the steady continental seventy — viii
"Whoa!" Dipper blinks a few times, but light is not forthcoming. "What in the—"
"Dipper!" Pacifica says in alarm.
"Hold on," he says, digging blindly through a pocket. He gets his phone out and taps at it until the screen comes alive, lighting the inside of the tent with its multicolored glow.
It takes him a second to find his flashlight app; with the camera flash emitting a steady light, he unzips the tent door and looks outside. The store has been plunged into utter darkness. Another beam of light cuts through the gloom as Pacifica turns on her phone's flash. They scramble out of the tent, confused and disoriented.
"Maybe the storm knocked out the power," Pacifica reasons.
"Yeah, but what about the windows?"
Dipper raises his phone and shines it along the wall, searching for glass. Instead of a view of the stormy morning, he sees flat metal panels. They look heavy-duty, more like armor than storm shutters. Is that normal?
"Did they seriously lock us in?" Pacifica says.
"I don't know. I guess there could be a tornado or something." Dipper takes stock of the environment; it's utterly dark in every direction and he doesn't know the layout of the store. "Let's go back to the entrance and see if we can find everyone else."
The store is transformed in the dark; the scenery which had once been a heady fusion of unfettered capitalism and outdoorsmanship now strobes out of the murk in strange shapes and shadows, menacing and always half-obscured. The sound of the stream, still babbling along its wooden course, has become a comforting signpost. As they pass through the atrium, Dipper sees that the employee is gone.
When they reach the entrance it's just as Dipper feared: locked up tight. There's no exit and still not a hint of light.
"Okay, this is unacceptable. Let me out or I am going to sue you and I will WIN," Pacifica pronounces, raising her voice.
Dipper cocks his head to one side, listening intently.
"I just want to go to Portland," Pacifica says through clenched teeth. She bangs her fist on the gate. "Let. Me. Out."
"Do you hear anything?" Dipper asks.
Pacifica puts her tirade on hold. "Like what?"
"I can't hear the rain anymore," he says, looking upwards.
They are both startled by a sudden shout from one of the side hallways. "HEY!"
Someone's flashlight is visible there, a pinpoint of light against the blackness. "Mabel?" Dipper calls back. "Is that you?"
Instead of a reply, another shout echoes down the corridor. The point of light falls and then goes still.
"Mabel?" Pacifica yells. "You'd better not be trying to scare me! We talked about this!"
No reply. Dipper starts walking, heading quickly towards the light with Pacifica close behind. He reaches it to find a familiar Shimmery Twinkleheart phone case staring up at him, the phone's flashlight still on. He picks it up and looks around.
"Mabel?" he says. He's really, really hoping she's just playing a dumb and inappropriate prank, but he knows better. "Mabel, say something if you can hear me!"
Nothing.
"This is freaky," Pacifica says, shifting her weight from foot to foot nervously. "What is happ— AAAAAAAAHHHHHHhhhhhhh—"
She goes flying backwards into the dark. Dipper holds up his phone and begins frantically sprinting after her, but she's moving incredibly fast. It looks like someone is holding her, but surely a person couldn't hold her and run that fast. Dipper does his best, but soon enough Pacifica's screams are fading in the distance and he's alone.
"LET HER GO!" he yells as he spins in place, looking for any sign of her. "Pacifica? Anyone?!"
There's nothing. The racks of camouflage gear hang silently.
He's completely alone.
"Okay, okay—don't freak out," he breathes, his eyes straining against the blackness. Talking out loud helps, makes him feel less isolated. "That… whatever-it-is could have taken you, too, but it didn't. Why? Think."
A second later, he's completely blinded when the lights come blaring back to life along with a deafening blast of… music? What?
"TONIGHT," a voice booms from everywhere and nowhere, rattling Dipper down to his bones, "LORD ZOR PRESENTS: HUMAN HUNT XXVI!"
Dipper covers his ears as an unseen crowd roars in approval.
"SIX CONTESTANTS! SIX DAYS! SIX HUNDRED WAYS TO DIE! PLACE YOUR BETS NOW! ALLIANCES WILL BE FORMED! BACKS WILL BE STABBED! AND AS ALWAYS, THE ROBOTOMIZERS WILL KEEP THINGS FAIR—BY TRYING TO KILL THEM ALL! SOME MAY SURVIVE, BUT ONLY ONE CAN ASCEND TO BECOME THE ULTIMATE HUNTER."
Dipper can't believe this. "Are you for real, man?!" he shouts at the ceiling. "I'm not competing in an alien pay-per-view!"
Either the voice can't hear him, or it elects to ignore him. "CHOOSE YOUR FAVORITE CONTESTANT: MEDIUM-VEST-BOY! TALL-FLANNEL-GIRL! SHORT-PINK-GIRL! TALL-COAT-MAN! MEDIUM-SWEATER-GIRL! AND MY PERSONAL PICK, TALL-ROUND-MAN! HE'S GOT THAT KILLER INSTINCT!"
Dipper puts his face in his hands. "I am not going to die as Medium-Vest-Boy."
"THEY CAN'T MAKE IT ALONE—BUT THEY CAN'T WIN TOGETHER! THE CLOCK STARTS… NOW!"
A loud buzzer cuts through the entire store. With a clang, all the shutters over the windows retract, letting in a strange orange light. When Dipper looks outside, he is horrified to see not the familiar cloudy sky of Oregon, but a bizarre, harsh-lit nebula of unknown gasses stretching into infinity. The store seems to be suspended, if not in space, then something very like it.
Pacifica's right. He just wants to go to Portland.
He needs to calm down. He has to have his head on straight if he's going to get out of this and get everyone else out too. There's an elevated deer stand display behind him; he scrambles up into it and hunkers down in the shelter. It's not exactly a fortress, but it's better than standing out in the open. He looks through the windows and doesn't see any immediate threats.
Okay. So, he's on some kind of alien show, which may or may not be a gameshow or just a betting ring or something like that. He's still in the store, but the store seems to have been moved somewhere, and that somewhere probably isn't Earth. If it was moved one way, then it can be moved back. He just has to figure out how. The rules of the game seem to presuppose that the participants are enemies or at least strangers. The 'there can only be one' rule must be designed to put a stop to any alliances in the endgame. Dipper is here with his family—he can trust all of them, no matter what. He doesn't have to worry about being betrayed, and they'll be much stronger when working together.
Now, the 'Robotomizers,' on the other hand, sound bad.
"The tent section is that way, customer. The tent section, is, that way, customer. The-the-the tent section. Is… customer."
The sudden voice comes from down the hall to Dipper's right. He looks out the entrance to the stand and sees the employee from earlier, walking slowly towards Dipper's hiding spot. The man's feet hit the floor flat, and his head is hanging at an odd angle.
"The t-t-tent section is THAT way, customer," the man says in a weird, off-pattern stutter. His head swivels to the left, fixated on something, then swings to the right with unnatural speed, like a bird. His jaw pops up and down, teeth clicking rhythmically. "The tent-tent section is section that way, customer-r-r-r."
Dipper doesn't need any prompts from the announcer to know he's looking at a hostile. He pushes himself against the side of the stand, trying to make sure he can't be seen and wishing he hadn't picked a defensive position with only one way out.
"Customer. Customer." The thing's voice is very close. Dipper can hear its feet hit the floor with abnormal weight.
There's nothing in the stand that can be used as a weapon. If the 'man' currently stalking Dipper is in fact a robot, then punching it will accomplish nothing with the probable exception of breaking Dipper's hand. A hunting and fishing store will be full to the brim of things which can be used as weapons—no doubt a feature of the game—but that doesn't do him much good when nothing is readily available. His hiding spot is, in retrospect, not particularly clever.
He realizes he can't hear the employee anymore. Which could be good or bad—
"Bad! Real bad!" Dipper yelps as the employee's head suddenly appears in one of the stand's viewing slots.
"CUSTOMER!" the employee roars with a metallic shriek. "THE TENT SECTION IS THAT WAY!"
"I'm good, I already found them!" Dipper yells as he flees out the door.
He gets his first bit of reassuring information as he runs: The employee is slow, and quickly lags behind. This is countered by a bit of extremely troubling information when the employee, hobbling awkwardly after Dipper, rips part of the metal staircase clean off the deer stand. So, yeah, avoiding hand to hand combat is definitely the way to go.
Dipper doesn't have a plan outside the vague, if pressing, goal of getting away from the Robotomizer. He ends up deep in the back of the sporting goods section, huddling behind a big mesh basket full of tennis balls. Against the back wall is a selection of baseball bats and he takes a few off the shelf and hefts them, trying to pick a likely weapon. The aluminum bats are too light, and aluminum is too soft a metal. He finds a heavy wooden bat that feels like it might do some damage. At the very least, he might be able to knock one down long enough to get away.
He hasn't seen any sign of the others. About half the lights in the store are still off and they change sometimes, lighting up and going dark without any apparent pattern. Between that and the strange orange light of the nebula it's not easy to see, which could work to his advantage, though for all he knows the Robotomizers use infrared.
The areas around the entryway are sparse when it comes to cover. Dipper does his best to stick to the clothing sections, weaving around the racks and ducking behind t-shirt displays. Robotomizers are a frequent presence but never overwhelming, which is probably intentional; some of them show signs of wear, missing eyeballs or lacerated fingers revealing the metal underneath the fake skin. It occurs to Dipper that they must be coming from somewhere, and wherever that is might be a way behind the scenes into the guts of the store.
The problem is that the Robotomizers don't seem to have any need to return to wherever they came from. They may have to recharge eventually, though Dipper would prefer to be long gone before that point. He doubles back and heads towards the entrance, hoping to run into someone else either there or along the way. The front door and the store map are the only landmarks that he knows everyone is familiar with.
He's crouched behind an ATV, scoping out the entrance, when a Robotomizer comes literally out of nowhere—a panel in the wall slides down and the robot staggers out with a chainsaw in its hands. Dipper scurries backwards, avoiding a sloppy swing. The Robotomizers don't seem very coordinated, which may explain why the chainsaw isn't running. The android swings the inactive device towards Dipper again in a bizarrely silent pantomime of a chainsaw attack.
"This would be a lot scarier if you actually turned on the chainsaw," Dipper comments as he easily avoids another sweep.
The Robotomizer brings the chainsaw down on top of a nearby golf cart, smashing its roof in half with nothing but sheer brute force.
Dipper's overconfidence evaporates. "Oh, right. You're a super strong robot. Look, this is usually my girlfriend's go-to move, but can I pay you to leave me alone…?"
The Robotomizer kicks the golf cart, sending it spinning towards Dipper. He dives out of the way, dropping his baseball bat as the cart just barely misses his ankles. When he manages to get back to his feet, the robot is far too close for comfort. Dipper backs away, only to come to a halt when he hits the wall, trapped between two more golf carts.
"IS THIS THE END OF MEDIUM-VEST-BOY?" the loudspeaker thunders.
Dipper tenses, ready to flee through one of the golf carts. He has to wait until the last second so the Robotomizer can't alter its swing and hit him after he moves, which sounds good in theory but is pretty scary in practice as the robot raises the chainsaw over its head for a full-power downward blow—
Something comes flying through the air and hits the Robotomizer directly in the head with a tremendous clang. The Robotomizer emits an electronic squeal of distress and falls, hitting the floor and going still.
Soos comes jogging out of one of the lightless sections of the hall, a second bowling ball clutched in his hands. "Uh, that was, like, a killer robot or something, right? Not a regular dude?"
"Soos!" Dipper says in relief. "You're alright!"
Soos' face lights up when Dipper speaks—he must not have been able to see who it was behind the carts. "Oh, hey, Medium-Vest-Boy! It's me, Tall-Round-Man!"
Dipper sighs and steps over the fallen Robotomizer. "It's just Dipper, Soos. Just say Dipper."
"I guess we're gameshow contestants now?" Soos says. He looks down at the disabled robot. "Man, I don't know… I think I'd rather be on Cash Wheel than the Thunderdome."
"We're getting out of here," Dipper assures him. "Have you seen anyone else?"
"Just these robots. For real, though, they're kind of jerks."
Dipper approaches the store map and runs his finger over it. Wendy and Mabel were headed for the hunting section. Of course, there's no guarantee they hadn't been shuffled around at the start of the game like Pacifica. That's probably what happened to Mabel when she dropped her phone. Dipper knows it wasn't anything worse because the announcer counted them as being in play.
Dipper leaves the store map and returns to the section of wall where the Robotomizer emerged, retrieving his fallen baseball bat. He runs his hand over the wall, trying to find the panel that he knows is cleverly hidden behind the fake wood furnishing. He manages to get his nails into what he's pretty sure is the seam, but he can't find any way to open it from the outside. He drops his hand and debates the wisdom of having Soos try to smash it open. If it works, they'll be outside of the game. If it doesn't, the noise could bring any number of other Robotomizers. Of course, even if it does work, it's still going to make noise.
"Yo, Dipper?" Soos says.
"Yeah, Soos?" Dipper says, still studying the wall.
"I don't think these metal dudes like you messing with their wall, heh heh!"
Dipper turns around to see what must be at least twenty Robotomizers entering from the central atrium. "Oh. Uh… Run."
There's no time to plan a route. Dipper and Soos take off as fast as their legs will carry them. Soos abandons his bowling ball, the makeshift weapon bouncing across the hardwood floor in a series of deafening cracks as they sprint into the depths of the store with a horde of lethal automatons staggering after. Dipper makes it a little further with his bat before he, too, drops it in favor of celerity. It's not hard to outpace the things; more difficult is shaking them entirely. Long after the two humans have left the Robotomizers behind, they can still hear them pursuing, following the sound of Dipper and Soos' retreat.
Dipper skids to a halt in the paintball section, a display stack of glow-in-the-dark paintball cans shining eerily beneath the darkened fluorescent fixtures. "Here!" he whispers to Soos, and pulls the larger man down behind a rack of airsoft guns.
They crouch in the shadows, trying to stifle their breathing and waiting to see if the patter of uneven footsteps grows closer. Eventually, they relax; the throng of Robotomizers continues past them, disappearing into the labyrinth of halls and shops.
"They must be programmed to stop anyone from getting out of bounds," Dipper says as he catches his breath.
Soos nods. "Bad news for us, du—"
The shelf next to them explodes in a storm of splinters and shattered plastic, a Robotomizer's clenched hand striking downward as it crunches through the remnants of the display, its teeth bared in a robotic death's head grin. Dipper scrambles backwards, his feet failing to gain traction as they slide chunks of polished wood and slick plastic across the tile floor. Soos jumps up and wraps his arms around the Robotomizer, lifting it off the ground in an impressive display of strength. The Robotomizer is stronger: It breaks Soos' grip with ease and sends him sprawling with a hit of its elbow. Dipper desperately sorts through the debris, looking for anything that might work as a weapon. The Robotomizer reaches for him, its hand opening like the jaws of a vise.
And then there's a very strange sound, like a nail being pushed through a tin can. The Robotomizer goes still, a stick sprouting from its head. It begins to move again, only for two more bolts to come flying out of the darkness and puncture its neck and eye socket with the sound of circuits crunching. A wisp of smoke curls out of its nostrils. It takes a single step, and collapses.
"Dude, this is messing me up," Wendy says as she emerges from the darkness with Mabel at her side. "That is way too much like shooting an actual person. Kinda wish they didn't have skin."
Wendy has a compound bow and a quiver of arrows; Mabel also has a quiver, though she's carrying a bright pink and white crossbow.
"Yeah, they sell crossbows," Mabel says, noticing Dipper's appraisal. "It's no grapping hook, but it's pretty good at crossbowing robots."
"I have to cock it for her," Wendy says with an exasperated shake of her head.
"You should have let me get the crank-crank crossbow!"
"I told you, dorkus, it's too loud."
"I'm just saying, I could be crossbowing so many more of the things."
"That's definitely not a verb," Dipper says as he painfully hauls himself to his feet. "Also, you saved our butts."
Soos sits up in the wreckage of the shelf, his eyes wide. "Dudes, this game is dangerous. It's, like, the most dangerous game!
"Mabel, didn't you get grabbed at the start?" Dipper asks.
"Oh, yeah," Mabel says as if she forgot all about it. "Something put a bag over my head. My breath really smells like sour gummy worms."
"But you didn't see Pacifica?"
"It wasn't the kind of bag you can see through, bro," Mabel says with an apologetic shrug.
"Right." Dipper blows out a frustrated breath. "I know we need to find Great-Uncle Ford to get out of here, but I'm worried that Pacifica might be by herself."
"Maybe she's with Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford," Mabel says optimistically.
"I hope so." Dipper readjusts his hat, thinking.
If he were Great-Uncle Ford, where would he be? Somewhere with the best chance of fighting back. But Wendy and Mabel had obviously been to the hunting section and hadn't seen him. Great-Uncle Ford would fight back differently, though. He'd use science. He'd use whatever he could find.
"Electronics!" Dipper says. "We have to find whatever they have for electronics. I know it's an outdoor store but they gotta have, like, cameras and radios."
"Yeah, I know where that stuff is," Wendy says. "Come on, follow me!"
Gathering together, they follow Wendy through the dim corridors of merchandise.