Haven Days
(August 2020)
16-Decisions and Revisions
"I don't know," Mabel murmured, uncharacteristically morose. She was nestled comfortably under Teek's arm. Though the hour was early for this kind of activity, with the sun still an hour away from setting, they were parked in his car up on Lookout Point. Not that anyone would call their activities very intimate—they sat in the front seats with the console between them. And both were fully clothed.
Serious intimacy, as all the world knows, enters a car through the back doors. And prompts the removal of unnecessary garments.
Anyway, the two had parked in the Valley's notorious make-out spot and general-purpose Lovers' Lane, but they had it to themselves. Amorous-type cars didn't gather there until darkness began to fall. On an afternoon like this, the spot was always deserted except for random tourists snapping photos of the scenic woods, waterfall, town, and in the distance the purple-gray cliffs.
And in this plague year, no tourists, random or otherwise, showed up, making the Point a good, private place just to talk things out.
Teek kissed Mabel's nose. "You don't know what?"
She squirmed a little. "Uh. Just, you know. Thinking. Uh, that maybe we should postpone the wedding? Until everything's better?"
He smiled at her. He squinted a little—his contacts probably needed to be changed to a different prescription, but he hadn't got around to that while in film school. "I think," he said, "everything will get better after we're married."
She punched his ribs, not hard. "You! Yeah, yeah, I know, it's not like me to worry. But I guess I share some genes with Dipper. I'm having second thoughts. Me, Mabel, who's always right about everything, all the time!" She paused to kiss him and in a slightly breaking voice whispered, "I love you so much."
"I love you too," he said. "So . . . what's the problem? I'm having a hard time seeing this."
"I don't know how to explain," she said, leaning back to stare through the windshield. She bit her lower lip. "I mean, the world's in such a mess, so many people sick, the virus just getting worse and worse everywhere but here. Do we really have the right to just care about what we want? That sounds so funny coming from me. But . . . do we?"
"I think everyone has a right to try to be happy," Teek said, holding her hand. "It's in the Constitution, isn't it? We all have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That includes us, right?"
"Yeah, but—could we be trying to do something to help everybody? Like Grunkle Ford is doing?"
"Love to, but what would we do?" he asked.
"Um . . . a musical puppet show about staying healthy?" Mabel's voice had grown hopeful.
"Instead of getting married?" he asked, chuckling. "We could do both, you know. Get married and then do the puppet show."
"Yeah, I guess we could, at that," she murmured, squeezing his hand. "Forget the puppet show, though. We could only do it in town, and people here are already safer from the virus than anywhere else.
Teek said, "No, it's a good idea, but we'd need to reach people all over. Maybe make it into a movie. I've had some classes in screenwriting and CGA, and you know your art, so we'd have the layout and storyboarding and all done. Then you could record voices and . . . wait, though. The theaters are closed, so . . . straight to Webflix, I guess. The one tiny problem would be finding a producer to put up the money for it!"
"It's stuffy in the car," she complained. "Let's get out and walk around a little. In the shade down the hill a way."
He agreed and, ever the gentleman—Mabel thought privately it was something Teek had picked up off there in film school in Georgia, the gallant Southern gesture and all—he walked round and opened the door and took her hand as she got out. "Whoo!" she said, tossing her hair. "At least we're getting a little breeze up here."
"It'll be even cooler in the shade," he said as they walked hand in hand downhill along the winding road. The trees began not far downslope, first a thicket of twenty-foot-tall firs. They came to a creek that passed beneath the road through a culvert and they turned with the stream to follow it as it curved, cascaded, and leaped further down the hill until they found a grove of birch trees, uncommon in western Oregon but with outposts in the Valley in places close to water. In the light breezes, the branches overhead swayed like dancers and the spade-shaped leaves fluttered, showing now their deep-green surface, now their paler undersides. The shade did feel cooler, and through the gaps in the white trunks they could see part of the river down below.
"What kind of trees are these?" Mabel asked, taking a deep breath of the clean air.
Teek inspected the leaves and trunks, as if that would tell him anything. Then he admitted, "I don't know. Poplar maybe? Wendy would know. Take her a leaf and she'll tell you all about them."
Mabel frowned. These were those white tree trunks with brown steaks and spots and patterns on them. The majority of the patterns looked like stylized sketches of eyes. They bothered her, but—she shrugged. "Yeah, not important, I guess. But the marks on the bark make it look like they're staring at us. I've seen the same kind before, but I don't remember where."
"I think those eyes are just scars where branches have fallen off. Anyway, let 'em look," Teek said. "We don't have any secrets from a tree."
"Wait, I got it," Mabel said. "Back before Weirdmageddon, Soos and I saw Gideon in a circle of trees just like these. He was doing like this weird backwards-talking spell, and then Bill Cipher showed up and we heard them plot to steal Grunkle Stan's brain, so we rushed back to the Shack, but we stopped to buy some Burrito Bites—Whoa. Ford told Dipper that when Bill Cipher was in the Mindscape, he could spy at our world through those eyespots!"
"Want to go back to the car?" Teek asked.
But Mabel was on a roll. "And, and, Ford also said he used to meditate in that same place, a clearing in the middle of a grove of these trees! What? Car? No, don't worry about it. Bill's not in the Mindscape now, he can't spy on us." To prove the point she kissed him, a passionate, clinging, long kiss. But then after a few minutes, she leaned with her face against his shoulder. "Help me here. Big decision. What do you want to do?"
He sank down to sit on a grassy patch and pulled her down to sit beside him with his arm around her waist. "I want us to be married," he said quietly. "I don't want us to postpone it. I mean, you and I—we need to be together. And besides, well . . .."
She leaned against him. "Besides," she said quietly, "we don't know if anything's ever gonna get any better. I want you too, so much. OK, let's be practical here just for a minute. We get married, then you have your last year of courses online, fine, great with that, but how are we gonna make a living in the meantime? I mean, an animated puppet show's a real long shot. I can't open an art or design studio during a pandemic, and you can't shoot movies."
"No, but I could write them," he suggested. "Writing's worked pretty well for Dipper, and some of the visiting artists at GCAF have complimented my film-school scripts. A couple of the directors even suggested that I try doing a full-length script and send it to them. That's a foot in the door. Toe, anyway. I think there'll still be some movie production even while COVERT-19's going on. Maybe a lot of that will be animation, though."
Mabel said, "You know what? I'm gonna ask Dipper if he can put you in touch with the production studio that does the Granite Rapids show! They've ordered another two seasons. I think all the actual animation's done abroad or in Mexico or someplace, but the preproduction and storyboarding—is that right?—and that stuff are all done in LA. Anyway, since they're talking about two more seasons and there aren't that many books to adapt, they'll need Granite Rapids scripts. Or is that—uh, nepotism? I could ask Dipper, but, you know, not if you say no. I mean, would you hate if I—"
"No, I wouldn't hate it," Teek said, smiling. "Let's talk it over with Dipper together, though. And we can relax a little. We're not going to be desperate at first. You know, I had a full ride at GCAF with the scholarships and all. No loans, even. So I've saved some money from my job—"
"Wait, what? You had a job?" Mabel asked. "You never said!"
He shrugged. "It wasn't anything to brag about. I started out as a student assistant in the library, you know, shelving films and books and all, my first term. Then I got to move over to the production studios, keeping track of the equipment, working on the set construction crews, working the projection booth for the weekend campus movies, stuff like that. They just allowed me a max of twenty hours a week, and the pay wasn't great, eight bucks an hour for the first term and then a raise to ten an hour for the rest of that year and all the next two. My scholarships covered room and board, books and tuition, so I ate in the dining hall and started saving almost my whole salary."
"How much is that?" she asked.
"Well, my typical weekly salary was, I guess, about two hundred, gross."
"Gross?" Mabel asked. "What's gross about it? We're rich!"
". . . but they held Federal and state taxes out, so my take-home, my net, was about a hundred and forty."
"Boo!" Mabel booed.
"Still, I kept twenty-five dollars in cash every week for pizza contributions and walking-around money and put the rest in savings. That's over three thousand a year, and right now I've got just short of ten thousand saved."
"Not too shabby," Mabel said. "I've got about half that much, 'cause I had Soos hold back half of my Mystery Shack pay in the summers. Grunkle Stan said if I saved that much, then he'd match it, which would set us up pretty good. If we can pry it out of his hands."
"If we stay in Gravity Falls for the next year," Teek said, "which we pretty much have to, anyway, Soos has told me we can have your room in the Shack for a one dollar a year rent."
Mabel gave him an embarrassed glance. "Uh, you asked him?"
"No, he brought it up one day. 'Uh, dawg, not that me and Melody wanna be pushy or anything, but if you and Mabel, like, do tie the knot or whatever and need a place to live—,' You know Soos. He offered. And I like the Shack. So if we take him up on the deal, we mainly have to pay for food, clothes, and gas."
"And we won't be doing a lot of driving," Mabel said.
They cuddled for a while, quietly.
Then a Gnome—Karl, Mabel thought, though it was still hard to tell from any distance—popped up from the brush and yelled, "So is the marriage on or off? Jeff will want to know! Ouch!"
A pinecone had found its way beneath the maples, and even at that range, Mabel's throwing arm and aim still served her well.
A day or so later, sitting at the table in the attic—it doubled as his writing desk—Dipper signed contracts. Two separate sets in triplicate, each one weighty enough to be a small book. "There," he said to Wendy. "Forty more episodes of the show and three new novels, all signed. Hope I can live up to both of those."
"Sure you can," Wendy said. She lay on their bed, taking it easy after they'd done an extra-long morning run. "So now exactly how much are they paying you?"
"For the next three books, about five thousand more than last time, and that's the advance up front," Dipper said. "I'm getting a one-percent bump in royalties, too. The TV deal is more generous, about one and a half times the first contract for each new season."
"Whoo! My man!" Wendy said. After a while, she rose and came over to him, dressed but barefoot, and stood behind his chair and hugged him. What's wrong, Dipper? Same old same old?
—I suppose. The animation team will run through all my published books halfway through next season. So the next thirty episodes will be take-offs or pastiches or something.
Do you get like script approval?
—They have to consult me. They don't have to be bound by my decisions. I hope they don't take the show off in directions I wouldn't like.
Could you, like, send in plot synopses? So the writers wouldn't get too far from your characters and all?
—That's a good idea. I'll take it up with Bea, and she'll put it to the production guys. Can't hurt to ask.
How are we coming on the latest book?
—Emailed it to my agent this morning after we got back.
That novel, Tall Tales, Short Subjects, concerned the Palms twins' run-in with Tiny Ephrem, an annoying kid who was a fake psychic. For still mysterious reasons of his own, he wanted to own the Mysterious Mansion. In earlier novels, he had already courted Alexa, unsuccessfully. In the new book he took advantage of Tripper's discovery of a shrinking-and-growing crystal to try to capture Uncle Manny. And in the B-story, the twins accidentally fell into the Infinity Pit, where to pass the time as they free-fell they made up stories to tell each other until, after a subjective half-hour (but no time passed in the outer world) they shot back out near the Mysterious Mansion, just in time to thwart Tiny Ephrem's plot.
Wendy playfully mussed Dipper's hair. Good for you. This one's a nice mix of mystery and humor. I told you last month it was ready to send in.
—I know. But I always think there's something I can do to make the manuscript better.
Wendy laughed out loud and said, "Dude, even after they're published, you still think of ways you could make them better!"
He grinned ruefully. "Yeah, it's awful. With every book I think it'll be different, but every single time . . . . well, all this is signed and sealed and we'll take it to the Post Office this afternoon for the 5:00 pickup. Then what about a date? You want to go out with me?"
"Every single time," she said in her sexy low voice.
"Maybe a nice meal. A movie."
"Or," she purred, nuzzling his cheek, "maybe just go look at the stars and see if they're still in the same places."
He stood and took her in his arms, kicking off his loafers. He wasn't wearing socks, and, both of them barefoot, he waltzed Wendy to no music. "I love holding you," he said.
She laid her cheek on his shoulder. "Mm. Love when we dance. Make me some music."
Dipper randomly began to hum, three-quarter time, and then found a tune somewhere in his head and improvised words: "I love waltzing with you, Wendy, like we're doing right here. Now hold me and kiss me, my dear. Let's keep dancing like this, darling, until the tune halts—it's the beautiful, sweet Barefoot Waltz."
That evening they had their meal, though even in COVERT-free Gravity Falls the restaurants had cut some difficult-to-import items from their menus ("Sorry, no lobsters"), and after dinner they went to a spot on a hilltop they liked, spread out a big groundsheet, lay back, and studied the faithful stars overhead. Lying on his back, Dipper hummed softly. Then Wendy eclipsed the stars and he felt her red hair falling to envelop him.
So much better than a blanket.
The tune stuck in his head. A few days later he sat down with his guitar to feel his way through the melody. It would never be a national hit, my God, who waltzes nowadays, but when Dipper played it for the family, the tune tickled Stan's fancy.
Later on in the fall he would organize a senior dance in and a miniature orchestra would play the song, and a whole bunch of older citizens waltzed to it and were sure they'd danced to it in their youth, though that was a false memory. That's the kind of song it was. Whatever, for Stan and the seniors and the happy young couple, it was worth it.
Fiddleford was unsatisfied with early tests of his first effort to create a virus-destroying vaccine. The nanites just weren't latching onto the virus right. He had four labs (two of them Agency related) cooperating across the country, and nobody could figure out why the nanite approach was failing.
So McGucket sucked the failure up and reluctantly talked everything over with Ford. Sometimes you do what you hate to do but have to do, right?
Like a scientist will experiment with innocent lab rats, not allowing them to be named, not admitting that, for rats, they're pretty darned cute. And some will get sick and die, others get sick but live, and the lucky ones not get sick at all. It can sicken a sensitive person, but if it brings benefits in the long run, if it cures a terrible disease . . ..
Fiddleford's trouble was sensitivity to Stanford's feelings. For Ford, the problem was bigger, the strain harder. One of Stanford Pines's outstanding traits was stubbornness.
Oh, he would be more inclined to value his intelligence, which was indeed high. The Oracle would praise his courage. In moments of fear and threat, he never lost his head but controlled his terror, faced it, and fought it down. In short, he had many exceptional qualities along with quite a few weaknesses and—frankly—irritating habits, but in fact he had inherited from his parents a tough, determined, unbeatable Pines stubbornness.
Stanley had it too. For the longest time, he and Stanford had been furious with each other. That started over Ford's failed perpetual-motion science-fair project, Stan's estrangement from their father and then his spectacular bad luck with money, success, and love, and the feud intensified with a brotherly reunion that broke up because of Ford's need to dispose of Journal One safely.
Only after the two elder Pines twins had beaten Bill Cipher's bid to seize control of all humanity did their long-standing grudge seethe down from a rolling boil to a mere simmer. Long story, and already well-told.
Even after their reunion, their mutual resentment remained strong. At one crucial time, Stan (who knew that if they succeeded in banishing Cipher he would be again homeless) and Ford (who knew that Stan had pulled him out of the Nightmare Realm a bare instant before he could have disintegrated Cipher) could not reconcile their differences even for a second. Stan's request was simple. He wanted Ford to thank him for rescuing him from the Multiverse.
Ford's ire was complex. He wanted his house back—the Mystery Shack was a tacky embarrassment. He wanted his name back—Stan had been masquerading as him for decades. And he wanted Stan out of his life.
And both of them had that stubborn streak.
Even when the fate of the universe depended on their reconciling, Ford only grudgingly thanked Stan. Stan responded with a sarcastic comment, and Ford went all Grammar Nazi on him. They fell out and broke the circle of the Zodiac in their squabble.
And Mabel and Dipper very nearly died.
It took that to bring them to their senses.
Over the years since Weirdmageddon, slowly, the brothers Pines had rediscovered their love for each other and finally had not only made up their feud but put it out of their misery and buried it.
OK, so the point is that both of them were too stubborn.
But people can learn, and even Ford had to be honest with himself. His lingering distrust of Billy Sheaffer, a bright but odd kid, was beyond normal obstinacy. Cipher had betrayed him in the worst way, using Stanford's intelligence as a weapon against him. Even the Oracle urged Ford not to forgive the dimensional demon.
Yet . . . Dipper and Mabel vowed that young Billy Sheaffer and the part of Bill Cipher that now lived within him were trying to do good, were trying to earn the second chance that the Axolotl had offered Bill. Billy and Cipher had given Ford assurances of innocence. Still it was so hard for Ford to agree, but . . . "We need Billy," Ford had finally conceded.
And Fiddleford, Ford's oldest friend, came to him, put his hand on the scientist's shoulder, and said, "I can't solve this alone. I gotta ask you—can we call in th' triangle guy? He scares me bad, but I think we need him."
And Ford, his expression grim, nodded. "Yes," he said.
So, now that the quarantine the three of them had to follow was over, Billy joined them in Fiddleford's home lab. With a smart young boy's curiosity and capacity for awe he walked all around the hologram of the virus, even walked through it, viewing it from the inside out.
"Billy, this is the best image that we have, but something about it seems wrong. Before we go ahead with what we hope will be the vaccine that ends this pandemic," Ford said, "we must be certain of our assumptions. This hologram is made up of the best scanning electron microscopic images we could obtain, updated just today. Only Bill would know for sure if there are any mistakes, even tiny ones, that are so far acting against Fiddleford's nanites. Please let him advise us."
Billy nodded, his face pale. He still found those moments when Bill Cipher completely took over his thoughts and his voice frightening. But he closed his eye for a moment and mentally invited Cipher to take a close look.
"Right, Sixer," the boy said, his voice higher. "I'm letting Billy doze. If there's bad news, no need bothering him yet. Does McGucket want to leave before we start?"
"Reckon not," said the older man. "Yore illusory abominations skeered me so bad that one time it made me try to wipe out my remembery, an' that pert' near wrecked me. Nowadays I got my wife, I got my son an' daughter-in-law, an' I'm in my right mind. Jest warn me if you're gonna git up to anything numbskull crazy, so I can skedaddle."
Billy glanced at Ford, and Ford could see the change in his good eye—weird, he had one yellow slitted eye and one apparently normal blue eye, but the normal-looking one was prosthetic. Imitating McGucket, he said, "Whoo-ee, that there's a lot of hillbilly gibberish for me to ungibber. Hey, Ford, he's not from around here, is he? Hah! Just kidding, Banjo Man! Go Grizzlies, am I right, Tennessee Boy? Sheesh, tough crowd."
"Bill, please," Ford said.
"OK, OK, down to business. Let me take a peep at this nasty character right here."
For ten minutes Billy roamed around the hologram and Ford revolved it in three dimensions for him. "You're right about the image. There's something off about the way the domed sections anchor round their edges," Bill said through the boy. "This doesn't quite match what I see in my mind. It's almost there, but not quite. The real thing's less like a seam and more like a zipper. I think it's interlocking atoms, and that's the spot where a nanite vaccine can get into them. If I give you a list of what I need, can you get a medical lab to do some extra close-up probing of the viral body?"
"I can arrange that," Ford said.
"Take this down."
Billy would not have known any of the technical terms Bill used in his description. In fact, the boy would barely recall the experience later. He went back home to his mom and dad with no clear recollection of just what he had done while Bill was inspecting and dictating. "They showed me their lab," he told his mom and dad. "It was great."
But Ford and Fiddleford went over the notes and looked at each other. "By gummity," Fiddleford said. "The kid's right. That's how come my nanites went wrong. They was trying to bore in when they shoulda been workin' on the interlock."
"So you can make nanomachines tiny enough to—"
"Easy as eatin' peas off a knife," Fiddleford said. "The hardest trick is to make 'em jest machines. Foller a program, then when it's complete, switch off. That's where I got to be absolutely certain-sure these doohickeys won't cut loose. They could be worse'n the disease."
"Let's make sure, then," Ford said.
Fiddleford cleared his throat. "You, uh, you an' Cipher, you plumb shore you're OK with cooperatin' with him now?"
"I don't think I'll ever be OK," Ford said solemnly. "But I'll deal with it."
"Then we got work ahead of us," Fiddleford said.
And unlike Ford and Billy, the old man and his old friend shook hands on the deal.