8: Magic, Schmagic
(June 27-29)
From Tuesday to Thursday that week, the heat grew steadily more intense. The highs not only hit one hundred degrees but left it behind, hovering around 102 on both Tuesday and Wednesday and then 104 by Friday—and the peak heat lasted not just an hour, but three or four.
Dipper thought, almost hoped, that the blistering heat wave would thin the tide of tourists but it did not appear to daunt anyone. As usual, the gift shop bore the brunt—first, it was on the sunnier side of the Shack to begin with, and second, Soos had underestimated the amount of cooling it would get from the central air conditioning unit.
"I Soosed up my numbers," he said on Tuesday evening at dinner. "I'm saving up enough money so next spring I can add a couple of ducts and also replace the unit with a bigger capacity or some junk. Coming out of the Museum and into the shop was like walking into a sauna!"
"But you're losing weight," Mabel, who always looked on the bright side, chirped. That was true—at the end of a hot day, Soos weighed about five pounds less than he had at the beginning.
"It's water weight, though," Wendy pointed out. "All that sweating."
"I'll, like, try to keep it off, though," Soos said, reaching for the mashed potatoes.
Sheila had dropped in for dinner—with Stan out of town, she was on her own, and Melody had thoughtfully called and invited her. "Where's Grunkle Stan off to?" Dipper asked her.
"Oh, he's up in Canada," Sheila said. "There's a casino up in British Columbia somewhere that doesn't have his picture taped to the security-room monitors."
"Do they really do that?" Mabel asked.
"I'm not sure," Sheila admitted. "He claims he's banned from three or four casinos, but he goes to Vegas at least once every three months, and when he can, we go to Atlantic City and even to some in Europe. I don't think he's actually ever been to a Canadian one, but before he left, he told me his photo wouldn't be up in this one."
"Sounds like a Stan joke," Wendy said.
"I don't get it," Mabel said, frowning. "Why would a casino turn away a perfectly good customer just 'cause he wins?"
"Casinos aren't in business to lose money," Dipper told her. "And Grunkle Stan's freakishly lucky."
"Well, he doesn't always win," Sheila said, smiling.
Wendy grinned. "No, but he knows how to walk the line—he loses enough so his wins seem random, but he somehow always comes out ahead."
"That's true," Sheila agreed. "Usually I like to go with him just to watch. He says I'm a good-luck charm. I don't gamble myself—well, the slots, but I take about fifty dollars in quarters and that's my limit. Stan's fun to be around when he plays cards, though, but this time he said it was a special trip, more business than pleasure, and so I stayed behind."
"Where's he gone?" Mabel asked. "I know you said British Columbia, but—"
"It's not far north of Vancouver," Sheila said. "It's a hotel and casino on—" she frowned. "Some river. Wait a minute, I'll remember it. Anyway, he called this afternoon and said the trip was smooth, he had a good hotel room, and that the temperature out on his balcony was about seventy."
"Seventy! He really is lucky," Dipper said. In the gift shop, it had been over eighty-five, and that was indoors, with the AC running.
"I wish he could send some cool air our way," Mabel said, and immediately clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oops—are we sure the genie's gone?"
"Stawamus!" Sheila said. "That's the river. The casino's mostly owned by the—how do the Canadians put it? The First Nations?"
"Oh, dawg!" Soos said. "It's an Indian casino!"
"In Canada, they're not Indians. They're First Nations," Dipper said.
"Got it," Soos said. "I'll make, like, a mental note."
That whole day and well into the evening, the heat—muggy since the thunderstorm—lay heavy on the Valley, and that night even Mabel didn't want to go out and do anything. "I'm gonna lie on my bed with a fan on me," she said. "And Tripper will have to stay down at the foot and not touch me. He's a hot dog!"
Tripper sniffed but didn't reply, as always.
"If a low pressure system moved through, slowly," said Wendy, "that would cool things off. Bring some rain, too—we're under the average for the year, pretty dry winter and spring, and the farmers could use it."
"If the genie is listening," said Mabel, "I change my wish to a low pressure system and three or four days of rain. Mabel, over and out!"
Up in his room, Dipper considered going down to the lab to sleep. The attic was a space he loved, but—it was at the top of the stairs, and warm air rose. If the downstairs was a comfortable 75 degrees, the attic bedroom would be about 82 to 83, bearable but decidedly warm.
Of course it had been worse back in 2012, when he and Mabel had shared the room and there was no AC at all, but somehow by opening the window they had toughed it out. Though he did remember one sweltering evening when he had left his bed to sleep in the bathtub, and Mabel spent the night on the sofa on the back porch.
And it was true that the lab, especially the third level, was always cool because it was underground and insulated. However, that really was Ford's territory, and Ford tended to worry about their fooling with his equipment, so . . . with a small table fan whirring and oscillating on the table he used as a desk, Dipper read another few chapters in the Ticonderoga book, pondered his great-uncle's theory that magic was really just a tangling up of one reality with another, and wondered if a quantum entanglement of Gravity Falls with, say, an ice world would possibly cool things off.
Nah, with typical Pines luck, it probably would only pull through a pissed-off Wampa. Better not try, he decided.
Magic, or dimension-weaving, or whatever, well, if it worked at all, was a rich source of unintended consequences. Even Grunkle Stan's temporary possession of a pair of magic money pants would probably backfire in some spectacular way. It just might sour his run of good luck. Or Genie money might turn out to be like the fairy gold from the legends—real enough by moonlight, but it turned to yellow leaves at dawn.
He tried to force himself to concentrate on the complex mathematics in the book that showed the theoretical possibility of one dimension's influencing another. He could only follow the math to a point, and then it became indecipherable symbols.
As he struggled to understand just how things worked—no small feat in Gravity Falls, where nothing worked the way he expected, anyhow—Dipper started making a mental list of questions for Ford. He closed his eyes to rest them and fell asleep that way, the book open on his chest.
At the same time, down in her bedroom, Mabel sat propped up in bed, two pillows behind her, a floor fan sending a breeze over her, and surfed the Internet on her tablet. Coincidentally, or it just might be that twin brains tended to think alike, she was hitting web sites that discussed magic. Weather magic, to be precise.
"If there's just a safe way of doing it," she told Tripper, who'd curled up into a bagel shape—the fan blew right across him, and since he apparently didn't mind hot weather nearly as much as his humans did, he turned his nose and tail away from the air flow. "What do you think? Worth a shot?"
Tripper stared at her with his big brown eyes and tilted his head to the right, then straightened it a little. He flicked his ears. Mabel could read his body language, or so she claimed, and she interpreted that as a doggy shrug: "Maybe yes, maybe no, who knows?"
"There's like a million different ways here," she said. "Take five flints and throw them over your shoulder behind you, but you got to be facing east. What's a flint, anyway? Let's see . . . huh. Chert. OK, so what's chert? Mm . . . a hard gray rock containing flint. That's a lot of help. Flint, flint . . . hard gray rock . . . produces sparks when struck against iron or steel . . . arrowheads and spear points made from this rock. So—do I throw rocks or arrowheads? Magic isn't specific enough."
"Werf?" asked Tripper.
"No, there's lots of other spells. This one, you have to have a wand. I guess I could use one of the fake ones we sell in the Shack, but then we'd get what, fake rain?"
Tripper yawned.
"This one looks easy. What's henbane? I wonder if there's any in the pantry. Hm. This one just requires a bowl of water. You could do that one."
Like Dipper, she eventually grew sleepy and dropped off, the tablet on her chest. That night she dreamed of the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of the old Fantasia movie, which she'd watched with Dipper when they were about six. If dreams could be warnings, that one might have been trying to tell her "Don't mess around with things you don't understand."
If so, what difference would it make? Heck, if people didn't mess around with things they don't understand, boys and girls wouldn't fall in love and get married, and then where would we be? Probably nowhere.
She woke up on Wednesday morning as Dipper came down the stairs. He wasn't stamping, but she could hear him coming down, and then she heard a murmur of voices as he and Wendy went out onto the lawn to do their stretching before their daily run.
Tripper whined.
"OK," she said, getting out of bed. She was wearing only her faded sleep shirt, short on her now, so she tugged on a pair of shorts. Tripper was doing his doggy potty-dance at the door. "I'm coming, I'm coming," she said. She padded barefoot to the side porch. "Do I need a baggie?" she asked. "Do you have to do Number One or Number Two?"
Tripper barked three times.
"Oh, Number Three. Let me grab a bag, then."
She did, he ran out and soon made himself comfortable, and she picked up after him. Dawn was coming on, with the eastern sky brightly pink, but the sun wasn't showing. Tripper heard Wendy and Dipper talking and ran around to the lawn to say good morning, and Mabel followed.
"You guys are sweating already," she said.
It was true. Both their faces glistened, and Wendy had tied her hair back into a giant ponytail—very unusual for her.
"It's hot out already," Dipper said. They were doing knee bends.
That was true. The air felt muggy, and inhaling it was like trying to breathe damp cotton. "What's the temperature?" she asked.
"'Bout seventy-five already," Wendy said. "And the sun's not all the way up yet."
"Going to hit at least 102 by two o'clock," Dipper said. "And the humidity's way up, about eighty per cent."
"Then it ought to rain."
"Doesn't work that way," Wendy said.
"Then they should change it. Hey, Dip, remember that time when Mom and Dad took us to Disney World?"
"Oh, yeah," Dipper said. They had switched to side stretches.
"This is how Orlando felt," Mabel said. "It isn't fair. We're way north of them!"
"This will break in a few days," Dipper said.
"Yeah, or I will. What does that do? Looks like you're trying to reach something on a high shelf."
"Helps loosen up our spines," Wendy said. To Dipper, she added, "You warmed up?"
"How could he not be?" Mabel asked. "I'm sweating, and all I'm doing is watching you!"
Tripper must have felt the same way. He started panting.
"Let's go in where it's cool," Mabel told him as Dipper and Wendy jogged off toward the Mystery Trail. Inside, Tripper drank water for about half a minute. Mabel knocked back some orange juice. Then she said, "Ugh, I'm sticky. I'm gonna take a shower and then I'll feed you. I don't want a hot breakfast today, either. Not even coffee. So cereal and OJ it is!"
Tripper looked meaningfully at his food bowl.
"Nuh-uh," Mabel said. "You eat when I eat, remember. That way you won't be looking at me with sad eyes wanting Oaty Ohs."
She took a tepid shower—it felt cool to her—and sighed. "I swear, if this heat doesn't ease off by the weekend—I'm going to try one of those darn weather spells!"
Being in the shower, it was a private observation. And being Mabel, and anticipating logical reasons from her brother about why that wasn't one of her better ideas, she decided to keep it private.