The Pines sat in traffic, and Mabel munched on her chips as Stan leaned on the horn. A brilliant idea came to her, and she grabbed two of her nachos and hung them on her ears. "Ha ha! Nacho earrings! I'm hilarious!"
"That's debatable," Stan deadpanned. He honked again. "Aw, come on. What's with all this traffic?" He peered at the crowd. "And why is it all . . . covered wagons?!"
Confused, she peered out the window. Sure enough, everything looked old-timey. Covered wagons and horses and dresses for the girls. Raccoon hats and wooden wheels.
Stan must've figured out what was going on because he said, "Oh, no. No! No!" He switched gears and slammed them into motion, their tires squealing as they spun around a corner. "Not today! Not today!" He pressed on the brakes so as not to run into a couple women with old-style outfits.
One of them was sweating. Poor lady.
So then he went into reverse. They shot backwards, and Mabel was very confused at this point. So was Dipper, and he asked, "Grunkle Stan, what's going on?"
"We gotta get out of here . . . before it's too late!" he replied, panicked. Mabel mentally pouted. That didn't exactly answer the question. They screeched to a halt. "They've circled the wagons! We're trapped! NO!"
Mabel was now extremely confused (and slightly amused.) A cow bell clanked outside her window, and she looked at the big brown cow standing outside. "I got a good feeling about today."
They climbed out of the car and looked around, and it was all new and different. Or, well, maybe old and different was a better term. "Man, look at the town," Dipper said. He held up an old postcard and compared it to the oddly brown-tinted town in front of him, which was almost identical.
The men holding the brown-tintedness, a piece of dirty glass, walked off, calling, "Dirty glass! We got dirty glass! Dirty glass!"
"Ah, boy," Stan said, walking up to them. "It's Pioneer Day. Every year these yahoos dress up like idiots to celebrate the day Gravity Falls was founded."
Toby Determined walked up in a cowboy outfit. "Welcome to 1863!" he said, holding a whole bunch of newspapers and doing a little jazz-hands dance.
Stan rolled up his sleeve and shouted, "I will break you, little man!" Toby screamed and ran away, crashing into a barrel and losing his hat. Dipper watched, honestly not that alarmed. Stan did this often enough he'd gotten desensitized.
Meanwhile, Mabel must've turned around, because she said, "Wow, look! Candle dipping!"
He looked too and found his own sort of thing. "Whoa! Gold panning!"
"I now pronounce you man and wife," a priest said before a man and . . . a woodpecker?
"I do!"
"What you talkin' about?" Mabel asked, cocking her head in confusion, and Dipper pulled out the Journal and opened to a certain page, as it had piqued something in his memory.
"Oh, yeah, I remember this," he said. "In Gravity Falls it used to be legal to marry woodpeckers," he read, and the newlyweds walked up.
The man looked down at them. "Oh, it's still legal . . . very legal."
Dipper figured this guy probably needed therapy.
Their conversation was interrupted by a voice over the . . . what was it, a speaker? That didn't sound pioneer-ish. "Come one and all for the opening ceremonies!"
The creepy woodpecker guy walked away, and he heaved a mental sigh of relief. He knew that mental instability wasn't infectious, but that guy was still creepy. Mabel turned to Stan, who'd walked up. "Grunkle Stan, you comin'?" Mabel asked excitedly.
"No, thank you!" he replied devoutly. "Just remember if you come back to the Shack talking like these people, you're dead to me!"
Dipper immediately saw the joke he just had to make. "Thar's a carpetbagger in the turnip cellar!" he said in the old-timey twang, closing one of his eyes.
"Well, hornswaggle my haversack!" Mabel said, closing one of hers.
Then they both spat on the ground and ran off, laughing, and in the distance, he vaguely heard Stan scream, "Dead to me!"
They made their way to the stage for the opening ceremonies, and Sheriff Blubs, with a raccoon hat, shouted, "Hear ye, hear ye! Ye olde commencement ceremony is about to commence."
Deputy Durland ran up, too, whooping and ringing a bell. "Whoo! I got a bell!"
In the crowd, a thief nabbed some poor old lady's purse, but the cops were too preoccupied with the bell (and each other, Dipper thought uncomfortably). Still, as he dragged Mabel through the crowd, he heard some manly screaming (he wished his screams sounded like that), and before long, Antonio showed up, handing the lady her purse with a carefree smile. Then he made his way to the twins.
Though it wasn't clear to Dipper how Antonio got the purse back.
On stage, Pacifica tapped the microphone, and then started a speech. He barely kept himself from rolling his eyes. Rich girls. "Howdy, everyone. You all know me, Pacifica Northwest, great-great-granddaughter of town founder Nathaniel Northwest. I'm also very rich."
The crowd applauded, and he wondered why that deserved applause.
"Now, if you've got the pioneer spirit, we ask you to come on up and introduce yourself."
From next to him, Mabel gasped. "Audience participation!"
"I don't know, Mabel. Isn't that girl kind of, like, your archenemy?" he pointed out.
"That's water under the bridge." She giggled and ran up.
Dipper looked up at Antonio, and both of them knew what was coming. This was not going to end well.
Pacifica started cheerfully, unaware of who stood next to her. "Our first newcomer is . . ." She looked over and narrowed her eyes. "Mabel."
"Yeah! Let's get this Pioneer Day started!" She blew a raspberry. "Right, guys?" Everyone was just quiet. Dipper figured they were trying to figure out how to process her. "USA! USA!" she chanted, and the crowd picked it up. He started chanting now, too, because it wasn't actually that bad.
Some guy with all the stars and stripes was crying. "USA!" he sobbed, and he sniffled. "USA!"
"I'm sorry to break it to you"—oh fudge, here it came—"but Pioneer Day is for serious people, and you look and act ridiculous. I mean, a puppy playing basketball?" Pacifica looked down at Mabel's sweater with the rude comment. "Are you always this silly?"
She grabbed it, visibly uncomfortable. "Hey! I can be serious!" She tried to make a serious face.
Pacifica was unimpressed. "You do have nachos hanging from your ears, hon." Mabel grabbed them, her face going red, and Dipper felt awful. It wasn't that bad, even if . . . even if he'd thought the same things sometimes. The rich girl giggled. "Wow, I'm embarrassed for you. Give her a hand, everybody!"
Everybody clapped but Dipper and Antonio. He looked at his sister, and even though she was usually really happy and upbeat, she looked close to tears. She sullenly walked off the stage, and the boys pushed their way through the crowd. He ignored Pacifica's, "Now, who wants to hear more about me?"
Mabel needed help.
"Hey, you okay?" he asked, even though she clearly wasn't.
"I need some old-timey butterscotch," she muttered, and then she saw Antonio, and her face went red again. He noticed her pulling off her nacho earrings and eating them as discreetly as possible. Antonio noticed it, too, and he slipped away, but not before giving her a pitying look.
Dipper felt really, really bad for her, too.
"Let's get out of here."
Stan was having a lot of difficulty trying to pull his car out of the mud. He pushed harder on the gas, but the wheels continued to just spin. A familiar face passed by, with a donkey.
"Hey, there," he called. "Uh, donkey boy. Give me a hand with my car, huh?"
"Here in 1863, I have never heard tell of a . . . car," he said, and Stan seethed. "Pray tell, what is this magic wheel box?"
"Aw, come on, Steve, you're a mechanic, for Pete's sake. Cut me some slack!" he shouted.
"'Slack.' I am unfamiliar with this bold new expression."
Stan shook him by the collar. "I can't take this anymore! I'm getting dumber every second I'm here!" And it wasn't like he had a ton of brain cells to spare, unlike . . . no, no, he wasn't gonna think about Ford. That just hurt.
"Are we gonna have to intervene here?" Sheriff Blubs asked, running up with his stick thing and his deputy.
"Oh, look . . . the constable," Stan said sarcastically. "What are you gonna do, throw me in ye stocks?" He laughed at that.
Then found himself in ye stocks.
"Aw, come on!"
There was some annoying little humming, and Gideon walked up, dressed up like a little rich boy, his hair done like a powdered wig. "Hey, nice outfit, Gideon. You actually look less girly than usual." He laughed at that, too.
"Why, Stanford"—oh, he so wished he could correct this bucko—"I'm just a humble tomato farmer sellin' his wares. Whoops! I dropped one!" He threw a tomato at his face. "Whoops! I dropped another one!" The two of them landed on his glasses, covering up his eyes.
He screamed as loud as he could muster, "PIONEER DAY!"
The twins sat on the steps by the Nathaniel Northwest statue, and Mabel munched on her butterscotch. It looked like it was helping, but only a little. "Dipper, can I ask you something?" she asked. He looked at her. "Do you think I'm . . . silly?"
"Uh, noooo?" he said unconvincingly.
"Ugh! I knew it! The nacho earrings, the sweater . . . I thought I was being charming, but I guess people see me as a big joke." If he knew her as well as he thought he did, she was thinking about Antonio, too. She took off her sweater and tied it around her waist.
"Come on, Mabel. You love that sweater," Dipper pointed out.
"I did before Pacifica ruined it for me," she said, upset. "She ruins everything."
"Pacifica!" Dipper said, frustrated. "Why does she think that being related to the town founder means she gets to treat everyone like garbage? Someone needs to take her down a peg." Something clicked in his brain, and he gasped. "Wait a minute! I feel like I read something about Pacifica's great-great-grandfather before."
He pulled out the Journal and started to flip through the pages. "Of course! Oh, this is perfect." He sat down and showed her the page, starting to read in an old man voice. "'In my investigations . . .' Should—should I do the voice?"
She shook her head.
"Eh, I'll just read normal. 'In my investigations, I recently made a discovery. Nathaniel Northwest may not be the founder of Gravity Falls.'" Mabel perked up. "'I believe the proof of this secret is buried somewhere on the enclosed document. If only I could crack the code.'" He unfolded the paper and looked at it. "Oh, man! If this cover-up is true, it means Pacifica's whole family is a fraud! This could be a major conspiracy!"
"Really?" she asked, her eyes going all big with excitement.
"I gotta investigate this!" he said, standing up.
"Wait. I'm coming with you," she said. "Conspiracies are serious, right?"
"Oh, yeah, definitely."
"Well, if I help you crack this code, nobody could ever call me silly again!" She seemed impressed with her own justification, and he kind of was, too.
He thrust his hand in the air. "Yeah! Mystery twins?"
"I thought you hated that."
"I'm starting to accept it." She fist-bumped him, and they ran off, laughing.
But unbeknownst to either of them, Sheriff Blubs had been listening from behind the statue.
Mabel read with Dipper in the library, though she kept getting distracted. It wasn't her fault that it was fun to watch Old Man MuGucket rip the cover of a book off with his teeth.
"All right, Mabel," Dipper said, starting the rundown as usual. "If we can prove that Nathaniel Northwest wasn't the real founder of Gravity Falls, it'll finally put Pacifica in her place."
"And solving a mystery will prove that I'm not silly . . . I'm serious." She licked up some butterscotch without using her hands. "Serioussssss . . ."
"We just need to crack this code," he said. "Let me see . . ." He started murmuring and flipping through slides on the projector. "Wait, of course! The triangle is the alchemist's symbol for flame. Lighting the parchment on fire will reveal the secret message!"
"It's so obvious!"
He reached for the candle, but she'd grabbed the paper and folded it into a hat. "Mwop! I made a hat!" she said proudly. Then she realized what she'd done. "Ugh. I just did something silly again!" She blew a raspberry, upset.
"Wait. Mabel, you folded it into a map." He lifted up the light to the hat, and she glanced from side to side. She'd done what? He looked at his candle. "And I was gonna burn it."
They heard a voice murmuring. Sheriff Blubs. Looking for two kids who might be reading. That he and the deputy were hunting down for secret reasons.
Secret reasons, as in, uncovering a major town-related conspiracy.
"Maybe we should take this elsewhere," Dipper suggested.
She took the hat off her head and looked at it. "This map should lead us to . . . the Gravity Falls Museum of History."
"You realize what this means, Mabel," Dipper said dramatically. "We're gonna have to break in."
"And those are your free Pioneer Day passes, and your balloons, blue and pink." Mabel smiled and grabbed her balloon.
"We're in," he murmured. She gave him a weird look.
They walked around the exhibits, rather aimlessly. "What are we gonna do next?" she asked. "Steal Thomas Jefferson's rib cage?"
"Ew. No. According to the map, the next clue about the real town founder should be right . . . here!" He pointed at a strange triangular carving thing. "We have to figure this one out quick. I have a feeling those cops weren't at the library to check out books."
"I don't think the one with the bell can read."
"So what is it, anyway?" he asked, and they both turned to look at the strange carving. She got bored after like five seconds of looking, and she plopped down on the bench.
"Hey, painting! Be less stupid." She spun around in her seat, until she was sitting upside down, and she gasped. "It worked!"
"Huh?!" Dipper ran over and sat down next to her and looked at it, too. "Wait! It's not abstract, it's upside-down!" She squinted at the revealed image, and it clicked. She brightened up.
"I think I've seen that statue in the cemetery!"
"Let's go! Quick!" They both stood up very quickly, and they both had to deal with the consequence: a head rush. As soon as they'd overcome that, they rushed right out, running past the cops. They got caught in the door, though, so the twins could escape.
Stan tried to pick the lock holding him in the stocks with a hairpin in his mouth, but it fell to the ground. He grunted, frustrated.
A little hand picked it up. This time it was that rich girl who'd been at the party, Pacifica Northwest. "Well, if it isn't Mabel's uncle, Mr. Pines. Looking for this?"
"Yeah, yeah. What do you want, money?"
"I want you to say that the Northwest family is the best family in Gravity Falls," she said cockily. Stan mentally sighed. This kid could run circles around him—but only literally, since he was stuck. He had a plan.
"Oh, sure. You want that in writing?" he asked sarcastically. She just provided a pen and paper, and with his mouth, he wrote the words he was intending to write. He grinned as she stared at what he'd written.
YOU SUCK!
He laughed. "Ha! I did that with my mouth!" She whistled, and more people walked up with tomatoes. "Oh, come on!" he groaned, bracing for impact . . .
But it never came.
He opened his eyes to see none other than Antonio standing in front of him. Pacifica was gaping up at the boy, mortified, and the teen turned around to grin at him. A squished tomato was lodged in his hair, and the juice was dribbling down his temple. "Hello, Mr. Pines," he greeted.
Stan was just laughing at the look on Pacifica's face as his employee grabbed the hairpin from her and picked the lock. As soon as he felt the stocks release release, Stan was out of there, and the tomatoes followed them, hot on their heels.
They were both laughing maniacally, though.
At least until they got caught again, and both of them were stuck in the stocks.
"Huh." Dipper looked at the statue in the cemetery. "The statue must be pointing to the next clue." He spun around to try and look for it, but the sound of his sister laughing made him look back.
"Oh, gross! She's picking my nose! Ha ha!" Sure enough, Mabel was hanging from the angel's finger by her nostril, but the finger wiggled in her nose, and a stone slab retreated into the ground.
He gaped. "Mabel, look!" He gestured at the hidden staircase.
"Ha! Who's silly now, Pacifica?" Mabel asked, hanging from the stone finger by her nostril. "Bam!" The stone tugged against her nose, and she came off of it. The two of them descended into the darkness.
He led the way with the flashlight, and behind him, he could hear his sister grinning. "Now we're getting into real conspiracy mode. I feel so serious," she said, and he heard her munching on another bit of toffee. He smiled a little bit, glad her mood was back up and running.
"Okay, look out for booby traps," he warned.
"Ha! Booby traps."
There was the sound of a pressure plate being pushed down, and he spun around to look at Mabel. Her foot was on one, and a moment later, a dart shot into the wall. "Tranquilizer darts!" he yelped, and they both ducked, running through the passage as fast as possible.
They tripped and ended up sliding down a huge mud slide, screaming all the way. They rolled through a spiderweb and into a dusty room with all sorts of strange, old-timey-America stuff. He shone the flashlight over the room to look at it all.
"It's a treasure trove of historic-y, secret-y things," Mabel said, picking up a folder. She flipped through it, and though he couldn't see the other stuff she saw, she didn tell him: "Oh, man! Ben Franklin secretly was a woman."
"Hey, jackpot!" he said softly, spotting a folder labeled 'The Northwest Cover-Up.' It had a top secret stamp, obviously. It wouldn't be a real conspiracy if it wasn't top secret. "Now we'll find out who the real town founder was."
He eagerly opened it and read, "'Let it be here recorded that Nathaniel Northwest, fabled founder of Gravity Falls, was, in fact, a fraud, as well as a waste-shoveling village idiot.'" He laughed. "Oh, bad news for Pacifica. Wait'll the papers hear about this!"
"Once people see that I uncovered a historical conspiracy, they could never call me silly."
"'The true founder of Gravity Falls was Sir Lord Quentin Trembley, III, Esquire.'"
"Who's Quentin Trembley?" Mabel asked, which was a valid question. However, a light switched on behind them, and they spun around to find Sheriff Blubs standing there, Deputy Durland behind him.
"That's none of your business!"
They both gasped in fear, and the deputy rang his bell. "Whoo! We gotcha! Whoo! Whoo . . ." He passed out, falling flat on the ground, revealing a lot of darts stuck in his back.
"He got hit with quite a few of those darts," Sheriff Blubs said unhelpfully.
After Deputy Durland woke back up, the sheriff held up the document. "I hate to do this, but Quentin Trembley's a matter of national security."
"Yeah! Whoo." The deputy panted. "I think I might be colorblind now."
"What do you mean, 'national security'?" Dipper asked.
"And who is Quentin Trembley, anyway?" Mabel added.
"See for yourself." He lifted his hat, pulling out a reel of film. They plugged it into the old-timey camera and watched.
Mabel pouted. "Ah, it's black and white?!"
"Shh! Mabel!" Dipper scolded her, annoyed.
And they watched it.
There was a man in a suit onscreen. "If you're watching this, then you are one of eight people in these United States with clearance to view this information. In fact, I myself will be shot as soon as the filming is complete." He looked offscreen. "What? No? Ha! Well, that's a relief!
"Of all of America's secrets, the most embarrassing was that of Quentin Trembley. The eighth-and-a-half president of the United States."
"President?!" they both gasped.
"Eighth and a half?!" Mabel asked, confused.
"After winning the 1837 election in a landslide . . ." The video showed a literal landslide covering up everyone but him. ". . . Quentin Trembley quickly gained a reputation as America's silliest president. He waged war on pancakes, appointed six babies to the Supreme Court, and issued the de-pants-ipation proclamation. His state of the union speech was even worse."
The voice reenactment said, "The only thing we have to fear is gigantic, man-eating spiders!"
"He was kicked out of office and escaped to an uncharted valley he named 'Gravity Falls', after plummeting into it at high speed. Trembley's shameful term was erased from history and officially replaced by William Henry Harrison as president and local nobody Nathaniel Northwest as founder of Gravity Falls. The whereabouts of President Trembley's body are unknown."
Then the tape ended.
"Until now," Blubs said, gesturing behind them, where the president was literally stuck in a golden, translucent block. Dipper gasped.
"Whoa! Is that, like, amber, or something?" he asked, touching it.
"The fool thought he could live forever by encasing himself in a block of solid peanut brittle. Smooth move, Mr. President!" He turned back to the twins. "Finding Trembley's body was our special mission. And now, thanks to you, it's complete."
"Who knew all we had to do was follow a little girl's trail of candy wrappers?"
He looked at his sister, unimpressed, and she moaned. "Oh, silly!"
"Now that you know the truth, well, we can't let you go around talkin' about it." He rubbed his hands together, and both twins flinched back.
"Does that mean . . .?"
"Are you gonna kill us?!"
"Oh, no!" Durland screamed, though Dipper wasn't sure why he was freaking out.
"No, no. C-calm down now, buddy, calm down," Blubs said comfortingly. Then he turned back to the twins. "We're just gonna escort you and all this stuff back to Washington." He walked a couple steps away, then added, "You ain't comin' back, by the way."
They both exchanged a fearful look.
They were in a crate, on a train, on train tracks that headed for Washington. They both pounded at the walls, shouting for help, but it was to no avail. Mabel turned around and groaned. "Ugh! I can't believe I left a trail of candy wrappers. This is all my fault. Pacifica had me pegged all along. I'm just a silly failure, like that embarrassing President What's-His-Name."
She sighed. Antonio probably thought she was a failure too. She grabbed a chunk of peanut brittle from the encased president and took a bite, but she turned around when it started cracking and splintering before her eyes. She jumped to the other side of the crate to stand with Dipper.
They watched as it crumbled to pieces, and they both screamed.
The president guy, apparently alive, somehow, declared, "It is I, Quentin Trembley!" And right in front of them, he ripped his pants off.
Dipper pulled away with a grin. "You're alive? But how?!"
"Peanut brittle really does have life-sustaining properties!" Mabel gasped. "You're not silly, you're brilliant!"
"And so are you, dear girl," Quentin said, "for following my clues and freeing my from my delicious tomb!"
Dipper put a hand on her shoulder, and she looked at him. "He's right! Making maps into hats, hanging upside-down," he listed. "Your silliness solved the code that serious cops couldn't crack in a hundred years!"
"Oh, stop it." She was blushing at this point.
"By Jefferson!" Quentin randomly exclaimed. "We seem to be trapped in some sort of crate-shaped box."
"It's a crate, Mr. President," she supplied.
"Good thing I have the President's Key, which can open any lock in America." He confidently walked over to the wall and tried to stick the key in the wall, and Mabel ran over. She frowned when she saw what he was doing, though.
He grunted, and Dipper walked up, too. "I don't think that's gonna work," he said.
"Wood! My age-old enemy." He narrowed his eyes at the wood. "In order to get out of here, this is going to take the silliest plan ever conceived."
"I think I know who can help you," Dipper said with a smile, and Mabel smiled back.
She thought for a moment. "Hmm. How about . . ." Her eyes fell on the wall of the crate. "That hole?" She pointed to it.
"We will leap through it!" Quentin declared, and at the exact same time, they both dove for the hole and tried to squeeze their heads through it. She ended up wiggling her finger through the hole.
Dipper wasn't participating. "I'm not sure this is working," he admitted.
"Trust the silliness!" she grunted right back. She wiggled with more intensity, and a woodpecker started attacking her hand. She quickly pulled her finger back out to avoid getting pecked any more.
Quentin gasped. "Is that my third wife? Sandy?"
The woodpecker managed to pry off a board, and then the entire thing fell apart at once. They just kind of stood there awkwardly for a moment.
"Well, we didn't fit through the whole," the president said. "Let's rebuild the box and try again!"
"We gotta get outta here!" Dipper said, grabbing the papers of the Northwest file off the floor and running away.
"Also good!"
They ran through the train cars, until they encountered Deputy Durland, who was happily getting a cup of ice . . . for some reason. He dropped his ice and called out "Blubs . . . !" when he saw them, and the Sherriff poked his head out.
Dipper slid the door closed, and they ran the opposite direction. They came to the end of the train, and for a moment, there was panic, but Quentin spotted the emergency exit trapdoor on the ceiling. He, naturally, tried to use the President's Key, but Dipper seized it from him and just opened the door. They climbed out and ran along the roof of the train.
They ended up with all five of them on the roof, the twins and the president pushed up against the log car.
"There is . . ." Blubs panted. ". . . no escape! Let me—I gotta take a knee." He did so, and a worried Durland started fussing over him. "Edwin Durland, you are a diamond in the rough."
Mabel shipped it! Though this was probably a bad time.
"Sheriff Blubs, do you really want to lock us all up in a government facility somewhere?" Dipper asked.
"I've got no choice!" Blubs said angrily. "Our orders come from the very top!"
Mabel was freaking out, but she could see the gears spinning in her brother's head. "Wait! Quentin, did you ever sign an official resignation?"
"No, sir! I ate a salamander and jumped out the window."
"Then technically you're still legally the President of the United States, right?" he said excitedly, and Mabel brightened up. "You've gotta answer to this guy now!" he told the cops.
"Huh?!" they both exclaimed.
"As president of these several United States, I hereby order you to pretend none of this ever happened. And—and go on a delightful vacation." He got hit in the back of the head with some target thing. "Ow! Yes."
"Vacation?" Blubs asked with a smile. "What place have you always wanted to visit? One, two . . ."
"Silly Water Fun Slides in Grand Lakes, Michigan!" they said at the same time. They both giggled, and before long, they were both on their way on a train, on train tracks, headed for Michigan.
She watched them go, standing next to her brother and the president, who kneeled down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. "You've done a great service to your country, Mabel," he said. "As thanks, I'd like to make you an official US Congressman." He pulled out a top hat and inflated it. She grinned and let him put it on her head.
"I'm legalizing everything!"
(She did notice that Dipper had on a proud but confused face. Probably some government structure problem or something.)
"And Roderick . . ." Quentin said, turning to her brother.
"Uh, actually . . ."
"You, dear boy, are on your way to unlocking the mysteries of this great land, so I'd like you to have my President's Key." He pulled it out and gave it to him, and Dipper smiled.
Quentin walked back to the main area with them, telling them stories. ". . . and then he chased me around and spanked me with a paddle for, like, three hours. Bottom line: George Washington was a jerk!"
"Agreed," Mabel said. She still had on that silly hat.
They came up to Pacifica, who was overseeing some girls running around a pole with some ribbons and stuff. The twins wandered over to her, and Mabel was just as happy as she usually was. "Hey, Pacifica! I uncovered a government conspiracy about the eighth-and-a-half president of the United States!" she proudly proclaimed. "Who's silly now?"
"What? Who is that idiot?" She squinted at Quentin, was trying to attack an eagle, running around without his pants on.
"The eighth-and-a-half president of America," Mabel said, like it was obvious. Dipper couldn't help but feel like even he wouldn't believe it if he hadn't just lived it. (He wasn't sure that he did, even despite it all.) "I know what you're thinking: 'How is he still alive?' Well, it turns out you can hibernate in peanut brittle and it—"
Pacifica suddenly laughed mockingly. "Ha ha ha! Wow, you really are a sad, dumb little girl. Nice top hat, by the way." Her parents laughed for her. "Ooh! I see your car is stuck in the mud. Enjoy walking home."
A car that would've been fancy in 1863 pulled up, and she walked in, with her nose in the air. Dipper glared after her. "Aren't you gonna tell her about her ate-gray ampa-gray?" he asked through gritted teeth.
"You know what, Dipper? I've got nothing to prove. I've learned that being silly is awesome!" She managed to pull her sweater on, despite the top hat that was bigger than her own head.
Pacifica's car pulled away, and his brows set in determination. "Well, I haven't learned anything!" He whistled. "Hey, Pacifica!" Then he ran up to her car, which squealed to a stop. The window rolled down, and he looked at her, showing her the document.
"Nathaniel Northwest didn't found Gravity Falls, and your whole family is a sham. Deal with it!"
And he gave her the papers and left, heading back to Mabel. "Man, revenge is underrated," he murmured. "That felt awesome!"
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned to see Quentin standing there. "Children, I am needed elsewhere." Where, exactly? he couldn't help but wonder. "Just know that I'll always be right here . . ." He pointed to his chest, then opened his hand. ". . . on the negative twelve dollar bill."
Dipper examined it. "Whoa. This is worthless!"
"It's less than worthless, my boy. Trembley away!"
He jumped backwards, onto a horse, which rode away into the distance. "Where do you think he's going?" Mabel asked.
"I'm gonna say . . . off a cliff."
They went to go find Stan, and they found Antonio there, too, both of them covered in tomato juice and stuck in the stocks. Well, actually, Stan was stuck in the stocks. Antonio was tied with his hands behind the wooden pillar, since there was only one thing of stocks. (What would you call the multiple of stocks? 'Cuz he was pretty sure it wasn't stockses.)
"And then Soos came by and talked to us for, like, an hour," Stan complained.
"You've been through so much," Mabel said sympathetically.
Antonio turned to look at her, as well as he could manage with his arms so awkwardly tied. "Oh, hey, Mabel, I'm glad you got back to normal. I think your silliness is awesome! You'd be so boring without it, honestly."
She beamed.
Dipper pulled out the President's Key and unlocked the padlock keeping Stan in the stocks. "It works!" However, he doubted it would work on the ropes holding Antonio. "Um . . ."
"Oh, I'm fine," the teen shrugged, and he tugged on his bonds, the rope snapping. Dipper frowned, seeing something wrong with the edge of the rope. It looked blackish. What the . . . ?
"So what's with the top hat?" Stan asked.
"I am a congressman," Mabel informed him.
"Pardon me?"
"You are officially pardoned."
Both twins laughed, and Antonio grinned. Stan just sighed and said, "Oi! You are never gonna make sense, are you, kid?"
"No, I'm not, Grunkle Stan. No, I'm not. Mabel away!" She tried the trick that Quentin used, but she just ended up crashing into a bunch of stuff. "I'm okay!"
My respect for the creators of Gravity Falls has risen. On the cover-up document, the bottom paragraph has gems such as this: "Writing jokes for cartoons is more important than sleep." I want to be this awesome at some point.
Also, a couple actual things. Sorry for the delay. I needed to take a break from writing fanfiction to get my thoughts back together. My schedule has filled up, so posting won't be as frequent as it used to be, but I will start actually working on it again.
And as for story requests, I do take some (this fic itself is a request, after all) but I've got a lot of projects, so if you're gonna reach out, it'll need to be a really dynamite idea. Just figured I should mention that. Beta reading is okay, though, I can do that without needing to watch the actual show and get my creative juices flowing.
So, yeah.