5-Babysitting
Though these stories sometimes share elements with my customary AU, they really aren't canon to that series. Each was written as a response to a prompt (the story title) and the conditions were that each story had to be set in 2022 and in some way deal with the past in GF.
Written for Wendip Week 2022.
Wendy was off on a photography shoot for Pacific Coast Nature when Dipper got an unexpected call from Grunkle Ford: "Mason, I hate to ask you, but I must have backup immediately! Stan's in Vegas, and Fiddleford's too old—it's an anomaly hunt. Possibly dangerous, probably not lethal. I think. Are you willing to go with me and watch my back?"
Dipper looked into the living room, where the twins were building something elaborate out of a set of intricately shaped wood blocks that their grandfather Dan had carved especially for them out of six different varieties of hardwood. "Let me make an arrangement and I'll be there as soon as possible," he said.
"Please hurry. Something is coming through from the monster dimensions!"
Dipper phoned Mabel. "Can I drop the kids off?" he asked. "Wendy's out of town, and Ford needs help."
"Uh, sure, Brobro," Mabel said. "But Sandi's teething, so—"
"That's OK," he said. "Danny and Gwen will play with each other. Be there in ten minutes."
Life is strange. Six years after the Mystery Twins had left Gravity Falls for high school and later college, Dipper and Wendy, then newlyweds, had returned to the weird little town to settle there. Mabel came back a few months later, because her boyfriend, who was now her husband, worked in the Falls, having replaced Blubs as sheriff when he and Durland retired and moved to Florida. It was a win-win, she figured. Sandi would love playing with the Gnomes and her hubby would have probably the least dangerous police assignment in the Northwest. Plus he was smarter than Blubs and ten times smarter than Durland, but then so was moss.
Dipper and Wendy lived up the road a half mile from the Shack, still run by Soos and Melody and their brood, and Mabel lived about the same distance down the road from it. Dipper pulled up and the three-year-old twins came with him to the house, Danny cheering, "Yay! Aunt Mabel!" and Gwen protesting, "No! My Aunt Mabel! Mine!"
Mabel opened the door. "There you are, my beautiful knuckleheads!" she said. "Come on in! I have juice and cookies!"
"Uh, not yet," Dipper warned. "They just had breakfast. Maybe a snack later, but not too much sugar."
Mabel slapped down the very idea with a dismissive gesture. "Oh, Broseph, no worries. You know my iron self-control! Come on in, kids!"
"Yeah . . . right. Well, thanks, Sis."
"You be careful, Dip."
Though Grunkle Stan was out of the Shack and on his own, living downtown in an apartment, Ford had turned his underground laboratory into a combination research center and home. Waving at Melody, Dipper pressed through the early crowd coming out of and going into the gift shop and ducked into the Employees Only part of the Shack. Because Ford realized that repeatedly seeing someone open a secret passage behind a vending machine just might make a stranger suspicious, he had rearranged things a bit. Now a closet to the left of the lockers, marked "DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE / ELECTRICITY" and locked with a facial-recognition security unit scanned him and then silently opened to reveal an inner door to the extended elevator, and a narrow side door that opened to the emergency ladder, roughly where the stair used to be..
Ford met the elevator on the top level of the lab, aiming a quantum destabilizer at Dipper. "Good, it's you!" he said, lowering the weapon. "Or is it? Quick tell me how to pacify the Gremloblin!"
"Give him a singing fish!" Dipper said. "Grunkle Ford, is there a monster loose in the basement or something?"
"Something's here, all right," Ford said. He looked much the same as he had ten years before, except his hair now was mostly white and he had undergone laser surgery and no longer wore glasses. "I somehow can't get a fix on it. I think it's currently on the bottom level, but in order to capture or neutralize it, I need a wingman! Wait a minute and I'll arm you."
To Dipper's surprise, Ford handed him a rifle-style quantum destabilizer. "It's set to narrow beam, lowest setting," he said. "Even so, be careful. A shot in the wrong place could bring the whole Shack down on us!"
Meanwhile, and some miles away from Gravity Falls, Wendy stood on a temporarily non-flooded beach and took beautiful photos of Hug Point, specifically of an inlet that allowed a waterfall to tumble straight onto the beach, like a replica in miniature of some Hawaiian spots. The weather was good that morning with just a few puffy small clouds, and she squatted for one angle, stood tall for another, shifted position for another, and captured at least a dozen great shots. Her assistant said, "Mrs. Corduroy-Pines, the tide's just turned."
"Six more and let's get out of here," Wendy said. If they lingered much longer, a rising tide would catch them between ocean and a bluff, and they'd have to clamber over water-slick rocks and then push through tangles of thorny growth and over slippery, mossy boulders to get back to the van. She snapped the last few pics, then turned and got some photos of breaking surf—each wave coming a bit closer—before she joined Grace and they briskly hiked down the beach until they hit the spot where they'd come in via a narrow, crooked footpath that led to a parking spot. "Tired?" Wendy asked as Grace unlocked the car.
"Getting tired," Grace said. "How far did we walk?"
"Couple miles each way. Don't know about you, but coffee's not lasting me. We need some food. Let's find a place to get brunch and then what's next on the list?
"Um." Grace consulted her phone for the list. "Nehalem State Park."
Wendy corrected her pronunciation: "Neh-HAY-lem, not KNEE-hah-lem. Cool! That's only like half an hour away, and I know a bakery and café there where we can eat. Can you wait that long?"
"Sure." Grace said. She unlocked the van and Wendy stored her cameras before climbing into the passenger seat.
"Two more long days of this," Wendy said. "Be good to get back home."
Grace drove south and they chatted, but after about ten minutes Wendy's phone chimed. She glanced at the screen and answered it: "Hi, Mabes. What's up?"
"Um, I'm kinda stuck here," Mabel said. "The twins want a snack, but I don't know what you and Dip let them have, and I can't get him on the phone."
"Why are you babysitting?" Wendy asked, sitting up straighter in the passenger seat.
"Dipper has some emergency deal with Grunkle Ford, I don't know what, and I love having them over, but, you know, they're saying they're hungry."
"They're always hungry," Wendy said. "OK, let me see, what would you have handy? Yogurt?"
"Uh, yeah, banana flavored. Is that OK?"
"Perfect!" Wendy said. "Give both of them about three ounces of that and maybe, um, two small graham crackers? Like snap a regular one in half for each of them?"
"Got those!" Mabel said. "Thanks. I'll go take care of this right now!"
As soon as she hung up, Wendy tried Dipper's number. It went straight to the voicemail message. So she tried Ford's. No luck.
But when she dialed the Shack number, Soos answered: "The Mystery Shack, where the dreams are real! Come and visit us! This is Mr. Mystery speaking, how can I help you?"
"Soos," Wendy said—
"Wendy?"
"Yes, right. Listen, are Stanford and Dipper over there?"
Soos lowered his voice: "They're like down in the secret L-A-B, up to something mysterious and all. I can go see if they're busy."
"Um, don't bother them. But soon as you see them, let Dipper know to call me."
"I will, dude! That's like a Soos promise."
"Thanks, man."
The drive south was scenic, the brunch tasty. Still, Wendy couldn't shake a feeling of foreboding.
"What is that thing?" asked Dipper.
"It's either an eldritch horror or a cryptid monstrosity," Ford replied, sweat beading on his forehead. "Still behaving in the same maddening way. Since the moment I spotted the thing, it keeps phasing in and out of reality! It's impossible to get a good bead on it!"
Whatever it was, the . . . apparition, the thing, appeared momentarily as either an eyeless, slimy, pulsating, purple-and-pink blobby thing with short spiked-tipped tentacles, or a twelve-legged crab-like scuttling blood-red crustacean-like creature with abut nine eyes on stalks, or a lurching, glurching monstrosity that looked like a zombie's torso, except the distorted, crumbling face was on the chest and it had no head. And less describable shapes in between. It didn't speak, but made strangely faint, strangled, gurgling sounds and sometimes seemed to chuckle at them.
"It's like the Shapeshifter," Dipper said. He'd given up on trying to shoot it with the destabilizer rifle. From the way it flickered, both in his vision and on Ford's anomaly-detector screen, he was sure that if he fired, the thing wouldn't be there by the time the beam actually ignited.
Ford was shaking his head. "The somatic pattern does not match the Shapeshifter's. It's something else, from somewhere else, and I suppose we really should fire if it ever manifests completely. One thing gives me pause. So far, it seems to have made no hostile moves. I hesitate to make a first strike when it hasn't attacked or even made a threat display."
"It is a threat display," Dipper said.
"If only it would retain its grip on our dimension—there it is again!"
This time it looked like a snake with three heads threaded through a six-legged turtle's body. It scampered for a foot and a half and vanished.
"You're absolutely sure it isn't the Shapeshifter?" Dipper asked.
"Not the same morphic signature at all," Ford said. "And I checked the surveillance feed from the bunker, and the cryonic chamber is stable and secure."
Dang, the thing, now something like the melancholy offspring of a turkey and a lobster, flickered into view and immediately faded.
Dipper gripped his weapon without attempting to sight in on where the thing had been. "Have you ever come across something that sort of phases in and out?"
After a few moments, Ford replied, "Well, actually I recall that when I was lost in the Multiverse, I once had a brief fit of dimension-flicker. It was at a time when I made a narrow escape from a dangerous situation by diving into a natural portal, and I seemed to be on the edge of two realities. One was a swamp, the other a desert, and bizarre creatures yammered at the sight of me in each one. I went back and forth for quite a long time before I was able to hold onto one of the dimensions long enough to get away from the instabilities. Unfortunately the desert rats were hostile, and I had to find a way out of there before—"
"It's here again!"
Now it appeared in a corner of the lab, facing away from them. It spun and they wished it hadn't. This bodily form looked like a toad formed to display a greatly outsized mouth, but when the toothy jaws opened, there was a beak behind them and when that opened there were like seventeen tongues serpent-like.
"Move left and aim for the corner!" Ford said, moving to the right.
The creature faded again, but it did not move very far between appearances, and now they should have it, quite literally, cornered.
"Wait for it, wait for it—" Ford said.
He and Dipper both nearly jumped out of their skins when a deep voice boomed from behind them: "MY BABY!"
By the time Wendy had shot her Nehalem Park photos, ranging from the beach to the walking trails and to views of the mountains, her nagging feeling of alarm had increased. Once again she called Dipper.
This time he answered: "Hi, Wen, can't talk right now, got a situation, twins are fine."
"Gah!" Wendy viciously switched her phone from call mode.
"What's wrong?" Grace asked.
"Probably nothing," Wendy said. She called Mabel again.
Mabel answered in a soft voice: "Hi, Wen. Shh. Danny and Gwen and Sandi are all down for a nap."
"Are they OK?"
"They're fine! What could go wrong with me, Mabel, babysitting? Just a sec. OK, I'm texting you a picture."
"Aw," Grace said, looking over at the mat with the three sleeping kiddos sprawled out on it.
"Watch the road," Wendy warned. "Thanks, Mabes. Listen, I may head home pretty soon. I've still got a week's deadline and only two more days of shooting, so—"
"Don't worry!" Mabel said. "Everything's fine. Do your photo thing and then come home, but don't make your trip longer than it needs to be by doubling back here. I'm sure Ford will keep Dipper safe. Probably."
"I'll think about it," Wendy said. Instead of thinking, she worried.
Dipper's outlook had a way of rubbing off on her.
"Thank you," the weird creature said. It looked, as much as anything, like an enormous toad with seven legs, three tentacles, and nine eyes on stalks, and its body was indeed toadlike, except the mouth ran seventy per cent of the way around it. "How much should I pay you?"
"Nothing, nothing," Ford said, speaking through Fiddleford's universal translator device, which had pickups and speakers in every room of the basement. His words came out as gleeble glup gleeble, but the sort-of-toad thing seemed to understand.
She (Ford supposed the gender) heaved and belched up something that looked like a dinner-plate-sized, slightly flattened purple egg. "At least take this. And I apologize for Slunguggle's playing with his firstfather's dimension hopper. He's just a naughtums itty baby, really."
"Floorbie shzinkle pookie," said the translator, though what Ford had said was, "We're happy he's well."
The baby gargled, "Muppa loopa gumma goob." Obligingly, the translator said, "Muppa loopa gumma goob. Um, possibly 'The pen of my aunt is on the table?'"
"Come along, little one," said the probably-mother. She picked up the child, which now looked like a partly-metamorphosed tadpole version of her.
The creatures vibrated and shimmered out of existence.
"Well," Dipper said, "that happened."
Ford took a deep, unhappy breath. "It will take a lot of air freshener and pine cleanser to get the smell out of this laboratory."
They took the elevator upstairs, and Dipper, to his surprise, saw that the sun was down and the Shack was closing up. Ford thanked him. Deadpan, Dipper asked, "Aren't you going to share our babysitting fee with me?"
"Good Lord, you can have it all!" Ford said. "It's only a nodule of purple quartz."
"Kidding," Dipper told him.
At Mabel's, he went inside and found her snoozing in a recliner. "Wake up, Sis," he said. "Dinnertime!"
She yawned and blinked. "Dipper! Hi. Everything OK?"
"I'll tell you about it later," Dipper said. "Meanwhile, I brought you a pizza with everything. Also, I came to collect the twins."
"Yay, pizza! Oh, about your kids," Mabel said, grinning. "They wanted a sleepover, and I told them that's fine. My neighbor watched the kids for a few minutes, and I went up to your house and got them some clothes and PJ's and a few toys. They're being real quiet now, so let them stay over tonight. I love babysitting!"
That didn't sound like her, but Dipper shrugged. "Uh—well, sure, if you want—do you really love babysitting that much?"
"Oh, Brobro, it makes me want to have two more kids of my own! See you tomorrow around noon, OK?"
"That will be fine," Dipper said. "Say hi to Jimmy for me when he gets off duty. And save him some pizza."
Through a mouthful of crust, toppings, and mozzarella, she said, "Let Jimmy get his own. He knew the job was dangerous when he took it!"
He drove the short distance up Gopher Road and parked in the driveway. What a day. It's gonna be weird here all alone in the house, he thought. He'd become so used to the toddlers' clamor and giggles. Silence was going to be worse than their noise.
He was too tired to think about cooking. In the kitchen he slapped together a ham and cheese sandwich and chased it with a Pitt's. Then he trudged upstairs to the bedroom, tugging off his shirt and unfastening his belt as he went.
Dark in here already. He had stepped through the doorway and had pushed his pants down, kicking them aside, before he switched on the light—
"Don't stop there," Wendy said from the bed. She threw back the covers to show that she hadn't stopped there.
"You're back!" Dipper said joyfully.
"And my front, too," She said, grinning. "And now about those annoying boxer briefs—"
"Um, the kids are—"
"Are with Mabel, I know. She came up and got their overnight stuff to give us a little break. And Grace is at the motel in town, and she's gonna come and pick me up at six sharp tomorrow morning for the rest of my photo job, so we don't have all that much time together and we're all alone and I'm feeling kinda hot for you." She rolled out of bed and came over and removed his shorts for him. "Come to bed, man."
He did and as they pressed warmly together, she said, "I had a feeling all day that something was bad wrong here. Was I right?"
"Yes and no," he said, kissing his way down her throat. "Ford called me in for what turned out to be a routine job."
"Chasing spooks?" she asked. "Ooh, don't stop, that's nice."
"Babysitting," he answered her, and then carried on with the nice part.
The End
