"That's great, Candy, stack up those cans of beans over there," directed Stan, pointing towards a pile of non-perishable goods. "We'll need those in case we lose power." Candy nodded, immediately jumping to the task.
Stan took a moment to watch the activity around him, satisfied with his handiwork. While his memories of Weirdmageddon were still a bit hazy given his experience with the memory gun, he had vivid recollections of his time defending the shack with a band of misfits seeking shelter. What had started out as a bunch of freeloaders in his house had become a chance for him to provide leadership to a group in dire need of it, at least for a little while. He had been chasing that feeling ever since and was happy to step in once again.
All around the lobby, teams of lodge guests were preparing for the worst - either arranging mattresses and linens from guest rooms as a communal sleeping area, preparing a supply of food, or putting together makeshift flamethrowers using common household items. Ford may figure out a more targeted way to take out the trees, but Stan reasoned that a flamethrower would win against a tree any day of the week. Besides, he hadn't gotten to use one in years, and this time, it would actually be for a good cause.
"Mr. Pines?" Pacifica called, approaching with a clipboard in hand. Of all the lodge guests that Stan had enlisted in his disaster prep, Pacifica had been one of the most eager to help. It remained unspoken, but the reason was all too obvious to Stan - her guilty conscience. Given his thirty-year history with his own guilty conscience, he allowed her to do what she could to abate those feelings while not saying a word about them. There'd be time for that later if she felt like opening up, he reasoned. And, more practically, he hoped she'd take that conversation to someone else anyway.
"Blondie, it's just Stan, alright?"
"Stan then," she corrected herself, before holding up the clipboard to show a long printed list of names. "I've made a full list of all our documented guests, and I've crossed off anyone we know is accounted for."
"Tell me some good news," Stan groaned, fully expecting to not receive any. He could already see the number of empty boxes greatly outnumbered the checkmarks on her page.
"About 18% of the guests are in the lobby or working somewhere inside. I haven't done a door-to-door survey of all the rooms yet, but it's a disturbingly low number." Pacifica paused, taking in the gravity of what she was saying. "Hopefully there's more inside because if not I..."
"Hey, hold it together," Stan reassured her, putting a hand on her shoulder. "My brother and nephew are on it. Everything will be fine, we just got to be ready to do our part when it's time." He expected Pacifica to turn and start working on something else, but she continued to stand nervously in front of him.
"I'm just having a tough time dealing with my role in this," Pacifica sniffed, blinking repeatedly. She looked up at Stan from the clipboard, her eyes welling up with tears.
His feelings for his own niece and nephew were a notable exception, but for the most part, nobody would mistake Stanley Pines as a man who cared about kids. But what he found striking at that moment was how connected he felt with Pacifica's pain. The look he was receiving was the same one he had inadvertently cast in the direction of father figures for decades, a look that was desperately seeking something that was being withheld. 'Nobody else is going to have this conversation with her,' he slowly realized. 'At least not someone with your experience.'
Stan looked around to make sure Preston wasn't nearby, hoping to avoid another one of the elder Northwest's dramatic outbursts, before kneeling down to Pacifica's level.
"Look, you can't choose your parents, kid."
Pacifica looked down at her shoes, not wanting to make eye contact as she finally lost the battle to hold back her tears.
"No, hey. Seriously. Everything that's happened to your family is your dad's fault. You've got the Northwest name, and it's got baggage at this point. Okay, so what? That's only a problem if you want to try and use it to do the sorts of gross jerk things he used it for. But I have it on good authority that you have other plans."
Pacifica wiped her eyes, looking back up to see a reassuring smile from Stan. "There's just so much I can't fix about my family."
"Yeah, I couldn't fix how my old man saw me as a failure either. But I worked hard to make sure my brother didn't feel the same way. Call it something schmaltzy like self-improvement if you want, I just try to be less of a jerk than I was all alone. And you're doing that right now. Keep leaning into it, it's working."
Pacifica beamed, wrapping her arms around Stan in a hug. Stan immediately recoiled but wasn't fast enough to avoid her embrace.
"Hey, hey, come on," Stan protested, "You've got a job to do." Pacifica let go, allowing Stan to stand back up. At that moment, he noticed Pacifica wasn't looking at him in the same way she had in months past, with her upper-class disdain and disgust. Rather, the look on her face looked more like the way Mabel looked at him. Reputation as a grump be damned, he somehow accidentally got another kid looking at him as a role model.
"Thanks, Stan," she added before taking off toward the rooms. Stan chuckled to himself and shook his head. Suddenly, he felt a buzz from within his jacket, followed by the sound of his own voice. "I'm Stan and I was wrong, I'm singing the Stan wrong song." Many people had asked him why he would choose this to be his ringtone, since the song was a punishment that Mabel had forced him to sing on camera. His answer was simple: Mabel picked it and refused to tell him how to change it back.
Stan pulled out his phone, flipped open the lid, and held it up to his face. "Stan here."
"Oh, hey Mr. Pines! It's me, Soos," came the jovial voice from the receiver.
"Soos, really not a great time," replied Stan.
"Just need a moment to ask a quick question, then I'm out of your hair."
Stan groaned, clutching his temple. "Alright, what is it?"
"Do you think Dipper and Mabel want more of a tight-knit, warm family-style holiday get-together? Or would they rather have a big town party at the Mystery Shack? Melody and I were talking, and we're not really sure what they-"
"I'm hanging up, Soos," Stan growled impatiently. Soos laughed.
"Okay Mr. Pines, have a nice-"
Stan closed his phone and stashed it away again. He didn't have long to recover, as he suddenly spotted another pressing issue he needed to deal with. "Wendy!" he called out across the lobby, "Don't test the flamethrowers indoors!"
Ford stared intently into his microscope, carefully adjusting a glass slide with the knobs on the side of the instrument. Elsewhere in the room, Dipper paced while nervously chewing on a pen, while Mabel had wrapped herself up in blankets and was entertaining herself with their shared phone.
Finally, Ford let out an "Ah-ha!", bringing Dipper immediately to attention.
"What? Did you figure out what it is?"
Ford gestured for Dipper to approach, "See for yourself." Ford stood up from his chair and offered it to Dipper, who immediately filled it and looked into the microscope. "Tell me what you see."
"Ummm," Dipper struggled to understand what he was looking at. Before the break, he had spent a few lab days in biology looking at cheek cell samples, but this was nothing like anything he had ever seen through a microscope. If anything, while the structure didn't look organic at all, the nodes and interconnected lines looked somewhat familiar. "I don't know, Grunkle Ford. It looks more like a computer chip than a cell to me."
"Yes, it does," Ford agreed, clapping Dipper on the back. "And what sort of theories can you draw from that resemblance?"
"Well," Dipper began, turning around from the microscope to face Ford, "I guess maybe the trees themselves aren't attacking, they're some kind of… organic machines that are being controlled by someone or something else." Ford grinned.
"My thoughts exactly. I wonder… do you mind, Dipper?"
Ford made a gesture towards the microscope. Dipper backed his chair up slightly, allowing Ford to lean forward and look at the sample again. "I've seen this pattern before but I'm drawing a blank now. If we can find an analog for this organic circuitry, we might be able to guess what the purpose of these trees is."
Ford stood up straight again, looking around. One of his laptops, largely going unused in the larger laboratory setup, was perched at the edge of the table. He picked up the computer, pulled a multitool from his jacket, and swiftly removed the casing to reveal its microchip innards and ribbons of wire. "No," he muttered to himself, pointing to different components. "No, no… hello!" Ford pulled one of the circuit board components from the computer and held it close against his face. He laughed and held the component out for Dipper to inspect.
"It's a sound card," Dipper noted, reading the inspection label printed on the circuit board. "That doesn't make any sense."
"It makes perfect sense!" interjected Mabel from across the room. Dipper and Ford turned in surprise. Mabel scoffed. "Every time the trees have attacked, we've heard weird groaning noises or screaming. They're big mobile speakers."
"That's… plausible," admitted Ford. "But who or what would benefit from attacking a ski lodge with a stereo system?"
"Well given this has happened here before, maybe whoever is responsible really likes this forest and wants to keep people out of it?" explained Dipper. "If you were constantly attacking people with monster trees, somebody would figure it out eventually, but if you have a forest full of speakers, you can project spooky noises and scare off ninety percent of the people without drawing attention to yourself."
Dipper's mind reeled at this theory. Not only did it make a lot of logistical sense, but it was a connection only his sister could have made. While his anxieties and insecurities around working with Ford were still ever present, when he and Mabel worked together on solving problems, Dipper was filled with pride and excitement. It was, after all, the family business.
"But that would mean there'd have to be someplace they're controlling these tree-speakers from." Dipper turned back to the microscope, then up to the various monitors surrounding him, watching the waves of ultrasonic activity ebb and flow. "Can we map where these waves are coming from?"
Ford chuckled. "Yes, Dipper my boy, we can." Ford leaned forward and entered several commands on his keyboard. Suddenly, the two-dimensional wave graphs morphed into histograms, displaying the data over multiple aerial and topological maps of the ski resort. "Can't believe I didn't think of that," Ford muttered to himself. Once the data was projected topologically, it was immediately clear that the strongest signals were coming from underground.
"An underground bunker sure seems to back up the theory that these organic machines are being controlled from somewhere," Dipper concluded.
"Yes, but I'm a bit concerned with how we're going to get there," said Ford, pointing to a hot spot on the map. "That seems to either be a broadcasting location for these waves, or some kind of service tunnel into the bunker. Either way, it's deep in the middle of a hostile artificial forest."
"What if we could blow out the speakers?" asked Mabel, wandering over to the lab setup. "Grunkle Ford, if they're getting a signal from somewhere, maybe we could send a signal of our own, perfectly calibrated to take out their circuitry!"
Ford stroked his chin, staring at the signal on the monitors. "The lumber folk of Gravity Falls said this forest has been like this for decades. If organic circuitry works anything like regular circuits, they'll have corroded and aged over time. It won't work on all of them, and it would run a major risk of sending the remaining trees into a crazed frenzy."
"I'm Stan and I was wrong, I'm singing the Stan wrong song…"
Ford's cell phone rang. Unlike on his brother's phone, the Stan Wrong Song was set as his ringtone by choice. He looked at the caller ID on the screen - coincidentally, it was Stan.
"Stan, I've got you on speaker with Dipper and Mabel," greeted Ford. "We think we know what the trees are and how to get past them."
"Good," replied Stan, "We're getting a little antsy down here. Hey!" Stan began to yell at someone in the lobby. "Stay put, Robbie! Nobody cares that your eyeliner is running from crying too much. Ugh," Stan's voice grew louder as he returned to the call. "What do you need from me?"
"We think we can disable most of the older trees," explained Dipper, "but it might send the newer ones into a frenzy. That could put people in the lodge in danger."
"I've got five improvised flamethrowers down here and a group of teenagers chomping at the bit to use them," Stan replied confidently. "Do what you need to do, we'll take care of the rest."
A look of horror crossed Ford's face, but it faded the harder he thought through Stan's plan. "Stan, normally I would be concerned about your pyromania, but potentially burning down the lodge is a risk we might have to take for the safety of the guests. Can I at least count on you to make sure nobody will be in the lodging wings when you start burning things?"
"I've got someone on it right now, and if the building goes up, we're ready to move everyone out of the lobby with defensive weapons. It's not perfect, but hey, I'm working with what I've got here."
"Thanks, Stan. Keep up the good work," said Ford, hanging up the phone. Mabel smiled, knowing that the little affirmation Ford added as an afterthought would mean a lot to her Grunkle Stan. "Kids, it's going to take me a few minutes to jerry-rig a mobile signal jammer and to lock onto the frequency. See if there's anything you can do to help in the lobby, and I'll come to find you when it's time to go."
"On it, Grunkle Ford!" declared Mabel, motioning for her brother to follow. Dipper jumped to his feet from the desk chair but stopped short of following his sister.
"Are we possibly not coming back here?" Dipper asked cautiously. Ford sighed.
"Dipper, Stanley is armed with a flamethrower. What do you think?"
"Excellent point. In that case..." Dipper opened the closet door to find his luggage, brought up hours earlier by the front desk staff. Among their larger bags, Dipper found a backpack he had used to carry essential toiletries and the postcards his friends had sent him from Gravity Falls. After ensuring the sentimental cargo was secure, Dipper stuffed the robes Pacifica had gifted him and Mabel inside the bag, zipped it closed after a bit of a struggle, and swung it around onto his back.
"Comfort is the grandest of all luxuries, Dipper," Ford mused with a grin. Dipper grinned back before darting out the door. Mabel, waiting outside the door, started to run alongside Dipper as he exited, the pair taking off in the direction of the lodge lobby.
"Nice thinking with the speaker theory, Mabel," huffed Dipper as they ran through the hotel corridor.
"I wire speakers and lights into my sweaters all the time, Dip Dop, I have a basic understanding of electronics," Mabel laughed, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Dipper couldn't help but laugh himself. While loud and silly, his sister was disarmingly smart and crafty, and anyone who underestimated her did so at their own peril.
On the third floor of the lodge, wandering the empty hallways on her own, Pacifica had settled into a routine. Reach a door, knock, open with her key card, search the room. If nobody was inside, she made a checkmark on the door with a red whiteboard marker and moved onto the next room. On the rare occasion that someone was inside, she instructed them to make their way down to the lobby before marking the door and moving on.
She had already gone through the entire west wing of the lodge, and the third floor was the final part of the east wing to clear. While she was happy to round up the remaining guests in the lodge, it forced her to directly confront the knowledge that most of the guests were unaccounted for. And wandering in the shell of her family's resort, seeing the amenities and details her father had stressed over empty and abandoned, she couldn't help but feel immensely guilty.
At the end of the corridor, she reached the keyed entry to the concierge lounge. 'Last stop,' she thought to herself, entering the keycard and pulling on the door handle. It refused to open. She tried a second time, this time watching the key card reader. It glowed red when she entered her card. 'That's weird,' she thought to herself, peering into the lounge through the window.
The cozy lounge space was, like every other part of the lodge she visited, empty. From her vantage point, she could see drinks and snacks on the tables, abandoned half-empty in a hurry as the trees encroached on the property. As if to underline that theory, the windows that once gave a panoramic view of the ski slopes were dark with the pulsing brush. Pacifica suspected that even if it were the middle of the day, no light would make it through. Watching the trees as they unnaturally shifted and grasped sent a cold chill down her spine.
Pacifica pounded on the door. "Hello? Anyone in there?"
Inside, a shadow shifted in response to the call. Moments later, Preston Northwest peered over from the other side of the coffee bar.
"Pacifica?" Preston asked, his voice muffled but his face registering to Pacifica as confused even from a distance.
"Dad?" Pacifica shouted back, frustrated. "You're supposed to be down in the lobby with the others!"
"I couldn't bear to take orders from that dumb oaf," spat Preston, brushing the shoulders of his coat as he stepped out into the clearing. He approached the door but stopped short of opening it.
"Stan isn't dumb," shot back Pacifica, "he's doing a great job taking care of everyone right now."
"Caring about everyone is dumb, Pacifica," said Preston, narrowing his eyes. "I thought we taught you better."
Pacifica tried to retort but couldn't decide where to start, resulting in multiple false starts.
"That… What are you... " Pacifica groaned in frustration before exclaiming, "Why are you like this?!"
Preston chuckled, seemingly amused by his daughter's anger and frustration. "Because there's no benefit to being anything else." The callousness of his reaction only fueled Pacifica's rage.
"How do you find the nerve to be this smug when this," Pacifica shouted, gesturing forcefully to the windows blocked by the trees behind Preston, "is something you knowingly walked us all into? Don't you care?" Preston turned half-heartedly to look at the window, unamused. Pacifica looked down at the checklist in her hands, the list of the invited guests of the Northwest who were missing from the resort. She held it up to the window, pointing aggressively at the pages. "This is blood on our hands, dad."
"Pacifica, there's a very simple rule that our family has followed, and it's served us well," Preston explained, approaching Pacifica in order to loom over her. "If you do harm to the common rabble, nothing bad happens to you. Maybe you pay a fine, maybe you have to hire a PR firm to do some damage control, but there are no real consequences. Truly, the only time you can fail as a person of means is if you harm someone else of means. Then, and only then, would you see dire consequences for your actions. Steal from a stockbroker and you'll never see the sun again. Steal from an entire town of rubes and rednecks, and they'll worship the ground you walk on."
"The people of Gravity Falls are better than you give them credit for," Pacifica replied sternly. Preston laughed.
"Oh really? Spend much time with them, do you?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do," she spat, her heart pounding in her ears in fear of what she was about to admit, "I've been working at the diner for months. The people you're so quick to write off have lives. They have dreams. They care about one another. That's more than I can say about you."
Pacifica clenched her fists, unable to process how calmly her father was discounting the lives of everyone he invited to his lodge. Preston's brow furrowed, but he remained eerily calm.
"The blood on our hands, as you put it, is the family business. I thought we cleared that up at the old manor."
"And I thought maybe some of those experiences would have made an impression on you," said Pacifica. She looked up to her father's face, seeking even the slightest bit of remorse or emotion, but found an uncaring smirk and a bored look in his eyes. That gulf of expectation was the final straw for her resolve, and she felt the tears she had forced back flowing down her cheeks.
"You apparently have an unfounded reserve of optimism," Preston sneered.
"So what you're telling me," Pacifica asked slowly, "is that once this is all over, you're just going to keep putting people in harm's way again and again?"
"But of course. I have to secure our legacy somehow, and once the Pines brats deal with our infestation, we'll be back in business in no time. I'm bored of this conversation, Pacifica. If you'd like, you can go find your mother and I'll let you both inside. We can hide in the pantry and wait until the coast is clear. But when this is all over daughter, we're going to have to deal with your insubordination. It's an insult to the family name that you're working in a diner to begin with, but the idea that you're sympathizing with the people of this town is egregious. I'll be personally making sure you aren't influenced by the common rabble in the future and we'll be working on correcting your outlook back to the Northwest way of thinking."
Preston watched Pacifica expectantly. As demanding and hurtful as he was being, Pacifica was shocked to see that Preston's face had softened from his arrogant sneer, and he seemed to be looking to her with... hope? Hope that she would abandon her new values in order to please him? Pacifica scoffed in disbelief.
"Fine, dad. Stay up here for all I care. I'm going to keep helping and working to fix everything you've ruined, as per usual. When this is over, if you use me as an excuse to hurt my friends again, I promise it'll be the last time I ever speak to you."
Pacifica turned and angrily stormed off. Refusing to look back even once, she didn't see the pained expression on her father's face as she returned to the lobby.