Episode 22/Return to Amphibia: Inside the Mystery Shack, Pacifica Northwest is having a bit of a good natured laugh at how amazing and luxurious Anne Boonchuy finds the human convinces of the place to be after returning from the wilds of Amphibia, even as rundown and resource strained as they seem to Pacifica. The Pines family has debriefed her upon her return through the portal with Dipper, and Soos has rigged up a video call so Anne can finally let her family know she is safe, providing a modified version of her story that Dipper coached the girl on: she and her friends were separated in a road accident, then were discovered and offered shelter by the Pines.
Much emphasis is given here to the fact that Anne's parents were worried hopelessly sick about her, afraid she'd been murdered or something else terrible and while Anne knew they'd be concerned for her it really sets in here how terrifying this incident would be from her perspective... and how disheartening it must be for the parents of her two friends, who are still missing. This results in Anne impulsively declaring she and the Pines will find them, and the three girls will return home together!
Her parents obviously think this is concerning, but since they're under the impression she was found by the authorities they assume this means staying in said custody a bit longer to answer questions, and so have most of their worries alleviated and are sympathetic to the two other families to approve of this. This deception is presented as one of the Coalition's increasingly morally questionable decisions, though their justification for it solidly remains that they don't want to make even more people targets for Bill Cipher.
Once she's had a chance to relax for a minute and really take on how easy traveling to and from Earth is though, Anne is absolutely willing to go back to Amphibia and helps the Coalition to protect it. I appreciate the recent review that suggested she'd react more favorably to the town and can honestly agree with it. I suppose if these plans were ever adapted to a full length story this inaccurate characterization moment could be justified by Anne intending from the get go to simply hop to earth, let her parents know she's alive, then go back immediately or if the escalation of danger/moral ambiguity is what frightened her, since it's one thing to deal with a singular alternative world full of monsters and cannibals and another to find out there are hundreds of horrible death realms filling the multiverse and she's been dropped smack dab into a war between a bunch of them. Whatever fix would work best, I acknowledge this was a mis-characterization.
Back through the portal, the old robot factory has been turned into a full blown but still tentative Coalition base, with McGucket getting things up and running, Mewman knights providing security and River providing wilderness recon.
One of the systems McGucket is assembling here is a boxy looking radio array for Coalition forces to coordinate across Amphibia with, but what little of it he currently has set up is broadcasting some confound jamming that he can let make sense. Pacifica is surprised that anyone in this dimension is transmitting something McGucket's equipment can pick up, but Anne recognizes it through the static as soon as Fiddleford gives them a listen: Distorted as it is, she still recognizes the sound as the ringtone to Sasha Waybright's cellphone, prompting the factory base to set to work triangulating her location.
The question of how she's managed to broadcast this instantly recognizable signal is answered (for the audience at least) by a hard scene cut to Sasha and Captain Grimothy crouching near a table with a futuristic but simple to operate Gem technology communicator atop in, in the middle of a Legionary field camp that the two ambushed and wiped out together. Sasha has simply placed her cell phone down next to the active communication device and is letting the tone ring.
As ruthless as there two might be in the show canon, they are both totally opposed to Bill's forces here after first encountering them before Newtopia was even sacked, with Grimes resenting the Legion for recruiting away almost all of his soldiers while Sasha learned quickly enough they have standing orders to exterminate all humans in this dimension, and has hatched her plan here to try and bring all her friends back together in the face of this massive threat.
Buff Frog is meanwhile caught up with in Wartwood by Pacifica and Anne who arrive in one of the rough terrain jeeps acquired from the CSG equipment pool. After escorting the Plantars back to town, the long time lieutenant of the monster army found himself hopelessly charmed by the town of frogs even as he was trying to focus on scouting the area. Being an amphibious humanoid with the Plantars vouching for him and possessing formidable combat and tracking skills in a time where bandits are pillaging the countryside makes him instantly popular and accepted by Wartwood, but Pacifica, as another terrible beast with a ferocious golden mane, is greeted more coldly.
Pacifica intends to drop Anne off in town and pick up Buff Frog to find the source of the signal, since it's almost certain Bill's forces are homing in on it also and they promised Anne was safe, so she reluctantly agrees to wait with the Plantars while Buff Frog and Pacifica retrieve Sasha. She still ends up running after them when it turns out Sprig had climbed into the trunk of the departing jeep, intrigued by the action all these otherworldly visitors kept talking about and the roaring metal beast they control from the inside.
The plan was to rush in on wheels, collect Sasha and get back to town before Bill's forces followed the signal, which gets complicated because there's no Sasha Waybright at the oddly positioned and recently pitched camp ground with her phone next to a communicator. Just Bill and a gaggle of his amphibious followers.
A stand off occurs. Bill himself has his shrink wand weapon, two toads with energy rifles and a dozen mixed followers with knives and axes. Having Pacifica and Buff Frog surrounded, Bill starts chattering about what a useful hostage Dipper's girlfriend will make and demanding information about the Calamity Box, as he seems to assume Pacifica knows more about it than she actually does.
The dire odds staring the two down as they're surrounded by killers get broken by a chain reaction of well timed interventions: The first is Sprig imitating the attack call of a dangerous predator from the trunk of the jeep, causing the Bill's forces to flinch and then panic completely when one of the energy rifle toads is shot with a laser from out of nowhere, causing the whole bunch of them to panic and break formation, turning a clear cut gunpoint holding into a confusing melee when the hidden shooter fires again to take out the other toad.
Buff Frog, Sprigs, Pacifica and their mysterious laser cover survive the bandits rushing at them partially because Bill gets impatient and starts carelessly shooting his shrink ray into the melee, but before he can line up a shot on one of the protagonists River Butterfly bursts from the brush and smashes Bill on the side of the head with a log that's bigger than he is, knocking Bill away from the fight and causing him to retreat, with a virulent rash beginning to take root where the ivy covered log smacked him.
A few moments after things calm down, Anne catches up with River all huffing and puffing, as she had caught him scouting the outskirts of Wartwood when she ran after Sprigs and got his aid. On the opposite side of the ditch this camp was set up in emerge Sasha and Captain Grimes, the former carrying a stolen Gem energy rifle that they've added a natural leather shoulder strap to.
Sasha manipulated this whole encounter in order to gauge the strength of this human hunting legion (Bill's sadistic threats towards Pacifica legitimately unnerve/disgust her), investigate rumors of organized resistance to the unexpectedly high tech raider faction, and to potentially draw her friends back together. She's sincerely happy to see Anne again, despite all the previous unpleasantness, but Anne is freaked out by this and condemn Sasha for playing games with people's lives like this, and for making Wartwood a target for reprisal. Sprigs and Grimes naturally take opposite sides of this argument but Pacifica mediates things long enough for them to collect the alien weapons and fall back to Wartwood to see us out.
Final scene is Anne sitting in on Grimes and Sasha getting debriefed on earth. They settle on working together to find Marcy but finding their own personalities/friendship more irreconcilable than ever: Sasha integrates fairly quickly into the Pines-Butterfly coalition and is eager to help them plan counter attacks against Bill's forces, while Anne looks on nervously at the crates of firearms and explosives that are being are being marked up for delivery to Amphibia. The dimension was definitely a pretty violent place, but this is distinctly an escalation.
With the discovery of Bill employed alien weapons matching the technology of the dimensional corridor, the world of Amphibia becomes an active front for the Coalition: Whatever dimension a Bill fragment is controlling the "Crystal Aliens" as the protagonists call them from is likely his greatest seat of power so long as Mewni is sealed, but Belos cannot scry upon it and broad spectrum multiverse scanning to try and find it would take a potentially infinite amount of time and would light up their position. Between that, the pressing need to recover the Calamity Box and Bill's own atrocities against the natives, the Coalition approves of a search and destroy strategy based out of the factory McGucket reactivated and added a portal transmission beacon to for more reliable travel to and from, an early version of the double sided technology that could one day link dimensions together as easily as a tunnel through a mountain.
Anne continues to cooperate for the sake of finding Marcy and becomes an invaluable advisor on the dimension and its people, but remains conflicted feeling regarding Sasha and Grimes; the latter two actually strike up an unexpected friendship/professional dynamic with Dipper. Given their shared levels of ruthlessness, the three regularly put their fields of expertise together (science for Dipper, people for Sasha and strategy for Grimes) to brainstorm approaches for Coalition objectives or exceptional threats.
Buff Frog becomes the Coalition's representative to Amphibia based out of Wartwood, recruiting local assistance against Bill, building communication between the inhabitants and humans, and helping the young and frail take refuge on earth for the length of the conflict, adding frogs and toads to the diverse inhabitants of Gravity Falls and the Coalition at large. He still believes in the necessity of fighting Bill but struggles with doubts he is becoming too much like the Mewmans...
Episode 23/Carved in Stone: Opening scene is down in the laboratory, where Ford and Dipper are examining the containment unit that had originally come from the crashed spaceship and was hidden in the graveyard. Ford establishes that they could crack it open with the equipment they currently have, but until they have some sort of better idea about what's inside of it the risk is too great, hence all the scans and tests they're performing.
Eclipsa is nearby working on her own project but offering commentary and suggestions to the Pines' work, while she tends to a small bed of plants being cultivated underground through the use of grow lamps plugged into the dimensional portal. This is an experiment is creating portable "magic pills" that would enable spell casting in low to zero magic environments by juicing and condensing plant material grown under arcane radiation. The plants are definitely absorbing the magic, but cultivation might prove a problem based on how rapidly and unpredictability it makes them mutate (save the control group) as Eclipsa is left to manage when the Pines shelve the box studying to answer a transmission from the Boiling Isles.
The contents of the message aren't revealed right away, but they do prompt the cast to form two teams to split up and deal with the events of this episode and the next one down simultaneously, as the tail end of the Amphibia stuff from the previous chapter is still running its course. For the diplomatic visit Moon, Star, Marco and Mabel are assembled along with a cluster of Mewman knight bodyguards (including Higgs), and take the scissors to the Boiling Isles following some exposition from an unusually winded seeming Hekapoo about the perception of that dimension:
Those in the know about travel between world view the Boiling Isles as a dangerous, savage frontier that's teaming with magic but from which very few return. The Lucitors always had a mild interest in it for reasons Mewni didn't understand, and Emperor Belos is known to the MHC but is essentially considered to be the equivalent of a petty third-world dictator relative to the Kingdom of Mewni, and the amount of development Hexside alone sports comes as a surprise.
Speaking of, when they arrive to the other dimension Lilith is quick to escort them to the Emperor while Mabel splits off to explore the Hexside grounds, combining her canon reference to Harry Potter with a bunch of the deconstructionist elements towards that body of work The Owl House does.
She meets Amity Blight, naturally enough, and as a development of her steadily increasing active empathy and consideration for other people Mabel is actually more effective at her matchmaking senses (which were previously a mechanism to stoke her own ego rather than any sincere insights into matters of the heart) and as a result very easily moves through the student body and picks up a lot of emotional insights into the witches they are all dealing with (including Lilith herself second hand from Amity) as well as getting a feel for the Imperial Coven society.
Meanwhile, the monarchs are negotiating and some abrasions are starting to show, though the risk of showing division in front of the enigmatic emperor is motive enough to keep a lid on things. Moon is still the most experienced actual diplomat but is technically only here as an advisor, since Star is the only one that can actually negotiate on behalf of the majority of the Coalition. In addition, she gave the wand off to Eclipsa for her mission, which Moon grudgingly tolerates again with the logic that at least the witches here won't be able to steal it from them during the diplomatic visit.
Among other worldbuilding details, this chapter would explain the Mewni Traditionalist viewpoint on the Imperial Coven: Despite the superficial similarity between witches and mewmans, Moon and most of her guards see the population here as a mangy cesspool of freely mixing monster bloodlines and peasants getting hopped up on magic, and the knights assume with contempt that the witch race originated as humans rather than mewmans when the idea of the Boiling Isles being inhabited by cross-dimensional transplants that evolved to adapt to the extremely high levels of arcane radiation here come up.
On the other hand, Moon is on point when she deduces that the Imperial Coven and the Hexside institution are a conquering, totalitarian society in the making but since she opens her objections with "he's arming peasants with magic!" to Star, her daughter ignores her objections to their alliance with Belos; Star isn't oblivious to his shady nature but doesn't view him or the Imperial Coven as any more inherently evil that the Kingdom of Mewni at this stage of her disillusionment with royal stature, and the negotiations continue.
In addition to discussing the possibility of the Pines-Butterfly coalition importing magic resistant plant species to the Boiling Isles (to be grown as backup crops, due to how horribly magic attuned plant crops can get wiped out or ruined by magic blights and disasters. An earth adapted species by comparison would be a slower growing but more stable source of backup food in the event of a magic famine) Belos has fresh information on the Mewni dimension, and a request: There is a stone ruin not too far from Hexside but well hidden in the jungles. There have been odd energy surges coming from the area that potentially match the Lucitors, so Star and Marco agree to check the place out and shut down a potential incursion.
During the section of the meeting where crop exchanges and trade deals are being discussed, Lilith has one of her usually repressed emotionally immature moments where she's bored to tears by all the talk about plants and politics and actually misses Ford a bit, having found the old scientist infuriating but stimulating to discuss the arcane with. Still, the Bill Cipher fragment execution is still on schedule (work on the rune array is slow going since it explicitly requires mixing magic types together), so he'll probably show up for that. As for Belos, his interest in security crops is genuine (a useful carrot to dangle ahead of the Coven's stick) but is still playing his own game: he sees the Coalition as a useful backup source of dimensional travel if acquiring the series doorway doesn't work out.
Back at Hexside, Mabel has given some genuinely sound advice to Amity about trying to approach Luz, though unfortunately her mention of special guests demanding the attention of her mentor tips Luz off that the Emperor's mysterious guests are on the move, so she gets hold of King and goes to follow them out of intrigue after her encounter with Dipper and Ford. Poor Amity is left hanging by this turn of events, so Mabel takes her somewhere to drink it off.
During this lighthearted, shipping-heavy B-plot something that would try and be demonstrated subtlety is that Mabel's still sincere enthusiasm to help people and move relationships around has molded into a very effective information gathering technique, where overt nosiness and asking prying questions about interpersonal relationships/histories get dismissed as merely obnoxious at worst and willingly indulged at best instead of generating outright suspicion. In the same vein that her brother has a knack for picking up on secrets and unraveling buried conspiracies, Mabel very effectively cops to hidden, complex or secretive relationships and/or histories between the prominent people of new settings she reaches. She's already picked up on the major romantic attractions of the people she's met, as well as the social implications of things like the coven stratifications and the Titan imperial cult.
Given Lilith's status as the Coven's representative in their dealings Mabel is interested in her right away, and early on finds some old stuff from when her and Eda were at Hexside, buried in some dusty side room Mabel certainly wasn't supposed to have access to. Amity proves very easy to work for information about her mentor through the lens of romantic support. She is sincerely sympathetic to the various troubled student's she plying for information this way but is determined to have actually useful truth, or "seuth" as a Mabel-ism, for her family, and this new motivation for her style of con artistry causes it to grow more powerful.
The ruins are reached and secured easily enough by Star, the knights and Marco while Moon remains in the capital, and with the modified gieger-counters they brought the group determines the circular, curving stone halls are actually completely magically dead in comparison to the surrounding jungle... curious. The hallways are covered in carvings of runes that Marco and Luz start taking pictures of, while Star is searching high and low for a Lucitor incursion and isn't finding it. There is, however, an enormous teleportation rune spread over a grand floor at the heart of the complex. In addition, evidence here suggests the vanished inhabitants of the mysterious stone colony were magic users and proto-Underworld demons at that!
The worldbuilding here is that this was a grand ritual site constructed by an offshoot faction of Boiling Isles natives in the distant past, who probed the higher dimensions but found themselves teleported away en mass after an arcane overlord on the main portal room flooded their rune powered city. They ended up in what would become the Underworld, and in a mirror of Glossaryck giving the first mewmans the wand, Bill Cipher provided these early demons with the new types of magic they would need to thrive in the inhospitable underworld.
Luz infiltrates her way into the ruins, ambushing the patrolling knights with her runes and taking interest in the exponentially more complicated ones carved into the walls before meeting Star at the center of the structure. The two have their initial protagonist vs protagonist magic battle, though this one is limited on both sides: Luz is still getting the hang of her more complicated magic tricks, while Star is casting wandless. Both are also weakened by the fact they're in a dead magic zone and the fight ends inconclusively, as crossover dream matches are won't to do.
The reason this area is so magic dead actually bursts up through the floor to properly end the fight: a gigantic, hibernating Mother Basilisk. Possibly related to but vaguely less mobile than the one that pretended to be a school inspector, it's the reason a once burning with magic ancient settlement is now just crumbling piles of rune covered stone: it moved in when the inhabitants warped away, gorged itself on the magic equivalent of a power plant and has hibernated ever since, until a fresh battle of delicious energy woke it up. With Luz's advice, the mewmans fighting together and Higgs of all people being willing to jump in and out of the Basilisk's throat to feed it a grenade belt, they manage to kill it.
Star and Luz are left both intrigued and cautious towards one another: Star seems far too cheerful and creative to be aligned with the Imperial Coven and her magic defies all conventions, but her claims of there being a threat worse than the Emperor out in other dimensions is met with skepticism. In return, Luz is recognized as one of the missing people from earth the Coalition had investigated, but out of gratitude for her helping save Marco (who got his bond provided body magic drained in the fight, a scary reminder of Meteora stealing his soul) and relating to someone wanting to leave their drab home life behind for somewhere wondrous, leaves without further conflict. They have unquestionably become rival characters after this meeting and another battle is implied to be inevitable.
Back at Hexside, Moon and Mabel are waiting for the expedition to return with some diplomatic success to show for it: The Emperor has agreed to the employment of "magic condensers" by the Coalition in his realm to let ambient magic energy be collected and then transported to earth in exchange for earth crops being transplanted, while Mabel has made a bunch of new friends and talked up how cool Mewni and Earth are!
Lilith sees them off, handing off fresh scrying reports and thanking the group for their assistance, explaining that, yes, a slumbering great big basilisks would explain the odd signals from there. This is naturally a lie that Moon and Star are suspicious of but can't prove: Belos knew about the creature dwelling there all along and used the Coalition to eliminate it, so that his loyal yet bumbling forces can actually sweep the old ruin and destroy it, due to it serving as an archeological contradiction to the historical narrative his regime is trying to construct to justify itself. The extensive photographs of the place still exist, but beyond the minor material gains to use against Bill Cipher and some cute shipping moments this episode ends on a pretty heavy downer, as Belos has successfully manipulated what he wanted out of his allies.
Episode 24/Ego-Death: The opposite team deploying at this time, lead by Eclipsa with the wand, Stanley, Dipper and Janna are tracing the Bill fragment that was destroyed attacking the weapon convey and trying to conquer Stan's mind, requiring a fairly far dimensional jump to a realm of the dead far removed from Earth and Mewni's relatively close proximity, a dimension tentatively (and oh so creatively) named Mortellus inside my notes. The only inhabitants of the dimension seem to be an order of monks that inter the dead in a variety of ways across a patchwork vista of landscapes surrounding their living temple.
This would introduce a bit of worldbuilding regarding death I'd thought up for this shared setting: Some dimensions, through their own unique properties, become "negatively" charged in relation to the "positive" energy of the soul, and the soul is a flashpoint imprint of all of a person's personality and memories into the collective magic in their body at the time of death, which unshackles the soul from its mortal form and lets it float freely between dimensions. Sufficiently strong emotional imprints can create lingering spirits or even allow a person to keep acting as they would while alive as a ghost, but most are simply pulled towards the relative "death" dimension and become a part of its natural cycles, and in the Mewman Underworld this is a cycle the Lucitors have researched how to tap for their own ends.
In this dimension the Mortellus Monks engage in a sort of study by practice of the multiverse's rituals and traditions regarding death: if you can travel to their world and give them instructions on how your culture disposes of their dead, they'll give you a lavish funeral for a steep discount, hence the variety of terrains are to allow for things like sky burials, disposing of bodies at sea, etc. With the dimension's negative charge keeping souls from being pulled away from this world and into a next one, the monks are able to observe the effects and repercussions of any given culture's burial practices with a minimum of outside variables, while studiously recording their findings.
The Lucitors have always been interested in Mortellus as well as other death dimensions, and had quietly seized control of the monastery as part of the buildup to their coup. On the surface nothing has changed besides their services getting even cheaper, but many suspect not all of their recent customers are actually reaching their elaborate cultural funerals...
The coalition members arrive in an elaborate, over the top figures setup that everyone except Stan knows isn't working right away, but the Lucitors posing as the monks are playing along to lure fresh bodies deeper into the facility due to the slump in business: Stan is pretending to be an eccentric inter-dimensional business mogul looking to arrange a flashy funeral for himself, Eclipsa is his significantly younger, most recent wife, while Dipper and Janna standing on each other's shoulders in a trench coat are their mysterious bodyguards.
The idea is that this would create an ongoing psychological game during the tour but I have no idea of this would actually be tense in execution or just comedic, with both parties trying to keep the illusion going while also snooping/preventing them from snooping. Fortunately Stan knows how to steal everyone's attention, particularly by offending the high class Underworld types who'd taken over someplace like this. However, the behind the scenes backers of this operation are watching from the crypt, and strategically divide up the Coalition members before attacking:
The "bodyguard" is asked to remain outside at one point so contract measures can be discussed, which they agree to in order to search around: Dipper finds the monk's library and is instantly fascinated by all their ghost research, while Janna finds a coffin storing room attached to a morgue where all the caskets are chained shut there's no one actually inside them. Stan is directed to sit in a comfy chair to discuss the agreement, and gets dropped down a trap door. The plan was then for the attendant guiding them to ransom Eclipsa for her allies lives, but they're clearly out of the loop in regards to how the last attempt at that worked and she magic neutralizes him no problem.
There are very few Lucitor soldiers actually left in this base after the botched raid on earth, so the Homeworld Gems deploy themselves to try and kill the group: A Yellow Sapphire glides quietly into the library and hunts Dipper between the giant bookcases with a heat ray fired out of her one eye, Janna gets locked inside one of the coffins she was investigating and put on a conveyor belt into an incinerator, while Eclipsa is jumped by Jaspers and Stan's status is unknown beyond the general impression he'd been taken deeper into the crypt.
I didn't quite have the details of any of these fights worked out, but I would want to work in someone (probably Eclipsa) yelling "Aim for the gemstone, that's their weak point!" and then another character applying something overkill to it, like potentially explosives that were kept in storage for an alien culture that honors their elite in death through pyrotechnic displays. Like, in the source material for Gems the protagonist goes out of his way to use a sword that straight up can't shatter a Gem, but neither the Pines or the Butterflies really have any compunctions about it. Like if Dipper could pull a magic weapon out of his stomach that was a representation of his soul it'd probably be a sniper rifle at this point.
Anyways the three win there fights either together or with help from the others rushing in and have a little moment of reflection afterwards: Dipper might get past his opponent's future vision by setting off a domino chain of toppling bookcases that leave no viable escape route and vows to protect the monk's legacy of knowledge. Janna puts all her escape artist skills to the test getting out of the coffin from the inside, but instead of for fun Jannanigans this is a ticking clock life or death escape that leaves her short of breath and a realization that this isn't as much fun to do now after rolling off the conveyor belt at the last second, while Eclipsa just kicks ass and fights off a squad of Jaspers with her dark magic.
The three fight their way down to the crypt, where the Gem commander directing her dwindling resources is growing increasingly nervous while her pale dressed Pearl stands by smiling completely placidly after she returns from trying to kill Janna. The Lucitor's engineering security and the Homeworld Gems ultimately can't stop the invaders, particularly with Eclipsa on point, but when they reach the command center it's strangely barren, with nothing but a fine layer of dust spread across the command console and the aforementioned Pearl standing completely still in a corner. Given their unfamiliarity with Gems, they sort of assume she's the alien commander, so Eclipsa prepares to probe the Pearl's mind while Dipper examines the equipment and Janna looks for Stan.
By utilizing the spell from canon that let Eclipsa have a dreamscape conversation with Globgor while he was frozen in crystal, Eclipsa enters the mental landscape of the motionless, unspeaking Gem. It's very drab and rigid on the inside, very pre-fabricated in terms of landscape, but ultimately a simple Pearl knows nothing of use Eclipsa can uncover, though that's not to say she isn't technically in charge of the operation...
Janna finds Stan, who had been dropped down the trap door in a chair that had closed clamps around his arms and legs, but still managed to escape the locks and trick the two Lucitors wheeling him somewhere into shooting each other trying to subdue him. Janna declares him the coolest old man she's ever seen, Stan promises to teach her some of his advanced pickpocketing techniques in a moment of levity, and then they make a horrible discovery: The Lucitor soul crematorium technology had been transplanted here in advance of the invasion of Mewni, and the unspoken implication is that similar setups exist elsewhere.
This is one of Bill's horrid masterpieces, a sordid fusion of Lucitor soulworking magic and Homeworld colonization technology: organic matter and living souls are feed to massive furnace (individually or while the two things are still bound together) that uses time and pressure distortion magic to compress the raw carbon into intricate gemstones (which is a real thing, look it up) while the soul energy is strung apart to destroy personality and then reapplied to give the gemstone life as an obedient Homeworld soldier. Much faster and more efficient for churning out soldiers than the lengthy planetary colonization cycle. Janna and Stan are disgusted by it and eagerly work together to rig the thing with explosives.
Back inside the Pearl however, the trap is sprung and Eclipsa realizes she isn't alone in there as she brushes up against the psychic prescience of the Goddess of Gemkind and the Supreme Ruler of the Homeworld: White Diamond. What ensues is an incredibly trippy and frightening mindscape battle between the two, though battle might be an exaggeration; Eclipsa is throwing everything she's got just to survive, while White Diamond is toying with her out of curiosity because she recognizes Bill's style of mind magic.
Imagine the moment where a person whose eyes had adjusted fully to the dark abruptly have a bright light switched on in their face, now imagine it stretches on forever. That is the sort of passive discomfort/damage Eclipsa suffers each moment she's trapped in the mindscape with the Gem ruler, and the Diamond's command of this reality is absolute: This would be the part where a bunch of my ideas regarding the actual... physiology I guess you'd say of Gem species get made into hard AU canon, for anyone whose still reading cares. Their minds are sculpted towards their function just as much as their bodies are, and an ingrained propensity towards obedience to superiors as the species-wide foundation.
The Diamonds, in addition to this, have outright "backdoors" programmed into Gem souls as they grow, with a failure for these to take being considered the most high priority "defect" in need of "adjustment." These intentional backdoors make Gems vulnerable to being hypnotized and mind controlled as well as making them perfect host bodies for psychic parasites like Bill. In this AU, where the ongoing war with the Irkens has forced the reclusive Diamonds to regularly bolster their armies to even the odds their powers have expanded with experience and become far more unsettling and broad reaching: Yellow can outright turn a individual Gem soldier into an kaiju sized engine of destruction as she's dropping from space, Blue can drain entire planets of the will to live while transferring their fighting spirit to her own army, and White has become a borderline colony organism, turning every Gem in her court to a functional extension of her own will. Very creepy, very space machine elder god.
Eclipsa, as such, has nothing to defend herself with except her own memories while exploring the shell of a Pearl since the landscape has been bleached clean and can only manage to escape with her life since digging deeper for information would be equivalent to trying to mine the surface of a star. She initially uses loving memories for this, represented by dream creations of Globgor and Uncle Jushtin that would also serve as an awesome chance to explore her perception of these two figures in her life. White causes an army of faceless Gem soldiers to melt out of the bleak sterile landscape to assail them. "I have created pure and radiant Gem life from the dirt."
Love doesn't defeat the approaching glare in open battle however, causing Eclipsa to flee through a distorted, dire patchwork slideshow of her own memories of Mewni with a psychic representation of Meteora swaddled close to her. If I ever had a chance to have something like this animated, I want something like a disturbing Picasso piece given motion, where the Mewman-Monster war and various instances of Gem colonization all run and mix together, the jagged and colorful landscape melting behind Eclipsa as she goes to every length possible to keep her daughter ahead of the sword.
At the end of this acid trip nightmare, we get the first appearance of the other two Diamonds as well, when White's presence conjures her dream creation versions of the Authority's other rulers to destroy the dark queen: Rigid, ruthless, obedient and to Eclipsa's own shock, kinda thick. White Diamond is so conceited and solipsistic that her own internal image of what are essentially her children (which is what Eclipsa is interpretation it as at least, based on the vibe she gets from this messed up dream realm) is that they're loyal tools who are appreciated for their usefulness but are disappointingly clinging to all their stupid personal emotions instead of just being all about her.
For the same reasons that she eventually lost her patience with Moon in the previous Episode Guide, this realization makes Eclipsa outright sick with anger, snarls that the alien goddess is a heartless abomination and summon her three absolute worst memories as psychic constructs to answer the Diamond tri-attack taking aim at her soul: Her mother, in full monster ripper combat state, her daughter as a rampaging giant and Bill Cipher as he would have been if Eclipsa had been manipulated into making him physical. When the dust clears, everything except Eclipsa and White Diamond has been wiped out. The former is exhausted and the later is simply fading away, not so much defeated as suddenly having some questions she is very eager to ask her scientific advisor...
Eclipsa would still have actually been killed by this if Dipper hadn't been the room however; The mental battle that would probably have stretched a few chapters long was less than a minute in real time, and after ten seconds of it Eclipsa began to have a heart attack from the psycho-somatic feedback that Dipper responded to by grapping the wand from her and applying magic CPR. Janna and Stan rush back in just in time to watch the Pearl obediently engage it's self-destruct function and explode into dust while striking a final salute, just like the Gem commander directing the base at done when ordered to. The team makes their escape, shaken by this adventure but ending on something of a positive note: The Lucitors' extra-dimensional bases have basically run out at this point, as with the information captured from the Mortellus base they can plan an attack on the few that are left.
Episode 25/Royal Theater Troupe Re-Opening!
This one would essentially be a "what's happening back on Mewni?" type episode that explores the victorious Lucitors and then drops a significant story shift at the end. The opening, tone setting action scene is the last of the Johansen Clan rebels being overwhelmed in their wilderness base by flying demons and red armored Hellknights being commanded by Prince Tom.
The rebels are cornered with nowhere to run, but the mountainside they've built their base into is incredibly well fortified while the forest surrounding the mountain was bristling with traps and guerilla fighters. Tom is making a sincere effort at the time to take better care of the troops under his command after watching Bill waste so many lives storming the Sanctuary. To do so he burns down the forest surrounding the mountain under his own power to clear the way for his army, then issues a personal challenge to the rebels to settle the siege in combat by champion: Himself against whoever among the insurgents are willing to face the Prince of the Underworld.
The challenge goes unanswered to begin with, as the majority of the Johansen's refuse to trust a Lucitor and hurl accusations of treachery mixed in with racial slurs at the demon prince in response, and while he naturally prickles at the slurs he really can't deny to himself that the Lucitors have acted treacherously. This strikes a cord at Tom and would be the start of his character thread during this examination of the Lucitors, as one of the reasons he was sold on his father's plan was the promise of the hardworking, dignified denizens of the Underworld getting the respect they deserve from the lazy, decadent of Mewni.
This really appealed to Tom since despite being royalty, he's felt disrespected and unappreciated a lot due to his hybrid heritage: No one can discriminate against him to his face obviously, but a significant Underworld political faction was founded on resentment of Mewman influence on demonic culture and has always opposed the most recent royal couple and their child. This is also tied into a feedback loop with his anger problems, as the more angry and destructive Tom ends up (which Bill and to a lesser degree Dave encourage him towards) the more people justifiably want to stay away from him for personal reasons, creating the eventual expectation in the prince that his subjects would stop walking on eggshells around him and mewmans would finally show him respect as an equal once the Lucitors controlled the dimension, but it simply hasn't come to pass despite Tom's sincere interest in acting like a "better" prince.
The rumination ends, however, when someone accepts the challenge: The strong, chiseled form of Princess Jaggs steps out of a tunnel, carrying a limb booster-less pigeon knight in both her hands. Tom is completely unbothered fighting two against one, and the face off happens on a flat section of cliff a short ways up the mountain with both armies watching. The ensuing battle is sort, but would sort of highlight what about Tom he is trying to change and what specifically sparked his need to do better, despite his more villainous characterization in this AU.
In an very Avatar kinda reference his rage fueled fire powers are intense but are getting more difficult to control. The Jaggs and Pigeon duo gain an early advantage over Tom even when the smaller bird flies circles around his head too fast for him to get with a pinpoint fire beam while the princess swings through his guard to get hits in. The Prince hits his rage breaking point because of this, exploding with enough anger to win the duel but also set of a burning avalanche of collapsing stone down the mountain they were fighting on, causing both armies to get scattered by a rain of burning stone. This does technically drive the rebels out of their fortified positions but it sends them out fighting, making all of Tom's efforts to capture them all alive without loss of life pointless.
Instead of a mighty triumph where the captured Johansens are marched through the capital in chains, Tom returns home to a sort of mediocre success that never the less advances the Lucitor strategy and brings praise from King Dave: With the Butterfly-allied clan of bushwhackers and wild men broken as a fighting force, the infrastructure for "Bringing Magic to Everyone!" can finally be laid down without fear of sabotage. While this public praise for his son is somewhat politically motivated (Bill's Gem import forces had so far failed to root out these rebels) he is otherwise sincere about Tom's success and tells him not to worry about the casualties it took, which the prince isn't sure he can do anymore.
With the need for his field leadership passed as a smoldering peace begins to settle over the dimension of Mewni, Tom goes to see his mother to talk about things. Wrathmelior is honestly in kind of a depressed state when Tom meets with her, but their affection for one another is established as being sincere, definitely more so than the apparently encouraging but far more power hungry Dave.
We get Wrathmelior's backstory laid out in detail here, as well as more explicit worldbuilding about the Underworld: She is the last living, sound of mind and body, member of the original, pure demonic royal bloodline, which through copious amounts of sanity/power depleting incest have remained a true lineage back to the first demons taught valuable soul magic by Bill, hence why he is celebrated as a messenger deity in the Underworld. Wrathmelior was the runt of her generation, uninterested in the squabbling of the family, and as per the official AMA answer about their meeting, did in fact meet Dave Lucitor in a coffee shop and was swept off her feet by him.
In contrast to the Butterfly family, where the legitimacy-breaking secession irregularities were successfully covered up, the Lucitor royal family had legitimately remained continuous since its foundation. This ended up having its own ruinous consequences though, exemplified by the fact that the official story, that a family dinner exploded into a curse slinging argument that killed most of the royals, was accepted by a broad enough percentage of the population to allow the Lucitors of the show to rule effectively. Wrathmelior is still legally the one with most of the power over the crown and the allegiance of the loyalist population, while Dave is technically only a royal consort but worked effectively to build closer ties between the royals and the weapon manufacturers as part of the plan to invade Mewni, which was his ambition from the start.
After they talk about a lot of this, Tom and his mother have to get dressed up fancy: They're joining Dave at the opera tonight, it's the grand re-opening event of the Butterfly royal theater, which is now fully aligned with the new leadership and missing all of Marco's resistance friends, who have not been seen on earth either.
Cut to Dave yuking it up in the Butterfly family private viewing box, taking an absurdly petty enjoyment out of mildly vandalizing their luxurious finery while ruminating on his ambitions, going to internal flashbacks to explain him...
Born to an aristocratic but not royal family of Mewmans late in the reign of Queen Comet, Dave was born with a different name that he no longer cares to remember, having embraced his life as a Lucitor. His studies led to him working as a military alchemist during the war with Toffee, but he always coveted the power of the wand and used the security clearance he had from his position to constantly pour over records of magic and mystique from Mewni's history. Queen Solaria's magic in particular was cited often in his work, but ultimately his research unit was shut down and imprisoned as an act of political "house cleaning" before Queen Comet tried to forge a road to peace.
On the eve of Comet's assassination and Moon's ascendancy, Bill first appeared to the ambitious alchemist while he was sleeping in a dungeon and offered him a deal and some advice. A flashback of Dave escaping from the castle dungeon with nothing but memories of the dream as an advantage was something I thought about, like it's a comically self-idealized memory at points but does still get across that younger Dave was genuinely quick witted, observant, fast to learn and charismatic enough to engineer a ruthless but impressive escape. Out of all the different villainous rulers in this story I guess you'd describe Dave as the "self-made" one in that he's determined, pragmatic and more careful than most of the villains due to having little to no innate power that can meaningfully uphold his rule or substitute for planning. It makes him the evil reflection of Marco and Dipper in a sense.
He started calling himself Dave after escaping, and spent a few years adventuring, researching, preparing, and courting Wrathmelior. He communed on and off with Bill during his quest to build a sort of "knock off" of the royal wand out of a variety of magical components and created a weaker version of Queen Eclipsa's darkest spell that was tuned towards demons; while both of these proved effective at massacring a majority of the Lucitor bloodline over a holiday banquet table, the strain of it melted all the magic items together and destroyed the makeshift wand, partially motivating Dave's choice to spare Tom's already incomprehensible Uncle and keep him as essentially a pet.
Wrathmelior sincerely does not suspect Dave of this in the slightest and her affection for him, as shown when she and Tom enter the viewing box and startle him from his memories, is genuine. From her perspective, Dave was there for her when the crazy Lucitor family she'd always been an outsider of finally blew up, and she's happy to have his support in ruling the Underworld, which has always had the political yearning on some level to rise to surface and usurp Mewni's place in the balance of power. Tom is growing increasingly uncertain about his father's plans.
For the time being however, with the Lucitor family on top of the house and the rest of the theater seating fills out according to the new hierarchy for the grand reopening: The Cloud Kingdom representatives are all business types instead of royals, the Pixie Empress has arrived with an entourage as a diplomatic guest, distinguished monster soldiers and rebel leaders rub elbows with the bureaucratically inclined nobles and civil servants that make up the Underworld Court upper crust; in comparison to the Butterfly Kingdom governing a wide, crop producing surface nation through a feudal network of interrelated noble families court positions in the Underworld were much more flexible and competitive. There are Mewmans in the crowd aside from King Dave, though they are obviously low in the hierarchy, being the likes of corn experts, labor coordinators, media personalities and turncoat royal advisors instead of full blown nobles and military figures.
The performance of the evening is a play Dave introduced to the reorganized theater company, which he describes as a foreign masterpiece he had a script copy of translated and imported to the Underworld with his influence as a king. The play itself is a cheeky Avatar the Last Airbender reference and the comparison of the joke is to the many points of contention regarding anime translations. With the idea of Dave being the dark reflection of Marco and Dipper, this is his nerdy, sincere interest in foreign theater that expresses in the lingo of modern day anime discourse and a few outdated references to 19th-20th century Japonism for humor. While this isn't one of Dave's fundamentally villainous traits there is meant to be the implication that his imported and home dubbed foreign masterpiece is an actual Fire Nation propaganda play. His interest in art and appreciation for craftsmanship regardless of its source is sincere in comparison to the culture bigotry of the story's many other villains and rulers.
Providing security and serving drinks at the opera showing are an increasing number of yellow hued Gems, the increasingly enigmatic secret service of the royal family that seem to have increasing numbers of available bodies each time they make a public appearance, as the more perceptive guests note. The end of this chapter is creeping, suspenseful transition to Bill's perspective, where the fragment inside the Lucitor's cathedral machine can see through all of the Gems created from the dead on Mewni under his direction, as part of an ever expanding network of scrying channels the new regime is establishing across the land. Bill is eager to see a construction project spread out from the MHC Sanctuary, and the sealed well entrance inside it. That is how he will bring the Nightmare Realm to Mewni, and it's only a matter of time until it is ready.
A/N: While typing the stuff about the Underworld nobility system and Bill's influences in it I had a wild idea: If Disney is ever willing to try another crazy RPG property with its characters ala Kingdom Hearts make it some kinda SMT/Person ripoff/collab staring all the protags from its original fantasy animation lineup. Bill Cipher represents Chaos and Glossaryck is the Law deity.
