In hindsight, the first part of this chapter should have been made into the last part of the last chapter.

Ah, phooey.

Thankfully they made it back to the house without incident, and without McGucket or his son appearing to have noticed they were gone, since they were still working on the automaton. Quickly Dipper and Mabel went inside, and hurried upstairs with their prize.

Dipper sat down cross-legged on his bed, with the book resting in his lap, and opened it again, with Mabel leaning her chin on his shoulder so she could read it too.

To his disappointment, most of the writing was all faded, or the ink had run together, so he could only pick out the occasional word. On the bright side, at least most of the artwork was still intact.

They flipped through the pages, marveling at all kinds of beautifully drawn images of fantastical creatures: something that looked like an owl with a cow's face and an udder; a campfire with skinny legs and eyes; a strange duck-like creature with four legs and a plaid pattern on its coat. Some of the drawings had been scratched out; Dipper wondered if whoever had made them was just very critical of their own art.

The person who this used to belong to was also kind of sloppy, especially as they came close to the middle of the book; some of the pages had red-brown stains splattered all over them, eugh.

And then, halfway through, the pages just...stopped. There were just two final pages of writing, on one of which Dipper could make out one legible sentence, written in a hand that looked almost frantic: "In Gravity Falls, there is no one you can trust."

He stared at it, wide-eyed, and brushed his thumb against the words.

"...No one you can trust…" he murmured aloud. And then the meaning behind the words sunk in a little. "Mabel, do you know what this means?"

"That whoever wrote this was kind of paranoid?" Mabel suggested.

"No!" Then he hesitated. "Well, maybe. But also that whoever wrote this was probably from around here! Maybe we can find them and-I dunno-give this back?" His voice trailed off as he realized how ridiculous that statement was, given the quality of the book and the fact that it had been stuffed in a tree for goodness-knows-how-long.

Mabel hummed thoughtfully-and then brightened. "Hey, Grunkle Ford and Mr. McGucket are both pretty old-maybe they'll know who the author is!"

"The author of what?"

The children jumped, and whirled around to see their elusive grunkle standing in the doorway of their room...looking a little like he'd been in a fight or something.

His ridiculously thick hair had leaves and twigs sticking out of it, and there was a long scratch down the side of one cheek which actually had a trickle of dried blood, part of which had gotten smeared on his spectacles. His clothes were similarly torn up, with more red patches near the worst areas.

The twins both gaped at him.

"...Grunkle Ford, what happened?" Mabel finally asked.

Ford blinked, and then looked down at himself in realization. He gave them a sheepish smile. "Um-I-well, I miscalculated the strength of some of the local wildlife's sense of smell. But don't worry, I was able to eventually evade them, and ensure that they wouldn't be able to track me here, so we should all be relatively safe. As long as we don't start hearing unexplained bluegrass music, there's no need to fret."

...Somehow this did not assuage the childrens' concerns.

Ford seemed to realize that, as he coughed awkwardly and looked down towards the book in their hands.

"What do you have there?"

"We found this in the-" Dipper elbowed Mabel just in time- "yard. It's an old book of some kind."

Dipper got up and held the book up for Ford to see. "Have you ever seen someone with this before? We think whoever wrote it must have lived around here once upon a time, and-"

His words came to a halt when he saw Ford's expression.

It was that look again. The blank one, only somehow worse than it had been the first time they saw it.

Ford abruptly brought a hand up to the side of his head, squeezing his eyes shut and uttering a small groan.

"Grunkle Ford?!" Dipper dropped the book on the bed and hurried to his uncle's side, putting a frantic hand on his arm. Mabel went to his other side, pulling him over to her own bed and pushing until he sat down.

"Are you okay? Do we need to get Tate?" She took a worried glance at his head-maybe the cut was deeper than they'd realized, or he had a worse injury, they'd heard about people whose heads would get hurt and then they'd suddenly drop de-

Ford's eyes opened again, and he blinked dazedly.

"I-I'm sorry, children." He gave them a somewhat confused smile. "What were we talking about?"

Dipper's heart sank. He looked at Mabel worriedly over Ford's shoulder, while his fingers tightened the smallest bit in his grunkle's coat. She looked equally disturbed by this memory lapse or whatever it was, but she just squeezed Ford's arm.

"...Do you need help cleaning up? You look like you got hurt real bad."

Ford's smile deepened into something a little warmer, and he gave her hand a reassuring pat.

"No, I-I'm all right, thank you. I just need a bath. It's really not as bad as it looks." He got up, and before they could protest, strode back out of their room.

Dipper sighed, and his shoulders drooped again.

"Well, back to square one."

Mabel squeezed his shoulder. "Don't worry, bro-bro. I'll help you figure out who the Author of this thing was if it's the last thing I do!"

Dipper wasn't sure why she was investing herself so deeply in helping him with this mystery...but he'd be lying if he said he didn't appreciate the enthusiasm.

Not least because the new project was helping him not think about things he didn't want to think about.

After about a week in Gravity Falls, Dipper had noticed a number of strange things about the people he and his sister were living with now.

1) Grunkle Ford and McGucket both seemed to have an extreme aversion to the color yellow, especially when it appeared unexpectedly. On their third day here Mabel had come down wearing a hand-knitted sweater decorated to look like it was covered with buttercups, and Ford had seen her out of the corner of his eye and nearly shot her with his crossbow. And as they were both trying to calm down McGucket came in for breakfast, and as soon as he saw Mabel he let out a high-pitched shriek and actually threw a wrench at her before registering who she was. Both of them had apologized profusely, and clearly felt terrible about it, but ever since then both children had been careful to keep anything yellow out of their presence.

2) Grunkle Ford was not the only one with memory problems. McGucket's weren't quite as bad, but if he wasn't working on an automaton, then often he seemed to just forget whatever he was doing unless someone else reminded him. Grunkle Ford mentioned offhandedly that his lapses had gotten a little better than they used to be, continuing his ongoing streak of providing information that he clearly meant to be reassuring yet made things just that bit more horrifying for the children.

3) Neither of them seemed to really have lives outside their work. To be fair, Tate mentioned that they didn't quite fit in with the townsfolk of Gravity Falls and felt it easier to have him be the main errand-runner whenever they needed food or tools, but Dipper and Mabel would have been okay with that, if it had instead meant getting to spend a little more time with them instead. Instead, though, McGucket was always working out in his shed (usually with a lot of explosions involved), and Grunkle Ford was always either in the woods or in his study with the request that he not be disturbed, and only spent long amounts of time with them when Tate forced him to stop working and eat something for cripes' sake.

The last one was the one that bugged Dipper most, but he honestly didn't know how to address it without sounding childish or selfish. Maybe he was just being unfair to them; after all, what they were doing was clearly important to them, and what did a dumb twelve-year-old like him know anyway?

So instead, he and Mabel would spend their time studying the journal (he'd concluded that was what it was, rather than a book, when he saw that some of the entries had dates scrawled nearby) for more clues about who it belonged to, in between helping Tate around the house; when they finally got the chance to ask Grunkle Ford if they could help tidy up his mess of papers he awkwardly conceded that maybe it would be an easier task if he had people helping him out, and Tate had been pleased that someone else was willing to try and keep things clean around here.

It turned out to be even more of a herculean task than they had expected.

Seemingly every room in the house had at least one scattering of Grunkle Ford's work lying in a corner. And not all the papers that were in the same place were relevant to each other, as if he had started writing about one topic, lost interest, and gone on to another, before moving to another part of the house and suddenly remembering the first thing he'd been thinking about.

So for their first few days, Dipper and Mabel had their work cut out for them just gathering everything together and putting it in Ford's study. Once they had done that, though, they were able to get started on sorting them more thoroughly.

This was even trickier, due to the endless number of topics Ford took an interest in studying, and the number of ways in which they overlapped and cross-referenced and sometimes got repeated or corrected by later papers-

Let's just say that looking through them too long gave them headaches almost as bad as the ones Grunkle Ford always seemed to be getting. Even if Dipper did enjoy seeing information about all the strange creatures that he seemed to be so invested in studying, many of which seemed too fantastic to be real.

And then, one afternoon while they were sorting through the latest stack, Dipper stopped short as he pulled a paper into view.

It had a drawing at the top of what looked like a castle. Not anything really fancy, at least not compared to some of the castles he and Mabel had read about in books, but it still had turrets and the beginnings of a stone wall shaded in around it and looked all mysterious and cool.

Underneath it Ford had written, and then crossed out, the beginnings of a sentence: I think I remember being here once

Mabel looked over his shoulder. "Whoa. Grunkle Ford's a really good artist."

"I've seen this before."

"Wait, what?"

Dipper pulled the journal from his vest pocket, and pulled it open, flipping to a page near the beginning.

Sure enough, there was a somewhat faded drawing of the exact same castle.

For a moment they stared at the two pages in stunned silence.

Then Dipper said determinedly, "We need to figure out where this place is. Maybe then we can get some answers."

"And maybe if we go there we can find a magical talisman to help Grunkle Ford and McGucket with their memories or something!" Mabel chimed in.

Dipper gave her a look. "You've been reading too many fairy tales."