It was a tight squeeze, getting the massive coach bus down the windy forest road that led to the Mystery Shack. But all obsessions with conspiracy aside, Cooper was quite the talented bus driver and navigated the narrow clearance with ease. Once the towering roof of the tourist trap was in sight, he pulled the bus off towards the edge of the plowed clearing that functioned as the parking lot and slowed to a stop.
As the door hissed open, Stan was the first to disembark, followed closely by Cooper, with Ford taking up the rear. Stan looked back momentarily, hoping to make eye contact with his twin and get some reassurance that everything was still going according to his plan. But Ford's gaze remained focused on the back of Cooper's head, only occasionally looking down to glance at his handheld monitor. To keep up appearances, Stan took the opportunity instead to flash a conniving grin at Cooper, who smiled enthusiastically in return. 'I'm with ya, Sixer,' he thought. 'I just hope you know what you're doing.'
Approaching the front door, Stan reached out to knock. But before he could, the door had already opened, with a grinning Soos standing on the other side of the threshold. "Mr. Pines! Ford! And a bus driver, for some reason! So glad you dudes could make it." Soos immediately stood aside, welcoming the party into the shack.
Stan glanced around the gift shop and peered through an open door into the gallery room. Inside he could see various tables laid out with snack foods and fizzy drinks, the winter-themed decorations, and a DJ booth that was already set up for the night. A few teenagers milled around the space, clearly early arrivals to the party about to begin. 'Hopefully, we can clear this up before too many people are put in harm's way,' he thought.
"Stanley, go ahead and activate the vending machine," instructed Ford. "There's no sense in beating around the bush."
Reluctantly, Stan obeyed. Walking over to the vending machine, he typed a passcode into the keypad. With little delay, the machine slid aside to reveal the entrance to Ford's old lab underneath the Mystery Shack. Despite the loud, sudden appearance of a futuristic doorway, the early arrival party guests in the gallery were too engrossed in their own conversations to notice anything had happened.
Soos laughed to himself. "Wow, I forgot about that one. You dudes gotta get me the password so I can make the lab part of my tours." Stan bit his tongue, making a mental note to explain to Soos in great detail how bad of an idea that was once everything had been resolved. "Say Mr. Pines, I've been waiting for a chance to show you all the changes I've made around the Shack since I took over. Can I, you know, give you a quick tour before you settle in?"
"Soos, we're kind of in the middle of something," replied Stan impatiently, pointing to Ford and Cooper as they waited at the top landing of the stairs behind the vending machine. "Can you just make sure nobody messes around in the gift shop until we come back?"
"Oh. Uh, yeah. I suppose I can do that," nodded Soos, his jolly expression shrinking slightly. Stan grimaced at this reaction, suddenly becoming aware that this was his first time back at the Mystery Shack during operating hours since he had returned to Gravity Falls. But he didn't have long to dwell on the thought, as Ford cleared his throat loudly behind him.
"Look, we'll talk more in a bit, okay?" said Stan, backing up towards the vending machine. Soos managed an awkward half-smile and wave as Stan turned to lead Ford and Cooper into the lab below, and forced the vending machine to slide back into place behind him.
For a moment, Stan wondered if the best course of action was to send Ford down to the basement with Cooper alone. Part of their mission at the Mystery Shack was to inform Soos and Melody of the potential danger to the party tonight, after all. And with the party about to begin, there was a good chance that soon they would be too preoccupied to heed the warning. But he shook the thought from his mind, trying to keep his guilt towards his dismissal of Soos from dampening his performance as Mr. Mystery. If there was a lead to be followed inside Cooper's mind, he reasoned, helping Ford follow it took precedence over his obligations to Soos. At least for the time being.
The party reached the elevator, which had already been waiting for passengers at the surface level. "Here's where things get really interesting," teased Stan, pressing the button for the lab floor once everyone was on board. The elevator doors closed and quickly reopened after a few moments of a slow descent into the earth. Once the trio had exited the elevator into the subterranean lab, Cooper looked around in cautious awe, his head whipping back and forth as he tried to take in the various devices and strange sights that surrounded him.
As Stan looked around for himself, all he could focus on were the signs that the lab had sat dormant for months. Abandoned coffee mugs, chewed pens, and haphazardly scattered documents lay about the room, all coated in a thin layer of dust. At one point, this lab had been a somber place for him, the one mysterious link he had to his missing brother. Looking around in retrospect, without any of the emotional weight he had previously assigned to the place, it was just a dingy basement filled with scientific equipment. Nothing more.
"I knew you were hiding something down here," Cooper breathed.
Ford, recognizing that Cooper was distracted by the unfamiliar sights, leaned in close to Stan's ear. "Grab him when I give you a signal. Stall him until then." Stan grunted in acknowledgment, and Ford retreated backward towards a walk-in closet until he disappeared from sight.
"So Coops," began Stan in his showman's voice, stretching out his arms and smiling confidently, "I bet you're wondering what all this is for."
Cooper turned, immediately giving Stan his full attention. To his right, Stan noticed the control panel for the dimensional portal. Ford had dismantled it long ago, but Stan knew the portal itself remained intact in the gigantic staging room hidden behind the blast shields. With a dramatic turn, he gestured towards one of the switches on the panel.
"If you're ready for everything you think you know about our world to change, step right up and flip this switch."
Cooper stepped forward, reaching out to the panel. Just before flipping the switch, he stopped. "This isn't a trick, is it? I flip this switch and I get hit with a memory ray or something to make me forget everything I've seen here?" Stan laughed.
"You really think I'd put a memory ray on the control panel? What if I hit it by accident? That would be really stupid. Trust me," he said again, pulling Cooper closer to the panel, "you're gonna want to see this."
Still reluctant, Cooper took a final look around the room. After a moment of preparation, he reached forward and flipped the switch.
The blast shields opened, revealing the portal room. Utility lights clicked on, unveiling what was left of the portal in the center of the cavern. Ford had taken the time to repair the hole blasted in the room's ceiling, but the space had otherwise remained untouched since he had disassembled the portal towards the end of the summer. While it no longer formed its previous, towering pyramid shape, the ruins of the device were still alien-looking enough to serve as an impressive distraction.
"What is it?" gasped Cooper, his eyes wide and darting around the disparate, disassembled pieces of the portal. Stan scratched his head, reaching for an improvised lie that Ford would approve of.
"Well back in the 1900s, the Imperial Russian government discovered this thing in the Siberian tundra." As he pulled together pieces of history documentaries he fell asleep watching and half-remembered science fiction television shows in his head, Stan's storytelling grew more confident and boisterous. "Peter the Great shipped it on the Battleship Potemkin to Oregon to try and use it to buy back Alaska, but then he had some kind of laundry issue where he mixed his reds in with his whites, and Moscow forgot about everything. The military set it up down here, thinking it could be an alien transportation system. They brought in all sorts of geeky archaeologists in here to try and translate the symbols and get it to turn on, all so that they could go and bring American democracy and Canadian television actors across the galaxy. But then Jimmy Carter cut the program to save on the electric bill, and the government harvested pieces of it to build the Space Shuttle."
"It all makes sense," replied Cooper solemnly, nodding along with Stan's every word.
"Now, Stanley!" shouted Ford from the back of the room.
Before he could react, Stan grabbed Cooper's arms from behind his back, holding him in place. He looked up to see Ford sliding a wheeled chair in his direction. Despite Cooper's best efforts to wriggle free from Stan's grip, he was powerless to stop Stan from forcing him onto the chair. Ford moved in quickly with a long extension cord to tie Cooper's limbs and torso to the chair, firmly locking him in place.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, Stan. The closet was a mess," explained Ford. He set down a dusty briefcase, opening the clasps to reveal another device of his own design. From Stan's vantage, he couldn't see much other than rows of dials and toggle switches, and a retro-styled CRT screen.
"Eh, it was fun. I forgot how much I enjoyed bamboozling people," shrugged Stan.
"Though you really should have been more careful, there actually is a switch for the memory ray located on that panel." Ford shook his head with a wry grin. Stan snorted, as he still struggled occasionally with knowing when his brother was serious or pulling his leg. Ford carefully raised a device that appeared to be a crown made from scrap wire and aluminum plates out of the briefcase. Delicately, he placed the headgear onto Cooper's head.
"You won't get away with this!" spat Cooper melodramatically, looking nervously between the Pines twins.
"Get away with what?" Stan asked mockingly before his expression blanched in confusion. He turned to Ford. "No, seriously, what are we doing?"
"Our new friend Cooper's theta waves are elevated," explained Ford as he spun dials on a control panel inside the briefcase. "After Fiddleford and I first tested the portal and I began to have doubts about Bill's true intentions, I put together this prototype mindscape reader. If I ever suspected that someone was coming under Bill's control, I could use this to communicate with their subconscious in the mindscape."
"What are you talking about?" asked Cooper, growing increasingly distraught. "What are you going to do to me?"
Ford sighed, opening a nearby desk drawer and pulling out an aerosol can. He spritzed Cooper's face with gas, which resulted in him immediately falling asleep. "That wore out its welcome quick," he noted with annoyance. Once he was sure that they were alone, Ford stepped back from the briefcase to face Stan. "That stone in the forest has forced us to consider a disturbing possibility. I hope to put it to rest as quickly as possible." Stan nodded, gesturing for Ford to proceed. Grabbing another chair, Ford sat himself down in front of the briefcase device and got to work.
After a moment of calibration and troubleshooting, Ford flipped several switches in sequence. The CRT monitor sprung to life with a click and hum, and seconds later static faded into focus. As Ford spun the largest dial on the panel, the static shifted in frequency and shape, occasionally revealing brief pictures in black and white.
"As I tune different frequencies on this dial, we'll be traveling between different rooms in Cooper's mindscape. With the communicator," Ford gestured to a microphone attached to the panel with a coiled wire, "we can communicate with anything we find inside." Given his experience with the transcendental side of Ford's research started and ended with his memory being erased, Stan didn't fully understand how a device like this could possibly work, but as usual, he had to assume that Ford knew what he was doing.
For several minutes, Ford scrolled from picture to picture, watching different events that took place throughout Cooper's life. Given his occupation, it came as no surprise that many of the different images were from the same vantage point - the driver's seat of a bus. As the scenes flickered past, they ran together in a sort of boring montage of a life spent working for an intercity bus company in the Pacific Northwest - lots of winding mountainous roads, endless rows of pine trees, and foggy Puget Sound mornings.
But there was one scene that immediately caught Ford's eye, forcing him to twist the dial in reverse and focus on it for a closer look. It was a strange scene, of a simple landscape of rolling fields of grain and fluffy clouds that looked impossibly perfect.
"What do you make of this, Stan?" asked Ford, squinting to try and better make out the details on the blurry, colorless monitor.
"Looks like Nebraska. Or one of the other boring states," Stan replied.
"Hand me the communicator," said Ford. Stan leaned forward to grab the microphone and placed it into Ford's outstretched hand. "Hello? Cooper?"
A second passed with no significant changes to the scene on the monitor. But slowly, the picture began to warble back and forth. It had been a long time since Stan had seen issues like that with a television set, given that analog broadcasting had ceased years ago and Gompers, the Mystery Shack's resident goat, had consumed most of his VHS collection over the course of a long weekend binge. But he knew enough to know that something was interfering with the signal, which created visual banding and tracking on Ford's device. In addition, when the screen wasn't distorting or devolving into snowy static, he could see that on the screen, the field of grain had stopped blowing in the wind, but was now clicking back and forth rhythmically.
But as the visual glitches finally subsided, a shrill voice came over the aging, tinny speaker. "Well, well, well, if it isn't my old buddy, Stanford Pines."
Ford gasped in horror, nearly dropping the microphone at the sound of the voice. The picture on the monitor was suddenly overtaken, the scene of the wheat field opened like an eyelid to reveal the unmistakable form of Bill Cipher, floating in empty space on the screen. As if to add insult to injury, Bill tipped his top hat.
Stan turned to Ford in time to watch the color drain from his face, his mouth frozen in stunned horror. He could only imagine what his brother was feeling at the moment - while Bill and the events of Weirdmageddon had finally been explained to him, his memory of it was like that of a history lesson. It was an event that happened in the past separate from him, not a lived experience that came with feelings, smells, and sounds. He could understand Bill as a threat theoretically, but Ford's entire body recoiled with the memory of his past with him. Stan put a reassuring hand on his Ford's shoulder, helping to shake him from his terrified stupor.
"It can't be," whispered Ford, after a seemingly endless silence. On the screen, Bill looked all around his mindscape environment, as if trying to determine where he should be looking. If nothing else, it certainly undercut his usual air of omnipotent confidence.
"Hellooooo?" came Bill's voice through the speaker again, conjuring up a microphone in his hand to tap expectantly. "You still out there, Fordsy?"
"So much for all-knowing," smirked Stan. "We can see him, but he can't see us." On the screen, Bill began to search around his empty void of mindspace, frowning as he received no reply to his question. To his relief, Ford's face slowly regained some of its usual resolve, watching with amusement as Bill toiled within the small screen. While the screen size was arbitrary, it certainly helped to make the once-formidable interdimensional being look pitiful, defeated, and trapped behind a wall of glass.
"There is something different about this," Ford mused, leaning forward slightly. "He's certainly not at the level of power he had with a corporeal body. And the fact that it took this much equipment at this close of range to Cooper's brain to find him leads me to believe that he's not even at his usual mindscape strength." Ford chuckled to himself. "He's a shadow of a shadow at this point."
"Is this thing on?" sneered Bill, sticking the microphone up into the air. A shriek of feedback erupted from the speaker, forcing Ford and Stan to cover their ears in pain.
"Stop it!" shouted Ford into the microphone. Bill zapped his microphone from existence and placed his tiny hands on his sides.
Stan leaned forward to speak into the microphone. "What gives? We got rid of you. I should know, I nearly lost my brain in the process."
"Oh, what a loss that would have been for humanity, to lose all that wisdom and intellect," droned Bill sarcastically, rolling his eye. "But credit where credit is due - given what I know from being trapped in the mind of this inane people mover, you clearly did erase me from existence and stopped me from bringing my plans for the universe to fruition. Give yourself a pat on the back for that one, pal. But the one thing you didn't do was erase me from the minds of everyone in this podunk little town."
Ford slumped back in his chair, covering the lower half of his face with his hands. "No. That's can't be right," he muttered to himself, muffled.
"So, wait..." Stan asked, struggling to piece things together while Ford composed himself, "you're not even real. You're just this guy's memory of Bill."
"Listen, we could get into a long philosophical debate about the nature of the self and reality, but I got a feeling verbal sparring of that caliber is a bit out of your weight class, Stanley. But truthfully, it's a rough existence as a memory," Bill admitted, holding out his stick arms to gesture to his empty surroundings. "As you might have guessed, Cooper doesn't have much going on in here. And let's just say, after having lived for billions of years acting under my own free will, being imprisoned inside a meat puppet with an expiration date can give you quite the existential crisis. But as luck would have it, I've come out the other side ready to make what's left of Cooper's life count."
"I don't like the sound of that," frowned Stan.
"Wait a minute," asked Ford incredulously, "are you seriously admitting that you can't do anything from inside Cooper's mindscape?"
"Back it up, Sixer. There are exactly two things I can do in here," explained Bill. "First, I'm perfectly capable of performing one of my old standards: taking control of Cooper's dreams. And second, from in here, I can see everything Cooper does, and hear every thought he thinks in real-time. Admittedly, not a lot of material to work with. But by now, you've gotten pretty familiar with what I've been able to do with it."
"But you said you were trapped inside Cooper's mind," recalled Ford. "And you can't possess him directly. So how does that translate to the entire town doing your bidding?"
"See, 'bidding' is a funny way of putting it," corrected Bill. "Nobody is doing my 'bidding.' At least not the way I'm accustomed to. I went from being the most powerful being in the universe to being an anecdote buried in the brain of a bus driver. So naturally, I took it out on him. I presented myself in his dreams as a friendly muse, who tried to guide him out of surreal, torturous mazes of my own design. I subjected him to night after night of torment, to the point that he'd stay awake for hours on end just to avoid my wrath. It was pointless, accomplishing nothing, but it was all the fun I was going to get for the rest of my existence, so I figured I'd settle in and make the best of it."
Stan looked over at the motionless Cooper, slumped over and tied up in his chair. Despite all the anxiety that the Disciples group had created amongst his family and friends, and Cooper standing in as the face of that uncertainty, he certainly deserved better than a lifetime of nightmares from Bill Cipher.
"But then he did something I couldn't have possibly predicted. He went onto the internet and started writing about me. He didn't expect much from it, he just thought he was venting his fears into the void. But the void wrote back. He started receiving replies from others who were experiencing the same nightmares, all starring the same strange, helpful, one-eyed triangle. And that's when I realized, there were hundreds of me. All stewing in our collective prisons, treating the sanity of our captors as our only source of entertainment. At that moment, I realized I wasn't alone. And when Cooper's brain flooded with thoughts of community, acceptance, and conspiracy, I began to understand that my pathway forward was through the greatest torture device ever created by humans - social media."
"A few days later," continued Bill, "Cooper's community message board post got taken down by the city. I gave him a dream that night, telling him that the government didn't want him to learn the truth about what they were doing. Days later, a private group gets made. I respond in a dream. Over and over, I create a feedback loop until he no longer thought for himself, but relied on me to tell him why he believes what he believes. And while there's no way to know for sure, from the group messages I've read through his eyes, the other memories of Bill in Gravity Falls have begun to do the same. Can you believe I used to think mind control was powerful? Hah! Turns out, you can build an entire army of mindless robots if you just convince them all that they're free thinkers who are under attack at all times. Human free will is more chaotic than I could have ever imagined, which just adds to the fun! It adds some fun twists to the game that I never would have thought of alone. Like now, it sounds like one of those Bills carved out new coordinates for the portal. Just wonderful."
"What do you mean, new coordinates?" asked Ford. Bill chuckled, leaning back as if on an invisible chaise lounge.
"Obviously new coordinates! With that vast, prodigal mind of yours, you should know by now that your portal was only able to connect to the Nightmare Realm. We both know it's a dumping ground for the entire universe, across all dimensions. But I didn't always live there. There are dimensions where I was still wreaking havoc in my home dimension, ones where I succeeded in taking over everything, and ones where I gave up on my dreams and became a math teacher. If I had ever entered one of those dimensions and met myself, the entire dimension would have collapsed, so it wasn't exactly useful information at the time. But I kept those addresses around, just in case. Now that I'm dead, there's no reason not to let one of them through. It'll take time, but eventually, some of us will make it into your lab. Some of us will teach our meat prisons to rebuild the portal you desecrated. And one day, a different Bill Cipher will emerge from another dimension to finish what I started."
"What do you get out of this?" barked Stan, growing more irate as he watched Ford's distressed ticks intensify the longer Bill spoke. "You think another Bill is going to let you out of your mindscape prison?"
"But that's my favorite part, Stanley. When the next Bill enters your universe and he kills every living thing here, all the mindscapes of Gravity Falls will cease to exist, and I'll go to my end as well. And in that moment, I'll die knowing that I took the rest of you down with me."
Ford stared forward, at first unable to speak as he contemplated the cosmic horror of endless iterations of Bill spread out across the multiverse. But as Bill began to dance on the screen, rocking his triangle frame back and forth as he swung his arms side to side, his fear turned to seething rage. Finally, after a moment, he turned to Stan. "Stan, there's a memory gun under the console. Give it to me now."
Immediately, Stan retrieved the gun and placed it in Ford's outstretched hand. Leveling the gun with Cooper's head, he entered Bill's name into the memory input on the hilt, and fired. A flash of light surrounded Cooper's head, and the mindscape scene containing Bill on the briefcase screen began to melt away. Bill continued to dance as his world crumbled around him, but before he himself dissolved into nothing, his voice echoed through the speaker one last time.
"See you soon, Stanford."
The screen first went black, and a moment later was replaced with heavy static. Ford reached forward, flipping several toggle switches to turn off the mindscape reader. Once the CRT monitor went dead, he slumped back into his chair.
"Everyone," said Ford, struggling to comprehend what he had just heard. "Everyone in town is an unwitting Bill Cipher sleeper agent. It's worse than I could have ever feared. And once again, I'm the one who dismissed the threat as impossible. I'm a fool, Stanley. A dumb, naive fool."
"Hey Ford," chided Stan, shaking his brother's shoulder. "Snap out of it, will you? We can point fingers later. The real question is, what are we going to do now?"
Ford sighed, defeated. "Even if we shut down the Disciples of C group online now, even if we find the Herald, it's all been window dressing to the real threat this entire time. How do we coordinate a mass mind wipe of the entire town? How do we do it fast enough to ensure the various mindscape variants of Bill don't course correct to avoid getting erased? The logistics of coordinating that many mind wipes alone would take weeks, and even a single holdout could start this process all over again."
"We've done it before," noted Stan. "Remember, we wiped the minds of the government agents descending on the Mystery Shack after I activated the portal to bring you home."
"That was still a localized wipe, it only needed to reach around the perimeter of the Shack," dismissed Ford. "This would require a charge large enough to hit the entire valley at once, and powerful enough to account for any obstacles in the way. We'd need to be sure that a version of Bill didn't survive just because someone picked the wrong time to go down to their basement."
"So you're telling me that my brother, the paranoid supergenius, never built a mass mind wipe device and hid it somewhere in Gravity Falls? Frankly, I find that hard to believe."
"I had thought about it, obviously," Ford admitted, the dots connecting in his mind as he remembered, "I had even gotten some of it ready to implement, but that was right around when you showed up and I ended up lost in the multiverse."
Stan groaned dramatically. "Can we go one day without you reminding me-"
"Forgive me, Stan," Ford interrupted apologetically, shaking his head at his insensitive phrasing. "I didn't bring that up to open old wounds. I mention it to illustrate that everything we need is already in this lab. A few hours of work and we can erase the collective memory of Bill from Gravity Falls forever."
"Then what are we waiting for?" Stan clapped his hands together excitedly. "Tell me what you need and I'm on it."
"First things first," said Ford, "you need to go upstairs and warn Soos and Melody. Cooper will be sleeping soundly for the next few hours, but the others might still be coming to crash their party tonight. Get in contact with Dipper and Wendy too, and see if they've gotten any closer to shutting down the Disciples group on social media. I'll find all the components for the mind wipe device and get them ready for assembly."
"On it, Sixer," replied Stan with a grin. "You can count on me."
As Stan bolted out of the laboratory to carry out his orders, Ford smiled to himself. While a version of himself from decades ago would have cringed at the sound of Stan declaring that anyone could count on his help, he found himself saying "I know I can," to the empty room, confident that he was in good hands.
As Stan emerged from the subterranean lab, he could hear from the gallery room that more guests had arrived for the party. He peered through the doorway, looking for any sign of Soos, but he wasn't at either the food service area, and someone else was manning the DJ booth.
In the process, he couldn't help but notice the party theming. The focus piece of the room was a Christmas tree decorated with spiders and snakes, plastic skeletons were dressed up as elves and reindeer, and a collection of wrapped gifts hung from an enormous spider web on the ceiling. While Stan found the idea of yet another Gravity Falls appropriation of Halloween to be lazy theming, he had to admit that the execution of the concept was solid.
"Oh, hey Mr. Pines," came Soos' voice from behind Stan's back.
"Soos! Finally," exclaimed Stan, turning around. Soos was dressed to the nines in a new Mr. Mystery outfit, this one white with blue adornments, including a foil blue pumpkin emblem on his fez. "I've been looking all over for you."
"Here to help, dude," Soos replied with a friendly smile. "Would you like a refreshment? There's lots of fun mocktails around, but, uh, I've got a little something under my fez you can add to the Spider Egg-nog if you'd like." As if Stan needed any further hints as to what Soos might be referring to, he raised his eyebrows suggestively.
"Maybe later," dismissed Stan, leaning in to make sure Soos could hear him over the music. "Look, Ford and I have reason to believe there might be some shady characters trying to crash your party tonight in order to snoop around the Shack. Have you gotten any weird comments on the Shack's Snapa-whatzit page lately?"
"Hmmmm," replied Soos, pulling out his phone and tapping on the screen. "Now that you mention it, I have been getting more engagement than usual on the last post I made about the party." Soos scrolled up and down on his phone, squinting at the screen.
"Lemme see that," insisted Stan, walking around Soos to peer over his shoulder just as he scrolled back up to the post in question. But as he reached the post, Stan couldn't help but utter an involuntary "Oh no..."
At first glance, it was a remarkably great photo of the Shack. Soos had taken a photo of the Shack in winter, and had replaced all the lights inside with colored lightbulbs to make it appear festive and funky. He had shined exterior lights upwards at the shack as well, to create dramatic shadows and shapes using the unique frame of the house. But he had also shined a triangle shaped spotlight at a round upper window, inadvertently hiding the form of Bill Cipher in his photograph.
This trick of the light might have gone unnoticed by itself, but it was the caption on the photo that had stopped Stan cold.
WINTERWEEN - THE RECKONING. TONIGHT AT THE MYSTERY SHACK.
"Soos, what have you done?" moaned Stan, watching as Soos scrolled down through the comments again. Dozens upon dozens of comments, all expressing adoration for C, the Herald, or that this was the sign they had been waiting for, continued to flood in beneath the promotional photo of the Mystery Shack. Worst of all, the top comment suggested that anyone seeking answers from C should head to the Mystery Shack immediately.
"You like it?" chuckled Soos. "Melody thought Winterween was a bit derivative, but then, like, I thought - how do the pros make a sequel seem more like it's own thing? And it hit me, dude. A subtitle. So I thought up some ideas, like 'Winterween - Requiem' or 'Winterween - Brotherhood.' And they were cool and all, but like, 'The Reckoning.' Heh heh. So cool, right?"
"Soos, you gotta delete that right now," demanded Stan. Soos' smile shrank a bit, but he chuckled awkwardly in an effort to dismiss Stan's concern.
"But why, Mr. Pines? Everyone seems to like it, and from the looks of all this engagement, we're getting a lot more people coming out to the party now."
"You don't understand," yelled Stan, struggling to be heard over the party music. "They're not coming here for the party, they're coming to tear the Shack apart."
"You're right, I guess don't understand," admitted Soos. "I... uh, I thought you'd be happy to see how much the Shack has grown since you passed it on to me."
"What are you talking about? Soos, it's not about that at all. I-"
Stan frowned in confusion and frustration, looking back and forth between Soos' face and the phone in his hand. Suddenly, he pictured Ford working in the basement, counting on him to make sure his work could continue unimpeded. 'We don't have time for this.' His mind began to form a plan, though it was one he wasn't very proud of. "I'm sorry, buddy," said Stan, "but this is for your own good."
Stan lunged at Soos, scrambling to grab the phone from his hand. Letting out a yelp of surprise, Soos staggered backwards, keeping his center of gravity high enough to remain upright. He defensively waved his arm, struggling under Stan's weight in an attempt to repel him, but all Soos succeeded in doing was weakening his own grip. As Stan made another rushed grab for the phone, it flung backwards from Soos' hand.
Soos and Stan both whipped around to watch as the phone arced through the air gracefully before swan diving into a large bowl of Spider Egg-nog. Despite their singular focus on the bowl, the loud music and flashing lights of the party continued around them, undisturbed by the brief scuffle they had just had.
"Mr. Pines… why?" Soos asked, his eyes welling up with tears. Stan glared back, about to burst into an explanation of the danger Soos had unwittingly brought upon his own party.
But as he opened his mouth to speak, he froze as someone behind him shouted "What do you think you're doing?"
Stan spun around again to see Melody, stomping towards the two of them angrily. Stan glanced and pointed to the Spider Egg-nog bowl before turning back to Melody again. "I can explain," he stammered, but he found himself unable to form words once Melody forced her way into his face.
"Do you know how much time Soos put into this party?" yelled Melody, her burst of anger coming just as the song that had been playing abruptly ended. Suddenly, the entire room was now staring at Stan, Soos, and Melody. While he wasn't a stranger to the attention of large crowds, the attention focused on him while he was being righteously berated was a new, uncomfortable experience for him.
"Look, I-"
"Soos spent years looking up to you," continued Melody, seething. "He won't let anyone say a bad thing about you in his presence. He loves you. And this is how you repay him for that?"
Stan turned back to look at Soos, who stared directly at the floor. It wasn't often that Stan felt the warm wash of shame creep across his body, so when it hit him in that moment, he was utterly unprepared for the feeling.
"But I'm trying to help," Stan finally managed to spit out. "Something terrible is about to happen here, and-"
"Something terrible has already happened here, Stan," Melody interrupted with a derisive scoff. "And you can help by leaving."
Melody pushed forcefully past Stan, and he watched as she moved to console her shaken boyfriend. For a moment, Stan thought about continuing to try and explain what was about to happen, but the idea passed as the DJ began to blast another high-energy song in an effort to restart the party. Melody pulled Soos into a hug, and pulled him onto the dance floor. 'I guess he might as well enjoy it while it lasts.'
With a dejected groan, Stan retreated from the gallery room and into the gift shop. He took a minute to look around, realizing in that moment that this was the first time he had set foot in the gift shop since he had left the Shack to Soos at the end of the summer. Hard to miss in the center of the room was a crudely modeled likeness of Stan himself, a statue that read "Our Founder" at the base. Someone, most likely Wendy, had added a small whiteboard sign next to the statue that read: Days Since Statue Has Made a Child Cry, with a red zero written underneath in marker.
Apart from that, the room had remained the same, but he began to notice subtle differences in the product offerings. He picked up a stack of the postcards that were on display next to the cash register and began to flip through them. While some of them were the old generic Mystery Shack postcards that he had always had for sale, he began to see images of Soos' new creations for the winter tours. 'Whoa, this is pretty good,' he thought to himself as he viewed images of the Krampusaurus and Graytivity UFO.
The final image in the stack was a rendering of Soos in full Mr. Mystery costume, made to look like an elaborately painted gallery portrait. A surge of pride rushed through Stan, only to be quickly chased with another dose of shame. 'I'll make it up to you, I promise.'
"Grunkle Stan!"
Stan turned around to see Mabel, Grenda, and Candy enter the gift shop. Once the door was shut firmly behind them, they began shedding their coats to prepare to join the party.
Stan tried to feign enthusiasm and wave, but he found it hard to fight against the feeling of disappointment that now there were three more kids about to be in harm's way. And besides, the hope that he could hide his feelings from Mabel was naive to begin with.
"What's wrong, frowny face?" joked Mabel, walking up to Stan and smiling warmly.
Stan sighed. "Something real bad's about to happen here tonight, kids." As Mabel and friends processed this cryptic, distressing piece of news, Stan pulled out his phone and began to type a message. "And I blew the one shot I had to keep it from getting worse."