July Heat
12: Seeking Advice
(July 2-3, 2017)
It was the best of Saturdays, it was the worst of Saturdays. On the one hand, again the Shack set a record for attendance (Stan attributed that to the Ghost Harassers episode; Wendy thought positive reviews online had helped more). With the A/C on the generator, Soos cranked it up a little more, which used fuel faster but at least let the gift shop level off in the high eighties.
On the other, everybody who worked that day started to get cranky and irritable, and since they couldn't take that out on the customers, they quibbled with each other.
Gideon, for example, complained that Dipper got time off from the cash register to spend an hour on the Mystery Trail, and Dipper crankily retorted that next time Gideon could try it and see how much he liked being outside in hundred-plus weather. Mabel and Teek had a minor spat when Teek was finding it hard to make sandwiches as fast as people ordered them. Wendy snapped at Soos when Soos rushed people through the Museum and into the gift shop, which was already crowded.
Late that afternoon, when the Shack had closed for the evening, Stan gathered them all together and said, "Look, I want you to know I appreciate how hard you're all workin'. I know that the heat and the crowds get you down, but please, that's no reason for turnin' into jerks. That's my job! OK, we got a break 'til Tuesday, which is a half-day 'cause it's Independence day, so you guys rest up. And hope for cooler weather."
Mabel said, "You could offer everybody a little bonus."
"After the way you all acted like jerks! Ha! But to show my heart's in the right place, if you can all get through Tuesday morning makin' nice, then I'll consider throwin' some extra dough your way."
"Not Stan bucks!" Mabel insisted.
"You're walkin' on thin ice, Pumpkin. OK, OK, American money, fine. But not more than twenty-five bucks each!"
"A hundred!" Mabel said.
"What are you, nuts? Thirty-five!"
Dipper said, "Grunkle Stan, you know where this is going."
"Oh, yeah. Fifty and that's it."
"That was my goal!" Mabel said.
"Yeah, I know it was," Stan told her. "But your doofus brother ended the fun."
"Boo!" Wendy said. "Don't pick on my fiancé!"
"It's OK," Dipper said wearily. "I'm used to it."
They were more than tired that evening, and after a sketchy dinner of cold sandwiches—Teek had made extra—they all went home or to their rooms to recuperate. Except for Dipper. The attic remained broiling even with the slight boost in the A/C, so he lingered downstairs. Wendy had gone to shower, and she eventually joined him in the parlor. "Too hot upstairs?" she guessed.
"Yeah, real uncomfortable," Dipper said. "I think I'll sack out on the sofa tonight."
"My room's not too bad."
"Thanks, but I'm exhausted."
She sat next to him and ruffled his hair. "Why do you work so hard?" she asked. "This is just temporary."
"I guess everything is when you think about it," He said. "That sounded more, uh, mordant than I meant. But, you know—I love this place. And Soos is a good boss, and Stan's—uh, family. Anyhow, you work just as hard as I do."
"Yeah," Wendy said. "But that's because I want to prove that I'm not terminally lazy."
"To who?" Dipper asked, laughing. "We all know that."
"To myself," Wendy said. "Guess it's that bit about being worthy of loving." She leaned against him. "Dip, you ever get scared of the future?"
"Not exactly scared," he said, putting his arm around her. "Tense, I guess. But Mabel's the one who gets so worked up over change. Parts of what we'll be up to kind of intimidate me, I guess. But parts—" he kissed her—"are going to be wonderful."
I'll try to make them wonderful, Dipper. Tell me something, straight up: Are you worried about Mabel fooling around with magic?
—Now, that scares me silly. I'm going with her to talk to Great-Uncle Ford and the Hand Witch tomorrow, though. Maybe they can talk her out of trying it. Odds are that it won't work—even in Gravity Falls, magic doesn't, half the time. If not, maybe they can control it so she doesn't flood everybody out if she manages to call rain.
Doubt that she'll bring anything. Dad says the farmers in the Valley have been doing some of the old rituals from past times. They don't work.
—Like what?
Oh, like burning eagle feathers and saying some rhyme. I don't know the words, but something along the lines of "Smoke rise up and tell the clouds it's time to rain." Or catching a frog and letting it get so dry it's all like lethargic before putting it back in water and yelling to the sky that it's doing the same thing to us. Crazy stuff. 'Course there's some people that know about Native American rain dances and junk. I don't think the Oregon tribes ever had anything like that, but they say the tribes down in the Southwest all do.
—How bad is the drought?
Not a record-maker. That was back in the 1930s, but I don't remember the exact years. This is pretty bad, though. Heat makes it worse.
—Wendy? Can I ask you something?
Sure.
—OK, I want to go with Mabel when she talks to Great-Uncle Ford and the Hand Witch tomorrow. For the Hand Witch, we'll have to go down into the Crawl Space. Will you go with us?
Yeah, dude! Somebody's got to rein Mabes in if she goes overboard, and sometimes she'll listen to me if she won't to you. Man, I think you're even more tired than I am. I can almost feel you drooping and drifting off.
—I'm pretty tired. Thanks for agreeing.
No problem. Dip? Uh, if you want—my offer stands. You can sleep in my room.
—Thanks, and you know why I want to, but—like you said, I'm really tired. I'll just sack out here.
A few seconds later, he fell asleep, and Wendy felt the change. Smiling, she gently disengaged his arm and helped him lie down on the sofa. Then she went upstairs, as quietly as she could, and got his pillow. He probably wouldn't need it, but she found a light blanket, too.
Dipper had been right. Even at ten P.M. the attic was stifling. Wendy went down into cooler air and put the pillow under Dipper's head. She left the folded blanket at his feet—and she even tugged off his shoes and socks without waking him. And before going back to her room, she bent down and kissed his cheek and silently wished him pleasant dreams.
Stanford Pines listened to Mabel's proposed rain rituals with a quietly skeptical air. When she finished up and asked "Will they work?" he took a deep breath and tapped his chin with a finger.
"I can't be sure," he said. "As you say, Gravity Falls is conducive to what some would call magic. But consider the ramifications before you act."
"What are they?" Mabel asked.
Ford shrugged. "Well—you're essentially meddling with the natural order of things. Are you familiar with the concept of quantum superposition?"
"Hah!" she said. "Child's play."
"What is it?" Dipper asked her.
"Oh, Dipster, if you gotta ask, you aint' never gonna know!"
"That," he said, "is jazz, not quantum physics."
"OK," she said, giving up. "Explain it to me and dumb it down."
Ford smiled. "Let me just simplify a bit. Theoretically, any physical system can exist in a whole range of states. The classic is Schrödinger's Cat. Schrödinger puts a cat—"
"What's its name?" Mabel asked.
"It's . . . hypothetical," Ford said, blinking.
"Not much of a name. OK, Hypothetical is in a box."
"And the box is sealed."
"Wait, what? Like airtight? What kind of a monster is Schrödinger?"
"It's not a real cat," Dipper assured her. "It's imaginary."
"All right," Ford said. "Now, since the box is soundproof, the cat may be dead or may be alive. There's no way of telling. It's a case of superposition, with both possible states existing at once. Alive and dead represent two possible physical sates of the cat, do you see?"
"But the cat's imaginary. So It can't be either alive or dead," Mabel told him.
"Astute, but beside the point. If we open the box, we can find out if the cat is alive or dead."
"If it's alive, watch out. That cat is gonna be pi-, uh, peeved at you!"
"However, Schrödinger argued that until the box is opened, the cat can reasonably be described as both dead and alive at the same time."
"Zombie cat, huh?" asked Mabel. "Dipper, did you have anything to do with this?"
"No!" Dipper said. "Schrödinger was a physicist. He died more than fifty years ago."
"Is he in a box?" Mabel asked suspiciously. "Because if he is, how do you know?"
"Look," Dipper said, "Grunkle Ford is saying that the imaginary cat in the imaginary box is an example of superposition—state Dead and state Alive at the same time exist as potentials. When you open the box, you cause one potential to become reality—"
"Oh," Mabel said. "So doing rain magic opens the box and maybe not-raining becomes raining?"
"Sort of," Ford said. "However, consider this—if the many-worlds theory is correct, and I personally accept it because I've visited so many of the many worlds, then in causing rain to fall here, you may be depriving another dimension of that same rain."
"What have they ever done for us?" Mabel demanded. "Anyhow, I don't want to steal all their rain, just borrow enough of it to break this heat wave."
"Well—all I can say is that it's theoretically possible. But remember the law of unintended consequences."
"How much time can I do for breaking it?" Mabel asked.
"Well, none—"
"Then it's officially ignored!"
Wendy said, "Mabes, come on. Dr. P. means that if you cause rain, some of the effects are gonna be something you never anticipated. Could be bad, not good."
"And then," Dipper said, "you'd want to do another magic spell to counteract the bad effect, and that one would have unintended consequences, too—"
"OK, OK, I get it," Mabel said. "But I'm gonna shoot for just a day or two of steady rain, all right? No flooding, no Noah's Arky stuff. So any unintended whatevers should be minor."
She further told Ford about her plans to consult the Hand Witch—whom Ford knew—and he made her promise to abide by whatever limitations the Hand Witch recommended. And then Mabel thanked him, and she, Wendy, and Dipper—Teek had opted out for the trip, though he'd agreed to help if Mabel needed assistance with her magic spell—went back uphill to the Shack and out onto the Mystery Trail and into the stinky, disused outhouse.
Stan had dubbed it the Outhouse of Mystery, for the reason that sometimes when you went into it to have a nice private sit-down, time got wonky. You might think you'd spent only ten minutes—and your watch might confirm this—but when you stepped out again, it could be two or three hours later in the rest of the world.
The time-slip effect actually resulted from the outhouse's being one of the two known entrances to the Crawl Space, a huge, irregularly-shaped cavern about fifty to a hundred feet underground that partly underlay the town of Gravity Falls and twisted as far as near the Shack. The Crawl Space was a neutral spot where the more sentient of the Gravity Falls monsters conducted their business. In fact, the Crawl Space was the Marketplace of Mystery, Madness, and Monstrosities.
Humans were not welcome there.
That is, they hadn't been until a beast called the Rumbelow—a sub-species of phoenix—had devastated it some time before. The twins and their friends had helped out then, resulting in a kind of uneasy détente. If humans came down there nowadays, the denizens wouldn't eat them. Probably.
But they would be ignored.
"Cooler down here!" Wendy said once they had performed the ritual and the outhouse had transported them down.
"Not hardly as stinky, either," Mabel agreed. "Come on—it's early, and they're still setting up shop."
Some Gnomes—the friendliest of the underground denizens—were getting ready to open a gemstone-and-jam store, and they helpfully pointed the three to the spot where the Hand Witch had her booth.
They found it, but the Witch wasn't in. Instead of her squat, strange form, a short but handsome middle-aged woman was setting up shelves and laying out watches and rings.
"'Scuse me," Mabel said, and she turned around and smiled. "We're looking for the owner—the Hand Witch."
"I'm the Hand Witch," the woman said.
"Huh?" Mabel tilted her head. "What happened to you? A makeover? Witches are old and ugly!"
The woman glanced around, but no one and no monster was close. "Let me change." She snapped her fingers, dwindled, and became the grotesque Hand Witch, with a green complexion, mismatched eyes, and hands for feet. "There we go, dearie! This here's my business suit, you might call it. Nobody takes a witch seriously unless she's, like you say, mature and plain."
Plain was actually a compliment in her case, but Dipper didn't say anything. Five years earlier, Mabel had hooked the Hand Witch up with her husband, who was not too bright but cheerful and obedient—a big plus—and whose main ambition was to be a house-husband. They were the oddest of couples, but seemed happy. Anyway, the Witch had a soft spot for Mabel.
"Listen," Mabel said, "I want some help, but I don't want to cost you customers."
"Oh, we have a couple of hours until traffic picks up," the Hand Witch said. "What's your problem? Lay it on me and I'll see if I can help."
Mabel explained, and the Witch listened, nodding. "Yep, I get where you're coming from," she said. "The nights have been hot, even up in the mountains. I have to admit, weather magic isn't my specialty—I'm more into body horror—but run your spells past me and I'll tell you which ones I think might just work."
Mabel did, one by one. The Witch nodded when Mabel mentioned tossing the flints—"Oh, yeah, Earth magic, I'm down with that. Here, I'll write down an incantation that might limit it so's you don't call in a monsoon."
Similarly, she liked the water-in-a-pot suggestion. "Water magic, another elemental spell. That one's kinda weak, but it could work. Make sure you stir the water widdershins."
Mabel blinked. "Uh—Graunty Lorena was a widow, but I don't know if I can get a big enough pot for her to stick her legs in—"
Dipper explained that "widdershins" just meant "counterclockwise." Again the Hand Witch wrote down an incantation.
She turned thumbs down on six other possible spells—either they wouldn't work, or they "messed with karma, and you don't want that." And finally, she suggested one other possible spell—"This is a mild one, and any witch starts out by learning weak magic like this one."
By then a few monsters were shopping—and a few of them, Dipper noticed, were going into Skinny Dude's Gym, where monsters could slim down while learning how to grow tentacles at the same time. "Time to go, I think," he said.
He, Wendy, and Mabel threaded through the caverns, waving at a Maul Cop they knew, and passed by the Gnomes again, who hardly noticed them because they were doing a hot business in jams.
Then back to the portal platform, up to the stench of the Mystery Outhouse, and out into the open again. They'd spent three hours underground, but Dipper said, "Just five minutes have passed out here."
"Good," Mabel said. "We can try out these spells before the heat sets in. What are we waiting for? Let's get our ingredients and then go for it!"
Wendy glanced at Dipper. "You ready for this, man?"
"I feel like a cat in a box," Dipper said. "But let's do it."