifica, she'd been under a lot of stress in the hours before the Wasps had sunk their talons into her; either she was subconsciously hanging on to as much sleep as she could possibly get, or she was in full retreat from reality. Either way, both kids ended up back downstairs with Mabel.

After they'd settled them into beds, all they could do was sit back, wait for their exhausted charges to awaken, and wonder what were they to do with the friends and foes that remained…

Finally, Mabel awoke. It was a long and ponderous kind of awakening, the kind that Mabel only displayed when she was seriously under the weather – according to Stan: she'd open her eyes, notice the small crowd of people sitting around her bed, smile dozily and mumble a few hellos before promptly drifting back to sleep. After about four or five of these failed starts, she finally opened her eyes and kept them open, finally taking in the sight of the strange-looking gaggle of friends peering down at her. Though all of them were almost back to normal by now, they still looked a bit unusual: Ford was sporting a few stubborn traces of chestnut in his hair; Fiddleford's beard hadn't quite turned grey yet; Stan looked young enough to be Mabel's father; Soos was still a bit on the shorter and slimmer side than usual; Wendy was looking more like Mabel's big sister than anything; Grenda was surprisingly dainty at present and Candy was currently without her glasses… and finally, the ensemble was rounded out by all twenty-seven copier clones including Tracy and Quattro.

"Am I dreaming?" Mabel wondered aloud.

"No, kiddo," said Stan. "This is all real."

In that moment, Mabel achieved liftoff: one minute she was lying in bed, blinking sleepily up at them; the next she was hurtling through the air with a shriek of joy and wrapping her arms around Stan's neck. For next four or five minutes, she did little else but hug people, sprinting from person to person at just a little under the speed of light and dragging them into bone-splintering hugs, kissing them several times as well for good measure; she probably would have kissed the copier clones as well, but all twenty-seven of them politely declined on the grounds of avoiding moisture. Nobody was able to translate a single word that left her mouth in that time, partly because she was speaking almost quickly as she moved but mostly because she was shrieking at a pitch that dogs would have struggled to make sense of.

If there'd been any doubt that Mabel had finally shaken off the pall of depression that had been hanging over her since the rise of the Forger Wasps, it was gone: the old, excitable, exuberant Mabel was back with a vengeance.

Eventually, though, even she had to stop to take a breath, leaving her to collapse into a chair with a smile that couldn't have been removed without dynamite. "Where's Dipper?" she asked, as Ford began checking her pulse.

"Still asleep," said Wendy, nodding over at the two hospital beds on the other side of the basement. "He's been through a lot, so he needed extra time to get back to normal. Same with Pacifica."

"Pacifica's here as well?"

"Right next to him."

A wicked grin crossed Mabel's face, and before Ford could stop her, she immediately made a beeline for the opposite end of the lab. "They're not ready to be woken up yet," he called after her.

"I'm not gonna wake them up!" she called back. "I'm just gonna make sure they wake up in a good mood."

And before anyone could ask what she meant by that, Mabel had begun laboriously pushing the two beds together, and despite being fresh from an exhaustion-induced collapse, she was showing no signs of fatigue. Once she'd taken the railings down, Dipper and Pacifica were all but occupying the same bed.

"The matchmaker strikes again," she cackled triumphantly.

Stan opened his mouth to ask what had brought this on, but then the familiar glazed expression crept over his face as recollections began streaming into his brain: so far, it seemed as if everyone carried at least a few memories from their time connected to the hive mind, some of them more useful than others. As for what the Forger Wasps themselves had directly experienced, those memories were still relatively indistinct and often mired in the haze of pleasant stimuli that the Wasps had pumped into their hosts brains to keep them docile: Ford had memories of working on this very enclosure and presiding over Mabel's inoculations, but other than that there wasn't any light dawning on what Fabel had done.

"Oh, right," said Stan at last. Then, he added, "Does anyone actually think Dipper's going to wake up with any idea what's been going on?"

"Probably not," Ford remarked. "In all likelihood, he wasn't even awake for his transformation; these last few days will be just a dream, something between a pleasant fantasy and a nightmare. All things considered, he's lucky… but we'll still have to tell him what happened sooner or later, and he'll have to deal with the fact that he ended up getting possessed again. It probably won't be very pleasant, especially if he retains enough of Dabel's memories."

"It's not as if we've got the option of pretending it really was a dream, is it? Not with the repair bill we've got to work with: Dipper's smart – he'd figure it out sooner or later."

"And definitely not with everyone in Gravity Falls having been infested. Even if we could go the Weirdmageddon route and convince everyone in town to never mention it again, he'd probably end up hearing it from the Gnomes or the Manotaurs instead. So someone's got to break the news to him."

There was a distinctly sombre pause.

Then, in near-perfect unison, Stan and Ford blurted out "I'll tell him," before realizing that they'd just blocked each other.

"I should tell him," insisted Ford. "I know the most about the Forger Wasps, so I should be the one to explain things."

"Come on, Ford, the kid needs a light touch after everything that's happened to him; it should be me."

"No offense, Stanley, but the words 'light touch' don't exactly spring to mind when I think of your approach."

"And yours does?"

"Okay, fair enough, but if we're going to give him the news-"

"It's going to be me," said Mabel flatly.

Another pause followed, this one quite distinctly shocked.

"Mabel, you don't have to put yourself through this – you've been through more than enough already without having to make your day even more miserable-"

"It's going to be me," Mabel repeated. She was still smiling, a little sadly, but even that couldn't quite dim the smile on her face. "He'll have to know everything, and I was there for all of it, so it has to be. Besides, I've been tidying up my mess all day; I can't chicken out now."

Ford and Stan looked from Mabel to Dipper's still-slumbering form and – once again almost in perfect unison – realized that there was absolutely nothing they could say to dissuade her, not after everything she'd done to stop the Forger Wasps.

And in the silence that followed, the copier clones eyed the supine body of the Grey Professional and asked, "What are we going to do with this scumbag?"

"I had some ideas," said Ford, "But they don't quite solve the problem on what to do with his supporters: we've got to do something that'll stop 8-Ball from ever sending another hitman after us, and we've got to make sure Grey here won't come back for revenge."

"So we can't lock him up permanently?"

"Not with the facilities we've got: even without his equipment, he's too dangerous to be allowed to mix with ordinary human beings."

"And we can't just tie him up in a car and roll it downhill into a lake?" Suddenly realizing that everyone was staring at him, Stan hastily added, "I'm just making suggestions, okay?"

"We're not killing anybody," said Mabel firmly. "I mean, anybody else. We're just going to make absolutely sure he never hurts anyone ever again."

"What about his gear?" Wendy suggested. "Maybe there's something we can use in there."

For the next few minutes, they picked through the small arsenal of weapons and futuristic machinery that Grey had brought with him, and though all looked immensely interesting, none of them offered any concrete ideas until Ford uncovered a small handheld screen no bigger than a landline phone. It took a little effort to activate and unlock it, but eventually Ford found himself staring into one of the strangest things he'd seen since his return from the multiverse.

"What the hell is Facebook?" he asked.

Wendy shook with laughter. "Oh man, we have got to get Tambry in on this…"

"Oh Grey? Wakey-wakey, Grey. This is your nine o'clock alarm. Wakey-wakey eggs 'n bakey."

The Grey Professional groaned; he was dimly aware that a bright light was being shone in his eyes, and on instinct, he tried to turn away from it… only to realize that he wasn't asleep on a couch in the Retribution Squad's HQ, as he'd initially believed.

He was tied to a chair.

And on all sides, he was surrounded: Mabel Pines, the paper doppelgangers, Stanford Pines, Stanley Pines, Wendy Corduroy, Soos Ramirez, Fiddleford McGucket, Grenda Grendinator, and Candy Chiu. And as if the fact that they had all been restored to normal wasn't shocking enough, all of them were smirking with undisguised glee.

An ice-cold drop of fear landed in the pit of Grey's stomach and began spreading along his spine. Even with his arms tied behind his back, he could already tell that he'd been stripped of all his equipment: his Mistifier, his comms unit, his dimensional teleporter, his weapons – all of them were gone and were likely well out of reach by now. For the first time in over a century, he was completely helpless. For the first time in his entire life, he'd failed.

"Morning!" said Mabel, grinning maniacally. "We were thinking of letting you sleep for a little while longer, but we've got stuff to talk about before we get rid of you. Grunkle Ford, you can give him the bad news."

"The Forger Wasps are all but gone," Ford explained, as Mabel slipped into the background. "The Queen and her first replacement are dead; the swarm's been wiped out, and now that we've worked out how to operate your teleporter, they won't be receiving any reinforcements. Long story short, your 'friends' are gone and you've lost."

"And now it's your turn," Stanley Pines chuckled.

Grey barely managed to suppress a shudder of fear. "Whatever you do to me," he snarled, "Whatever tortures you inflict before you finally work up the courage to kill me, the Retribution Squad will avenge a thousandfold. You'll suffer even worse than I will, I promise you that."

There was a ripple of laughter from the crowd.

"Kill you?" Stan echoed.

"Aw, dude, no way," said Soos. "We aren't gonna kill you; we're not even gonna hurt you."

Ford smirked. "Not physically," he added. "But yes, I think it's in everyone's best interest that you live a long and healthy life with your new reputation and your new state of being."

"…what do you mean, 'new reputation'?"

By way of an explanation, Ford held up Grey's personal datapad. "Thanks very much for keeping this DNA-locked by the way; it saved us the trouble of having to crack passwords. I mean, a datapad with access to the multiversal media networks? This might just be the single most valuable piece of technology on this planet, to say nothing of the access to all the newest developments in the field… seriously, it's the one thing you gave us that might be more useful than your teleporter."

"Get to the point."

"The point is that you've been recording just about everything that's happened here in Gravity Falls and sending it to 8-Ball… but your cameras still have the original files in the system. Now, I'm still a bit behind on this internet business, but I'm very lucky to have friends and family that were more than happy to show me how to work with social media."

"And now," added Wendy, "We've got the perfect place to put all that footage of you getting your butt kicked by a twelve-year-old."

"WHAT?"

"Oh, and the footage of you looking like an idiot in front of a bunch of humans," Mabel chimed in. She held up one of Grey's automated camera drones and grinned broadly. "Smile! You're on Candid Camera!"

As one, Grey's airborne cameras dipped into view and surrounded him, recording him from every angle; while a giggling Candy Chiu worked the drone remote, Soos and Wendy connected the remote link up to his datapad and began gleefully pressing buttons.

"I swear, Mabel, this will not be the end," Grey snarled. "Whatever you spread to the interdimensional internet will be your undoing: the Retribution Squad will know your face and they will know exactly what crimes to avenge. They shall make you suffer for this humiliation! They-"

But at that very moment, Grey felt his body turn traitor, setting his nerves alight with pain as his morphic field suddenly began to warp out of shape: his flesh melted like tallow, oozing into new configurations; his skeleton cracked and contracted and shrank inwards; his hair turned from grey to brown even as it began cascading down the back of his once-immaculately-trimmed skull. He began to shrink in his seat, his body shrivelling and withering away inside his suddenly oversized clothes, his view plunging steadily downwards – and as he dwindled, his mind began to change as well: for one horrible instant, Grey's memories fizzled out of existence, instantly replaced by a flood of recollections that could have only belonged to Mabel – the search for the Gobblewonker, dating Gideon, making friends with Pacifica, escaping Mabeland – before his own memories reasserted themselves and left him as the Grey Professional once again. Then his morphic field gave another violent lurch and he began to grow again, hurtling back to his normal height at a stomach-churning pace only to shrink back down again just as quickly; a moment later, it happened again – and again, and again…

"What have you done to me?!" Grey shrilled, his voice shifting wildly between his usual low register and Mabel's prepubescent gibbering.

"Remember how I infested you?" said Mabel. "Well, you've still got a Forger Wasp in you; now that all the others are dead, she's the Queen – the Last Queen. She's supposed to jump right back to me and start infesting people again, but Grunkle Ford's made sure she can't get out of you."

"You did what?!"

"Just a little alteration to the Wasp's physiology," Ford remarked. "Once we were able to dilute the cure serum to safe levels, we injected it into specific points into the Queen's body during her maturation process: all of a sudden, your passenger's too weak to leave. And while we're on the subject, thanks for packing that nanosurgery kit into your gear: I never would have got this little experiment to work without that."

"Anyway," continued Mabel. "Since she can't get out, she'll do the next best thing and try to turn you into me. Bad news is that the Queen can't do that either, not all the way."

"Another effect of the poisoning. Every now and again, she'll try to force your shape to conform to her desires and probably fill your head full of Mabel's memories, but she's too weak to maintain it. What you're experiencing is the Queen playing tug-of-war with your morphic field." Ford grinned wickedly. "Don't worry, it won't last for much longer than a few minutes before Her Highness runs out of steam… but she'll try again once she's recovered her strength. Oh, and by the way, there's no way of telling when she'll make her next attempt. Sorry. But on the upside, at least you won't be able to infest anyone: I sterilized her just to be safe."

"GET THIS THING OUT OF ME!" Grey wailed, his body concertinaing back and forth between one shape and another, his physiology shifting unevenly from form to form. "MAKE IT STOP! CURE ME!"

Ford grinned like the proverbial Cheshire Cat. "No," he said flatly. "I'd like to see what happens if she manages to work up enough strength to maintain your new form for a little while. I doubt you'll ever fully transformed into Mabel all the way, but you'll probably end up giving me more than enough to laugh about in the process."

"For crying out loud, you've made your point! STOP THIS! DON'T LET ME SUFFER! END IT ALL!"

"Nope," said Mabel, smirking triumphantly. "Not while we've still got work to do. Guys, do you think we've got enough footage yet?"

"Just need a little more. We're getting some really good shots of him crying here, but I think it might be funnier if we added a dubstep soundtrack to it."

"Dude, no way; I'm going for Straight Blanchin' all the way with this one."

"STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT STOP IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAARGGHHH!"

With one almighty scream, Grey lurched back into his true form and crashed to the ground, his body still convulsing from the pain of transformation. For the next few seconds, he could only lie there in a twitching, shivering heap of crudely-bound limbs as Candy went on recording footage.

"And I think that's enough," Mabel concluded. "The Grey Professional, everybody!"

"Uploading now, dudes…"

For the next few minutes, there was silence as Grey tried and failed to free himself from the knots that bound him – or at the very least to force himself upright again.

"If you don't even have the guts to actually kill me," he wheezed at last, "then I'll make sure this feud lasts forever; no matter what pain and humiliation you inflict on me, I'll return the favour someday. I'm still a member of the Retribution Squad, and I've got the resources to make your lives a living, breathing hell: I'll find things that'll make the Forger Wasps look like a plague of bedbugs, I'll tear this planet asunder and I'll ensure you spend every minute of your miserable collective existence in agony!"

As one, the onlookers smirked. "I don't think you will, Grey," said Stan. "Because we're uploading the highlights of everything you've been up to, and people are really startin' to take notice…"

"And you think I care what a few social media sites say about me?!"

"Not really," Ford admitted. "But I'm pretty sure that your employers will."

There was a wince from the background. "Ooh, they didn't like that," Mabel laughed. "Whaddaya know? It's actually illegal to make deals with Forger Wasps!"

"I'M A SENIOR MEMBER OF THE SQUAD! I HAVE CARTE BLANCHE TO DO WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE TO COMPLETE A MISSION!"

"Somehow I don't think they're gonna see it that way, pal. Oh, and now the comments are getting really interesting: you're not supposed to actually talk to the clients during a job!"

"Jeez, look at this one: 'using Forger Wasps or any resource that might spread to the rest of the multiverse constitutes a direct violation of the Code of Retribution and an indirect threat to the continued existence of the Retribution Squad. Flaunting this rule will be punished by a period of suspension no less than twenty years or a fine of no more than two hundred thousand'-"

The rest of Ford's sentence was lost in the wordless howl of rage that erupted from between Grey's clenched teeth.

Stan laughed. "My lord, and I thought the Shriners got tetchy about their rules: 'failure to correctly monitor a potential threat to the mission is considered a sign of blatant incompetence and…' Oh gosh, look at this, Ford!"

Everyone immediately crowded around the screen to get a better look at the comments section.

"What?" Grey demanded. "What is it?"

Mabel grinned. "Glad you asked, Grey: you're fired."

"…what."

"It's an official notice from the Retribution Squad," said Ford, smugly. "And it's being posted to just about every single social media network where the Squad has a presence: 'Montresor of Florence (also known as Agent Amontillado, also known as the Grey Professional) is no longer affiliated with the Eternally Clean-Handed Zathropodal Brethren Of Mercenary Vengeance, nor does he represent our order in any way, shape or form. As punishment for criminal incompetence, violations of safety regulations and the public embarrassment of our organization, he is now stripped of membership: his association contract has been officially terminated, all debts owed to him are cancelled, all properties granted to him by the squad are hereby confiscated and a council will be convened to decide on whether he should become the target of appropriate retribution for this egregious breach of our code of conduct."

There was a muffled whirring from the small pile of equipment lying in the corner. Soos went to investigate, but Grey already knew what it was: he'd heard that sound far too many times to fail to recognize what it might be, but up until now, the recipient had always been someone else – a failure, an unreliable agent, or even a traitor. More than once, he'd been entrusted with the duty of hunting down and punishing those unworthy agents when they'd tried to flee the judgement of the Retribution Squad… but now he was one of them. His electronic ID badge had just been updated with an official cancellation notice and would no longer allow him entry into the halls of Retribution Squad HQ.

From here on, regardless of whether or not his superiors called in a hit on him, he was officially an exile.

He'd failed.

He'd lost everything – and as his heart sank, he knew he'd lost what little remained of his will to fight as well. There would be nobody avenging his death now: there was nothing he could do to threaten his captors with, nothing he could do to escape whatever horrors they had in store for him.

How could this have happened?

"What are you going to do now?" he whispered. "What do you want from me?"

Mabel gave him a smile that looked as though it should have been equipped with fangs and a dorsal fin.

"I want you to leave and never come back," she said icily. "We know how to work this teleporting doohickie of yours by now, so we can send you anywhere in the multiverse; as soon we untie you, you're going to walk through the portal we make for you. You're going to leave empty-handed, and you're not going to say or do anything until you're out of this universe for good. Try anything cute and we'll duct tape you to the water tower until the Retribution Squad come to pick you up. Got it?"

"Absolutely," said Grey quickly. "Uh, what do I do next?"

"Easy: you're going to stay wherever we send you, and you're going to spend the rest of your life there with the Last Queen stuck inside you, making you transform and making you just as miserable as you made me. You won't hurt anyone, you won't threaten anyone, and you definitely won't be working as a hitman anymore because nobody's going to take you seriously once they've seen you transforming into me – or if you end up stuck between forms. And I know you like to take yourself seriously, so you're probably not even going to show your face in public in case you change, and if you do, you're going to be laughed at on street corners until the day you die. And that, Grey, is going to be your life from now on: hiding in shadows or being the butt of everyone's jokes."

"You'd do that to me? You'd do something so horrible as-"

"No, Grey," Mabel hissed. The smile was gone from her face now. "This isn't me being horrible: you don't know what me being horrible is like; Bill knew all about it, and so did the Forger Wasps, but you don't know what I'm like when I'm at my worst. I can be meaner and stupider and more selfish than you can even dream of, and I'm still making up for all the people I hurt the last time I was like that. This is me being nice, Grey. I've given you a new life, I'm making sure your old pals from the Squad don't find you, and we're making sure you can't hurt anyone else. This is me being shockingly nice, Grey, especially after what you tried to do to my friends and family."

She paused, clearly waiting for the unspoken threat to sink in.

"So now it's time: do you want to leave, or do you want to stick around and see just how nice the Retribution Squad can get when they find you?"

The Grey Professional – a man who, over a century past, had bricked up his best friend in a cellar over a long-forgotten slight – now sighed, bowed his head in shame, and made his choice.

A/N: Up next - THE EPILOGUE. Feel free to furnish me with your guesses as to what our final chapter might hold.

Meanwhile, time for one last code:

"DSZG WL BLF NVZM NB XIVWRG XZIW DZH WVXORMVW?!"