The dawning morning illuminated a world which at a glance closely resembled their own; the chirping of familiar birds, the dripping of familiar water, the same wind rustling the snow-laden branches of the same trees. Mountains, valleys, rocks and roots, the same native soil of Earth. But for all its familiar members, they could now plainly see that this was not their home; this forest was not their forest, this land was not their planet, this image was not their reality. It couldn't be.

The sky was changed.

That single bright star from last night had not moved an inch in the hours since, and no other heavenly bodies had joined it; no moon had set, no sun had risen. Rather, the light of the waning moon, the brilliant colors of sunrise, and the warm dawning of the day, had all been shone forth from this single thin, flickering, eight-pointed imposter sun. And as for the sky itself, it hadn't gone pink with sunrise nor blue with day, it remained black as pitch. There weren't even any clouds. Without ambient light, the shadows were deep, the sunlight was stark, and the colors were strange. There was, however, a faint and narrow band of ordinary blue near the horizon, which Dipper made note of.

The Earth was changed.

The long hill which they'd been descending the previous night had no bounds; the land seemed to just be LIKE that. Their experience last night told them it extended miles uphill at least. And now, from their position at the top of an old rockslide, they could see downhill even further. Indeed, they could see all the way down, and it didn't HAVE a bottom! To gaze down was to take in a distant vista of snow-laden hills and mountains, giving way to sky! There was sky below them! It seemed that somehow, for some impossible reason, the very horizon itself was tipped up on its end by 60 degrees. There were two jagged ridges of sheer and snowless rocky spires far beyond the mountains, extending across the whole horizon like two rows of sharkteeth, which Dipper also made note of.

And the empire was here.

It stood tall in all its grey majestic ruin in the distance below them, a small yet proud city, mighty buildings of cubes and cylinders and triangles, zygorats and bridges and towers, rusted steel and crumbled stone and faded glass. It appeared abandoned and lifeless, save for a still-glowing lighthouse at the top of the tallest tower, and three narrow trails of smoke rising from 3 different buildings. The lighthouse hadn't been lit last night, which Dipper made note of. The city was built in the middle of a wide lake, and seemed devoid of vegetation, which Dipper also made note of.

"This place gives me the creeps." Wendy said.

"Me too." Dipper nodded.

"Me three." Marcus agreed.

"Yeah." Kevin mumbled.

Gus's eyes remained glued to the slope. It terrified him.

Dan glanced at his map briefly before growling in frustration and folding it back up.

"It's a friggin' pocket dimension." Wendy ran her hands through her hair. "That tree-hugging smack-talking good-for-nothing grumpy lorax sent us to a straight-up pocket dimension."

"Yeah." Dipper scratched his chin, and pulled out his journal to make a quick sketch. "...That does seem to be the most well-supported hypothesis at the moment."

"Ford never knew about this, did he?" She asked, after the journal reminded her.

"No... Well. Other pockets, like the Crawlspace beneath the town and Cavity 37 in the ship's plasma ducts, are well-documented. But they require either forgotten magic or exo-universal torque to create, so he could never study them in isolation. And none of them were anywhere near this size."

"...How about the Librarian? Did he... Did he tell us anything about this?"

"I doubt it... Whatever happened here was a long time ago, but he just told us our future. I guess it could be correlated, but I don't know how."

"Do you want to check? Just in case? I still know my half of the code."

"No. Not really."

"...Okay. Fine."

"So...?" Kevin frowned. "So how do we get home...? Exactly?"

"And why is everything on its side?" Gus feared what would happen if he tripped and stumbled down the hill; would he never stop falling until he died? Would he die? Would even his bones keep tumbling? Where would his bones end up? It reminded him of a nightmare he'd once had.

"It only looks like it's on its side because gravity points toward the center." Dipper answered, pointing to the lake. "See the lake and mountains down there? They prove that that's the center: mountains would crumble if they were on their sides, and the lake would drain; so we know that gravity must face nearly straight down there. But the further toward the edge we go, the steeper it'll seem." He pointed toward the two ridgelines beyond the mountains. "Also, I think, (and this is the most unsupported part of the theory,) that this place repeats. Like, if we walk far enough right, we'd end up on the left. Those ridgelines are the border of this place, they formed at the same time as the pocket was made, when its perimeter smashed into itself on either side... I don't think this place can possibly be more than about 10 kilometers in diameter. And as for the sky, I think that 'Star' is actually some kind of spacetime breach, the fold where the spirits pinched off this area from the natural universe. All the sunlight that would normally hit this land is being focused in through that pinhole to reach us. And the breach isn't very high in the sky, so there's not enough atmosphere between us and the light, which is why the sky appears black in every direction except nearly straight horizontal."

"UGH." Wendy rubbed her face through her hands. "Why do you have to overanalyze and overcomplicate things? Look, all you had to say was 'it's a bowl but doesn't look like it' and 'we have to find an airplane and fly into the sun to escape'. Isn't that simpler?"

"It's NOT that simple." Dipper looked back at the city. "See those buildings on the outskirts? They're built at a slight angle to match the gravity."

"So? Of course they are."

"And see that lighthouse? It's a solar collector power plant; there's a bunch of mirrors on the roofs of other buildings, meant to reflect breachlight into it."

"So?"

"So both of those would only have been built after the pocket dimension formed! Which means that the empire still had all their industry and technical know-how, and the very fact that they used it to rebuild and adapt instead of escape means that they never found a way to escape! See that smoke? Some of them might still be here! If it were as easy as flying a plane into the sun, they would've done it! H-heck, they would've built an elevator! But they didn't! That breach could be the width of an atom for all we know! It- they didn't..."

"Well, then, what're we going to do?" Wendy demanded. "MOPE about it?"

"WE'RE GOING TO FIND A WAY OUT!" Dipper snapped. "We're going to climb as far up the hill as we can to test my theories about local gravitational effects, then we're going to climb all the way down to the city, and search the outskirts for clues about the fate of its inhabitants."

"Oh my gosh, okay, you know what? Screw this, I'm gonna cheat." Wendy walked over to her jacket, hanging near the fire. "Soon as I get home, I'm taking the time machine, coming back to yesterday morning, and leaving a detailed list of instructions on how to get home in my own pocket!"

"That wouldn't be how to get home, that would just be how we did get home, which introduces causal familiarity biases in our own eventual solution!" Dipper threw up his hands. "Somebody could get hurt or die in the loop and we couldn't change it, or we could find a better path and not take it!"

"Hey, look, you don't GET to mansplain time travel to ME!"

"I don't know what that means! I'm just saying that recursive paradox propagation could softlock us into whatever stupid thing your future self wrote on that paper! And I'd prefer not to run afoul of time-law if it DOES end up being unstable!"

"Screw the police, I wanna get HOME!" Wendy reached for her pocket.

"DON'T check your pocket!"

"You're not my dad!" She checked it. There was nothing there. "AND there's nothing there!"

"Which means that you either just doomed us to die down here, or proved your future self a lazy scoundrel!" Dipper's voice cracked.

"Yeah, well!" She spun on him. "Or maybe she's just not mad at you by then!"

There were a few seconds of stunned silence. The rest of the family stared at them, unsure of the reason for these sudden harsh words, and equally unsure what any of these harsh words meant.

Dipper nodded. His eyes fell to his boots. "Yeah." He agreed. "She's cool like that."

"She's a weirdo creep." She thought he resembled a beaten dog. "Quit feeling sorry for yourself."

"HEY." Dan stepped forward, almost stepped between them. "USE KIND WORDS." He told her, then to him: "AND YOU. USE SMALL WORDS."

"Right." Dipper scratched his head, trying to gather his wits and silence his panic and his heart. "So... This whole place is some kind of m-magic prison. Gravity will return to normal if we go far enough down the hill. We need to explore to gather clues about this world and how to escape it."

"WE NEED SUPPLIES AND PROPER SHELTER." Dan corrected him. "WE'LL HEAD DOWNHILL FIRST TO CHECK OUT THOSE BUILDINGS."

"Okay." Dipper nodded.

"Okay." Wendy agreed.

"HOW YOU DOING?" Dan asked Marcus.

"I'm okay. It hurts worse this morning though." Marcus winced as he stood to his feet. The strips of cloth binding his shoulder did a good job of covering the bite marks, but didn't hide the redness of infection spreading down his arm.

"CAN YOU WALK?"

"A'course I can walk." He nodded nonchalantly, with a resolve to ignore his pain for as long as it took. "No trouble."

"HOW YOU DOING?" Dan asked Gus.

"I'm still cold." Gus coughed, and wiped a trail of snot off his lip.

Dan could see he was becoming ill, and resolved to carry him again. "SAME AS US ALL, TROOPER." He said as he picked him up. "HOW 'BOUT YOU?" He asked Kevin.

"Fine." Kevin was hungry and his feet hurt, but at least he wasn't so cold anymore.

And with that, they buttoned their jackets, tightened the laces of their boots, checked the ammo on their rifles, and banked the fire. Then Dan led his family down the hill, toward the empire.


This was another short chapter, so I figured I'd save the space for an extra-long Author's Note:

I first had the idea to write December's Wrath, or something like it, years and years ago. In its original conception, the forest was inhabited by a society of long-hibernating reptiles that melt in the sunlight, (or something to that effect.) I forget the specifics, but the heroes would be faced with a number of tough moral decisions regarding kill-or-be-killed, and ownership of the land, and the True Meaning of Christmas, but none of it really came together.

But last December, I was finally inspired to begin the story in earnest. It was when I was working outdoors, in the snow and ice and bitter cold. There was one day that we had a big concrete pour, a deck of a parking garage, but it had rained and then frozen so hard the previous night that the entire deck, all the forms and rebar, were a quarter inch thick in ice. We arrived at 6:00 in the morning, dawn would not come until 8:00, and the pour was delayed until 11:00, to wait for us to thaw the ice out with weed burners and hoses. The finisher crews sat around for 5 hours just watching us laborers walking around trying to mar the ice. It was in the those days, in the December of 2020, that I realized how deeply nature can hate. It was the perfect villain for the story, and I could feel and see it as clearly as I wrote it. And it was Christmas time then.

Now it is March and the spring is coming. I now see before me, as I walk to the train station in a T-shirt with my previously-necessary jacket tied around my waist, that nature does not only hate but also loves. Light is shining through my window now, and as it does, I feel myself slowly losing inspiration.

But I'm also having tons of fun.

The elephant in the room is now obviously Chapter 4. Even my own flesh-and-blood sister dared insinuate that I posted a section of an original story by accident. However, in point of fact, that was not the case! Rather, I posted a section of an original story on purpose.

I've been feeling the need recently to put Gravity Falls behind me for good, and move on to other, bigger, original projects, but I can't quite do that while I still have so many ideas to expand the story and world I'd already created within the context of the show. A lot of these ideas have very little (usually nothing whatsoever) to do with the original show, and will probably fit MUCH better into my original work, but for now, I know my fanfiction is read by a lot of people who give nice feedback, so I figured I may as well devote myself to getting it all off my chest. And if I can tell a good story, jerk your brains around, or discover the True Meaning Of Christmas while I'm at it, all the better. Expect a few stories to appear in addition to this one.

Also, after conversations I've had about this story so far, I realized you Gravity Falls fans are a very sharp and very hungry bunch who love a good mystery, and were already picking apart clues I left in Chapter 4. Which encouraged me to make it even deeper and more convoluted going forward. So I guess you have that to look forward to, and yourselves to blame. Suckers.

Also, after giving the contents of Chapter 4 some additional thought, I went back and modified it slightly to change a few lines and technical details, to give some characters better names, and to make certain things like Underspace, the nature of the Ferryman, Sam's Identity, and the function of the suits, all slightly more clear. Nothing significant or story-changing, but thought it worth noting here for posterity.