"Bluuuubs! Ah'm tired!"
"I know, Durland, but we can't be too far from gettin' to the bottom of all this." Blubs replied. "Just pull up your perfectly fitted britches an' keep up."
"When I said we should go investigaterin' I didn't think we'd need to go lookin' fer secret things, Blubs. They're danged hard to find. My sippy cup's almost empty…"
"If we get to the bottom of this, I'll buy you three sippy cups for your collection."
Durland simpered. "Y'all always know the way to my heart."
"After our careers together, it'd be a crime not to wanna see you happy."
Gravity Falls' two foremost cops were not having the best day of investigating. Truth be told, the pair were exhausted. They had spent hours examining the forest, hours around the Dinkies factory and even examined Yumberjacks' Super-Happy-Fun-Time-Yumber-Meal-Boxes twice.
So far, nothing. The simple fact is that Blubs and Durland were not the finest investigators. Despite years of service in the town, most of their biggest cases had become foggy memories - like massive gaps existed in their minds, where things simply didn't make sense.
There was a time when the two were an active, diligent force dedicated to writing the town's more bizarre aspects - a young, finely dressed pair, bright-eyed and sheltered. A pair who were planning to climb the ranks and expose the mysteries of Gravity Falls for what they truly were. To protect and serve. They were never the smartest - no, not by a long shot. But they were sharp and dedicated.
And yet now - though they barely, themselves, seemed to recognise it - they simply weren't quite the same people. As time had gone on, the two had only become more eccentric. More lost. More attached to eachother's company and more and more oblivious to the place in which they lived.
It was frustrating; there was always a sense that they had discovered something. Learnt something. Gained some kind of understanding - but it had disappeared. They just couldn't find that knowledge, that enthusiasm or that spark anymore.
It was perhaps only natural that the two were so co-dependent on eachother, when there were so many outsized gaps in their experience - only strange, shadowy images of the past that they were unable to firmly connect. They were as close as they could possibly be, spending every moment of their lives together - not only out of sheer affection for one and other, but because together things just felt more comfortable. Safer. Things made more sense.
And now, here they were - desperately trying to find the answer to a problem that had struck the town and had led to the shocking realisation that maybe, just maybe, they weren't that good at their jobs. Between the pancake eating and squirrel hassling, they simply didn't seem to know where to start.
The two roamed mindlessly through the streets of the town, trying to find something - anything - that could be linked to what Manly Dan had been so insistent to be a critter problem. Instead, they had spent a decent chunk of time making sawdust angels while giggling like kids.
As much as it was Durland's idea to do some investigating, he was beginning to tire. "Bluuuubs, c'mon, it's been ho-o-ours!"
"I'm sorry, Durland, but I'm… I'm sure there's something we're-" The Sheriff looked up and scratched his nose. "You ever remember investigatin' the junkyard?"
The pair paused in front of the arched entrance and high fences that carved out the infamous cemetery of cars, fridges and cans, like a tremendous pit of despair in the middle of the town's streets - a place that seemed frozen in time. Never seemed to change. A sort of frozen, rusting, rotting time capsule to the town's detritus.
"Shucks, Blubs. I don't remember most of our investigaterin' past last year."
"Me neither." Blubs replied, a hand on his hip, flashlight primed. He furrowed his brow as his eyes scanned the leering, ramshackle sign. "Feels like a perfect place for crime to me."
Durland lit up like a Christmas tree, excitedly bouncing on his tiptoes and clapping his hands. "What kinda crime? What kinda crime, Blubs?!"
"Only one way to find out." Durland smiled. "Y'all wanna go first?"
"Oh boy oh boy oh boy!" the lanky deputy beamed and ran it with his baton flailing wildly in the air. As incompetent as Durland could be, he sure did love crime-fighting.
Unfortunately, they were to be - ultimately - disappointed.
The Gravity Falls Junkyard was just that - a Junkyard. A leaning, crooked mortuary of cars and household appliances piled haphazardly. If the place had ever been used to actually scrap or recycle vehicles, nobody really seemed to know. The place was as bland and uneventful as a place in Gravity Falls could be.
An empty doghouse.
Abandoned sheets of corrugated iron.
Yet, they couldn't fail to detect a faint smell of …secrets. Perhaps it was the leering shapes, the overwhelming silence or the stacks of cars beaming through sharp, crooked grilles with their dark, cracked headlights peering at them. Whatever it was, it made the hairs on the back of their necks stand on end.
In the centre of the junkyard, somehow, unbeknownst to the duo - though they were sure they'd been there before - there sat a strange structure. A sort of hut-like structure. Like a …hut. A hut for hootenannying.
The old home of Fiddleford McGucket was still standing - perhaps due to his natural abilities for engineering - and was much the same as the day he had left it in favour of Northwest Manor. Nobody had entered - after all, who'd bother? And not a thing from his nearly thirty-year reign as king of the Junkyard had been touched or interfered with.
The two exchanged a glance and tapped their batons on the door in unison, rendering a hollow clank that echoed across the declining road vehicles and the roughly cut pine fencing. The door simply fell inwards, landing onto the earth with a deafening clatter.
"Police! We don't have a warrant but we're sure good at pretending we do!" Blubs shouted.
There was no response. The two glanced at eachother again and swallowed as they stepped inside, far more hesitant now than they were when the thing was closed. The structure enveloped them into a surprisingly cavernous interior, still clearly made out of trash - of course - but with a certain method to it all.
It was surprisingly solid, furnished with old armchairs and potbelly stoves, with work tables and workshops peppering every corner. A crude mantelpiece made of fenceposts teetered against one of the walls. Rugs made of tortilla chip packets. A raccoon sized bed.
McGucket's entire life was held within those leaning walls. Everything from his final grand projects, to those when he was first on the brink of insanity - and, perhaps most tragic of all - the scraps of what had, once upon of time, been his final days of lucidity, written in haphazard notes, detailed maps and blueprints.
"Hey Blubs. You uh… you recognise this?" Durland asked, leaning over a rusting cabinet. "Somethin' on th'tip of mah mind…Some kinda gun?"
Blubs followed his deputy's voice, still distracted by the walls and structures that surrounded them, creaking and groaning in the breeze in pained, sporadic warnings - and blinked as he met his deputy's discovery. "Why, ain't like no gun I've ever seen. But it feels..."
"...Familiar?"
"Yeah."
The two picked it up and blinked as - directly alongside it, they found a long-abandoned blueprint. A long-abandoned map. A long-abandoned schematic deep into the bowels of Gravity Falls' Museum of History.
The two cops picked it up - and the gun - with a new resolve. "I think we need to find out just what all of this means, Durland."
"But Blubs - what about the beavers?"
"Somethin' tells me this is way bigger than some beavers. The city kids wanna deal with that junk, they're welcome to it. I think this is somethin' more important."
"H-how can you tell?"
"Durland… I think I might've jus' remembered somethin' ."
The two began assembling what clues they could, making notes and getting themselves ready for a journey of discovery - just as, on Scuttlebutt Island, the beavers were raising anchor and preparing for the greatest confrontation of their lives, and geese were being assembled for battle.
It was, perhaps, an unfortunate twist of fate that they had managed to find Fiddleford's forgotten papers rather than taking the opportunity to focus on the case at hand. Typically Blubs and Durland - and desperately dangerous for the McGucket and Pines families.
They had stumbled into the town's greatest, darkest rabbit hole. They couldn't take it up with Cutebiker, or Fiddleford, or even the Pines - this was their case. It was possibly their most important case yet. It was everything they had been looking for.
Durland put his hands on his hips as he looked over McGucket's shack. "What do we do, Blubs?"
"Trust no one, Durland." Blubs replied in a dark voice. "I think this is somethin' only you an I can know."