I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you.
July Heat
(June-July 2017)
1: The Day After Summerween
The Saturday following Summerween was hellish—tourists swarmed in, no longer an orderly, quiet, queueing crowd, but a mob of boisterous, roisterous, rambunctious, slam-dunktious . . . you know what, they were loud, rude, and unruly, leave it like that.
And so many of them flooded in!
Grampas and Nanas, moms and dads, babes in arms and babes who probably were carrying concealed arms, pre-teens and post-teens and teens in-between—it was enough to make Dipper dizzy, Mabel muddled, and a narrator prone to weird rhymes and alliterations.
Soos thought that the Ghost Harassers episode explained it all, and possibly it did. It was true that the brief few seconds of footage featuring the Invisible Wizard—Dipper's doing, that—had gone wildly viral since the show's debut. It was also unfortunately true that Dipper's name, while attached to most of the technically illegal uploads of the bit to MeTube, had been repeatedly mangled and remangled: Dipster Pint, Dipman Pins, and—this one he discovered retranslated into English from a Japanese uploader—Ladle Trees.
The footage, not clear to begin with—Dipper had deliberately sent in only the first-stage-filter shot of the closet and its inhabitant, since a clearer picture made it look, well, goofy—had lost sharpness and resolution as it was uploaded, downloaded, copied, and re-uploaded countless times.
People had used photo editors to draw in outlines of what they thought the images showed—ranging from a kind of green Santa Claus to an enormous pile of cow poop, from a Muppet-like critter ("yo," that uploader had written, "its a sok pupett an the clawset is like FAKE yall, probly make outa a shoebox") to a truly monstrous alien horror ("The abominations of the End Times are appearing among us").
That was just the beginning. The week before the Fourth of July had always been one of the Shack's busiest of the year, and this summer was no exception—well, it was, attendance had like quintupled since Stan's day, but even taking the increased patronage into account, it looked as though this year records would be shattered.
Stan, who showed up yawning on Saturday to perform Mr. Mystery in the Museum while Soos drove tram tours down the Mystery Trail and back, began the day when he startled Dipper at breakfast by telling Soos, "Oh, yeah, before I forget—I won't be here next week. Probably I'll be back before the Fourth—when is it this year?"
"On the Fourth of July," Mabel said helpfully. Unlike many of the Summerween party attendees, she didn't have a headache and double vision this morning—but then, she hadn't partaken of Smile Dip. She had merely made an idle wish that the punch they served had been spiked with the stuff. As she herself had once discovered on a memorable trip to a haunted convenience store, Smile Dip gave one awesome hallucinations, but coming down was a major bummer.
"I know that, Pumpkin," Stan said. "Ha! Get her! The Fourth of July comes on July Fourth! Good one, I gotta remember that."
"How is that even a joke?" Dipper asked.
"Now, what you said wasn't funny," Stan told him. "Learn from your sister!"
Wendy came to everyone's rescue: "Stan, the Fourth comes a week from next Tuesday."
Soos ruminated, "You know what, dawgs? The Founding Fathers should've, like, worked it out so the Fourth of July fell on the same day of the week every year. Like Columbus did all those days he discovered Ohio."
"But—" Dipper began.
Wendy kicked him under the table—not hard, just a warning tap. "Dude, let him have this," she told Dipper softly.
"Grunkle Stan," Mabel asked, "where are you gonna be? There's nothing wrong, is there? You don't have an appointment at the Dijon Clinic, do you?"
"That's Mayo clinic," Dipper said.
"I like mustard better," she said. "Are you sick?"
Stan laughed. "Naw, I feel great. I feel like a million bucks! I feel like two and a quarter million bucks! I just got an errand outa town that might take several days."
"What are you up to?" Dipper asked suspiciously.
"None of your beeswax," Stan said smugly. "But I ain't sick, and it's nothing to worry about. You'll find out one of these days. OK, so I'll try hard to be back a week from this next Monday, 'cause that'll be the day before the Fourth, and I know you'll be slammed. I might even be back on the Friday or Saturday before, but no promises. Hey, call in Ford to be Mr. Mystery. I can't tell us apart."
"That would be a real bad idea," Wendy said. "He'd turn it into a science lecture. People would go into the Museum and not be able to get out for, like, three hours! Let Dipper do it. He's done it before."
"Yeah," Stan said with a grin. "That's right. And he looks better in the suit, tie, and eyepatch, with his hair actually combed for a change. Mabel, you still got the Dipper-sized fez?"
"Sure I do!" she said. "I may not remember the name, but I always remember the—say it with me, one, two—"
"Fez!" she and Stan said together. Mabel laughed at her own joke until milk shot out of her nose, which in itself wouldn't have been so bad, but chunks of Razzleberry Rounds came with it. At least that entertained Little Soos, who guffawed until he was sick.
Nobody was laughing by ten that morning, though—the Shack had been open for only one hour, but already everyone was looking frazzled, including the usually immaculate Gideon, who'd come in to work the second cash register. Like Dipper and Wendy, Gideon had not imbibed Smile Dip-adulterated punch, but he'd been worried sick when his girlfriend, Ulva, the werewolf, had made an unfortunate wish in the presence of a mischievous genie, and like the two of them, he'd had very little sleep.
Ulva was probably in the best shape of any of them. She'd bounced back from her short stint as a hopelessly stereotypical teenaged girl, as imagined by a hormone-laden, anime-obsessed teen guy, and she was bright-eyed and eager in her job as organizer of the gift shop. She loved putting things in order, and that morning she had fantastic chances of restoring order to chaos, and she exercised it with all the eagerness of a six-month-old puppy chasing a ball.
By noon even Stan, normally indefatigable, wore a sheen of sweat and had talked himself a little hoarse. Wendy and Dipper didn't have their normal lunch break, but snuck away—separately—for quick trips to the bathroom and a hastily-eaten snack, peanut-butter crackers or trail mix, before hustling back to the bustling gift shop.
Finally at closing time that evening—nominally six, though they had such a line that they really didn't get rid of the last tourists until six-thirty—they tallied up and Soos, who looked decidedly punchy, said, "Dudes, I hate to, like, ask this, but we gotta take a quick inventory or we're gonna run out of stock next week. If I order online today, we can get it in by Wednesday. I'll pay you guys extra."
Ulva, who could tell him almost exactly what had been bought and how many of each, volunteered. Mabel made up an excuse—"I gotta wash Tripper's hair"—but Wendy and Dipper sighed and pitched in. Luckily, with Ulva's help it took only one more hour. Normally every Saturday night, Teek took Mabel out and Dipper and Wendy had a date night, but that night—"I'm dead on my feet," Dipper muttered.
"Same here," Wendy said with a wide yawn. "Hey, Soos! Let's just order pizza and call that dinner."
"Pizza!" Little Soos crowed. "Papa, I love pizza!"
"You got it, Wendy dude!" Soos said. "Stan, I mean Mr. Pines, you want to stay with us for pizza?"
"Nah," Stan said, stretching. "Me and Sheila will eat out somewheres, if she'll drive. I got carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists for some reason."
They ordered pizzas from Pizza Pizzazz, a recently-opened shop, and Dipper marveled at how many slices of cheese pizza Little Soos put away. It was clear that he took after his dad in one way, at least.
At dinner, Little Soos sat on his dad's knee as Soos said, "Hey, son, did I ever tell you about this one time when I got like a slice of Infinite Pizza? I mean, you took a big bite, and boom! It grew right back again, dawg! Only later I ran across this starving guy and gave it to him, and he lived. True story."
"Awesome," Little Soos probably said. It was hard to tell, since he had a mouthful of crust and mozzarella at the time.
After dinner, Dipper, Wendy, and—under protest—Mabel did the minimal clean-up, and then Teek showed up to take Mabel to the movies. "Wanna go, too?" Mabel asked Dipper. "It's a Transformers movie!"
"No, thanks," Dipper said. "I just want to rest."
"I know what you need!" Mabel said.
"No Smile Dip," Wendy said firmly. "Seriously, Mabes, you should ditch that stuff. It's nothing but trouble."
"I wasn't going to say that," Mabel replied with dignity. "You two need a movie night here. Pop yourselves some popcorn and chill out in the parlor."
She had a point. The Ramirez children and Abuelita all went to bed super early—by 8:30, most of the time—and Soos and Melody preferred watching TV in their bedroom, so the parlor was free.
Wendy popped a big bowlful of popcorn, they buttered it just right, not too little, not too much, and then they piled quilts and blankets on the floor, so they could either lie back or else sit with their backs against the sofa, and then settled in for the Saturday Night Shocker, a Gravity Falls tradition. That night it was The Monster Robot from the Robot Planet who is Also Part Gorilla. It didn't star Chadley and Trixandra, but it was just as cheesy.
"So how come the robot has the body of a gorilla?" Wendy asked.
Reaching for popcorn, Dipper told her, "I think when they rented the costume, the shop was out of robot bodies and gorilla heads, so they did a mix-and-match."
"Sounds logical."
A few minutes into the film, Dipper said, "Wait, wait. This is a monster robot from the robot planet, but he lives in a cave on the moon? How does that compute?"
"Yeah, and why does the moon have trees in the background? And I think I see a highway down there with cars."
"And am I mistaken, or is the death ray like one of those machines that blows soap bubbles?" Dipper asked.
It developed, probably—the movie plot was admittedly a little hard to follow—that the RoboMan, as the robotic gorilla was named, was on a mission to exterminate all human life on Earth. He somehow transported to Earth and wandered around aimlessly with a ray gun that looked like a shampoo bottle with a handle glued on, randomly firing it. It produced a deadly ray that looked as though someone had squiggled lines on the film negative with a grease pencil.
And though the people in the shots never once appeared on screen at the same time or place as RoboMan, they were slaughtered. Apparently. A shot would show some teens jiving outside a malt shop—though, the film having been made in 1953, a few of the teens looked like World War II vets already eligible for Social Security—when suddenly the grease-pencil ray would come from offscreen, and they all would collapse.
Not simultaneously, but raggedly, with the girls typically collapsing by sitting down gingerly. And then the screen would go dark for a moment, and when the picture came back, the sidewalk would be empty. An offscreen narrator who seemed to show up whenever he staggered through the studio pronounced, "The Choloinator Ray not only killed its victims, it dissolved the bodies!"
Wendy carried on the message: "Housewives, if you're tired of cleaning up those messy dead bodies after your dinner parties, get the Choloinator Ray now! It comes in six designer colors!"
Dipper chuckled. "You know, Grunkle Stan could sell that!"
By the third act, in which RoboMan was taking on the U.S. Armed Forces (they seemed to be represented by six guys clad in uniforms that were mismatched—an Air Force jacket, a Marine Corps helmet—two of whom, as Wendy pointed out, had already died twice), he called in the Robo Reserves, which consisted of dinosaurs in footage obviously recycled from films shot in previous decades.
Somehow, the monsters were defeated, offscreen, and in the end the love interest—a guy and a girl who had only come into the movie in the last fifteen minutes—embraced. "Oh, Chuck," the girl said.
Wendy called out, "His name is Chris! The actor is Chuck!"
"Yes, Wandine?" Chris/Chuck said, manfully taking her into his manly arms and staring into her eyes, which apparently were invisible and three inches above the top of her head.
"I mean Chris, is this really the end?"
Chris broke the fourth wall by staring at the camera. "It really is, for now," he said. "But keep watching the skis, everyone! What? Sorry, I mean skies!"
However, the question of whether it was all over seemed far from resolved. The movie cut to the RoboMan shuffling back into his cave on the moon.
"How'd he get there?" Dipper asked. "The last we saw of him, a building fell on him in downtown Cleveland!"
RoboMan continued his slow, shuffling retreat. Wendy voiced his thoughts: "Ooh, I hate these puny human beings. They're just so mean to me. I kill them and then they're right back in the next scene. Nobody loves me. I'm going to eat a gallon of chocolate ice cream and pout!"
By then it was ten-thirty. Dipper and Wendy tidied up. Dipper stretched his stiff arms and asked Wendy, "Run tomorrow?"
"Well, we skipped this morning 'cause of the late night," Wendy said. "But tomorrow's a day off from work, so yeah, but let's do it at like eight instead of six."
"Suits me," he said.
"Let's go out on the porch."
"Huh?" he asked. "Why?"
She nudged him. "Dude, this was a movie date! You gotta kiss your girl goodnight!"
They also let Tripper out. He ran around in the grass, did his business, and nosed out snacks that the tourists had dropped. He was great at that.
He was also great at ignoring what humans were doing. Dipper and Wendy both appreciated that doggy discretion, since they were pleasantly engaged in saying goodnight.