Stan was showing them something new, and he screeched to a halt in the golf cart, with his typical terrible driving. Camo really hated his driving, but usually it was the best she could get, so she dealt with it. "In this land of ours, there are many great pits," Stan said, "but none more bottomless than the Bottomless Pit, which as you can see here, is bottomless."

Thanks, Captain Obvious.

She looked down at the massive hole in the ground, very clearly labeled 'Bottomless Pit'. Knowing Stan, it probably wasn't bottomless. It probably wasn't even very deep, and just had a tarp of some kind at the bottom to make it look darker. Or maybe dark glass, to tint it.

"Question. Is it bottomless?" Soos asked. She felt the overwhelming urge to facepalm.

Stan sighed. "Kids, could one of you try explaining this to Soos?"

"Grunkle Stan, why are we here, again?" Dipper asked, completely ignoring his great-uncle's request. At least it wasn't just her he ignored.

"To dispose of things that we don't want," Camo and Stan said in unison. He'd said it multiple times, so she remembered. Because, you know, listening skills. "So long, Mystery Shack suggestion cards," Stan continued. She watched as the yellow slips of paper fell. Huh. Not a trick. Shocking.

Wait, if Stan knew this was bottomless, then why didn't he believe in all their other adventures? She smelled a conspiracy.

"Goodbye, creepy love letters from Li'l Gideon," Mabel said, throwing the papers in. "Die! Die!"

Soos started throwing his shoes in for no reason, and Camo thought. What didn't she want? Something that would benefit and bring joy to absolutely no one. Hmm . . . an idea came to her.

"Flee, my horrible cringe-worthy drawings!" she screamed, throwing them in. Lots of practice had improved her skills, and now these things were so bad they made her die on the inside. At least now she wouldn't have to look at the malformed faces.

Meanwhile, Soos had grabbed the grill and thrown that in, and Mabel had retrieved a massive box that was locked up and shoved it near the side. Dipper was staring at everything in horror, his eyes wide. As Mabel tried to lift her box into the pit, Stan, who was still throwing away the yellow cards, asked, "What you got there, Mabel?"

She chuckled. "It's just my personal box of mysterious secrets. Nothing worth wondering about!" She said it very suspiciously, then shoved in the box before Camo could insist on opening it up. "Goodbye forever!"

"Grunkle Stan, do I really have to be the one to point out that a bottomless pit is, by definition, impossible?" Dipper asked, sounding like the absolute nerd he was.

"This coming from the guy who has an encounter with the supernatural every other day?" Camo asked slyly. This launched him into a science-y lecture about the skewed physics of a bottomless pit. When she looked at Stan to avoid thinking about the preteen, there was a strange look of wistfulness in his expression, though it was quickly wiped away when he noticed her staring.

"Well, I guess we'll never know," Mabel said, shrugging. She was wearing a sweater with a wolf on the moon today, and it was awesome. At some point, she had to ask the younger girl to make her a sweater, because those things were super duper epic.

Just then, a massive gust of wind began to blow, and a dark cloud loomed ominously in the distance. "Ah!" Soos yelled. "It's some sort of invisible pushing force!"

"Yeah! Wind!"

"Quick! Everyone back to the Shack!" Dipper shouted, like the sensible person he was, and the kids plus Soos started to run in the direction of safety. Stan, meanwhile, was busy throwing his yellow cards in the pit, and with the wind, they landed on his face. Like the dumb heroes they were, the twins plus Soos ran to his aid. Camo folded her arms and weighed her options. Risk falling in the pit to save Stan, or have Stan risk falling in the pit and be safe. Hmm . . . "Camo!" Dipper yelled, aggravated. She huffed and ran to help them.

And then they all promptly fell in the pit. She heard the distinct bleat of a concerned Gompers as they fell for eternity.

They screamed. And then screamed some more. Everyone's screams were so unique, Camo was thinking for some reason as she shrieked like her life depended on it. You could really see into a person's soul based on the way they screamed. It was fascinating.

Then everyone collectively realized there was no point in shredding their vocal cords if they were going to be falling for eternity anyway. "So, anyone wanna scream some more?" Soos asked, his eyes strained despite the joke.

"Where are we?" Dipper asked, shaking his head around. Had he superglued his hat to his head or what, because it wasn't falling off, despite their falling.

Mabel proceeded to pull out a glow stick and wave it around. "We're somewhere where it looks like we're nowhere," she said, which was an intriguing sentence.

"Do you just keep a glow stick in your pocket at all times?" Camo frowned.

Both twins ignored her. "We're gonna land on something eventually. Could be any second now!" If you knew the twins at all, you knew exactly which of them said that.

Everyone braced for impact, but nothing happened.

"Well, it looks like we're down here for the long haul," Stan said cheerfully, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a deck of cards. "Who wants to see some card tricks?" He shuffled the deck, and the cards went up, up, and away. "Ta-da!" he said, as if he hadn't just lost his cards.

Mabel clapped. She had her glow stick around his wrist, and it looked like it was floating upwards.

Camo, meanwhile, was lost in thought. It was so silent, just the quiet rushing of air moving past. To be honest, she felt kind of like Alice in Wonderland. She swam through the air, over to the wall, and watched as the barely illuminated ground rushed past. It was intriguing, and she wondered how it worked. It was entirely possible that they were in some strange time loop trick thing, but the more obvious answer was that it was simply a bottomless pit.

In that case, they'd probably just fall for the rest of eternity until they died of dehydration/starvation, and then their bodies gradually decayed until it was just a couple of rotting corpses falling in darkness forever. Would they decay? Yeah—she was pretty sure the fact that bugs couldn't eat them wouldn't matter. Dirt and this dumb wind would destroy them just as easily.

Wow, she had morbid thoughts.

"Hey! Maybe we should pass the time by telin' stories," Soos suggested, and she perked up, kicking against the wall to go back to the main group.

"I've got a story!" Dipper said in his squeaky angry voice. "It's called the time Grunkle Stan got us all thrown into a bottomless pit, where we spent the rest of our natural lives!"

Camo hummed. "Well, bottomless pits are rather unnatural, so it might be for the rest of our unnatural lives too."

That did not help the boy's mood, and Soos's "Go on" didn't help matters either.

"Come on, Dipper, you can do better than that," his twin insisted.

"Fine. I'll tell you a story," Dipper said, taking the glow stick from his sister. If he dropped that thing, they'd be plunged in darkness forever, but he was smart. He (probably) knew that. "A story I'd like to call, 'Voice Over'."

She paled, knowing exactly what this was about. She swam back over to the wall and went back to her scholarly thoughts. She already knew this story, and it was super embarrassing. She'd hated that day, and she never wanted to hear about it again.

Where was Dipper's watch? If he'd had it on, she wondered what they'd see. She usually wore one, but she hadn't had one when they picked her up for Globnar and they hadn't supplied her with one after that. Time seemed irrelevant here, since they'd already spent a long time just floating in the darkness. She saw a larger rock down at the bottom, and she reached out her arm—

Wait. No. That was dumb. What would getting her palm shredded accomplish?

Instead, she practiced manipulating herself in the air. Spreading wide-eagled made her seem to float up, away from the rest, while shifting to an arrow pose made her fall down lower. While Dipper told his story (she wasn't listening, she would not listen to that), she played around, trying to master movement while free-falling. It was really fun. This was like those indoor skydiving machines, but free. Also, for eternity!

Free and for eternity! That could be a decent campaign slogan.

At some point, Dipper's voice stopped, and she figured it was safe to start paying attention again. Eventually, Mabel started a game of I Spy. "I spy, with my little eye, something that is black!" she said.

Soos raised his hand. "Everything."

"Yay for Soos!" The handyman looked very impressed with himself. "Hey, guys! Who wants to pass the time by spinning?"

Camo, who had been spinning and moving around for a good long while, gave the girl a look, but just said, "Sure."

The girls did a little waltz in the air, and when Dipper continued to be a wet blanket, they spun him. Or at least, Mabel did. Camo didn't feel comfortable touching him when he was in this mood.

"Dipper's pain is funny," Stan said, his first words in a while. "But I'm starting to get bored. Soos, tell a story."

"Really? Okay. This story is called, "'Soos's Really Great Pinball Story'." To be honest, it was hard to take him seriously with Dipper screaming in the background. "Is that a good title? Do they have to be, like, puns or whatever?"

Oh, she remembered that day. Vividly.

The kids sat on the beanbags in the room, watching Soos play pinball and chanting. He was pretty good at it.

"This is it, dudes. After four long years of trying, I might finally get the high score on Stan's creepy old pinball machine. If I do this, I'll go down in pinball history with the likes of Sal, Gaff, and, of course, Poo."

"Have you ever tried, maybe, just tilting the machine?" Dipper suggested, and she smacked him in the arm, and none too lightly. (She had been taking notes from Mabel.)

Soos was hesitant, as he should be. "I don't know, dudes. Isn't breaking the rules, like, against the rules?"

"Nuts to the rules!" Mabel cheered, sounding very much like her grunkle. "Tilt! Tilt! Tilt!"

"Mabel," Camo said, putting a hand on the excitable girl's shoulder. "Pinball rules are sacred. Punishments are not taken lightly. Surely you remember . . . the vampire incident?" She lowered her voice for that last bit, and the younger girl shuddered. "Some rules are meant to be broken. Pinball is not one of them."

"It's not going to come out like that," Mabel said, shoving the hand off her shoulder. "Tilt!"

"Guys, this is dumb," she warned, but Soos was done with playing by the rules and the twins helped him tilt the machine. Soos tilted it upwards so that the ball went in the skeleton's mouth and he got the high score.

The cheaters cheered, and Soos said, "This is the best moment of my life. This totally beats my old best moment." The handyman started daydreaming about it, but all four of them were pulled from their thoughts (disgruntled, in Camo's case) by the talking skeleton head.

"That ain't right. You cheated."

"Oh, yeah? What are you gonna do about it?" Mabel taunted, and Camo's expression turned into a warning one. "You're just a pinball game, pinball game. Taunt, taunt."

Dipper's voice cut through, sounding worried, as always. "Uh, guys? There's an awful lot of green lightning coming out of that game."

"No, that's the normal amount of green lightning."

Camo sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose as a bright light flashed. She sat upright, wearing an annoyed expression (and an epic cowboy outfit that reminded her of her Pioneer Day outfit). "Guys, why are you like this?"

Just like she expected, they were inside the game. It was a really cool place, but she'd been there before. Of course, Camo was the sort of person to tilt the machine and get herself stuck in it. The last time she was there, she only got out by making a deal with the skelly head: he'd delete her high score, she'd be let out, and she had to promise never to cheat again.

Meanwhile, the other three were looking around in wonder, running around, having fun, all that nonsense. She just stood there, tapping her foot, and wishing she had a watch to look at. Soos yelled, "Dude, if this is a dream, I never want to wake up!"

"That can be arranged," the skelly head said ominously. "Welcome to Tumbleweed Terror, pardners!" There was a whole bunch of gunshot sounds.

"Hey, it's the skeleton cowboy guy," Soos said.

Camo huffed. "No kidding."

"Did you zap me into your game to congratulate me on getting the high score? I beat Poo, dude."

"Hardly. If'n I do recall, I warned y'all not to cheat. I tried to be gentleman-like. But I'm plum sick of being tilted. So now I reckon I'm gonna tilt you."

Camo moaned, and said, "Hey, I wasn't the one cheating! Why am I in here? I followed your warning, skelly head!"

"Oh. So you did. Come 'ere. You can sit by me." She smiled in a very self-satisfied way and sat down next to the skelly head. The twins and Soos looked at her in betrayal.

She watched the game as the skelly head set the game to multi-ball and they ran behind one of the walls. Dipper and Mabel came out and stood on the little wingy flappy things and started distracting the cowboy head. Soos was nowhere to be found. When the twins left, the skelly head got mad, though since she was innocent, he didn't take it out on her. Instead, he lowered the sides so he could see them. They were talking over a hole.

Oh, Soos must be down there, trying to shut off the power. Smart. Not Soos, but the idea was smart.

Skelly Head then tried to swallow them whole, massive gusts of wind dragging all three kids towards his mouth. "Hey! You're sucking me up, too!" she shrieked, but he didn't stop. She made her way so she was on the back of his head, but she was slipping. One wrong move, and she'd go around him and get sucked in. All three of them were about to be eaten alive, when—

Everything blacked out, and she woke up, panting for breath. Aw, man. Goodbye, awesome cowboy outfit.

"Oh, you dudes okay?" Soos asked.

"Yeah, Soos," Mabel affirmed. "You did it! You freed us!"

"Hey, man, I'm sorry you had to lose your high score," Dipper apologized.

Soos happily looked at all three of them. "That's okay. I got a new life accomplishment now. Saving you dudes." Both twins "awwed", but Camo glared at all three of them.

"Never cheat at pinball again! I didn't want to go back there!"

"Back? Wait, you already knew—"

Camo floated in silence. Well, not floated. Fell. She fell in silence, along with everyone else. Stan huffed, "I can't believe this nonsense! Magic tonics? Soos winning at something?"

"You say that as we fall in a bottomless pit," Camo pointed out, which Stan ignored. All of the Pines did it, and it was dumb.

"Where do you come up with this stuff? I'll tell you a good story. It's called, 'Grunkle Stan Wins the Football Bowl'."

Even she knew it was the Super Bowl, and she hated sports. (Well, she kind of had to know about the Super Bowl, since it fell right around her birthday every year.) As expected, Stan's story was super duper dumb. He was totally a Marty Stu in it (male version of Mary Sue). He won the game, the football players said he'd taught them a lesson, he got a massive trophy from a young, scantily clad woman (ew, gross), and he had a robot that helped him.

Everyone hated it. Stan couldn't seem to fathom why. "What? That story was great. I even threw in a talking robot for the kids."

"Yeah, yeah. How about Camo tells a story instead?" Mabel said, and both Dipper and Soos seemed to like that idea, but Camo shook her head. Nope. Most of her other 'adventures' had been with Jason, and had mostly been about clothes/Ducktective. Wow, that sounded really depressing. "Fine. I'm gonna tell a non-terrible story. A story called 'Trooth Ache'!"

Oh, dear. Not this.

She remembered sitting on the porch when Stan's car came up. Apparently, not even a bear could drive as bad as Stan. It actually looked smoother coming in than when her boss did it. Mabel had gotten mad when Stan lied to policemen (evidently, she hadn't been with Stan and Camo when they went out, or else she wouldn't have been so upset),

The next morning, when she showed up to work, the younger girl had said she stuck 'truth teeth' in Stan's mouth, so he was unable to lie. That led to about the amount of chaos you would expect.

First, he insulted somebody's face. Then, he wrote I have committed tax fraud on his taxes. And throughout the entire day, he said things that made everyone uncomfortable. She'd thought Stan had no filter. As it turns out, he did have a filter. He was just automatically a lot blunter than anybody could ever muster up the ability to be.

"It's confusing," she told Mabel. "An inability to lie is not the same thing as being compelled to tell the truth. Stan's being forced to talk about this stuff he doesn't want to talk about it, completely unprompted. You'd have to ask him about these things for it to kick in."

"Huh?"

"The Author's made some very strange mix-ups with the wording. He should really fix it, because it's really dumb and could lead to major misconceptions."

Things really came to a head with the cops found out about the lie Stan had told him. ". . . there is no Doctor Medicine in Gravity Falls," Sherriff Blubs said angrily.

"You better have a darn good explanation for this!"

"Oh, and I do!" Stan said earnestly. "You see, I lied to you. In addition, I've been parking in handicap spaces, shoplifting fireworks, and smuggling endangered animals across multiple state lines. Also, you're fat."

Both cops stared at him with dumbfounded expressions. Blubs dropped his coffee in shock. He pulled out a set of handcuffs and asked, "Is all this true?"

"No! No, it's not true! Right, guys?" Dipper said in his typical very-bad-at-lying way. Came nodded and absently checked her nails. Aw, man, she'd broken one!

Mabel looked torn, and awkwardly said, "Uh . . . sirs, I have to be completely and totally honest with you," the younger girl said, and Camo's eyes locked on her. Mabel continued on with whatever she was doing, obviously anxious about it. "My Great Uncle Stan is . . ." Everyone was looking at her now, and Camo could see her sweating. "Stan is secretly a crime fiction writer!" she blurted out.

Camo, who had been with Stan when he committed crimes multiple times and had actually helped him on a couple occasions (hey, it wasn't her time, what were they going to do?), almost burst into laughter. It took every fiber of her being not to do so, and even more to keep a perfectly straight face. Honestly, she was pretty proud of herself for managing it.

"Yeah!" Mabel chuckled nervously. "He was just telling you about a character from his upcoming page-turner, Crime Grandpa! He's never committed a crime in his life!" Camo was, at this point, the only person left on the stairs, so she awkwardly walked down to join the Pines. "Also, have you lost weight?"

Sherriff Blubs laughed appreciatively. "Well! Finally someone noticed."

"Wow! An author! Can you teach me how to read?"

"What? Author?" Stan said, looking very confused.

Mabel laughed and pushed the officers out the door. "Writers! Masters of fiction. Good night, officers!" As soon as the door was closed, though, she sighed deeply with an expression on her face that was hard to read. Somewhere between guilt and shock.

"Hey, you all right?" Dipper asked, putting a hand on his twin's shoulder.

"I can't believe I lied."

"Mabel, it was for the greater good."

"Yeah. The greater good."

Stan, meanwhile, had made his way to the phone and said, "Hello, police station? Yeah, I forgot to tell 'em about my tax fraud. No, tax fraud." All three kids charged him to get him off the phone.

"We should probably take those teeth out of his mouth, huh?" Dipper asked, and Mabel looked disgusted.

Camo sighed. "I'll take him and convince him to do it, okay? I'll get the teeth back to you. Come on, Stan." The old man followed her, looking very confused.

That was where Mabel's story ended . . . but Camo knew there was more to it than that.

"Look, I know you don't believe in magic and whatnot, but you've got magic teeth in your mouth that compel you to tell the truth," she tried to explain, in an attempt to get Stan to take the teeth out of his mouth.

"Oh, but I do believe in it," he responded, and he said it so easily it took her a second to understand what just happened.

"W-what?!"

He nodded. "I've lived in Gravity Falls for thirty years, kid. How could I stay in the dark about it?" He seemed deep in thought, and she was just in shock. "Don't know what Mabel was going on about with me being an author, though. The Author is my—"

Camo forcibly shut his mouth with her hands, ignoring the fact she was touching her boss's mouth and it was gross. "Do you mean the Author? Of, like, the Journal Dipper is obsessed with?" she asked him, and he nodded. "Don't tell me. Take out the teeth right now. If you tell me, there's no way I'll be able to keep it from Dipper." He nodded again, and pulled the teeth out of his own mouth. He handed them to her—ew, saliva—and went to go get his normal ones.

Then he realized what he'd given away. He did a double take and looked back at her. She looked up at him, holding the teeth with as few fingers as she could manage. "So, uh . . ." he said awkwardly. "Don't tell the kids, okay? I kept it secret for a reason."

"I figured." There was a moment of awkward silence. "But . . . even though I'm a kid, I'm not one of the twins, and I could help you with whatever you're doing. They're your top priority, and I understand that. Their safety comes before my own."

Stan nodded again. "I can't do that. You don't deserve to have my problems hanging over your head. Just keep it quiet, okay?"

"Yeah." She looked at the golden teeth in her hand and winced. "I'm going to get these to Mabel."

"And I never saw that box full of magical teeth again," Mabel finished off. "Oh, wait! There it is."

Sure enough, there was the box. Camo had ventured down and found it, managing to maneuver it toward the group. At this point, she was basically an expert at movement while free falling. Anyway, all the boys groaned as one. "Oh, sweet! My shoes!" Soos said, grabbing them from the air. She'd fetched those, too.

"I liked the part with the bear," Stan said. "The rest seemed pretty far-fetched."

"Mabel, we already know that story. We just lived through it," Dipper said, annoyed.

Camo hummed. "Well, didn't we live through all these stories? They include basically all of us, sans Stan."

"So if we're living through that story right now, then how does it end?" Soos asked, which was a good question. With me discovering one of Stan's big secrets.

"Guys, do you see that?" Dipper's concerned voice said. She looked down, to the glowing circle of light that they were quickly falling towards. Everyone screamed various things until they fell right back out of the hole. She groaned and looked around. "I don't think any time has passed. It must be some kind of wormhole."

"Yeah, dude, that sounds science-y enough to be true."

Right back out the top? No time passed? Wormhole? Maybe they were in a very slightly different dimension. That would explain why none of the junk they threw in was there. But still. If this hole was right here, and Stan had known the Author, they must've been close, so either the pit was a new thing, or the Author never bothered to write about it. Or fall in.

Stan fell in the hole. Oh. Bye. Hope he didn't come out in a different dimension.

The only way I can get through the Voice Over story is by taking off my headphones, reading the subtitles, and pretending Dipper's voice is normal. I don't know what it is about it, but that one . . . I just can't do it.