Ford coughed and thumped his chest as the coal dust cleared. "E-everyone alright?"
"Oh yes. Quite well, thank you."
The voice that pierced the darkness was booming. A rumbling, distinguished tone that felt like thunder. Sophisticated and sharp, conscious and cognitive… but otherworldly. Ford immediately knew it wasn't a voice he recognised. (Unless Dipper's voice had broken into something completely bizarre.)
He cranked his cold-war-era dynamo flashlight. Slowly, the light flickered into life with a soft hum, illuminating a sight that not a single member of the Pines family expected. There, on the wooden table, the lumps of coal stood.
At least - they had been lumps of coal. They still looked like lumps of coal, but...
Each one had split open into a vice-like jaw, with bright white teeth and purple lips. Each lump's cavernous mouth was an empty black hollow, filled with only a large, mauve tongue. They had no eyes - no nose, not even a semblance of a throat. Yet they spoke, and spoke with an impressive, attention-grabbing depth.
Pacifica and Dipper stared, mouths agape.
For a moment, Mabel genuinely thought she would faint against Kevin's arms.
Stan mouthed an expletive that isn't fit to print.
Ford cleared his throat uncomfortably and adjusted his turtleneck collar. After a moment, he peered closer with the flashlight, his nose wrinkled in a mixture of amazement and - not disgust, but - those unnatural, outsized jaws. They were an uncomfortable thing to come face-to-face with.
"Boggles." A miniature mouth spat, somewhat aggressively.
"I beg your-"
"We are…" the leading creature boomed impressively, and paused for effect. "THE BOGGLES!"
"...Boggles? Really?" Dipper asked with his usual twinge of sarcasm and disbelief. "...Boggles. Of all the things in the world-"
"Boggles doesn't seem like a very monster-y name." Mabel said quietly.
"We aren't monsters."
Mabel was sure they were monsters. She found them pretty damned spooky. She was about to pipe up with exactly that opinion before Kevin clapped his hand over her mouth.
"Don't." He whispered. "I agree, but don't-"
Ford measured the beast with a slide-rule and started taking notes on what he had discovered - which, being fair, didn't seem that complicated, compared to a lot of Gravity Falls weirdness. They were literally just a pile of fist-sized rocks with mouths. Dipper looked over his shoulder and copied the old man's jottings, much to Pacifica's amusement.
Ford pulled on a pair of latex gloves and tapped on one of their teeth. They seemed - despite their utterly bizarre nature - to be very benign. It didn't try to bite Ford's hand off, which was usually a good sign. Of course, he couldn't help but wonder if it was just that they didn't have nervous systems.
They were just… rocks. Rocks with mouths. Potentially very bitey rocks.
He knocked one against the table gently and, once again, it didn't respond. As if it was just par for the course, or something it simply didn't have the faculties to feel.
"So, you're called Boggles, and you're sentient. Can you see?"
"We have no need for such senses!"
"Smell?"
"We have no need for such senses!"
"Taste?"
"We have no need for-"
"I think I get the idea." Ford said, writing 'Dumb as a bag of rocks. Very fitting.' in his journal.
Dipper and Pacifica glanced at eachother in confusion. They had very disproportionate tongues for creatures that couldn't taste. Dipper cleared his throat and piped up. "So you have no senses, you have no limbs… what do you do?"
"We do what we must do!"
"Do you happen to have a fire nearby?" Another of the Boggles spoke up.
"Uh.. sure, we've got the boiler just here," Kevin said, his eyebrow raised in utter confusion. He stepped over and opened the hatch. "See?"
Ford then reached a horrifying conclusion. "Wait. Wait, Kevin!"
"To oblivion!"
"Come, my brothers!"
"Finally, we may dine in Valhalla!"
"Wait, wait!" Ford yelled, trying to grab them. He managed to clench the Boggle-boss within his hand and frantically tried to reason with it. "You can't just-"
"Unhand me, Sir!" the leading creature yelled, jumping into Stanley's face, shattering the scientist's glasses. " I must go!"
Ford yelled and flailed backwards in surprise, leaving it to the rest of the family to try and catch them. The penny soon dropped in the others' minds as the Boggles frantically - excitedly - made their way towards the old furnace, positively jumping over eachother with burning (for lack of a better word) ambition.
It all happened so fast. Every piece of sentient coal threw itself into the red-hot furnace, disappearing into the flames with a bellow of glory and unbelievable purpose. They seemed to instantly burst into small clouds of soot, incinerating into nothing and flying with the roaring flames that surrounded them.
Stan's jaw dropped open at the sight of the diminutive beings throwing themselves into the fiery belly of the great iron vessel. "What the absolute H?!"
"Catch one! Don't let them get away!"
Stan did as he was told and threw himself onto the floor, grabbing the leader-Boggle inside his jacket, much to its loud, outspoken chagrin. Within a minute, he was the sole survivor of the mass, flaming exodus, all of his peers now smoking through the stovepipe chimney on the Shack's roof. It shook up every human in the room. They - they were like lemmings !(Though, as Ford so loved to point out, Lemmings had no interest in such activities)
"Curse you, human! Curse you!"
"I think I'm gonna be sick." Pacifica said quietly, white as a sheet.
It felt as if there was a minute-long stunned silence between every sentence they said. They were all trying to process it. For Dipper, Mabel and Pacifica, it was a stunned feeling; as if their feet were rooted to the floor.
Kevin Corduroy was far more impulsive, however. He hurriedly pulled on a pair of heatproof gloves and grabbed the tongs, intending to pull out the burning lumps of fuel. "Th-th-they just torched themselves! D-Do you think they're-"
He quickly reeled back with a yelp. The fire had grown white-hot, spiking into such a temperature that it threatened to singe Kevin's precious pompadour the moment he leaned in and plunged the tongs into the fire.
He stepped back and blinked at the tongs, now heavily warped and glowing bright red. "...Jeez."
"...That doesn't bode well." Ford winced.
Right enough, the thin metal boiler began to pulsate as it raised in pressure, its little water vessel swelling as contents heated up faster and faster. A pronounced rattling began to spread across the Shack's pipes and radiators. The 1970s-beige painted jacket of the vintage device bulged outwards.
A single rivet popped loose.
"Stanley. Grab the kids."
Stan immediately threw Mabel over his shoulders, grabbed Dipper and Pacifica, and hooked his cane through the overall straps of Kevin's shorts. In an impressive act of child juggling, he hauled them upstairs, away from the rumbling vessel with impressive tact - while still dealing with the angry shouts and squirms of the Boggle inside his jacket. Juggling kids, it turned out, wasn't that different to smuggling pugs over national borders.
Ford followed, clutching some of his precious slide rules and closing the door behind them. Almost immediately, the boiler burst open like a big, iron balloon - blowing the door off of its hinges, smacking Stanford Pines right in the back, while raising the floorboards above and scorching the concrete floor of the basement.
"Sixer, you alright?!" Stan asked, dropping the kids rather unceremoniously on the old orange armchair.
"I've taken worse pummelings than that, Stanley!" Ford replied, though his grimace hinted otherwise. "For Pete's sake, that must be the most flammable coal on the planet!"
"We are not coal! We are Boggles!" Came the muffled, enraged reply. "This jacket smells like musk and mothballs!"
"Someone got a jar?" Stan asked. "Preferably tempered glass? I think we gotta ask this wise guy some questions."