Wendy Corduroy was having a bad day. Then again, the last couple weeks hadn't been that great either. Dumping Robbie may have caused more harm than good. The boy was hopelessly enamored with the redhead, and he wasn't willing to abandon their relationship as readily as she. Day after day, he pulled off inane, cliched attempts at reclaiming her interest and, frankly, it was getting old.
Mountains of chicken-scratch, plagiarized love poems in her mailbox. Drunken calls in the middle of the night, begging for forgiveness. Confessions of love spray-painted on the water tower for all the town to see and laugh at. Holding a boombox over his head outside the Mystery Shack, blaring his tone-deaf music for disinterested tourists. It never seemed to end. Her father chased him away from their house, and Stan forbade him on his property, yet the greasy-haired teenager consistently found new bridges to cross and promptly burned them in his wake.
Worst of all were the texts. It had gotten so bad, Wendy was considering a new phone number. Her cell was her one reprieve from boredom during her working hours, and Robbie had managed to ruin that as well. His timing was uncanny; in fact, she worried he was spying on her. She couldn't so much as flip open the phone without a new message confronting her at that very instant, vying for any scrap of attention so he could plead his unwinnable case.
Wendy sighed and snapped her phone shut at the latest assault, then shoved it in her back pocket. Leaning on the counter in front of her, she lazily eyed the empty gift shop and wondered if her absence would even be noticed. Stan had just come back from his final tour of the day. He'd retreated to his office to count the cash he'd raked in. The last few straggler tourists had abandoned the Shack and gone on their merry way. The likelihood that anyone would come in, much less buy anything, was infinitesimal. And she should know; this had been the daily routine all Summer.
The girl smiled at the thought of leaving. Just walking right out the door. Ditching the Shack before closing time. Meeting up with her friends before the sun got too low. Her thumb twitched, antsy to text someone, anyone to come over—to tell them she got off work early. That she was finally free.
On cue, her phone buzzed. Her friends beckoned! The universe had heard her plight and spoken: dump work! Go, and enjoy your Summer!
She excitedly flipped open the phone, only to be met with Robbie's name on its screen yet again.
"How does he keep doing that," she growled.
She threw the phone at the far wall, where it hit a hanging shirt and slid to the floor with a dissatisfying thud. Part of her had hoped for the device to shatter to pieces in a cathartic show of her frustration. But more so, she was grateful she didn't have to buy a new one.
She sighed. "When is he gonna give up, already?"
An overwhelming sense of unease consumed her. Something was wrong.
She noticed the lack of sound first; the ambient noise of the forest outside faded into oblivion. And color soon followed. The room, its walls, the shelves, and the hundreds of trinkets that adorned them—their appearance melted into monochrome homogeneity, and the boundary between color and grayscale swept rapidly nearer from all sides until it ultimately converged at her feet. Wendy leapt onto the counter before it coalesced at the spot where she had been standing, missing its grasp by a fraction of a second.
The absurdity of the moment caught up with her, and her breath became haggard. She examined herself and confirmed that she did, in fact, retain her color. She sighed, then tentatively tapped at the floor below with the tip of her foot. Nothing happened. She eased the sole of her boot back onto the floorboard and, convinced that she wouldn't go gray with the rest of her surroundings, stood up as she had previously.
She rapped her knuckles on the counter she'd just dismounted. Still solid. She stomped a foot. The floor was solid too. The shelves as well. And the wall. The room seemed to remain intact around her, despite its new look. Wendy pressed her face to the window and examined the outdoors. It was as colorless as the interior of the shack. But, disturbingly, time had come to a standstill. Birds hung in the air like clouds, and tree branches remained bent in a frozen breeze. But everything was still here, and no threats were present. Her fear faded into confusion. She wasn't in any immediate danger; this was yet another of Gravity Fall's inexplicable oddities. With that realization, one name came to mind.
Dipper. He'd know what to do. He'd know how to fix this.
With a newfound endurance, she turned on her heel, prepared to run up to the twins' room in search of the boy—and came face to face with none other than Bill Cipher.