chemistry for changing times
It's the week before Christmas break and Dipper is on his computer trying to finish a homework assignment instead of what he wants to be doing, which is constantly checking his email to see if Great-Uncle Ford has responded.
He also wants to read through all the local papers he's gathered, searching for anything anomalous. It's depressing how ordinary most of the news is. One might think that a near apocalypse would have shaken the world up a little bit; it wasn't even a blip on the radar outside of Roadkill County. Which seems impossible, but so does everything else about it. The world had been narrowly saved from becoming Bill's extremely breakable new toy, and Dipper is starting to consider the consequences that might still apply beyond the sleepy little town of Gravity Falls, even after a barely aborted extinction level event.
Dipper knows that Great-Uncle Ford first came to Gravity Falls because he discovered that the town has the greatest concentration of anomalies within the continental United States. What Dipper wants to know is how Ford made that determination. It implies a lot of things, like records or prior research or maybe just that Ford had been taking the tabloids and the Fortean Times seriously. Which, as it turns out, isn't illogical or ridiculous.
The question that's bothering Dipper is how the rest of the world still thinks it is, and how long they're going to be able to keep thinking that it is.
He's looked at as many news sources as he can find, but not even the National Weather Service reported anything unusual around the time of Weirdmageddon. The boundary of the Falls had kept everything in, leaving the outside world untouched. But Ford isn't out sailing because he's taking a cruise. He said there are anomalies out there, and Dipper must assume the use of that word was deliberate. Maybe the weirdness of the other dimensions is spreading, seeping through a weakened skin. Or maybe it's always been this way and somehow people just don't notice.
There are more satellites in the sky and camera phones in pockets every year. The world isn't the mystery it once was; it grows smaller all the time. Common wisdom has it that the only frontiers left are in the endless space above and the darkest ocean depths below. Gravity Falls is isolated, but Oregon isn't the dark side of the moon. Heck, the Mystery Shack is a tourist trap, and enough people pass through to keep it afloat! The Society of the Blind Eye is no longer keeping anyone ignorant. The new Mayor may be taking a hard 'Never Mind All That' line, and most of the town is likely to follow it, but how long until someone in Gravity Falls decides they want to be famous?
Equally curious, how has that not happened already? There must be a reason.
Dipper and Mabel left the Falls with some evidence, so it's not impossible to do. The Law of Weirdness Magnetism doesn't prevent any proof from leaving the valley. Mabel's scrapbook contains a few inexplicable oddities, including photographs of McGucket's mechanical monstrosities, aspects of which are years ahead of the technological curve. Dipper knows that won't be the case for too much longer, considering how many patents McGucket already has pending, but it will still probably be at least half a decade before any of his tech becomes commonplace outside a military testing ground.
Mabel even has a few strands of unicorn hair still taped to one of the scrapbook pages. Dipper doesn't know if they differ in any substantial way from horse hair other than in their magical properties, which will probably defy typical scientific measurement. (Ford may be idiosyncratic, but he doesn't design his own equipment just because he feels like it—he has to.) Really, Dipper feels like they have just enough evidence to attract the lunatic fringe, but not enough to go mainstream. When he returns to the Falls, he could get the kind of evidence needed to go mainstream. The question is, would he want to?
He doesn't know what to make of it. He puts all his thoughts into his new journal and emails Great-Uncle Ford a second time. He writes about the encounter with the local ghost and includes his ruminations on how the weirdness of Gravity Falls relates to the world and whether it's only a matter of time before the town sees tourism for reasons entirely separate from the Mystery Shack. On one hand, Dipper likes to think of himself as a champion of the truth. On the other, he is afraid that truth will be the death of Gravity Falls; not as a town, but as a haven for the otherworldly.
There are still so many questions. And he wants to be trying to answer them, not writing a stupid two-page paper about political efficacy!
He groans loudly and puts his face in his hands, rubbing at his eyes. Across the hall, he hears an answering tortured groan from Mabel. He groans again, louder. Mabel groans back, even sillier. Soon they are making the most ridiculous noises of discontent they can muster, an exchange of wordless vocal distress.
"What in the world are you two doing?" their mother calls up the stairs.
"Homework!" they both answer.
"That doesn't sound like homework."
Later that night, Dipper is lying on his bed staring at the ceiling as he tries to will his mind to sleep. It's a familiar conundrum, one he usually solves by reading until his eyes burn and he has to close them. But the thing is, he knows that reading will, eventually, send him to sleep; attempting to use sheer willpower is much more unlikely to work. And that's sort of what he wants, because he has this prickling sensation that there's a nightmare coming on, waiting for him to pass out. Sometimes he feels like it's just the memories, a natural result of some scary things that have happened, and he can cope. Other times he feels like maybe it's Bill who's waiting for him to fall asleep, and those are the bad nights.
He knows the difference between a nightmare and a demon's dreamscape. He's not mistaking the former for the latter. It's more that he's afraid someday he'll close his eyes and get the latter when he's expecting the former.
It's because he's been made so aware that there are other dimensions around him. He can't see or touch them, but he knows they are there. Ford thinks that Bill lied about the source of anomalies being other, weirder dimensions; he believes that they are naturally occurring and drawn to Gravity Falls by the Law of Weirdness Magnetism. Dipper isn't so sure. Ford's conclusion seems more based on Bill being a total liar than the body of evidence. It's true that Bill tried to trick Ford into opening a portal, but that doesn't mean there isn't any truth to what Bill claimed. If anything, a half-truth would be more insidious. More believable.
Dipper thinks the reality is somewhere in the middle, between the weirdness of Earth and the weirdness of other unmapped places. And if there are more anomalies in the world—happening by statistical variance or seeping through whatever unknowable membrane hangs between dimensions—then what else is waiting for a chance to claw through the barrier?
Dipper suddenly thinks of the infinity-sided die: 'Outlawed in nine-thousand dimensions,' Ford had said. How does he know that? Who had told him?
Dipper has a hard time believing that Bill was the only demon at the threshold.
His ceiling holds no answers. The only man who does is an unknown number of miles away, doing who knows what. Dipper rolls over and looks at the clock on the nightstand. Three AM. He sighs and rolls back. At least it's a Saturday.
He nearly jumps out of his skin when his phone rattles on his desk.
He gets up assuming it's a low battery pulse because he forgot to plug it in, but his eyes widen in surprise when he sees he's received a text. Who texts at three in the morning? Unless it's not three in the morning where they are. Like on the other side of the world.
His heart skips a beat and he nearly drops his phone in his eagerness. He swipes at the screen and unlocks it, awaiting the white background and colored bubbles of text. When they appear, he immediately checks the name of the sender. His excitement wanes, replaced by confusion.
Pacifica: Are you there?
It's the first time he's heard from her. He added her number to his phone after their odd afternoon encounter but hadn't really thought she'd contact him. It had seemed more like they traded numbers just for the sake of their shared burden, the experience they both carry. Then again, maybe he needs to give her more credit. After she'd opened the gates of the Manor to the town there was no guarantee the change would stick. But she had risked her life at his side to thwart global annihilation. She had given him a birthday present and signed a farewell card. She really had tried.
He hesitates with his fingers over the touchscreen. What can she possibly want? He types back, Yes.
She doesn't reply for a good minute and a half.
Pacifica: Can I come see you?
Dipper immediately understands that something is wrong. He starts to ask why, then erases it. He types half a paragraph about how he's not sure what she's asking for and erases that, too. In the end, he decides that if she wanted to say more in text, she would have.
Dipper doesn't know a whole lot about her. He doesn't know what her favorite foods are or what her hobbies are besides mini golf or what her opinions are beyond the ones she's been taught to parrot. The things he knows about her are the kinds of things one learns about a person under the direst circumstances. He knows the things that her family and friends and people who have had so many more interactions with her don't know, because he knows who she is when her world comes crumbling down and everything she pretends she is cannot be sustained.
Asking permission to come see him is already a sign of vulnerability that Dipper finds worrying. Pacifica's snobby facade hides very real pain and doubt, but that facade is also all she knows (and everything she has been forced to be). Even when willingly attending his birthday party she had pretended that it was beneath her. She obviously wasn't serious about it, and Dipper hadn't taken it that way, but she had still needed the pretense.
Dipper remembers the conflicted horror on her face when she saw her parents in Bill's throne. He knows there's only one right reply. He types, Sure you can.
He waits for about five minutes but never gets a response. His eyelids grow heavier as he watches his phone, the task finally providing the distraction he needs from his earlier thoughts. He gets back into bed and puts the phone on his chest, just resting his eyes for a minute.