I do not own the show Gravity Falls or any of the characters. They are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of the show's creator, Alex Hirsch. I earn no money from writing my fanfictions; I do them out of love for the show, for practice writing, and to amuse myself and, I hope, other readers.

Who Wants to Get Badgered?

(1920s [?]-2012)

1-Old Times There

Sometimes Jeff regretted his interest in humans. They were too big, their language and their ways confused him, they smelled funny, and though he held a very few in high regard, most of them seemed to fear and despise him and his kind. Yet, though other Gnomes avoided humans, over the decades Jeff had begun to seek them out. He had to admit it—he had a soft spot for humans.

For one thing, his interest in them had led to his becoming one of the few Gnomes who could read and write, well, print, English. His secret days in human school had taught him that. A thousand years earlier (Gnomes couldn't really count well, and once they got up around twenty, they usually gave up and just said "A thousand"), a young Jeff had crept into Gravity Falls Elementary School, where he discovered a hiding place just the right size for him.

It was a supplies cabinet, the interior smelling pleasantly of pine, with a warped door that wouldn't quite close. If he pulled up a nearly-empty large economy-sized metal canister of powdered tempera paint, he could sit comfortably on it, and he was almost a part of the class. He had a view through the cracked cabinet door of the room. When Miss Autry, the third-grade teacher, stood at the blackboard, he could see the marks she made.

He'd also found in the storage cabinet ruled tablets, fat pencils, and books with words and pictures. He picked up on how to sharpen a pencil by watching the human children, so on some days he'd come early, scale the teacher's desk, and grind away at his pencil to prepare for the day's activities. He also borrowed some books (he always brought them back) and, lying in the crawlspace beneath the school, he spent hours looking at the pictures and the letters below them.

He realized that often Miss Autry made those same letters on the chalk board. Gradually it dawned on him: the marks C-A-T meant one of the furry animals that hung around some barnyards and competed with the Gnomes for mice and rats. And the English word sounded like "kat." The Gnome word was fascholk, which would translate to English as something like "bloody-minded evil snarly growly thing." Other words meant other things. Sally, Dick, and Jane were names for two female humans and one male human who did things in the textbooks, like see, run, and look. Jeff didn't know why they didn't behave like the kids in the class, but maybe they were mentally slow.

Following along as the children or teacher read aloud gradually taught Jeff to understand English. He even got good at repeating it, and if he'd had a chance, by his fifth year of schooling he could probably carry on a conversation. He just never got that chance, and odds were that he never would.

You see, the fact that Jeff even had days on end of free time to spend in school was remarkable. In those years, Gnomes were still mostly a burrowing race. When the spring thaw came every year, they spilled out of their tunnels and onto the surface, almost always at night, where they spent the months of Gaodach, Fliuchad, Belad, Loskath, Tharth, Palithas, and Dorchackath* scurrying around, industriously gathering all the storable food they could haul. It was a frantic time. Each Gnome had to find enough food to sustain his or her own life while desperately searching for hard-to-spoil foods he or she could drag down into the burrow to last through a hard winter.

All winters were hard.

Jeff (at that time his name was pronounced more like "Chefth," a Gnome name that meant "Runt" because he was the smallest of his family, smaller than even his younger brothers) wasn't much use as a scavenger, being too small and weak to haul a road-killed rabbit (for example) back to the burrow. When he tried to help, his siblings complained he just got in the way. Finally, his parents decided that all he had to do was find enough to live through the gathering time, when all the rest took such foods as would not rot down into the burrows.

Every night his mother, father, and many siblings would creep out, cautiously emerging from one of the burrow openings—their preferred one was hidden in the snarl of ancient roots under a very old oak—and after one of the elder sons ventured out and managed not to be eaten, they all would scatter. Jeff's mother would grab his shoulders, look him in the eye, and say, "You—just eat. Try to grow!"

The good part about that was he did not have to find food that could be preserved for months. He just had to find stuff he could eat right away. And he had discovered that the big trash bin behind the school held lots of scraps from the lunchroom. Half-eaten apples, stale bread, crusts of sandwiches, soggy vegetables, even chunks of meat, they were all there in abundance. Sometimes he had to fight off a rat or two, and he got to be so good at fighting the rats avoided him, but as the sun warmed the earth, Jeff was able to eat his one huge meal each day.

In order to find the food and see the rats, though, he couldn't climb in the garbage bin in the dark of night, so he tried it after dawn. Some older Gnomes had the superstition that sunlight would evaporate a Gnome, but Jeff discovered that the story was just that, a story, and that the sun was pleasant and warm and let him see what to try to eat and what to run from.

And then one morning he slipped inside the school and into the classroom and began to learn.

The other young Gnomes had a vague idea of what he was up to, and from them Jeff would pick up a nickname from that habit—Gorach. That meant, roughly, "Nerd."

He couldn't help it. He discovered he loved learning.

In all, he spent most of fourteen years in the third grade. By the time that came to an end, Jeff could read, write, and add and subtract (within limits). Jeff had watched Miss Autry grow old—humans aged a lot faster than Gnomes—and felt so sad that he wept one spring when Miss Autry announced to the class with a sweet smile that this was her last year as a teacher. She was retiring.

Jeff spent days working on something, and then one morning before anyone showed up, he left his handiwork on her desk, with a laboriously printed note: Miss Autry, this is for you. You are the best teacher ever. He would never know it, but she so treasured the necklace made of acorns, tiny pine cones, and soda pop bottle tops—each one painted a bright color—that twenty years later, at her own request, she was buried wearing it.

Fourteen years is not long for a Gnome, but for a human child it was long enough to grow up from eight to twenty-two. It took a Gnome roughly forty human years to hit puberty, something that at that time only about three out of five survived to do. But fourteen years is considerable, even to a Gnome, and in those years Jeff had made so many human friends among the children.

In his mind.

He loved watching the young humans, and they changed every season that he went to school. Each spring and each fall brought a new class, so many of them, and he loved almost all of them.

Secretly.

Edna and Alvin, Dorine and Susan, Steve and Betty, Danny and Sylvia, so many of them! Oh, Jeff never spoke to any of them, but he imagined. At recess he snuck out onto the playground and hid in the brush at the edge of the school property to watch their games, laughing with them, loving it when they ran in wild wheeling games of tag or made lines for Red Rover or played games with clubs and balls. Once he was bold enough to come out and grab a softball that a boy had hit right out of the playground. He shyly handed the ball up to the gangly kid called Clem.

In the following days Jeff regretted doing that. He and the boy had not spoken, but Clem excitedly had told the other kids about the fairy who had found the ball for him (Jeff vaguely resented being called a fairy, because he was thirty times the size of a mere fairy), and the other kids made merciless fun of the poor kid, calling him "Dopey Durland" and other mean names.

Anyway, with fourteen years of schooling under his belt, Jeff became the scholar of the Gnome tribe, though no one knew that for ages. The Gnomes did have wise ones and learned ones among them. The Cwimneths** kept the records, written in runes on scrolls of birch bark, but their interests were narrow—how good had the gathering months gone? How dire were the lean times of winter? When a Queen died, they recorded that event, and then when a new one was crowned, that, too, became a matter of record. Not much else was recorded, unless some weird creature from the Crawlspace broke into their burrows accidentally or—much worse—a Mole Man came up from great depths and killed and ate Gnomes.

Most years, thankfully were just "Gathering time brought almost enough food to us. Only seven of us starved over the winter."

Jeff's beard had grown in and was full by the time his schooling ended. And it ended because not only had the human teacher retired, but among the Gnomes the old Queen, Bethnath, died and a new one, Klemmatha, was named. Klemmatha was a granddaughter of Bethnath, but she was also elderly at the time she took the throne. She had two younger sisters, but it looked as if none of them would marry, and so the end of her line of Queens loomed in everyone's mind.

Klemmatha was about the same age as Jeff's grandmothers. Both of them were conservative in, well, everything. They would demand that the Gnomes not venture aboveground until the first full moon that, at midnight, shone straight down the vertical shaft of the Cleft, a crevice in the stones of the Gathering Room. It didn't matter if the weather above was warm enough, the food abundant enough, to save the Gnomes suffering from starvation. The moon had to give that signal before anyone went out in the open, and if a dozen or more Gnomes died of hunger before that date came, well, the grandmothers would say with a shrug, "It is what it is."

Both grannies also pooh-poohed the threat of the Mole Men, deep-digging creatures that had in the past century broken through from below into some of the Gnome tunnels. The Mole Men relished the taste of Gnomes, particularly the young, tender ones. Their raids had drastically diminished the Gnome population. Over many years, the survivors were forced to move to shallower and shallower burrows, until they were barely below the frost line, and in hard winters now, some of them actually froze instead of dying from hunger.

After a brutal winter when perhaps a quarter of all the Gnomes died from freezing, starving, or—the majority—from falling prey to Mole Men raiders, Klemmatha made the drastic decision that the Gnomes had to move aboveground to live year around. Better to freeze than to become dinner for the Mole Men.

Some Gnomes agreed and went with her. Some disagreed and remained below the surface. Jeff never saw his two grannies after the big move—they had stayed underground, while his parents, his siblings, and Jeff followed the Queen. Of the three Cwimneths, only the oldest, Moschanat, emerged into the open. The Queen asked if any of the younger Gnomes could become his apprentice, so the chronicles could be continued. Jeff, hesitantly, volunteered: "My Queen, I can read and write."

He demonstrated. "Those are not proper runes," Moshcanat said critically.

"They're human runes," Jeff said. He read them aloud: "Look, Dick, look. See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run! Funny, funny Spot."

Some of the assembled Gnomes gasped. Jeff recklessly said, "Moschanat, if you will tell me the sounds of the runes, I will learn to write them."

Moschanat, all too aware that his days were waning, willingly took Jeff as apprentice. In less than a week, the old sage spoke to the Queen privately: "The boy is brilliant. He has mastered the runes already. But his ideas of what to record are—elaborate. And he has some thoughts that you should hear."

Jeff gave them to her: We should build homes in the trees, like the birds. We will be above most predators, and no Mole Man could come near us. But our homes must be snug. An open nest will not do. We must have layers of moss and mud. We should colonize hollow stumps and logs. There are ways of keeping warm, and this winter, cold will become our worst enemy. We might also look into colonizing spaces beneath human buildings. They are sheltered and the humans keep their houses warm all winter.

And as for food—"Humans are wealthy," Jeff said. "They throw away as much food as they eat. If we are careful, we can take what they don't want, even in the coldest part of the year."

"The deep Gnomes," the Queen said, "will come out in the warm months to compete with us for food. Should we fight them?"

Jeff thought. "No. We are all Gnomes. Those of us who become—" he paused, but there was no real word for living in an organized, orderly way aboveground—"the human word is civilized, we should help them."

"Force them to join us?" the Queen asked.

"No, my Queen. Help them gather food, let them take it to their burrows. Let us hope that if we do well as civilized Gnomes the deep ones will someday join us of their own will."

Many seasons went by. Though the surface Gnomes mostly stayed out of sight of humans, now and then a human would glimpse a Gnome and almost always run away. The Gnomes were not afraid of the humans—they could tell when one of the huge creatures was anywhere near, and no human ever hurt a Gnome, though now and then one of them might fire a weapon at a Gnome, but not one ever hit the target. The Gnomes regarded that as harmless efforts to shoo them away from garbage and merely became more careful.

However, living in proximity to humans, many of the Civilized Gnomes spent winters right below the unsuspecting humans' feet down in crawlspaces or unfinished basements, hearing the speech of the people, listening first to radios and then to television sets. They began to pick up the human language. And other things changed, too, as the Gnomes watched the big people.

The Gnomes had always worn tall red caps, because in the burrows the hats told them when they were entering a tunnel too small for them and warded off occasional falls of mud clots or stones. Though they had less need of that on the surface, they maintained the red caps because it was a mark of Gnomishness.

Other things changed, though. For example, the went from their blue one-piece garments to styles of clothing more like those humans wore. The lumberjacks they spied on wore overalls and shirts, and so the male Gnomes began to wear facsimiles of those outfits, though they stuck to the familiar shades of blue as the color scheme. The female Gnomes mimicked the girls they saw, changing their one-piece blue coveralls for blouses and skirts.

Another way they changed: they liked the human names they heard.

Jeff changed his name to "Jeff," not all that different from his Gnome name, but at least it did not mean "runt." His friends followed suit, quite often—Steve and the brothers Jason and Carson, many others. More hidebound Gnomes kept their Gnome names—Shmebulock and his father, Shmebulock, Senior, for example, came up from the burrows about the third year after the Gnome migration to the surface.

Shmebulock had been an apprentice Cwimneth and quickly learned from Jeff how to read and write Human, a blessing because an ancient curse lay on him and all he could really speak aloud was his own name. The elder surface Cwimneth, Old Moschanat, had died, and Jeff taught half a dozen Gnomes how to read and write both Gnomish and Human. Some of the Civilized Gnomes began to be distressed because the younger ones were picking up Human words and their speech became corrupt: "Chalnakh heddagh cat's pajamas, vaschalla fun all night long, baby!"

Some of the more disgruntled went down into the burrows. At the same time, desperate Gnomes came up to join the surface dwellers. Both groups, the Civilized and the Feral Gnomes, survived, the numbers fluctuating but very slowly increasing.

Eventually, Jeff ceded his role as a Cwimneth to younger Gnomes. He became exclusively the aging Queen's advisor. Time rolled on until a spring came. The Gnomes had their own idiosyncratic way of recording years—one was "The year we came to live in trees," for example, but all their years were named, not numbered—anyway, this new year was by human reckoning 2012.

Queen Klemmatha had already been elderly when she ascended the throne. Both of her younger sisters had died—"younger" is relative, and both were certainly at least a century and a half old—and she began to think of the time when she would no longer be with her people, but would travel beyond the sunrise to the life-beyond-this-life. One day when the land still lay largely frozen, she called Jeff to her and said, "Young Jeff, my time of departure is nearer than it is far."

"I hope you will reign over us for many years to come," he said.

"We both know better. You know the problem that will arrive when I leave," she told him with a grandmotherly smile.

"You are the last in your line," he said.

"Yes. So when I go, the people must choose a new Queen. That has happened in the long-ago, but our Gnomes have never done that before—for as long as memory reaches, the Queen's crown has always descended from mother to daughter. I have something in mind. I cannot do it, but you can. And I ask you to promise me this, Jeff. When I die, whenever that shall be, you must take the lead in moving the people to select a new Queen."

"I don't know how, " Jeff said.

"You are clever. You will find a way. But this will be the hardest part. Do not choose a Gnome to be Queen."

Jeff stared at her, horrified. "I—what? But the queen of Gnomes must be a Gnome—"

"Hush," she said. "The Civilized Gnomes have changed. They must change more. Much more. I want to leave them believing that they should become more like the humans around us. They must work for the good of all and not merely for themselves. This is a hard thought for any Gnome, and to help it along, I wish the new Queen to be different from all those that have gone before. Choose a female who is not a Gnome to be the Queen after me."

"A human?" Jeff asked, trying to get his mind around that.

"That would please me. Or even a fairy if you can find one trustworthy. Or a werewolf if you can find one that will not devour us. Or any strong and wise creature. But find one that will lead our people beyond stubborn Gnomishness. Too many of us are too selfish. We need to change, young Jeff."

Jeff remained so silent for so long that the Queen asked gently, "Do you wish to be released from my service, young Jeff? I value and trust you as I do no other, but what I have said is my will, and I must have an advisor who will promise me to carry it out. Are you the Gnome for that task, Jeff?"

Bowing his head, unwillingly almost, and in a choked voice, Jeff said, "I promise, my Queen, that I will do my best."

"That," she said with her grandmotherly smile, "is all I ask."

NOTES:

*In those days, Gnome years had only eight months. The first seven were called "Windy," "Raining," "Warm," "Torrid," "Drought," "Cooling," and "Darkening." These corresponded very roughly with late February to November of the human calendar. The last month, by far the longest, comprised approximately December to late January/early February. It is suggestive of the Gnomes' desperate struggle for survival to note that their name for this longest month was "Nawar à Gleyve Sinbas"—"The Time When We Die." Coincidentally, their New Year fell around the time of the winter solstice.

**Cwimneths (the Gnomish plural was spelled Cwimnethi) was a Gnomish word that meant "those who remember." They were the literate Gnomes, rarely more than three in number—an elder, a master, and an apprentice—who could read and write Gnomish runes and served as tribal historians. The chronicles they wrote were straightforward and bleak: "Year of the Queen's Lameness: Gathered food during the seeking months. A third of us starved during the hungry months." A complete history of the Gnomes of North America would be no longer a volume than "How to Assemble Your New Stationary Bike."