Claire and Douxie answered more of their questions, and even though there were definitely things they weren't saying, Wirt learned more about trolls than he'd ever thought possible. To be fair, that was mostly because—despite seeing Jim in his distinctly not human form—Wirt still thought of trolls as those creepy little plastic dolls with brightly coloured hair that his mom had had in a box in the attic. (He'd had the misfortune of finding said box when scavenging for a Halloween costume once.) He'd never thought of trolls as something that could be real even after he'd been to the Unknown, so he never would've considered that they'd have multiple species and fight wars and just try to survive without being discovered by humans.

Not that that had gone too well for them, but whatever. He was pretty sure it was still impossible to change the past. Hopefully. At least, the whole time travel thing hadn't sounded like they'd really changed anything, just that they'd been there, so….

It was too bad that Greg wasn't here, really. He'd love this. Not as much as he'd love to meet the Pines twins, though. Maybe Wirt could figure out how to introduce them? He'd have to talk to Wendy later. Greg would jump at the chance to have a pen pal and actually write physical letters to someone, and he'd want to learn as much as he could about magic and the magical creatures in this world. If Dipper or Mabel could share some diagrams that Greg could easily copy, sending them on paper would be the easiest.

Well, it would be the easiest in that it would distinctly reduce the possibility of their parents finding out that Greg was jumping headfirst into something that might, to those not in the know, look rather…worrisome.

There was a reason Greg, who had talked about the Unknown freely, was praised for his active imagination.

As such, there was a reason Wirt, who had spoken of it to someone who wasn't Greg exactly once before now, was not.

In hindsight, he might have overcompensated.

He certainly felt like he was swinging too far in the other direction now, but his efforts to try to slow himself and find some middle ground weren't amounting to much.

He still stood by his earlier words, though.

He couldn't fight a war, and that was pretty much what it sounded like Toby and Claire and the others were doing.

Wendy had already volunteered her services. She'd promised to touch base with Dipper and get all the information she could from him, and she said she planned to hit up the other set of Mystery Twins, whoever they were, because they might even know about this fight already. (Claire had looked more skeptical about that remark than Douxie, but both had let it slide.)

Wendy looked comfortable.

As far as Wirt could tell, she wasn't freaking out about all of this at all. Then again, if she'd faced an apocalypse (was it any better to think of it as an apocalypse than the apocalypse?) and come out even more determined to be prepared for the next one, then she'd been ready for this for years. Douxie and Claire hadn't turned her down, of course. They had been able to see that she was competent even before she started comparing notes about magic.

He hadn't even known she'd known anything about magic.

He hadn't really taken Dipper and Mabel seriously when they'd been here, and now he wished he had a chance to do that night over again. He needed to pick their brains. Dipper had known all the technical stuff, but Mabel had been full of crazy ideas and plans that shouldn't work but that Wirt now suspected might've been real examples of things that had.

He wanted to survive whatever he was signing up for, and he suspected that his chances of doing so would be much higher if he could do a bit of both, combining technical skills with inventiveness. They already had a couple of tech experts, thankfully, so he didn't need to figure out how to fill that role, but while he'd initially started to think he might be able to handle research, he was quickly realizing that was not going to be the case.

I wasn't that he couldn't read through something and pick out the important bits. That was a skill he had. The problem was that he only had that skill when he had some background knowledge in whatever he was reading about, and it was becoming increasingly evident that Wendy—the one he'd assumed would be taken on as another fighter in a heartbeat—knew far more than he did. Heck, Wirt would put money on the fact that Dipper would happily consult for them if they were willing to tell more people their secrets. Even if he didn't know enough to chip in that way, he'd be able to read something and pick out the important bits.

Unlike Wirt.

He wasn't even going to pretend he could strategize as well as Jazz, either. He was pretty sure she was only scarily good at guessing his thoughts because she knew him so well, but while he was a lot more organized than Greg, she definitely had him beat in that department, too.

He couldn't fight. He couldn't do research. He couldn't strategize or plan or anticipate what might happen next.

How far would being somewhat recently re-certified in First Aid get him? He'd done a course last year. In theory, he could do more than just buy some painkillers. If he brushed up on it and similar things, maybe he could hold his own with Wendy and Jazz when it came to patching people up. Obviously, nothing he did would hold a candle to actual magic, but—

"Wirt!"

He started, nearly falling off his desk in the process, and looked at Wendy, who was leaning forward to get a clear line of sight on him from her place beside Jazz on Toby's bed. "What?"

"I asked if you needed more time to process this," Jazz said.

"Three times," Wendy added.

"You're zoning out," Claire said, "and I don't have to know you well to see it."

"You can still walk away from all of this," Douxie put in. "You don't have to help. You don't have to be involved at all."

"That's not—"

"You wouldn't even need to remember any of this."

"Wait, what?" Was he saying what Wirt thought he was saying?

Claire shifted on the bed, causing it to creak the way it always did when Wirt slept too close to the one side. "Doesn't playing around with memories get messy?" she murmured.

"There would be consequences to repeated wiping," Wendy said with a shrug, as if the conversation weren't about removing all his memories of this, "and if it happens often enough, those consequences aren't exactly mild, but that's not what we're talking about here."

Wirt didn't ask.

He didn't want to know.

"I can keep a secret," he said. He'd been through this before, or at least needing to keep a secret this big before, and he'd met Douxie, what, half an hour ago? That was not enough time for Douxie to accurately judge him when it came to something like this. Wirt looked over at Wendy and Jazz. "You guys know I can keep a secret. I think the fact that I didn't tell you about the Unknown for so long should prove that."

"You think being able to keep something a secret from your friends for a few months is all I'm talking about?"

Wirt shot Douxie an annoyed glance. "It's been five years since I was there!"

"You know that isn't a long time," Douxie said, and there was something in his voice that had Wirt shudder in a failed effort to shake off a sudden chill.

"You don't have to say that like you want me to bail. Toby's my friend. Maybe I wouldn't be the best help, but I could still help."

"By staying out of this?"

Why did he keep doing that? "No! By supporting him! Somehow. Even if I'm just a lookout or a messenger boy or something."

Douxie smiled. "Good."

Wirt, whose mouth had opened the moment he'd seen Douxie open his, blinked and stared. "What?"

"I wanted to make sure you were committed to this. It's not something you should take on lightly. I know all about helping people in the periphery. I've done it for centuries. I think you've got a knack for blending into the background, and that'll help you."

Hold up.

Centuries?

As in, the whole crack about Camelot wasn't related to time travel or ghosts? Or, at least, not only related to that? Sure, magic might explain the whole time travel thing, but did that mean the guy sitting casually on Wirt's bed was some kind of immortal? Douxie looked like he was in his early twenties at most.

Would it be wishful thinking to hope that he was merely taking a golden opportunity to mess with Wirt more in light of all the other crazy stuff he'd found out tonight?

Claire didn't look surprised by the comment.

She might be in on it, but…. Probably not. They wouldn't have known when Wirt was coming back or what decision he'd made. They wouldn't have had reason to get their stories straight on something like this. And he was pretty sure that that was genuine surprise on Wendy's face, and that almost never happened.

So centuries, then.

Cool.

He could deal with this.

Did that mean Merlin was still around and hadn't just been in some enchanted sleep all this time or something? If Douxie had been his apprentice? Was it not his magic that granted Douxie his long life, his youth? It had to be. If the Fountain of Youth was real—

Wirt didn't want to think about it.

He wouldn't want to live that long.

It was a moot point, anyway. It wasn't like he could learn how to do magic. He'd had enough trouble trying to learn Spanish as a kid, let alone whatever kind of language spells were in. Assuming they were spoken spells and not rituals. Wendy's knowledge was definitely more along the lines of a spell you recited, and Douxie had never corrected her, but Wirt had definitely gotten the impression that a bunch of stuff was nonverbal or at least didn't require speaking aloud, which meant there had to be something else going on somewhere.

Then again, if it was magic, it didn't have to be logical.

Which would make it even worse for him to try to figure out.

Douxie was right. Blending in was something Wirt would be much better at, mostly because he'd been attempting it for most of his life. He might not have been able to fake being normal well enough to fool Toby or Wendy or Jazz, but no one else had ever called him on it.

Leaving Douxie's apparent age for another time, Wirt asked, "How would that work, though? If you guys hang out with trolls and stuff? I wouldn't blend in with them." He bit his lip, remembered what Claire had said earlier, and ventured, "Unless I pretend to be a changeling?"

She shook her head. "The changelings are stuck in their troll forms. If someone has gone rogue and started kidnapping kids and taking them into some new nursery in the Darklands or wherever they can find a place that we don't have steady intel on, Strickler or Nomura would've heard about it through their channels. They would've told us even if they kept it from Jim's mom."

Wirt blinked. Jim's mom? As in, an actual adult? (Okay, fine, they were all adults, but he didn't feel like he knew what he was doing enough to really want to count himself among the adults who had everything figured out. He might not be a kid, but he was still very firmly a student in more than just the whole 'attending college' sense.) He hadn't really thought that they might have some help from other people. Other normal people. (From how Wendy talked about the other set of Mystery Twins, they wouldn't fit anyone's definition of normal and very likely had experienced something like he had at one point. He might have been able to figure out what from her stories if she'd given their names, but that hadn't happened yet.)

Claire's comment also made him realize that he hadn't thought about what Jim's parents might say to the fact that their son clearly no longer looked like their son, even if he was still the same person he'd always been on the inside.

At least, if Jim's mom was in the picture, that meant she'd accepted all of this—her son very much included.

That was probably the most comforting thing he'd learned since this whole thing began.

"I'm not talking about blending in with trolls, anyway. I'm talking about blending in with everyone else. Krel's tech is more reliable than it used to be, so he has more freedom these days, but Zoey's still tied down to her job because we can't afford to lose that connection. Having another person to help out when we're in a pinch wouldn't be a bad thing."

"And I can take you wherever we need you with my staff," Claire added. "We haven't figured out why, but it seems to be harder to track than shadow portals, and we're willing to take any edge we can get."

"Right," Wirt said, because doing anything other than acknowledging Claire's words and moving on would wind up with them on a tangent and him being even more confused, "and you think I'd be useful blending in with everyone else and doing what, exactly?"

"I think it would be beneficial to find other people like us."

Claire didn't look surprised by those words, exactly, but she did glance at Douxie as if she wasn't sure she'd heard him right. Wendy and Jazz had obviously decided to sit back and watch the show, so he wasn't going to get any help from them in this. Not that he was sure he needed help. He still didn't understand what he was signing up for. "Meaning?"

"Meaning there's nothing wrong with having multiple allies you can call on when you need it, assuming you're willing to help them out in turn."

Claire's expression melted from consideration to realization. "That's why you didn't mind that Toby decided to loop them all in."

Douxie shrugged. "Toby is a good judge of character."

"Wait, then why did you keep trying to get me to back out instead of telling me all of this when I said I wanted to help?"

Douxie didn't flinch, even though Wirt had tried to put some righteous indignation behind those words. "Because from everything Toby has told me about you, you want to be normal. And most normal people don't want to get involved in stuff like this. It's dangerous. It's messy. There's no clear end in sight. You're standing at the beginning of something, not the end of it. Finding out about all of this is just the start, and I can guarantee that this isn't the easier path."

Wirt took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. Immediately snapping out a retort wouldn't exactly help him right now. "I'm not walking into this blind, and I'm not walking into it alone. I know the importance of having someone to watch your back or to…to just be there for you. I don't know if I would have made it back from the Unknown if it weren't for my brother. And maybe me saying I want to help you is the start of something, but it's not the start of something right now. I can study up a bit on what kind of things to look for first."

"I'll give you Dipper's phone number," Wendy said before Douxie could reply. "We don't have to tell him why right now if you two want to meet him and Mabel in person first."

"No, I remember Toby talking about them," Claire said. She glanced at Douxie. "If we're building a list of potential allies, those two should be on the list."

"It might be worth considering Danny's best friends, too," Jazz said. "Sam, Tucker, and Valerie are all primarily familiar with ghosts, but we've dealt with the ghosts of magical creatures. It won't be a surprise to them to find out that there's more than just ghosts in this world."

"There you go, Wirt," Claire said. "More people to talk to. You can see if you can find any commonalities that might help you spot others like us."

Wirt briefly wondered how he'd wound up with the job that would require being extra social and meeting tons of strangers. He really hadn't realized he'd walked into this one. Douxie was better at trapping people that way than even Jazz.

Then again, if everyone else was the pool of potential people for this job, he was probably the one who could most easily pass for normal. The others might pass at first glance, but once you got to know them, not so much. But him?

He had years of practice.

Besides, he might get lucky. There was a chance, slim though it was, that anyone he talked to would be too steeped in weirdness to notice the inevitable awkwardness, so the fact that he wasn't exactly the most charismatic person in the world shouldn't make a difference. Hopefully.

"So, what do you say?"

They were all staring at him. Wirt swallowed. "Sounds better than getting shot at it?" It wasn't like he could say no immediately after offering to help when he had no counterproposal.

Well, he could, but it wouldn't exactly help his case when it came to insisting that he really did want to help Toby.

It wasn't like talking to people was outside of his skillset, and he'd get more polished at some sort of pitch with practice, even though he currently had no idea how he was supposed to start. Asking if people believed in ghosts, maybe? That didn't seem too out there. It might give him a chance to test the waters.

Yeah.

Yeah, that might be plan.

It was a starting point, at least, and that was the most Wirt could ask for at this point.

The others were chuckling and agreeing with him, and maybe that's why none of them freaked out when the world suddenly tore open like someone ripping through a flimsy backdrop.

Reality folded, the edges curling over to reveal bright green, and Wirt couldn't help but shriek as his mind registered giant claws piercing through what should be ordinary air, claws that were bigger than his head—

Then Toby tumbled through the gap, rolling easily back to his feet. Danny followed, spinning around almost immediately to call out, "Dankon, Wulf!"

"Thanks!" Toby added with a wave as Danny picked up the edges of reality and smoothed them back together. He did it easily enough, as if that were a normal, simple thing to do, and once it fit back together, the green light that had been shining through vanished altogether.

A sharp exhale caught their attention, and Wirt realized he wasn't, in fact, the only one who had been alarmed. Wendy was on her feet and holding the hatchet she'd given them after he'd moved in. The fact that she'd moved to retrieve it and no one had noticed to stop her told him she was much better at all of this than she'd ever let on in her apocalypse prep lessons.

"Remind me not to open up a portal around you," Claire joked as Wendy set the hatchet down on the floor.

"I haven't had the best experience with things that come out of a tear in reality."

It wasn't an apology, Wirt noticed, but maybe the others didn't expect her to apologize. She hadn't actually attacked anyone.

Then again, maybe the others had more pressing things to worry about than Wendy.

"How's Jim?" Toby had flopped down next to Claire, which apparently meant questioning him was now fair game. "Is he going to be okay?"

"I think so," Toby said. "Danny's friends recognized him for what he was immediately, anyway, so that's a good sign."

"Wait, they did?" That was Jazz. "How?"

Danny rubbed the back of his neck and transformed back to the boy Wirt had first met in a flash of light. "You know how I always said Frostbite and the others are, like, ghost yetis?"

"Yeah?"

"Apparently, the truth is a little closer to mountain troll. Same idea, though. Point is, Frostbite knew Jim was the Trollhunter before Toby even said anything, and Toby barely had to explain what had happened before Frostbite understood it. I still don't entirely get it, but he does, and that's the important bit. Anyway, they're helping him."

"What about my staff?"

Right. Toby wasn't holding it anymore. Wirt had been too distracted by the fact that there had been a gaping hole in reality in the middle of his dorm room thirty seconds ago to realize that until Claire had pointed it out.

"Jim's amulet wasn't the only thing Frostbite recognized," Toby said quietly. "He asked to study it to be sure, but he thinks it's an artifact of theirs thought long lost. I wasn't going to say no, especially after Danny said he had a friend who could help us get back."

"The thing Zoey found in a pawn shop is from another reality entirely?" Claire asked incredulously, but then she caught sight of Douxie's face. "What?"

"I've found a lot of useful things in pawn shops. That hardly means anything. It's why we check them as often as we do in the first place."

She sighed, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against the wall. "I know. I'm not going to argue. It was just nice to have another method besides the shadow portals in case someone manages to take me out completely. Not being tracked so easily was nice, too."

"If you don't mind mixing magics, I can see if Dipper has come across anything to help with that," Wendy offered. She glanced at Jazz. "Unless you two know anything?"

"Not about that," Jazz said as Danny shook his head.

"I can ask around, though, in case Dipper doesn't come up with anything," added Danny. "In the meantime, Wulf offered to come get us when it's time to go back."

From the sounds of it, Wulf would have as little trouble finding them as whoever was after Claire, Toby, Douxie, and Jim would once they started using magic more freely.

Which should be now, since they'd already used it.

Was staying here safe? He didn't like the idea of not being able to go somewhere he knew was safe. It reminded him too much of the Unknown, where home and all the safety it provided had started to seem like an impossible dream.

He'd been so close to slipping away—

Wirt shuddered.

If he hadn't been with Greg, he wasn't sure he would have made it out of there. Greg had grounded him, been the optimist Wirt had very much needed, and…and he'd given Wirt someone to protect. Wirt hadn't always done a great job of it, but he'd tried.

He might not do a great job of protecting his friends, either, but he'd try.

"Hey. How are you holding up?"

Wirt started; he hadn't noticed Toby move, but now Toby was standing only a couple feet in front of him. "I'm fine," he said automatically, though even as he said it, he realized that everyone in the room was looking at him and not a single one of them appeared convinced by that. "Really. I'm fine." He wasn't in another dimension getting some kind of specialized medical care, no one was chasing him—yet—and he wasn't lost somewhere with no feasible way home.

He was fine.

Was he okay with all this?

He tried to tell himself he was.

But that was his problem, not theirs. They'd all been very accommodating. If he was going to fall apart again, he didn't have to do it in front of them.

He was fine.

Toby hummed a note that clearly meant he wasn't convinced. Instead of pressing the point, he asked the room at large, "Who's hungry?"

Wirt blinked.

"Who wouldn't be hungry?" Danny said. "Good call, we should eat. Someone who's not Jazz, where's somewhere good?"

"Hey!"

"I can pick something up if you give me money," Danny said. He rolled his eyes at his sister's continued glare. "C'mon, you know how low our standards are."

"Tell me about it," Wendy muttered, not flinching away as Jazz elbowed her. "Toby should recommend the place."

"Nothing beats Jimbo's cooking," Toby said, "but there is a place that can get pretty close. Wendy, Jazz, you okay if we head to your place for supper? You guys actually have a table."

It was all a distraction. Even as the others hashed out the details around him, Wirt knew Toby's move for exactly what it was. He didn't doubt that Toby was hungry—Toby was always hungry—but that wasn't why he'd thrown out the idea of getting food.

He'd pulled something similar whenever Wirt had been getting overwhelmed with assignments and tests and deadlines and everything else too many times for Wirt to pretend Toby's question had been remotely selfish.

"Thanks," Wirt murmured after the others had scattered—Wendy with Danny, armed with Toby's directions, and Jazz with Claire and Douxie, heading back to her place. Wirt wasn't sure if they'd split up the way they had because Danny had been trying to ditch his sister or because Wendy wanted to grill him about that other dimension. "I think I needed that."

Toby flashed him a grin. "What are friends for?"