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.
Understanding Mabel
(August 3-6, 2017)
1: Production Meeting
On Thursday at lunch, Dipper explained what he wanted to do. Wendy, just setting her paper plate on the card table in the break room, sounded dubious: "Dude, is that such a good plan?" she asked. "What would your sister do if she came up with that idea?"
Dipper smiled at her as he sat down. "What do you think?"
"Well," Wendy admitted as she popped the tab on her soda can, "she'd say, 'All ideas are good ideas!' and go right ahead with it. But, seriously, Dipper, you usually think everything through at least twice. OK, say we go with it. You're not gonna be all hyper-critical, are you?"
"No!" Dipper said. "Why would you even think that? No, it's just—well, Mabel can be kind of self-absorbed, you know? She's already dropping hints about how our wedding is going to go. She wants to decorate the City Hall and release a flight of doves—"
"Oh, no, no, no! Bad idea," Wendy said. "Even if it's Mabel's. Mourning doves wouldn't strike the right tone—you don't mourn at a wedding. Domestic doves wouldn't stand a chance in the wild, because there are too many predators and hunters. The collared doves are invasive, and we shouldn't help them spread. They're the reason Oregon dove season lasts all year round."
"I didn't know that," Dipper said, munching on a fry.
"Yeah. Not mourning doves, though—that season ends in October. Any other species, fair game year-round, man. But releasing a flock of doves wouldn't make me happy, and it'd end badly for the doves. Anyway, we want just a quiet, quick civil marriage. Let her know that."
"You talk her out of it," Dipper said. "Only wait until after Sunday—"
"'Cause she's in Sweater Town until Teek gets home again," Wendy said. She took a bite of her hamburger. They had just twenty minutes for lunch—really took her back to her high-school years, this grab 'n gobble break.
Mabel was indeed in Sweater Town, at least metaphorically, because Teek was off in Atlanta, Georgia, or near it, taking the campus orientation tour and doing all the paperwork for his coming freshman year at the Georgia College of Arts and Film Studies. It wasn't a long separation, though. He would be gone really only today, Friday, and Saturday, and he'd be back by Sunday noon, but even so, Mabel was feeling sorry for herself.
"Not literally in Sweater Town," Dipper said between bites and swallows. "She's not off hiding with her collar pulled up to her forehead, like I've seen her do before. But she did ask me if she could take off work and just hang out in my room today."
"That reminds me, she wants her dinner brought up, too. Your turn for that one, Dip." Wendy said. Dipper had taken Mabel a breakfast tray—scrambled eggs with cheese, home fries, Canadian bacon, and toast, with orange juice, coffee, cream, and sugar. Then a few minutes after noon, Wendy had run her up a tray with a double burger, all the trimmings, fries, a fruit cup, and a Pitt Cola.
Mabel, sprawled on her old bed with Tripper curled up at her feet, had said without enthusiasm, "Thanks, but I'm not really very hungry." However, her breakfast tray was empty, and Wendy picked it up.
"OK, just eat what you want," she told Mabel, suspecting that Mabel would polish off everything. Even bad moods didn't much affect her appetite. "I'll let Tripper go out and run around for a little while."
"Thanks." Mabel put her headphones on and sat on the side of the bed, reaching for the burger. She had the volume set so high that Wendy recognized the song: "Weighty," by Lockdown.
She and Tripper went downstairs, the dog scooted outside to do what dogs did outside—and then probably to be ingratiating, roaming around with big loving puppy eyes and mooching from the tourists—and, humming the tune of the song, Wendy had joined Dipper in the break room for their own lunch. Abuelita was taking cooking duties, and while her hamburgers were tasty, they somehow lacked the special flavor of Teek's. Dipper had put extra mustard on his, unusual for him. "She still moping?" he asked.
"Oh, yeah."
"What's that song you were humming?" Dipper asked. "Seems like I should know it."
Wendy waited until she'd swallowed before replying. "Mabel's got her sad playlist going." She sang softly, "Feelin' the tragedy / Deep in the heart of me / Heavy like gravity, / Girl, it's so weighty."
"Oh, right, Lockdown. Huh. She's listening to break-up songs?"
"Don't think they're all like that. Just sad songs that make her feel down. When she swings away from cheerful, she swings down real low, doesn't she?"
"Oh, yeah, she's moody," Dipper said. They munched their burgers and fries and took sips of the peach-flavored Pitt Cola for a couple of minutes. Then Dipper said, "You know what? I ought to make a Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained video about Mabel."
They finished the burgers and had just about five minutes to spare before their break ended. They used the time to talk over that notion. "It wouldn't be mean," Dipper insisted. "And it wouldn't make fun of Mabel, either. It would just, you know, explain how a girl's moods can shift all of a sudden."
"Oh, man, lame! That's a stereotype," Wendy objected.
With a smile, Dipper countered, "Yeah, but remember I spent a day in Mabel's body. And another one in Pacifica's. I know how mood swings feel, and both of them were swinging like a fence gate in a tornado."
"Ha! Sounds like something McGucket would say," Wendy told him, grinning.
"McGucket's pretty smart, though," Dipper said. "Come on. I'll try to make it gentle and understanding and all that. Something she can look at when she's feeling low, and it'll cheer her up. I'll stress stuff like Mabel's cleverness and her courage, her love for family, the way she outsmarted the Gnomes and the great job she did when she made a memorial portrait of her favorite teacher—"
"Dude, you gotta put in fighting unicorns," Wendy said. "That was epic!"
"And she got the unicorn hair," Dipper said. "And unicorn tears, too!"
"Yeah . . . tears, right," Wendy said. "OK, I guess I've talked myself into it. When do we start?"
"After work today," Dipper said. "We'll have a production meeting and brainstorm a script outline. Mabel will probably come down to her own room after the Shack closes up, and we can use the attic as the studio."
"I hope we don't regret this," Wendy said. "Come on, Dip. Right now, it's time to go back to work."
"Yes, Ms Manager," Dipper said, tossing their trash. "You're the boss!"
"Hey, don't forget that, and we'll always get along fine," Wendy said, but she kissed him to show that she was kidding.
Gideon and Ulva were on the job, and now that the Ramirez kids were old enough not to demand constant attention, Melody took a turn on the snack-bar cash register, so they didn't miss Mabel too much. As Dipper had predicted, when they closed down everything at six and Soos suggested making a run to Low Main (it was at the bottom of the hill on Main Street, and, yes, it was a Chinese place) for dinner, Dipper went up to ask Mabel what she wanted.
She decided to come downstairs. "Thanks for lending me the bedroom," she said. "I was doing some thinking up there. Talking over my feelings with Darryl."
"With who?" Dipper asked. He hadn't suspected that Mabel had invisible friends—still.
"Up there!" She pointed at a rafter. "The mold spot, remember? I named him Darryl. He's a real patient listener!"
"Sorry, man," Dipper said to the mold spot.
"Hey, Soos!" Mabel said as they went downstairs. "Can I ride along? I never know what I want until I look at their menu!"
"Sure, dude!" Soos said. "You can help me, like, carry the bags!"
Abuelita was the only one who didn't much care for Chinese food, but she warmed up some leftover fajitas, rice, and beans for herself. Dipper and Wendy ordered fried rice, veggie spring rolls, and kung pao chicken, spicy, to share.
The run to the restaurant didn't take long, and around seven everyone sat at the table and passed around the white cardboard cartons. Mabel, as always, used chopsticks, though that was a little problematic with her wonton soup. However, they worked fine with garlic shrimp and veggies. Dipper could sort of use chopsticks. Wendy was a little better than he was, and he thought that maybe, after they were married, he'd ask her to teach him. Mabel used them without much style. More like ramrods than eating utensils.
"They put extra peppers in yours, huh?" Mabel asked her brother, whose face had turned pink and sweaty.
"Little spicier than normal," he said. Wendy didn't show any effects, though, so he toughed it out.
After dinner and the quick clean-up, Mabel said she thought she'd hang in her room and maybe call Teek—it would be nearly eleven PM in Georgia, and she was disappointed that he hadn't called her.
"They keep 'em busy at these orientation sessions, Mabes," Wendy said. "And also, he probably thought you'd be at work in the Shack, remember. If you call him, don't drag it out. He'll need some sleep tonight. Set a time tomorrow when he can call you and you can talk."
"That takes away the spontaneity," Mabel said. "But I guess it's the mature thing to do." She went down the hall toward her room already dialing Teek's number.
Wendy and Dipper went upstairs to the attic. "I didn't tell her I called Teek," Wendy said. She'd done that when Mabel and Soos were out getting the food. "He tried to call her around six, but she didn't have her phone on her. I don't think she even noticed he left her a message. Anyhow, I told him she'd probably call him and for him not to let her know that we'd talked. He's super excited about film school, but I warned him not to talk about that yet. He's gonna be asking her how she did."
"Thanks, Wen," Dipper said.
"No problem. Just trying to smooth out the course of true love."
In the attic, he pulled a box from under Mabel's old bed. "I think maybe there's something here—these are clothes that Mabel outgrew and just left here I think back before our fourteenth birthday—yeah, this is it."
He stood up, holding a red turtleneck sweater, hand-knitted and a little faded with years, with an appliqué of a shooting star trailing a rainbow on the front. "Oh, man!" Wendy said. "That's her trademark! She's still got one like this."
"She makes another one about every year," Dipper said. "This is the first one, the one she had when we were twelve." He held it against him and looked down. "Were we ever this small?"
"Oh, yeah, you were a real shrimp at twelve," Wendy said, laughing.
"No wonder you shoved me off the log and said we needed to stay just friends."
"Yeah." She sat on his bed and patted the mattress. He sat beside her. "But that was before all that doomsday crap with Weirdmageddon. I think that's when I started looking at you a little different, you know."
He nodded. Right. He hadn't realized it at the time, but Wendy, still dazed from the rollover of their hijacked car after the jump across the gorge, had heard what Dipper had told Gideon, leader of the Discount Auto Warriors at that moment—"If I've learned anything this summer, it's that you can't force someone to love you. The best you can do is strive to be someone worthy of loving."
"You both did a lot of growing since that summer," Wendy said, touching the sweater. "She got a lot better at knitting, too. This one was always kinda baggy on her."
"Well, it was the first one she made," Dipper said. "I think we'll go with this as the title card. Hang on, I'll set up the camera."
He did, using the tripod, and then after looking up something in his current journal, Dipper wrote a title on a piece of cardboard. "Let's put the sweater over the back of this chair," he told Wendy. They pulled it over, flattening and straightening the shooting-star emblem.
He switched on the camera, though he didn't start the recording, and lined up the shot. "OK, Wendy, I'm gonna hold the title card up. I'll nod when I want you to start recording—"
"Is this the way you and Mabel all shot those 'Guide to' videos?"
"Yep," Dipper said. "And I still have all the outtakes stored on my laptop. I'm going to use some of them in this video."
"What were you reading in your Journal just now?"
"Looking up the last video I did. See, I number them all—the first digit is the season. This is the sixth season—and this is the eighteenth video—so—"
He held up the card reading
DIPPER'S GUIDE TO THE UNEXPLAINED
# 618:
UNDERSTANDING MABEL
"Annnd . . . we're rolling." Dipper nodded, Wendy hit the START button, and they began the project.