All The World's A Toybox

by Straightjacketed

The movement to take back the Falls goes horribly wrong, and everyone has to suffer for it. And as Weirdmageddon spreads beyond Gravity Falls, Dipper, Mabel and a few other unfortunates have to face up to the awful reality of spending the rest of their lives as pawns in Bill Cipher's newest games.

48. What Do We Do Now?

A/N: Happy new year everybody! Second-to-last chapter and all's well.

A huge thank-you to everyone who viewed, reviewed, favourited and followed; I hope you've enjoyed the story, because it won't be long before it's over. As a result, this penultimate instalment might be a little longer than usual... but believe me, it's worth it.

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Gravity Falls is still not mine.

---

By the time the portal appeared in their living room, Mark and Anna Pines were nearing the end of their collective tether: the mind-numbing atmosphere of the Cookie Jar had left them on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and the fact that there'd been a nuclear warhead left in the basement didn't help much. Oh, Mr Cutebiker had said he'd disarmed the thing and made it perfectly safe, but knowing that it was still there didn't make any of them feel better – the cat least of all. They'd already decided by unanimous vote to leave as soon as an exit presented itself, no matter where it went or how it appeared. Anything, anything was better than here.

So, when that glowing doorway materialized in the air right in front of the now-useless TV set, the two of them didn't waste any time wondering about where it went to. They simply got up and made for it as fast as their feet could carry them: down the glowing tunnel they marched, moving swiftly out of the Cookie Jar's grey, hazy limbo, back towards the world of colour and life. They didn't feel much in the way of joy at the thought of escaping, or even relief. That was strictly reserved for the moment they found that they were well and truly free of this hellish place. For now, Mark and Anna Pines felt only the desperate, pleading hope that there'd be something better on the other side of the door.

And then they heard it: someone on the other side of the tunnel was shouting, screaming in growing horror. Neither of them recognized the voice – after all, Mark and Anna had never met anyone with a voice that unearthly outside their nightmares – but it sounded inexplicably familiar.

"No, no, no, we're not ready! Someone shut that portal, now! Pacifica, stop it before it's too late!"

"I can't – whatever he did to open it, it can't be stopped!"

"Mabel, do something!"

A much more familiar voice shrieked from up ahead: "It's not working! It's forcing back everything I throw at it!"

"Someone's coming through! Oh god, make that two someones!

"Oh no, this can't be happening! This is not happening! No, no, no, no, no, nooooooooo!"

And then the tunnel ended, disgorging the two of them in a room that could have comfortably accommodated a stadium or two, ablaze with impossibly vivid shades of colour: blood-red, fiery orange, near-luminescent black, and in the skies visible through the hole in the window, a mad kaleidoscopic swirl of gold, blue, pink and green. But no sooner had they begun to rejoice, sheer relief they felt at being somewhere with actual colours was swiftly dampened by two very disturbing revelation:

First of all, whatever this place was, it was in ruins: the walls were cratered, the floor was littered with fallen masonry, and along with the great stained-glass window behind it, the huge dais in the middle of the room had been smashed to pieces; any sign that it had once held a throne was long gone. All in all, it looked like a war zone.

Secondly, they were surrounded by alarming-looking strangers: an animated porcelain doll in a black dress, a teenage boy with no eyes and rotten-looking teeth, a gigantic centipede-like centaur of metal and flesh, a bald-domed kid shorter than Dipper, a twenty-foot-tall baby floating in mid-air, a couple of adolescent girls in mechanical suits of armour, a teenage girl with a scarred face and disfigured limbs, a plump-looking guy in a question-mark t-shirt, and, hovering over them all, a giant salamander.

Also, there appeared to be a large blue couch sitting in the middle of this strange group for no apparent reason.

There was an awkward pause – the kind that can only form as a result of an entire roomful of people having nothing to say and no coherent thoughts to work with.

Eventually, Anna coughed loudly and offered a nervous-looking wave. "Uh, hi," she mumbled.

There was an answering chorus of hellos from the crowd... and then, just as the two were about to ask the questions they'd been dying to pose for what felt like centuries, a haggard-looking figure began pushing his way through the inexplicable throng – and Mark recognized him immediately.

"Stan?" he blurted. "Stanford, is that you? What are you doing here? And who the hell is that?" He pointed in bewilderment at the terrifyingly identical figure in the black coat striding after him.

Mark's only surviving uncle sighed deeply. "That's a very long story, kid. Basically, he's Stanford, I'm Stanley-"

"What?! Stanley Pines – as in 'black sheep of the family' Stanley Pines? But he died over thirty-"

"I faked my death, okay? I said it was a long story!"

"Nevermind all that," snapped Anna. "Where's Dipper and Mabel? Mr Cutebiker told me they were still with you while all this was going on, so where are they? And what's all this we've been hearing about them leading some kind of minor resistance movement? I-" She shook her head, visibly forcing herself to focus on the important things. "I mean, at least tell me you've kept them away from this place, whatever it is – it looks like a bomb went off in it."

"Oh, it did, dude," said the fat man. "Lots of bombs, in fact."

Anna took a deep breath to steady herself, and as she visibly struggled to suppress a headache, Mark stepped in. "Look, would you just tell us where Dipper and Mabel are? Please? We haven't seen them in months, we've spent most of that time worrying about them, and we-"

He blinked. "Did that couch just move?"

Suddenly, both of them were staring at the couch. At first, it seemed as if the sudden move had just been Mark's imagination, but the longer they looked at it, the more it seemed as though this otherwise unassuming-looking piece of furniture was shivering.

And was that someone peeking out from behind it?

"Come on out, you two," said Stan wearily. "There's no point in hiding anymore. It'll be okay," he added, as the couch inexplicably shuddered again. "Trust me."

There was a pause, and then the entire couch rippled out of shape, twisting and sculpting itself into a human figure even as its threadbare upholstery softened into human flesh and clothing. In a matter of seconds, the couch was gone, and in its place stood Dipper – pale, sweaty and very nervous, but undoubtedly Dipper.

An equally-anxious-looking Mabel was hiding behind him, a small pig snuffling curiously at her shoes.

For a moment, Anna and Mark could only stare in confusion as they took in the sight of their two children: Dipper, fresh from having been disguised as a piece of furniture and wearing a different baseball cap, and Mabel, dressed in a gleaming white sweater, white skirt, white shoes… and a crown of all things. Everything about them aroused question after question, and once again, neither of the two parents could figure out which one to ask first.

And then Dipper gave a great shudder of fear, and suddenly he was no longer himself: he was a dog; he was a coiled anaconda; he was a mass of searing flame; he was a swarm of hornets; he was a stormcloud; he was a dove; he was at least a dozen things too alien to describe. And then he was himself again, trembling, shamefaced and looking as if he was about to cry.

Suddenly, the air around Mabel seemed to shimmer and crystalize, and in that moment, Anna and Mark saw their daughter as if through a diamond – but every facet of her was different: they saw her as an old woman, gnarled and wearied beyond words; they saw her as a small child, ready for her first day of kindergarten; they saw her as an adult, her eyes solemn and knowing; they saw her as ancient bones; they saw her as an infant; they saw her as she truly was.

And then it hit them. A dozen different names for the same mysterious gods of the Zodiac filtered through their brains, ending with the most recent: even Mark, sleep-deprived as he was, couldn't help but put two and two together.

"You're the King of Faces," Anna realized aloud, staring in astonishment at Dipper.

"And you're the Timekeeper Queen," said Mark, as the distortion rippled around Mabel again.

As one, Dipper and Mabel nodded helplessly.

"You weren't just leading your own resistance movement, were you?"

"You're in charge of these gods of the Zodiac everyone's been talking about?"

Once again, the twins could only nod.

Anna took a deep breath, trying to get a grip on what she'd just discovered. "How could this have happened?"

Dipper opened his mouth to answer, but couldn't utter a single word. Frankly, Anna didn't need to guess why: she knew the look on his face all too well, courtesy of countless falls, bruises, humiliations, and bad dreams that she'd comforted him through over the years. He was scared, nervous, and ashamed for being seen that way… but most of all, he was hurting.

Mabel, on the other hand, looked completely lost, as adrift as she'd been on those rare and terrible occasions when her exuberance had failed her and left her unable to focus on anything, even her art; she was hurting too, in her own terrible way.

And in the silence that followed, Dipper and Mabel began to cry; the former too upset to hide his tears, the latter too crushed to fake another second of optimism… and both of them too upset to notice their parents hurrying forward and gathering them into their arms, telling them that everything was going to be alright and not knowing how this could be true – because in that moment, truth mattered less than giving them the comfort they desperately needed.

Five minutes later, both children were asleep.

---

Once it became clear that Mr and Mrs Pines were in no mood to head back to the Cookie Jar and most of the families of the zodiac agreed with them, Axolotl decided to refurbish the Fearamid somewhat.

The Pines residence was plucked from the Cookie Jar and planted in one of the more spacious regions of the palace, along with the homes of the Corduroys and the Ramirezes, and as many houses as were needed to house the Zodiac's forces. Bill's gladiatorial arena now became a temporary residential district for the victorious army. Not that much of the army was interested in staying in residence at the moment: the colossal bar was now awash with militiamen desperate to let off steam, drinking and dancing and indulging in the most pleasant of the games left behind.

The Zodiac didn't join them, though: the day had been hard on everyone, but after the extended duel with Bill, the faceoff with Nyarlathotep and the succession of bombshells that had been dropped in their collective lap.

So, while the soldiers celebrated alongside their allies from beyond reality and Axolotl went to work on building a place for the rest of humanity to settle, the Gods of the Zodiac and a handful of other men and women rescued from the Cookie Jar slept and tried to recover.

Some found it easier than others.

---

Soos dozed for nearly forty-eight hours.

With Abuelita pottering absently around the house as always and the Axolotl combing the Cookie Jar for the real Melody, he had little to worry about. After all, everyone else in the newly-restored home was on more or less the same level: tired, shaken, but unharmed.

Slowly but surely, everyone was recovering.

And yet, when he awoke, Soos couldn't help but feel the tiniest bit discontented.

He'd done everything he could, and yet, for some reason, he couldn't help feeling as though he could be doing more. He didn't know what he was supposed to be doing now, but it bothered him nonetheless.

All things considered, Jesus "Soos" Alzamirano Ramirez would have been the first to admit that he was a simple, down-to-earth kind of guy who – all quirks aside – generally tried to think of practical solutions when he wasn't thinking of impractical ones.

So, when he realized that he was surrounded by houses that had emerged from the Cookie Jar a little worse for wear thanks to the occasional visits from the Henchmaniacs, he took it upon himself to fix them. There were windows that needed replacing, doors that needed to be re-hinged, roofs that needed repairing, and a whole host of other broken odds and ends that Soos was in the perfect position to repair.

He'd probably run out of houses sooner or later, but at least it gave him something to do in the meantime. After all, he was the Handyman of the Apocalypse: when the world was broken, he was the only one who could fix it.

All told, it was a shame he didn't think to share his solution with any of the others; if he had, the Zodiac might have figured out the answer to their problems much sooner…

---

"Robbie, dear, are you done in the bath yet?"

"Nmgnjjh. Not just yet, mom."

"Well, when you're done, your father and I have some lovely glass eyes for you to try out."

"...Why do you have glass eyes? More importantly, do I really wanna know?"

"They're from the funeral parlour, dear; sometimes the dearly departed arrive without eyes, and we have to get them looking presentable for the funeral. They're basically plain marbles used to pad out the eye sockets, so we've modified and coloured these ones just for you. Oh, and that nice Mr McGucket told us he was working on a new design for false teeth if his dental cleansing stuff isn't working. Enjoy your bath, dear!"

"Thanks, mom."

Robbie sighed luxuriantly and sank back down into the depths. He'd been here for almost half an hour, and he felt as if he'd just lost fifty pounds of weight just from washing all the accumulated filth off his body and out of his hair. Up until now, he hadn't had the time or resources for personal grooming: when he'd been living on the streets, the nearest thing to a bath had been the times when the stormwater drains had backed up and flash-flooded him; when he'd escaped, he'd been lucky if he could get a bit of rain every now and again; and while water was available in Cipheropolis and the Forge, it couldn't always be spared for washing and the cleaning products weren't always available, so they'd had to make do with what they had. As a result, Robbie had been only intermittently clean in the last few months, and thanks to being soaked in Bill's ocular jelly, he'd smelled absolutely putrid.

Now he was clean at last, his body scoured of dirt and blood, his hair vigorously shampooed and scrubbed free of all the things that had been living in it for the last few months, his aching scars and ratbites thoroughly soothed; even his worn old teeth were feeling better, courtesy of several glasses of McGucket's new "dental elixir" – true, they still looked like a tumbledown picket fence, but at least they didn't look as if he'd been drinking shoe polish. Best of all, there were clean clothes waiting for him!

As gloomy as the situation looked, if there were hot baths, soft beds and freshly-laundered clothes every day, Robbie could get used to it very quickly.

Of course, one of the few things he couldn't get used to was needing to keep a golem in the room with him just so he could see what he was doing. Quite apart from the fact that it was already pretty awkward to have someone in the room watching while he bathed, peed, took a dump and so on, watching himself bathing still felt really weird.

And the other thing he couldn't adjust to was that vague, ghostly sense of discontent in the air. He'd no idea why, the longer he relaxed, the more he thought there was something important he should be doing, some vital chore he'd forgotten about. What could it be, though? He'd saved the day, he'd helped defeat Bill, and the world was slowly being fixed. He'd done all he could.

Hadn't he?

There was another knock on the door. "By the way, there's someone to see you, Robbie. I think it's that nice girl with the purple hair-"

Robbie all but flung himself out of the bath. Towelling himself off as quickly as he could, he dressed in the new clothes laid out for him at roughly the speed of light and catapulted himself down the corridor like a torpedo, mind blank except for the all-possessing need to make himself at least somewhat presentable.

"Where are those glass eyes?!" he screamed.

"Just here on the table. Would you like green or blue?"

"Um…" Robbie's mind raced. "Blue! No, wait – green!"

Pausing only to reflect that he probably would have demanded a more exotic colour before Weirdmageddon, Robbie hastily slotted the proffered prosthetics into his empty eye sockets, then staggered down the corridor towards the front door with his golem in hot pursuit.

As expected, Tambry was waiting at the front door for him: like the others, she'd been in the Cookie Jar, so she seemed no worse for wear other than a look of near-crazed exhaustion on her face; she even had her cellphone in hand – but shut for a change. She opened her mouth presumably to say hello, and then let out a muffled squeak of surprise that quickly became a hastily-smothered burst of giggling.

"What?" Robbie asked anxiously. "What's wrong?"

"I – nothing! Sorry, it's just that…" Tambry shook with laughter. "You've got your left eye in back to front!"

"Oh, right. Hang on a sec…" He turned around, made sure his golem was looking directly at him, and hastily swivelled his eye until the little hand-painted iris was pointing straight ahead. "There we go. Um… you don't seem shocked by the zombies and glass eyes."

"I, uh… well, I've heard a lot about you since I got out. Everyone's saying you're a god now – the blind god of the dead. Helluva metal name, I gotta say."

In spite of himself, Robbie let out a snort of laughter. "I know, I know. Er, how are you?"

"I'm fine." Tambry's smile faded a little, and something not unlike pain crept across her face. "I think," she added weakly. "How are you doing?"

"…I'm getting better. I think."

There was a pause.

"Um… why is there a zombie version of me hanging around the front yard?"

Once again, Robbie flushed with embarrassment. "Bill made that," he confessed. "He made copies of all my friends, just to see if I could burn 'em like all the others – long story. Eventually, I learned to see through them. And, um… I've kind of been keeping them around for the last few months. I couldn't bring myself to get rid of them…" He trailed off, cursing himself for not disposing of his collection ages ago. "It's stupid, I know, but-"

"It was the only thing keeping you from going crazy," Tambry finished. "It doesn't sound stupid to me at all. I…"

She stopped, that tiny ripple of pain sliding across her face again. "Bill let me keep my phone," she said quietly. "Even gave me a working charger; I didn't know why, at first, but then I tried to call you. Nothing. I tried Thompson. Still nothing. Wendy, Nate, Lee, everyone I know, even my parents – I texted them and nobody picked up. I mean, I was getting a signal, but nobody was there. I couldn't find my way around the Cookie Jar, even when I could get out of the house, and I couldn't find any of the others: everything's wrong in there, everywhere looks the same and the longer you stay, the harder it is to get out of your house without feeling freaked out." She smiled bitterly. "Turns out my mom and dad were just a couple of blocks away all along. Same went for Nate, Lee and Thompson. None of us knew, because the Cookie Jar had us trained not to leave. So I just started calling people as often as I could, hoping someone would pick up. At first, I did it thinking someone might be on the other end that time; then I did it because I didn't know what else to do; then I did it because it was the only thing keeping me from going completely nuts. Me, alone in an empty house, texting and calling twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week until-"

She held up her hands: every single finger was layered in gauze and band-aids.

"I had to stop," she finished quietly. "For a while. But I'm still carrying around my phone; I don't know why – all the other phones in town are broken, and it's not as if anyone's gonna repair those cell towers anytime soon, anyway. But… I'm scared to be without it. I don't even care about texting anymore. I'm just scared that if I throw it away, I'll wake up and find myself right back in the Cookie Jar, and the only thing keeping me from losing it will be that phone."

Tambry took a deep breath. "Is it the same for you? Did you keep the zombie copies around for reasons like that? Because you didn't want something awful to happen?"

But Robbie couldn't tell her: he couldn't tell her that once he'd stocked his army with more zombies than he'd ever need and learned how to build golems of his own, he'd thought of letting zombie Tambry and his other zombie friends rest in peace… but in the end, fear had stopped him at the last minute. After all, what if the real Tambry had been dead, or would die long before he saw her again? Or what if destroying the zombie doppelgangers somehow killed their real selves? It was ridiculous, but he'd never been able to bring himself to put this little superstition to the test.

Confessing these silent fears, even to Tambry, was out of the question. They were just too big to admit to – they stuck in his throat and lodged there like shrapnel, impossible to remove without opening fresh wounds. And really, hadn't he had enough of being hurt? Didn't he at least deserve a little time to relax without all the stress and heartbreak and turmoil of the last few months? Hadn't he'd done all he could?

So instead, he only nodded.

"So you haven't looked up the others yet?" Tambry asked gently.

"No. I've been too caught up in living in an actual house for a change. Have you?"

"Nah: first few hours since I got out, mom was too scared to let me out her sight, and the next few, I've been too scared to leave. I've been cooped up in the Cookie Jar too long. Question is, what're we supposed to do now that I'm free and you're a god?"

And in that moment, inspiration struck.

"Mom?" he called. "Have we still got some shovels in the house?"

"Two in the laundry, dear!"

"Alright, thanks! We'll be in the front yard if you need us!"

Tambry blinked in confusion. "Hang on, what the hell are we doing?" she asked. "And what are we going to do with the shovels?"

"Well, we're going to get outta this house, get Wendy if she's in the mood, and then find Thompson, Nate and Lee, and have a reunion. But first we're both going to bury a few things we don't need anymore…"

---

Dipper and Mabel spent most of the day asleep, too tired even to have nightmares. Dipper slept so soundly that he spent most of the evening shapeshifting into a plush toy and back again, while Mabel didn't even notice the cat using her head as a pillow.

For a time, Annabelle and Markham Pines watched their children sleep from the doorway; after so many months apart, neither of them wanted to let them out of their sight for long. Eventually, they gave up on watching, gathered some chairs and took up a vigil by the bedsides; for a time, they nodded off and enjoyed their own light slumber – a welcome reprieve from the exhausting half-sleep they'd endured back in the Cookie Jar.

When they awoke, Mabel's new pet pig was sniffing Mark's shoes; Mabel herself was sitting up in bed, not-quite-fully-conscious, while Dipper was slowly returning to human form as he made the slow, lurching journey towards wakefulness.

"Am I still dreaming?" Mabel groaned sleepily.

Anna shook her head. "No, sweetie. You're still awake."

"Then it wasn't all a dream?" Dipper mumbled. "We won? We beat Bill?"

"That's what the others told us."

"Oh." Mabel yawned. "What are we gonna do now?"

There was a pause, as their parents considered this; in the end, the decision was made entirely without speech, because by now the two of them already knew what they were going to say. They'd been sitting on this question for almost twelve hours by now.

"If… if you're okay with talking about it," Mark began hesitantly, "We were hoping you could tell us what's been happening these last few months. I mean, we've heard all the tall tales, but there's been no way of telling what's real and what's not."

"But one of the stories did say that Bill Cipher came from Gravity Falls," said Anna. "That's all they say about him: nobody knows what he was, nobody knows why he did what he did; all they know is that he started out in Roadkill County, Oregon. Now, you don't have to answer us if you don't want to, but-"

And just like that, Dipper and Mabel told them everything: the discovery of the journal, a few of their adventures across Gravity Falls, the friends they'd made their first encounter with Bill Cipher, the opening of the portal, and their introduction to Ford. Mabel even explained the "deal" she'd been tricked into, amidst several interruptions from Dipper, who felt the need to constantly remind them that it hadn't been Mabel's fault. And as the story grew deeper and darker, the two storytellers began to change along with it: Mabel's control over time flared in conjunction with her emotions, objects around her shifting backwards and forwards through time (sending the cat fleeing in terror), while Dipper found himself shapeshifting on instinct, his body warping to accompany different parts of the story; in the space of a single sentence, he could be Mabel, Wendy, Robbie, Stan, Ford, even Bill. And as time went on, he had good reason to do so: together, he and Mabel charted the course of the games Bill had forced them to play, from the Endless Summer to Dipper's transformation into the Shapeshifter, from Soos's escape to Ford's transformation into the Fourth Horseman – continuing all the way into the uprising they'd staged and the war they'd won.

By the end of it, both were tired, teary-eyed and emotionally exhausted, but in spite of all that, somehow relieved.

It took quite a while before Mark or Anna were able to speak, and by then, nothing they could think of sounded even slightly relevant. Eventually, after perhaps a minute of silence, Mark managed to hesitantly murmur out, "I know it might not sound like much, but your mother and I are here to help you. I don't know how long it'll take for you to… recover – if that's the right word-"

"Or even if we can."

"Oh come on, Dipper, you don't know that."

"Axolotl said there's no going back to normal for any of us. This is the new normal now."

"I didn't mean that kind of recovery, Dip. People can adjust to the strangest things, make new lives without ever getting close to normality. Maybe I'm jumping the gun, but-"

"Dad, I don't know if I'm thirteen or thirty right now; in one version of history, I grew up in this house with you and mom, and in another, I started out as a specimen Grunkle Ford dug out of the ground, and the nearest thing to parents I had were him and McGucket. I've lived two lives thanks to Bill, the second of which I spent mostly trapped underground, eating rats and mole people! And Mabel spent months either totally alone or in a world that wanted her to turn into a complete psychopath! So how are we – how are any of us – supposed to recover from… this?!"

"Like your dad said," Anna remarked, "We don't know how long it's going to take, or even if it's going to happen at all. But whatever happens, whatever's happened to you and Mabel, we'll be here for you."

"Even though we're not human anymore?"

"I think roughly half the planet isn't human anymore, kiddo. Some people out there might get prejudiced about that kind of thing, but your dad and I aren't among them: no matter what happens, you're still the same kids who left this house at the start of the summer."

"Even though we're only going to keep getting more powerful and we're going to live forever?" Mabel asked gloomily.

"Nothing new, really," said Mark, a wry grin on his face. "When you have kids, one of the things you have to get used to is knowing that they'll be better off than you and they'll outlive you. Like I said, we'll be there for you; even gods need a shoulder to cry on from time to time."

Dipper groaned loudly. "Oh, don't you start: half the people we've rescued call us gods now. We'll be lucky if we can get through the next few years without someone starting a cult."

"And they'll probably be looking to us for answers on what to do next when we don't know what to do with ourselves," said Mabel gloomily. "So we're back to question one: what do we do now?"

"Who said you have to do anything?" Mark asked. "Haven't you gone through enough without setting yourself another big mission? You've just won a war and saved the world. I think you've earned a vacation."

But Mabel shook her head. "Trying to go back to arts and craft was hard enough in the war; I can't focus on it at all now, not when it feels like there's still so much to do."

"But Bill's gone!"

"And the world's still a mess: we got rid of Bill and the Henchmaniacs, but the world's still full of monsters and weird critters and things from other worlds."

"And," Dipper added, "even if Axolotl's going to fix it all for us, it's going to be years before things change. It doesn't feel right doing nothing while he does everything. Maybe this is the end of the war, but it still feels like we should be doing something."

"High school, maybe?"

As one, all eyes turned in Mark's direction.

"Only joking."

Mabel threw a pillow at him. "Well, I guess we can find something to do," she conceded. "Dipper can, anyway."

"Why's that?"

"Didn't you hear? He's got a girlfriend."

"Girlfriend?" Mark echoed.

Dipper blushed, rapidly shapeshifted from human to pillow and back again, and nodded sheepishly.

"You didn't tell us about that."

"I-I-I-I… I, errrr… didn't think it was important, in between the apocalypse and leading a war against Bill. Uh, you seem to be taking the end of the world a lot better than I thought you would, by the way."

Now it was Anna's turn to look downcast. "We missed most of it: we didn't get to see what happened to you and Mabel, what happened to the neighbours or the rest of Portland. But truth be told, what we did see was bad enough on its own. We mourned in our own way while we were still locked up… but eventually the Cookie Jar turned out to be even worse than being out in the Wastelands, and not just because of all the little things Bill added to make life miserable. Not knowing what happened to you two – it nearly drove us mad. Every time I walked past your room and thought I heard you and Mabel playing there, I'd always walk away thinking, 'the next time is going to be too much, the next time I hear that and find that they're not there, I'm going to completely lose it.' And now we're out and we're with you again..." She took a deep breath. "I don't know if we're coping any better than you are, but as long as you and Mabel are safe, I think we'll be okay."

There was an expectant pause.

"So… are you going to tell us about your girlfriend?"

Dipper smiled in spite of himself, exasperated but clearly glad to have something different to talk about. "Well," he began, "it all started out when Grunkle Stan threw a party; I actually had a crush on another girl at the time..."

---

She'd wanted to seem as calm and cool as she always had.

True, Wendy had been dreading this meeting ever since she realized that her family might be alive, and with very good reason: how could she ever get used to being around her father and brothers after spending months on end being hunted by perfect doppelgangers of them? How could she adjust to their presence when the last time she'd seen their faces had been the day she'd been forced to kill all four of them in single combat? The thought alone had left her almost paralysed with nerves outside the Fearamid's new residential block, until Pacifica had floated by and given her a reassuring pat on the shoulder, urging her on – if only because Wendy couldn't avoid this reunion forever.

So, she'd done her best to look brimful of confidence, hoping against hope that she could at least seem as though nothing about her had changed: there'd be no getting around how physically different she was, of course, but at least she could make it seem as though she was still the same cool, collected, unflappable girl they'd last seen at the start of Weirdmageddon. As long as they didn't ask too many questions or worry too much about her, she would be fine. At least, that was the plan.

It lasted up until the old log cabin crept into view, almost incongruous amidst the suburban houses transplanted from the Cookie Jar. Dad was waiting for her out front, with Marcus, Kevin and Gus lined up alongside him; for a moment, she was almost reassured that all four of them looked just as nervous as she felt… but then they saw her, and the horrified expressions set in.

She knew what she looked like by now: they could see the crater where her right ear had been; they could see the scars on her face where the axe had bitten through her brow, the old bullet wounds around her collarbone; they saw her gills, the cracked-porcelain left arm, the gleaming silver veins on her right, the nails of solid iron tipping her brutal-looking hands, the clawed feet in their black carapace. Most of all, they saw how her most distinctive features had withered, how starvation had sharpened her face and hardened her already-skinny frame, how all that remained of her hair was a ragged, close-cropped mess of crimson.

But still, Wendy tried to play it cool: she waved at them as she approached, she said hi, she stumbled through all the usual small talk as she ushered them inside. The other four responded in kind, mumbling their own hellos, offering to help her with her luggage and – most awkwardly of all – asking if the two members of the Society of the Enduring who'd escorted her this far needed a cup of coffee. It was so unlike them, so divorced from the usual Corduroy boisterousness that Wendy would have laughed if she hadn't been so nervous at seeing the usual family behaviour twisted out of shape again. The last time they'd behaved this unnaturally, they'd been clones out to kill her. But then, they were nervous as well: they didn't know what to make of her.

Then as she stepped inside the cabin, there was a metallic sounding-thud from somewhere around floor-level, and she tuned to see that Gus was lugging her axe indoors as fast as his little legs could carry him, a ghost of his old hyperactivity in his eyes. "You dropped this," he explained, clumsily handing it to her.

In that moment, something very odd happened in the back of Wendy's mind: somehow, this simple gesture seemed to have collapsed a dam inside her head, and suddenly, she couldn't keep up the façade a moment longer.

She opened her mouth to say "thank you," but all that emerged was a choked sob; she wanted to be as calm and cool as she'd always been, but the act slipped through her fingers like so much sand. Then, she sank to her knees and flung her arms around her brother as if she was afraid he might vanish, and perhaps she was – it was suddenly very hard to concentrate on her own thoughts, or even what was happening in that moment. She could hear her voice issuing from miles and miles away, frantically apologising to Gus and telling him how much she'd missed him, telling all of them how much she'd missed them.

Was she crying? It was hard to tell.

She could feel warm arms enveloping her, her father and brothers drawing her into a colossal bear hug, the kind that only the direst emergency could inspire.

She was dimly aware of being hoisted over her father's shoulder in a fireman's lift and carried down the corridor; when she came to, she was sitting on the gigantic flannel couch in the living room, and dad – his bearded features unnaturally solemn – was handing her a mug of something hot and sweet-smelling.

Hot cocoa, she dimly realized; her mother's special cure for bad days and nightmares. Suddenly closer to tears than ever, she accepted it, and took a sip. She barely had time to enjoy the chocolatey flavour before something like molten lead and a white-hot bolt of lightning shot along her tastebuds, and an invisible hammer slammed down on a nail positioned squarely between her eyes; her head spun counter-clockwise at roughly five hundred miles an hour, her mouth burned, her pupils crashed headlong into each other, and she nearly dropped the mug before she finally got a grip on the lurching world. For a moment she could only sit there, coughing and wheezing, until she finally managed to gasp out, "What was that?!"

Dad looked uncharacteristically abashed. "I, uh, added a bit of the Ol' Corduroy Moonshine," he admitted. "You looked like you could use it."

Wendy stared, blinking and coughing softly for a moment. Once again, it felt as if she was holding an explosion at bay inside her head, not of grief but of something much more powerful…

And before she knew what was happening, she had started to laugh. She whooped and howled and roared with laughter, barely managing to set the mug aside before it fell from her hands, and sobbing through her giggles and laughing through her tears, she slid down the couch and tumbled to the floor in a cackling heap. Funnier still was the fact that everyone else in the family was laughing as well: Gus a giggling ball of lunacy on the floor next to her, Kevin half-slumped against the couch and hooting with mirth, Marcus propped up against the wall as he guffawed, and Manly Dan Corduroy bellowing his thunderous laughter loud enough to shake the windows and rattle the doors.

In that moment, Wendy knew she was going to be okay.

She knew there was a long road ahead of her before she could fully adjust to a life at peace: there would be tears and nightmares and moments of shame and many hard years of making amends for the things she'd done in her delusions… but she knew she could live with it: she was going to be okay because she had friends who could help her through the worst of it and forgive her for her mistakes, and because she had a family that would love her no matter what.

She was going to be okay.

Once she'd finished her drink and told them all as much of her story as she could, she retired to bed for a while and spent the next few hours dozing. No nightmares this time around, thankfully, though it took a while to get used to sleeping in her own bed again.

When she awoke, it was to the sounds of hammering and sawing from outside, mixed with the familiar sound of boys laughing and egging each other on: at once, she realized that Dad was at work on the house with Marcus, while Kevin and Gus played their own ultra-aggressive form of tag; slowly but surely, they were falling back into their own habits, rebuilding their old lives – maybe even a semblance of normality. Of course, it'd never be completely back to normal, but that wasn't going to stop anyone from trying, nor was it limited to the Corduroys: on the way over, she'd seen a few militiamen, cyborgs and even members of the Society mowing their lawns, painting their houses and playing football, all of them finally free to relax and seek what happiness they could in this nightmarish new world.

But they're not the entire human race, are they? Wendy thought. There's still thousands of people living in the Cookie Jar, and they'll stay that way until there's a permanent place for all of them… and there's even more than that hiding in refugee camps and survivalist dens and all kinds of other places scattered all over the Wastelands. What are we going to do about them? How can they be helped?

Wendy sighed, adding it to the list of things to think about later.

Rising from the bed, she stripped away the tattered patchwork of rags that had been her uniform for the last few months and showered until she finally felt clean. Then, she sought out her old clothes. Annoyingly enough, her clawed feet no longer fit the shape of her boots, and she had to trim the last few inches off her jeans before they would fit, but other than that, the old ensemble suited her just as it always did. Best of all, her hat hid her missing ear and shredded hair – and would do so until it returned to its old length.

But now that she had a semi-normal life of relaxation at her fingertips, what was she going to do with it?

She was just beginning to ponder the question when there was a knock on the door. To her surprise, it was Robbie, now wearing in clean clothes and false eyes, Tambry on his arm. Behind him, a few anonymous-looking zombies waited patiently on the law, carrying an improvised palanquin between them.

"We were gonna see if we could find Thompson and the others," said Robbie, offering a shy smile. "Wanna come?"

Wendy grinned, glad to have something to do with herself. "Thought you'd never ask," she replied with a wink.

---

"Are you… comfortable?"

Not for the first time that day, Gideon's parents could only stare at him.

By now, they'd been settled in a house not unlike the one they'd owned in Gravity Falls, and had settled in the familiar places in the living room; even the armchairs and couch felt exactly as they had back at home. But however familiar the setting felt, it wasn't the same thing.

Once, he'd treated this place like an audience chamber, like a throne room, really. Here, mother and father had sat in terror like vassals awaiting his commands and his judgement, keeping the madness at bay only through the memory gun or the vacuum cleaner. Now, it was just a sitting room for three extremely traumatized human beings.

Now there were no vacuum cleaners or memory guns to be found, but the damage had already been done: even after all the work he'd done in piecing their thoughts back together, they were little more than shadows of the people they'd been before he'd ruined them. Mom was a nervous wreck and barely capable of being anywhere near Gideon without being overwhelmed with dread, while dad was barely recovered from the psychic damage wrought by the gun and Weirdmageddon; after months spent effectively comatose, he'd only just started walking and talking again, and it was doubtful he'd ever be back to his usual laid-back self – not with the scars on his brain still healing. And Gideon? Well, Gideon was so much less and so much more than who he'd been: the old confidence had crumbled in his hands the moment he'd started feeling guilt, the sense of childish invincibility had evaporated, and the surety of purpose was gone. Oh, the militia still loved him just as they loved all the Zodiac, and the few who weren't partying occasionally stopped by to ask his advice, but what was he supposed to do with that? What could he tell them? What could he do for them?

And what could he do for his parents, now that he had the conscience to care for them? He could put their minds back together over time; he could rebuild their damaged memories; perhaps, with some effort, he could soothe their pain and trauma. And maybe, in time, he'd even develop the power to psychically rejuvenate their cells and undo all the brain damage and blood clots and ulcers he'd given them… but how could he really make up for what he'd done? How could he make them trust him – of their own free will?

And why did he get the feeling that there were other things he could be doing?

Then, just as he was starting to wonder if he'd ever be able to settle down, there was a knock at the door. By now, he'd learned not to raise his voice around his parents, so he sent out the telepathic equivalent of "come on in" and waited for the door to open. To his surprise, it was Jheselbraum, bowing low to clear the doorway as she hovered into the room.

"Um… hi," he mumbled. "What brings you here?"

"A need to meet in person, just the once," said the Oracle. "I cannot stay forever, Gideon: my duties lie beyond this dimension, and I must return to my mountain… and when I do, your tuition will be at an end."

"What? But I've still got so much to learn-"

"The factors inhibiting your development have long since vanished. You have compassion, empathy, even something approaching love; you know how to use your powers and you know how to use hem wisely. You no longer need my help, not now that your powers have begun to grow exponentially. In fact, I would argue that I would be hindering your growth the longer I remain your teacher. So…" She spread her arms wide. "This is what lies at the end of the path all mentors must walk: our students exceed them."

"But..." Gideon bit his lip. "I don't know what to do now!"

"Must you do anything at all? You are free of your obligations to the militia: you no longer need to fight and kill to preserve them. Can you not simply be at peace?"

"I… I don't know. I don't know how to be even slightly relaxed. Before all this started, the closest I got to calm in this house was when I was plotting world domination. But of course, I can't do that anymore. So what am I supposed to do? How can I be at peace when I've still got so much to do? Just look at my parents: they need help, and I…"

A stab of guilt rippled through him. What he needed to say was too painful to speak out loud, so instead, he said it telepathically:

How can I make things right between me and them? How can I get them to trust me without fiddling with their brains? And why do I get the feeling that there's more I should be doing?

Jheselbraum's many eyebrows rose. Only for your parents?

No, not just for them. For Amanda. For the militia, for the refugees. Now that I can feel compassion, I can't switch it off!

This is the price sapient life pays for empathy, Gideon. Once you truly understand others, you cannot blind yourself to their needs, not without losing that vital understanding and cutting the most important parts of yourself away.

But it's more than that. I don't know why, but I feel like… like I've left something unfinished. I've done all I can, and I know I'm supposed to be on vacation… but I feel like I could do better. How can I know what to do next without you guiding me?

But then he felt a hand on his shoulder. "You already do," Jheselbraum whispered aloud. "On some level, you know – just as all the Zodiac do: by now, you've helped so many for so long that it's become second nature. Let those instincts guide you. You know how you can help your parents, just as you know how to help those broken by Bill's reign; you've seen part of the solution already, you just need to take the next step."

"And what's that?"

"You've seen what your powers can do in war. Now think of what they can do in peacetime. Your gifts are still blossoming: in time, psychic transcendence is the only logical conclusion to your ascent. This might seem like the end of a story, but you and the Zodiac, this is only the beginning: there are no limits to what your powers can accomplish, nor limits to the good you can do with them."

And before Gideon could think of a rejoinder, she bent down and kissed him on the forehead.

"You've learned to fly, Gideon," she said gently. "Now it's time to leave the nest."

Gideon bit his lip; for the first time in years, he found himself with an actual lump in his throat at the thought of saying goodbye. Good god, he was actually tearing up. In the end, he couldn't even bring himself to say the words he had to say out loud, once again letting his telepathy speak for him:

I'll miss you, Jheselbraum.

The oracle smiled. I'll miss you too, child. Never forget: you're on the right path.

Then, just like that, she was gone.

And in the silence that she left behind, Gideon dried his eyes, sat down cross-legged on the floor and began to think… and as he thought, he very slowly began to rise into the air.

---

Pacifica didn't have a home in the residential district, nor did she need to sleep except under very rare circumstances; she had no family waiting for her alongside the other people who'd been plucked from the Cookie Jar… and in many ways, that was the problem. Her parents were back in the Forge… and sooner or later, she had to return to them.

To explain what had happened.

She'd been dreading this moment ever since Axolotl had revealed the truth to them. The rest of the militia had adjusted quite easily to the fact that the world was never going back to normal, but they'd at least had their victory and the compensation of a relatively comfortable new home to sweeten the loss; but of course, Preston and Priscilla Northwest would be different. Quite apart from the fact that her parents had always been accustomed to the finer things in life and had tolerated their stay in the wilderness only with the greatest reluctance, she knew they'd been hoping that Bill's defeat would mean a return to the status quo, that they would have their wealth and power restored in an instant.

Pacifica would have to be the one who told them. She knew it had to be her, especially since nobody apart from McGucket was planning on returning to the Forge anytime soon, but that didn't make her feel any better about it. Her stomach was bound up into one tiny porcelain knot of anxiety, and her nerves were wound so tightly that she could barely sit still long enough to rehearse wat she was going to say… but even on the rare occasions she could smother her stress long enough to practice her lines, she couldn't think of anything that could vaguely encompass what she had to tell her parents.

It was ridiculous, really: she wasn't afraid of them anymore. She didn't live in fear of angering them, nor did they have the power to hurt her as they once had, and the bell had long since lost its hold over her. These days, she was the de facto head of the family: she'd led the Northwests across the ruined world to safety, she'd unlocked powers that her father had never even dreamed of and saved humanity from Bill, all without losing her newfound compassion or her friends. So why did she care what they would think of this? Why did the thought of upsetting fill her with such dread?

Why was she so worried about disappointing them?

Maybe it was just a ghost of her old conditioning, or maybe on some level she feared that Preston might do something stupid. Whatever the case, she knew she couldn't delay the matter forever; she had to break the news to them. She owed them an explanation: they were her responsibility now – with one regressed to childhood and the other half-insane, she needed to take care of them… and that included sharing hard truths.

All the same, it took almost an hour and a half before she bring herself to get anywhere near the Forge, and even longer for her to make her way to the empty storeroom they'd claimed as a cabin.

As expected, Mother and Father were waiting for her at the door, clearly awaiting good news but too afraid to speak up in case it turned out to be the exact opposite. Of course, since Pacifica was just as anxious as they were, the three of them spent the next thirty seconds silently climbing the walls in anxiety before Preston finally asked, "Did you win? Is Bill dead?"

Pacifica nodded.

"…but you're still a doll. And I don't feel any older than I once did. Is this just a delay, or…"

Pacifica shook her head.

"When will the world be back to normal, Pacifica?" Priscilla asked, briefly stirring from her waking coma.

Suddenly, her own silence was too much to bear.

"It won't be," she said. "Axolotl told us everything when we summoned him: what Bill did to us, what he did to the world – it can't be reversed. No time travel, no "breaking the curse," and definitely no quick fix. All we can do is wait until Axolotl can make some headway to fixing the universe, and even then, it's never going to be completely back to normal. It's just going to be… a little more liveable."

Father closed his eyes; as an adult, the expression would have looked exasperated, but right now, he just looked like a kid kept awake past his bedtime.

"And how long is it going to take before that's done?"

Pacifica took a deep breath; this was the part she'd been dreading. "Hundreds of years," she said at last.

"Hundreds?" Priscilla echoed, eyes bulging with shock.

"Axolotl said it could go on for thousands of years, but… even in the best outcome, we're still looking at centuries."

She paused, trying desperately to meet their eyes, but always failing; somehow, no matter how hard she tried to make eye contact, her eyes always kept wandering off-course. Why couldn't she manage something so simple? It wasn't as if she hadn't been able to stand up to them before: she'd yelled at them, defied them, denounced the family in every way that mattered and so much more; she'd even gotten Father to admit that the entire Northwest way of life was a waste of time. So why could she bring herself to tell them the painful truth without flinching? Why did she feel nothing but shame and guilt at being honest with them?

"I'm sorry," she said at last. And in truth, she was.

Silence erupted across the room. Frankly, she would have felt better if her parents had been screaming at her, demanding to see Axolotl as if he was the manager of a hotel and not an interdimensional demigod; she might have even been okay if the two of them had taken out their frustrations on her. But instead, they just sat there: if Mother had looked shell-shocked and horrified before, now she looked as if she'd just been told she had a month to live; and Father could only sit and hang his head, eyes closed, his posture slumped in despair.

"Oh well," he said flatly. "You did your best. I mean, it's not as if you knew it was an impossible task. Besides, we're all still alive and free, right? I've still got my health and-"

His breath caught in his throat, and for a moment, Pacifica thought he was about to cry.

"Dad, are you okay?" Pacifica almost clapped a hand over her mouth as she realized what she'd just called him; in the past, calling them by such informal titles would have been considered a sign of deepest disrespect, and her parents would have had her locked in her room for a week if she'd ever been so rude to either of them. But right now, Preston didn't even seem to notice.

"I'm fine," he replied, but even with his eyes open, he wouldn't look in her direction. "I'm just weighing my options. Tell me, does your friend – the Pines girl – do favours?"

"Maybe. Why do you ask?"

"Because I may have to ask the most important favour I've asked of anyone in my entire life. I..." He inhaled deeply, visibly steeling himself "I want to know if she can give me a clean slate."

"…what do you mean?"

"Look, we already know she can turn back the clock on my aging process without even meaning to. What if she actually put her mind to it this time around? What if Mabel were to regress me all the way back to the start of my life, and you were to give me to new parents to raise me all over again from the beginning? The two of you could do that, right?"

For a moment or so, Pacifica could only gawp in disbelief. Then, somewhere in the back of her head, a tiny jab of anger rippled across her brain. "What good would that do?" she demanded, a little more forcefully than originally intended.

"Because when Mabel accidentally regressed me, it was different from the first time: when Bill turned back the clock on my body, I had access to all my memories and all my adult knowledge; I asked around among some of the refugees you brought back, and that's apparently very common among people Bill regressed, probably because he wanted to torture them with the knowledge of what they'd lost. But when Mabel pulled the same trick… I forgot a whole swathe of information that I'd once memorized through hypnosis, vital pin numbers and codes I wanted to remember at all costs. Maybe, just maybe, Mabel has the power to wind back the clock on my brain and its contents as well; if she wills it, I can forget my past entirely and become a whole new person. Like I said, a clean slate."

"Why, though?!" Pacifica exploded. "What could possibly be the reason for asking my best friend to do that? And after everything she's been through, you want to make her do something that risky, that suicidal – why would you do something like that to her? Why should I let this request get within a mile of her?"

"Because the alternative is making me suffer for the rest of my life," said Preston simply.

"Oh, come on! If this is about what Bill did to you, Mabel can undo that easily: she's really good at playing with time now-"

"What Bill did to me goes beyond the regression, Pacifica." Preston pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation, and continued, sounding wearier than ever: "My fortune is gone, my reputation's in tatters if it even exists anymore, and every bit of property I once owned is in ruins except for the manor, and that's only because Bill recreated it. Before Weirdmageddon, I was the patriarch of the most powerful family in the United States if not the entire western hemisphere, and there was nothing but bigger profits on the horizon. Now I'm a pauper. You tell me, how am I supposed to get on with my life if I can still remember who I was and what I've lost?"

"Oh right, so wiping your memory and turning you into a baby is just going solve all your problems? Why don't you ask Old Man McGucket how forgetting everything worked out for him? Or better still, ask Mabel! She actually remembers who he was – she was the one who told me about it! For crying out loud, there's nothing stopping you from just starting a new life the old-fashioned way. You know, like everyone else on the planet?"

"You're right," Preston conceded. "It won't solve all my problems… but it'll solve the biggest one: me. I don't want to be like this, Pacifica: my kind of person doesn't belong in the world anymore. I can't think like that any longer, not if I want to start a new life. But I can't stop thinking about money, when money doesn't have any real value anymore; I can't stop thinking about the stock market when it doesn't exist anymore; I keep thinking about what will advance the family name when our family name is worth absolutely nothing! And then there's all those schemes we'd arranged over the centuries: they're all defunct now, but I can't get them out of my head. The Northwests have been practicing behavioural conditioning for generations, and my variant of the programming is still intact – and far more advanced than yours! Every day, I wake up thinking that soon, our great mission will be a success, and we will have a world where 'Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless…'"

He paused, and seemed to sag. "Oh god," he mumbled, his eyes suddenly full of despair.

"What, what's wrong?"

"I just realized: that sentence I just quoted – it's from the last book I ever read for fun. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. I read that when I was fourteen years old… and after that, my conditioning was accelerated. The only thing I've read since then have been newspapers and stock portfolios… and as for music, films and TV? If it didn't have some link to the global markets, I wasn't meant to be interested in it. The only thing I was supposed to take pleasure in was money and power, and they made certain of the last part just so I wouldn't hesitate to crush others if the occasion called for it. There were enough stray dogs buried in ditches around Gravity Falls to prove it, believe me. There's a reason why you think I could start a new life, Pacifica: you got out. You escaped the programming before it turned you into a monster. You're free."

"But-"

"Pacifica, please…" And with that, Preston finally made eye contact with her, and for the first time, Pacifica found herself faced with concrete proof that her father wasn't trying to manipulate her again: his eyes were full of tears – something he'd never in all his years lowered himself to, even for the sake of a lie.

"This is torture," he rasped, voice on the edge of sobbing. "Living like this is torture: my parents got me addicted, and their drug of choice doesn't exist anymore. Regression is the only way I'll ever be able to feel what you feel – what I used to feel. Now that you know what it's like to be outside the cage, do you really want to leave me in it? Can't you see I have nothing to live for in this world as I am now?"

"And what about me?" demanded Pacifica – and here, she felt her throat clench with anger and something that felt a little like grief. "You don't think you could at least try to overcome that conditioning for the sake of your family? Mom isn't worth sticking around for? Your own daughter isn't worth living for? I saved you from Bill even after everything you did to me! I tried to care for you when you were regressed, I kept you safe in the wilderness! And now you're telling me that I'm… I'm not even worth another minute of your time?"

She had to stop there: her throat hurt too much to speak.

And in that silence, Preston took a deep breath, steadied himself for a moment, and did the worst thing he could have possibly have done under the circumstances.

He told the truth.

"I'm sorry," he said – and Pacifica could tell he genuinely meant it for once. "But I've never felt anything for you, Pacifica. I've no affection for you as a daughter; I haven't even felt the slightest bit of familial connection between us. To me, you've never been a person, not really: when I looked at you, I didn't even see your face; I saw an investment that I was waiting for a return on. At best, you were just a means of continuing the family line and fortunes. That's all you ever were to me."

Pacifica recoiled – actually physically recoiled in pain. Even after all this time, even in the form of a child, how could he hurt her so easily? How was it possible that he could cut her this deeply even after she'd grown so far beyond him?

"Why… would you say that to me?" she gasped, trying valiantly not to cry.

"Because you need to understand what you'd be preserving if you don't get rid of me. See, the thing is, I haven't felt any real empathy for anyone since I was fifteen. I didn't feel anything for my parents when they died, I didn't feel anything for your mother when I married her, I didn't feel anything for you when you were born, and I don't feel anything for anyone apart from myself. By now, the conditioning's too entrenched. If I grew up again, I'd be even worse than I was when I was still rich and powerful; I'd be a different kind of monster, but I'd be a monster just the same. You and Mabel have the opportunity to end me before I become a threat, to give me a real second chance at life. So do it. You're a goddess now, Pacifica. Roughly half the people you've rescued say so. You have it in your power to save and damn at will, so..." He lowered himself to his knees, head bowed in supplication. "Grant me peace," he begged. "Please."

There was a slight pause, and then Mother raised a hand. "I'd like to be regressed as well," she confessed. "I hate to say it, but… I'm more or less in the same boat as Preston. What's the point in being here if we don't belong anymore?"

Pacifica opened her mouth to argue, only to realize she had nothing left to say. She felt weary beyond measure now, exhausted by everything that had happened today, and frankly, she was tired of arguing with her parents. She was tired of trying to force them to adapt to a world outside their preconceptions, tired of making them try to behave like real parents, tired of hoping that something would change, and tired, so very, very tired of waiting for them to be proud of her.

"Fine," she said, dully. "Whatever you want. I'll tell Mabel about this… but even if she agrees to it, we've still got to find new parents for you. That's going to take some time."

"I can live with that," said Preston. "As long as I don't have to live with myself."

"Likewise," agreed Priscilla.

"Good. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have other places to be…"

And before they could ask her where she was going, before they could even think of stopping her, she had already flung herself through a portal and into the ether. She didn't know where she was going, and frankly, she didn't much care: anything was better than spending another minute in their presence.

In the end, the other end of the portal didn't open in the ruins of Cipheropolis, or the Land of Endless Summer, or the frozen refugee camp, or the mountains where Dipper and Wendy had sheltered, or in any of the innumerable wastelands and playgrounds that the world had been divided into. Instead, this particular portal deposited her back in Bill's replica of Northwest Mansion, now long-abandoned since their departure and smothered in dust.

Right back where she'd started.

For a time, she'd floated from room to room, looking for god only knew what, until she finally blundered into Preston's old study – or, as Bill had intended it, the manor's throne room. The last time she'd been here, she'd been implanting the hooks and barbs of the Northwest Throne into her body, piercing herself with as many as she needed to escape; not too long before then, she'd been subject to promotions at the foot of that throne; and before then, she'd been witness to Father being regressed to childhood in this very room.

Now her power had grown beyond the limits Bill had set for her… and yet she still felt trapped.

The barbs in her back were still there, still all the more unsettling for the lack of pain involved; she was still a doll, still marked as a possession more than a person; and she was still nothing to her parents. Bill was gone, the Northwest family was forever dethroned, and the Zodiac had freed humanity, but something, Pacifica couldn't escape their grasp – or come to terms with what they'd done to her.

In spite of all she'd done for them, it was never enough. It wouldn't even be enough for herself, because already, she was beginning to reproach herself for not having done enough, even though she'd done all she could (hadn't she?).

Pacifica wasn't sure when she started screaming; all she knew was that she couldn't take the sight of that gilded, monstrous, ostentatious nightmare of a throne a moment longer.

With one flex of her powers, she tore it from its supports and toppled it to the ground with an almighty crash so loud it probably could have been heard on the ground floor. Then with a howl of rage, she set upon it with all her might, slicing it into segments with portals, tearing its components apart with telekinesis, even blasting them apart from within via matter manipulation – the first time in months she'd used that power. In the end, she burned it, summoning up a pyrokinetic blaze hot enough to melt the metal and reduce it to a rapidly-expanding puddle of sizzling ooze.

In less than five minutes, the mighty Northwest throne, Bill's mocking tribute to the power of the family, had been reduced to a heap of molten slag.

And the hell of it was, Pacifica wasn't even sure why she'd done it. Had she been hoping that she could undo what was done to her, disengage the barbs, end the game and make herself human again? No such luck there. After all, she'd grown beyond all the means of control and empowerment Bill had set up, so destroying the throne didn't do anything to her or her power. In the end, maybe she'd needed to destroy something, and it was better than taking out her frustrations on her parents.

But just as she was starting to wonder what she was supposed to do now, she felt a hand on her shoulder, and turned to find that Dipper and Mabel were standing behind her, their faces alight with concern.

"Are you okay?" Mabel asked.

To her surprise, Pacifica actually found herself absently wiping away a few stray tears before replying. "What are you doing here?" she asked hoarsely.

"We, uh, followed you," Dipper admitted. "We were starting to worry about you, and your parents didn't have any idea where you'd went, but… well, Mabel's learning how to read imprints left on the timestream, and I've got a few forms that that can see the energy signature left by your portals, so it didn't take much to track you down. Um, sorry. But we want to know if you were alright. Are you alright?"

And just like that Pacifica told them everything. Over the next few minutes, she gave them the unabridged story so far, allowing them time to ask questions and gawp in bewilderment at the idea that Preston and Priscilla would actually ask for that kind of fresh start. She even gave them a rundown of the conditioning, just so they'd understand the full scope of the problem, casually blurting out several generations worth of Northwest secrets without even thinking twice.

For good measure, she added, "In other news, I'm tired, I'm upset, mom and dad have done everything they could to make me feel guilty for not kicking them out of my life, I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with myself, and I keep getting the idea that I should be doing more even though we've already saved the world. All in all, I think I'm as far from okay as I can possibly get without actually being in serious pain."

She took a deep breath. "How are you?" she asked.

Dipper bit his lip. "We're not sure what to do either."

"Oh. Oh well, at least I guess I'm not alone, then."

There was a pause, and then Mabel asked, "Is there any way you can… I don't know, make yourself almost human again? I mean, at least to make yourself look less like a doll? That's something to keep you busy, at least."

"I thought about it, and… well, from what I know of my powers, it's not impossible. I mean, I know I've got at least some power over matter, but I haven't really done anything worthwhile with it, so I'll have to keep practising for a long time before it's up to anything... but eventually, I might be able to make myself a bit more human. Might. I mean, it'll probably take years, but it's not as if we're on a time limit or anything. It's just that…"

"What?"

"Well, being human again will mean that I'll be able to feel the barbs; I'll have my sense of pain back again… and since I can't get rid of these things in my back, it'll hurt. A lot. I mean, I don't know if there's any way of reducing it, but-"

"We'll help," said Dipper automatically. "Don't ask us how, but we will."

"You'd do that? You'd actually give yourself another impossible task to deal with this soon after saving the world?"

"When was the last time the word 'impossible' meant anything to us?" said Mabel with a wink.

"Besides," Dipper added, "We're friends."

Mabel giggled. "And in his case, much more."

"We've been through the end of the world together, Pacifica: we're not going to walk out on you now."

"And you'd give my parents what they want?" Pacifica asked.

"If they really want it and you think they deserve it, sure. Whatever decision you make, we'll stand by it… and we'll help you live with it."

Something in the vicinity of Pacifica's heart gave a spectacular wobble. For several seconds, she was lost for words; even after all this time in their company, even after everything she'd learned about life outside of the family, it still seemed so unbelievable that anyone could care enough to do this for her, of all people.

"You're good friends," she said at last. "Both of you. Oh, and Dipper…"

And without another word, she floated up to eye-level with Dipper and gave him a kiss – square on the lips. Dipper's eyes briefly widened in shock; then with another whirl of instinctive shapeshifting, he was a doll once more.

As Dipper blushed magnificently and Mabel punched the air, Pacifica reflected that she didn't know if she was ever going to be completely at ease with her life after Weirdmageddon or with the decisions she'd have to make now that the human race was declaring her a god – and she certainly didn't know if she'd ever be rid of the sense that there was always more work to be done. She didn't even know if she was doing the right thing by granting her parents' request.

But with Dipper and Mabel around, she could live with it.

Anything was bearable if you had friends.

---

Alone in the upper levels of the Forge, Fiddleford McGucket – Ruinous Toymaker, Master of the Forge and Maker of Monsters – considered his options.

He was free, now, or so they told him. He could go anywhere he wanted to and do anything he pleased. He could build anything he wanted, once he repaired the damage to the Forge and found it's a suitable new location. So why wasn't he happy?

In the beginning, it had been easy to find contentment. All he'd had to do was follow orders, convert humans into rust thralls and build as many machines as were needed for Bill's toy army; that was it. He'd been a toy himself in all but name, but he'd been satisfied with his lot if nothing else. And even after Stan and Ford had set him free, he'd been happy enough in his own way: he'd had plenty of work to do in preparing the Zodiac's air fleet, and Ford had been around to offer up enticing bits and pieces of his past to help rebuild McGucket's confused memories.

Now that the war was over, though, he had nothing else on the agenda apart from tidy up and wait until the servitors finished building the machines that would convert rust thralls back into human beings – and once that was done, assuming his half-hearted pursuit of his memories wasn't a complete waste of time, he'd be stuck chasing recollection until he literally had nothing to do. The fact that Ford's little talks had ground to a halt didn't help, especially now that the poor guy had lost the ability to speak in anything but gibberish

But what could he do with himself? How could he put his talents to use in a way that wouldn't hurt people? The Axolotl had already provided the people in the Fearamid with everything they needed, so it wasn't as if they'd need running water or power or anything like that, and the Fearamid tended to keep away monsters by its merest presence, so nobody needed him to build weapons, robots or anything else that could be used to defend the place; right now, nobody was interested in leaving their new bolthole of safety, so he didn't even have call to build transportation. His best work was now gathering dust in the Fearamid's hangar, for crying out loud! What was he supposed to do with a future in which he was almost entirely useless?

And as for his process of remembering, well, that was glacial at best. He'd been told a great deal, but only a handful of details had really connected with him: he'd regained his name and the general outline of his life in Gravity Falls, he knew he'd been married and had a son, and he even knew that Stanford had been his dearest friend for a time, but that was it. The rest of what he'd learned were just anecdotes, stories that featured him as a main character but didn't seem to stir anything in his brain.

But even if he did remember anything, would it do him any good? He'd changed so much since Bill had started digging holes in his brain that any memory of his past self would seem incongruous, alien in comparison to his current body. And anyway, it wasn't as if there'd be much point considering Tate had long since written him off as an embarrassment-

There was a pause, as the Toymaker considered his train of thought so far. It took him a while to trace it back to the revelation he'd nearly sped past, but eventually, it lit up his brain like an electrical surge:

He'd just remembered something – something that Ford hadn't mentioned.

Maybe this business wasn't so silly after all. Perhaps, if he were to keep up with his re-education and find Tate at some point, maybe he'd restore his memory; the more he remembered, the more he could understand people; the more he understood people, the easier it would be to help people; and if he understood how to help people, he might be able to find a way of putting his skills to some use in this strange new reality.

And perhaps, in time, he might know what to do with his freedom.

---

"Excuse me, coming through. Death twins coming through! Make way, please, my brother's got somebody he wants to talk to! Look, there's no point giving me that look, pal, the air's too crowded to fly. Gangway!"

The Fearamid bar had been built to accommodate Bill and his Henchmaniacs in any size or shape they cared to take, stretching nearly fifty stories high and a thousand yards wide; the furniture ranged from the human-sized to the absolutely gargantuan, with several hundred ordinary tables and bars being overshadowed by the colossal main bar looming above them like a cliff face. There were even stairs connecting the various levels, just so human slaves could service Bill even at his most colossal size.

And with several hundred militiamen and thousands of ex-slaves eager to celebrate their victory and dance their stress away, this chamber was now the hub of perhaps the biggest and most frenzied party in the Fearamid's comparatively short history. All across the colossal benchtop of the main bar, thousands of people jumped and gyrated to the noise of the loudest, most jubilant music they'd been able to dig up at short notice, while countless others collapsed into chairs and gorged themselves on the safest booze they could scavenge from Bill's copious collection of eldritch vintages.

But by far the most spectacular of all was the sight of the Axolotl's allies living it up in their own special way: with Alma and Shana having made their excuses and left early along with Jessica Sorrow, Coin, Crichton and Einstein, those who remained were the most inclined to party – or the least inclined to refuse. Among the gigantic bottles behind the bar, Dave Bowman and the Ellimist discussed the virtues of chaos mathematics while helping themselves to tumblers of distilled solar plasma; the Lutece twins sipped ice water and looked on dourly as Elizabeth whirled across the dance floor in a blur of blue silk and jubilant laughter; John Murdoch hectored the DJ for a jazz/swing song; Q hovered high above the bar in a floating deck chair, quaffing gleefully from a martini glass as he dispensed hot dogs and chocolate-chip muffins on the crowd with extravagant snaps of his fingers; Doctor Manhattan puzzled over the bartender asking what he wanted to drink, reasoning that the decision had already been made in the future and his choices were therefore irrelevant; the Doctors scattered across the gathering from the bar to the dance floor, from the gaming tables to the slot machines – Eleven dancing up a ridiculous-looking storm while Seven joined the blackjack games. And of course, Rick Sanchez was raving and leaping in the thick of it, high as a kite and determined not to come down anytime soon, even as Morty tried ineffectually to flirt with Elizabeth (only to end up constantly blocked by the disapproving Luteces).

In fact, the only one of the eldritch party guests who wasn't having fun was Emma Smith, who was too young for the festivities but – unlike Coin – hadn't decided to leave. She simply stood off to the side, patiently scanning the surrounding area and patting the hand of her masked bodyguard. "It's alright," she would say every now and again. "He'll be here. You'll get to say goodbye to him." Exactly who Emma was talking about remained a mystery.

Stan didn't know what to make of any of them, truth be told. The only reason he could put names to faces at this point was because Ford had identified the party guests for him. It was weird enough knowing that a bunch of aliens and gods from other dimensions had showed up to get hammered at Bill Cipher's expense, and the idea that Ford actually knew some of these people only made the experience of walking among them all the weirder. Then again, it wasn't as if the Zodiac was all that different from them: from the way Axolotl had made things sound, Stan and Ford would be just like these godlike knuckleheads in a few years.

With that in mind, Stan would probably have preferred not to associate with any of them. Frankly, he didn't want any hints to his future. But Ford had needed to talk to some of them, and with his speech still stuck in Weirdness mode, he needed Stan around as a translator. And though the old nerd would never admit to it out loud, Stan got the distinct impression that his brother was still deeply uncomfortable around big social gatherings and needed a hand to hold. So here he was, leading Ford through the crowd and wondering if the party was ever going to stop long enough for people to wonder what the hell they were going to do next – wondering if he'd ever work out what the hell he was going to do next.

"Ford! Ford!"

A burst of guttural laughter split the air, and Stan looked up just in time to see the tall, skinny figure with the Einstein hair and the pinprick pupils abruptly crash headlong into Ford at high speed, flinging his arms around him. It was hard to get a fix on the guy, since he looked to be high on things best left in underground vaults and only accessed by men in hazmat suits, but he seemed to be extremely pleased to see them. Ford had earlier identified him as Rick Sanchez and shared a little of their history together, but it was still a little disarming to imagine that someone as straightlaced as Ford could ever have been friends with this drug-addled bohemian, even if they were both scientists.

"How's it going you old sonofabitch? Goddamn, it's good to see you! Oh, and I see you've found your brother at last – good to meet you, by the way, I'm Rick Sanchez and I'm the one man your brother couldn't outthink."

"Svool Irxp," said Ford, smiling in spite of himself.

"Yeah, cool trick, pal. I don't know how you're do-uuuuuuurp-ing that just yet, because even my universal translator isn't telling me anything, but I'll figure it out soon; whatever it is, it sure freaked the shit out of Bill. Nice job there, by the way."

There was a pause, as Rick's slobbery grin seemed to grow even wider; either he was suffering from some paralytic side-effect of all the drugs, or he was waiting for something. Eventually, Stan could take the silence no longer and demanded, "Do you mind telling us mere mortals what's going on, Rick?"

"I'm waiting for Ford to be a good sport and admit that I was right," Rick crowed. "When we were together all those years ago, he decided he'd be better off playing hero out in the multiverse than staying with me. I-I-I mean, can you believe it? A fellow genius, the most exciting scientific discoveries in the multiverse, and someone who appreciates him enough to push him in the limits, and he picked the old kill Bill solution instead. So come on, Ford: just admit you'd have been better off with me!"

"Wlvh rg ivzoob nzggvi zmbnliv, Irxp?" Ford asked softly, his voice cutting through the noise of the party like cheesewire. "Vevm ru R dlfow szev yvvm yvggvi luu drgs blf, rg dlfowm'g nzggvi: R wlfyg dv dlfow szev nzwv vzxs lgsvi szkkb rm gsv olmt ifm."

"Um, Ford? You can cut that out now: Bill's gone, so there's no need to keep up the intimid-urp-ation factor."

"Blf szevm'g svziw? Blf szevm'g urtfivw rg lfg bvg? R'n mlg fhrmt gsrh uli rmgrnrwzgrlm, Irxp: gsrh rh dsl R zn mld. R'n hliib, yfg vevm ru R xlfow zwnrg gszg R'w yv szkkrvi ru R'w hgzbvw drgs blf, blf dlfowm'g yv zyov gl fmwvihgzmw rg vcxvkg gsilfts Hgzmovb."

The smile on Rick's face slowly dwindled into a distinctly un-Rick-ish expression of concern. "…are you okay?" he asked.

"R'ev xszmtvw, Irxp. Uli yvggvi li uli dlihv, R'n hlnvgsrmt wruuvivmg mld. R nrtsg yv zyov gl ivtzrm gsv kldvi lu xlsvivmg hkvvxs, yfg R wlfyg R'oo vevi yv sfnzm vevi ztzrm."

At this point, Stan decided to step in: his ability to translate Ford's Weirdness-speech wasn't perfect, but it was so close to fluent that it really didn't make much different. "He's changed," he explained helpfully. "Basically, Bill futzed around with our minds and bodies and accidentally turned us into gods. Some of us… well, we're not all there anymore. Ford was okay up until he spoke English for a little too long, and now he's pretty much stuck in gibberish mode."

"But what about Axolotl-"

"Already gone over that: there's nothing the big salamander can do for us. We're stuck like this. Same goes for the rest of the planet."

"Wl blf szev zmb rmevmgrlmh gszg xlfow hloev gszg, Irxp? Blf'ev lugvm glow nv blf xzm wl zmbgsrmt ru blf dzmg gl; hl, wlvh gszg vcgvmw gl nzprmt nv sfnzm ztzrm? Xzm blf fmwl dszg dzh wlmv gl fh? Drkv zdzb gsv gizfnz? R'n mlg yvrmt z hnzig-zhh, Irxp, R slmvhgob dzmg gl pmld, yvxzfhv yvrmt orpv gsrh ksbhrxzoob sfigh zg grnvh zmw nb mrvxv zmw mvksvd ziv xfiivmgob yfiwvmvw drgs gsv prmw lu gizfnzh ml gsrigvvm-bvzi-lowh hslfow szev gl vmwfiv."

"He wants to know if you can undo what Bill did to us and the rest of the world," Stan translated.

"Was that all? It sounded like he said an awful lot, there."

"He also mentioned how you used to say you could do anything if you wanted to. I think he's egging you on."

Suddenly quite incongruously sober, Rick drew a series of exotic-looking scientific instruments from his pockets and began examining Ford. But in the end, though his brow furrowed with concentration and his forehead knotted as he calculated on variable after another, Stan could tell he wasn't having much success; in the end, Rick put down the final device and sighed. "The Weirdness in you… it's too advanced to undo. I can't- I mean, with these tools, it wouldn't be-"

"Blf xzm'g wl rg," Ford snapped angrily. "Qfhg zwnrg rg, Irxp zmw orev drgs gsv uzxg gszg blf'iv uzooryov: blf xzm'g hzev nv zmbnliv gszm blf xzm hzev blfihvou."

"He wants you to tell the truth and admit you can't do it," said Stan.

Rick's face sagged like a bloodhound's, the wild eyes now dull with defeat. "…I… I don't know why," he said at last. "But there's nothing I can do. You're stuck like this."

He took a deep breath, and added, "I'm sorry."

Ford considered this. "...R mvevi gslftsg R'w vevi svzi blf hzb gslhv dliwh. Rm gifgs, R zonlhg ollpvw ulidziw gl rg... yfg rg'h mlg nfxs lu z erxglib gl svzi blf hzb gsvn mld. Dlfow rg nzpv blf szkkb gl pmld R'w szev yvvm yvggvi luu ru R szw hgzbvw drgs blf?"

"He wants to know if you'd be happy if he admitted he might have been better off if he'd stayed with you."

But Rick's frown refused to vanish. "No," he said quietly. "Not really."

"Gsvm kviszkh blf'iv urmzoob ovzimrmt: "yvggvi luu" wlvhm'g nvzm gsv hznv gsrmt zh szkkb, zmw yvrmt irtsg rhm'g gsv hznv gsrmt zh yvrmt xlmgvmgvw. Yfg gsvm, blf wrwm'g xlnv sviv qfhg gl tvg lmv levi lm nv, wrw blf Irxp?"

"…uh, little bit complicated. Ford, could you repeat that?"

"Gsviv'h lmv gsrmt blf szev gl pmld yvuliv dv kzig ztzrm: blf mvvw gl rmevhgrtzgv gsv Xrgzwvo. Gsviv ziv ornrgh gl nb hrtsg, zmw R xzm'g gvoo ru gsrh droo szkkvm gl gsv evihrlm lu blf R pmld, yfg R xzm gvoo gszg gsviv droo yv hlnvgsrmt evib hvirlfh szkkvmrmt zg gsv Xrgzwvo lu Irxph evib hllm. Sv rh dzgxsrmt blf, zmw sv droo wvhgilb vevibgsrmt blf olev. Sv droo mlg hglk fmgro sv yirmth blf wldm gl srh ovevo zmw ovzevh blf drgs mlgsrmt yfg vnkgb gslftsgh zmw hfrxrwv."

"Something about a Citadel," translated Stan.

"What, the Citadel of Ricks? I've already dealt with those jokers; the Council's dead and anyone who could make that bunch of tools dangerous again has had their balls clipped a long time ag-"

Without warning, Ford lunged forward and grabbed Rick by the coat collar.

"Orhgvm gl nv, Irxp," he whispered urgently. "Blf'ev nvg srn yvuliv zmw blf xzmmlg fmwvivhgrnzgv srn: veviblmv vohv fmwvivhgrnzgvw srn, zmw mld gsvb'iv zoo wvzw. Hkvvxsvh ziv uli xznkzrtmrmt; mld rh gsv grnv uli zxgrlm. Sv szgvh blf zmw Nligb zmw droo wl zmbgsrmt gl nzpv blf hfuuvi uli zoo vgvimrgb yvxzfhv lu rg. Ru blf ovg srn vmzxg srh kozm, sv droo gzpv veviblmv uiln blf: Nligb, Hfnnvi, Yvgs, Ni Kllkbyfggslov - mlg vevm Qviib droo yv hkzivw. Blf xozrnvw blf dviv zm fmuvvormt tslhg, yfg sv droo ivwfxv blf gl gszg ovevo, zmw ovzev blf drgs ml ivkozxvnvmgh, ml vhxzkv, zmw ml hfyhgrgfgvh. Kovzhv, Irxp, orhgvm gl nv; R wlm'g dzmg gsrh gl szkkvm gl blf, ml nzggvi sld olmt rg'h yvvm hrmxv dv tvmfrmvob olevw vzxs lgsvi, ml nzggvi sld nfxs blf nzwv nv szgv blf. Kovzhv, urmw gsv gifgs yvuliv rg'h gll ozgv."

Rick looked blank.

"You need to investigate this Citadel before it's too late," said Stan. "Someone there really hates you and he's out to kill everyone important to you. Um… something about you being an unfeeling ghost for real this time, no replacements or substitutes… and whoever this guy is, you've met him before."

"Alright, alright, I get it! I'll check it out, just let go of me!"

Ford sighed and released him. "Uli gsv olmtvhg grnv," he said solemnly, "R olevw blf zonlhg zh nfxs zh R olevw nbhvou. Gsvm R szgvw blf vevm nliv gszm R szgvw nbhvou. Rhm'g rg ufmmb sld dv hszivw mzixrhhrhn zmw hvou-olzgsrmt? Dvoo, R'n mlg hfiv sld dv hslfow kzig zugvi zoo gsrh grnv zmw gfinlro, yfg... R droo zwnrg, R nrhhvw blf."

He visibly braced himself, summoning up all his willpower to say exactly two words of coherent speech:

"Goodbye, Rick."

Then he leaned forward and kissed Rick hard on the lips, long, slowly and passionately; and before the intoxicated scientist could respond, Ford was gone, darting through the crowd in search of whoever he'd really been looking for.

In his wake, he left Rick standing shellshocked in silence, a thin layer of frost riming his lips where Ford had kissed him.

"Rick, are you okay?" Morty asked.

"Fine, just fine," he replied, but without enthusiasm. "Wubba lubba dub dub."

Belatedly realizing that Ford's current business was probably more important than his crazy ex-boyfriend, Stan hurried after him just in time to see him sit down at a small café tables across from…

Stan did a double take, and realized that he'd almost forgotten about one of the other demigods discussed earlier: the tall, purple woman with a serene expression and seven eyes could only be Jheselbraum the Unswerving, the oracle who'd taken in Ford during his rambling voyage across the multiverse. When he'd spoken of her in those long, rambling conversations they'd held in the depths of the labyrinth, Ford had made her sound like a friend at times, and at others had spoken of her in the same hushed, reverent tones more commonly used for discussing saints in the making. At the time, it had sounded a little weird that Ford would ever talking about anyone so awestruck, and Stan had wondered if it had just been the kind of devotion that built up over time and distance… but now that he was in her presence, he felt that unearthly aura of serenity and wonder that surrounded her, and realized that Ford's respect was well-earned.

And as they spoke, the distortion that shrouded Ford's voice seemed to fade ever so slightly; maybe Ford was forcing himself to be coherent, or maybe it was just whatever magic Jheselbraum worked. Whatever the case, he seemed clearer than ever.

"It's strange," Ford was saying. "When you told me that I had the face of the man who would defeat Bill Cipher, I thought you were actually talking about me." He shook his head in amusement. "I really did have to think of myself as the hero of the story, didn't I? I was stupid in those days."

"I don't think you were stupid at all, Stanford, just desperate to atone for past mistakes. Besides, you were all heroes in your own way, in that iteration of history."

"And Bill had to cheat to wriggle out of your prophecy, so… it ended terribly for all of us, didn't it?"

"As my own dear mentor taught me, one can run from fate, but fate has a funny way of catching up with you in the most unexpected ways. In the end, you and Stanley ended up sowing the seeds of Bill's downfall; he was terrified of both of you in the end."

Ford laughed in spite of himself. Then he sighed. "I'm glad we all survived it in the end… but what are we supposed to do now? Everyone's been wondering how we're supposed to occupy our time now that the world's been at least partially saved, from the Zodiac to the militia and nobody has any idea how to answer them."

"Perhaps the answer's right before your eyes, Stanford."

"And maybe I'm too close to see. Jhes, if you could be so kind as to just give me the answer, I would be immensely grateful."

The oracle smiled serenely, and eyed the crowd with interest. "Perhaps you don't need to ask me at all. I think your dear niece and nephew might be seeking answers already…"

As one, Stan and Ford's eyes followed her eyeline all the way to the shallow end of the dance floor, where the familiar figures of Dipper and Mabel were edging towards the crowd of gods and demigods.

"I think they've got a variation on the same problem you used to have, Stanford," Jheselbraum commented. "But then again, the same could be said for most of humanity; sooner or later, human beings are going have to learn that most of their problems could be solved by application of the simple, well-known tenet 'many hands make light work…'"

---

A/N: This chapter's soundtrack is Unrequited Love by Nobuo Uematsu.

Anyone care to guess what course of action Dipper and Mabel take? Feel free to make some theories – or translate this chapters code below:

Bnri gl Tvmvhrh, gsv hglib'h gsv hznv
Ml nzggvi gsv tlw, ml nzggvi gsv mznv
Rnnligzoh mvvw hlnvgsrmt gl hkvmw gsvri wzb
Kviszkh rgh grnv gsv Alwrzx ulfmw z dzb