A/N: I'm sorry this is late. Life has bee somewhat hectic with me the past few months. Now, without further adieu the second chapter of my epic story.

Chapter Two

Pacifica's moaned weakly, as short, sharp bursts of pain stabbed through her. Abruptly, she realized, even as she floated in darkness, that it was her head that was seething in pain. And with the realization that she had a head, was that she had a body. Her limbs began to feel heavy, and she clenched her fists and toes reflexively. Good, the thought drifted across the darkness. I'm not paralyzed. Her eyes fluttered open…and her pupils widened. Staring up at her was the brightest heavens she'd ever witnessed. The glowing band of the Milky Way arced across the night sky, a brilliantly glowing stream of light and dark. And on either side of that great band, were the stars that could be picked out individually by the naked eye, in all their millions and all their glory. Endless dots, glowing white and yellow, blue and red against the black.

She stood up, groaning as her back protested against the movement. As all at once the memories of last night came over her. She'd been kissing Dipper. Kissing Dipper! And they'd bumped into an improperly secured computer console. They'd fought desperately to drain the power from the alien hyperdrive and then there was that flash of green light. And she was here…and she didn't know where Dipper was. She resisted the urge, sliding down her spine into her legs to run off into the underbrush and fight. First thing first, try to figure out where she was. She couldn't begin to look for Dipper until she knew where she was.

She looked around her, and her breath caught as she didn't see the huge towering pine trees of the forests that surrounded the town of her birth. She wheeled around. Gravity Falls was nestled in the Cascades…which were nowhere to be found. She looked out towards the Three Sisters, the name for the three dormant volcanoes which could always be seen off in the distance, and saw a massive cliff face rising out of the ground where there shouldn't be one.

Then she heard it, her ears pricking to the sound and she started forward through the trees, and saw it. A massive river, its brown silty surface glowing in the combined light of the moon and stars. She stared across the bank, at the silhouetted trees on the other side. And her breath caught again, as she recognized however vaguely, the shape. The dense round crown that could never be mistaken for anything else even at night was what gave it away

"There aren't many sycamore figtrees back home," she said softly to the trees around her. "Not ones that aren't imported anyway. That narrows things down." In a more than disturbing kind of way.

Ficus sycamorus, the sycamore fig, was native to Africa south of the Sahel and north of the Tropic of Capricorn . And had been spread and cultivated in what was today Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon since antiquity. Which left quite a broad area for her and, she hoped to God, Dipper, to be in.

What I need to do is find the nearest town. The belt that sycamore figs are native too encompasses several former British colonies so there really shouldn't be a language barrier if I landed right. I can find help. And if she's here, we'll find her. Then we can contact the nearest American consulate and they'll get us home. Or failing that, launch a massive worldwide search.

"Pacifica!" Dipper called frantically, through the trees at the heart of the clearing he'd come too in as his heart tried to beat its way out of his ribcage. "Paz!" This was insane. One moment he and Paz had been making out in the basement and the next moment they were out God only knew where. Though he had a sinking feeling he knew roughly where they'd ended up. There weren't, after all, that many sycamore figs in Oregon.

"Paz!"

She could be halfway around the world from you. Dipper. She could be halfway around the world from you dead in a ditch.

No, don't think like that.

He took a deep, shuddering breath. Okay, first things first. Basic survival. Sycamore figs are edible, so that's not going to be a problem in the short-term. And I think I here running water ahead through the trees. Then I'll try to find my way back to the nearest settlement.

Abruptly the image of Paz's lifeless eyes staring up at the sky appeared in his head. He dismissed it with a short, sharp jerk.

She's alive, damn it, I know she is, he thought. Anything else is unacceptable.

He was snapped out of his musings by rustling in the underbrush. Dipper cast about wildly, and saw a large tree branch lying on the forest floor. He grabbed, the thick, heavy piece of gnarled wood (being strong and disproportionately broad-shouldered even for his height had its advantages) and held it before him two-handed. If it was a leopard tracking him through the underbrush, he was much too late to avoid action, which meant he had to force it to disengage. Though, he hastily slid behind a tree. At this point it wouldn't hurt too much to try.

Then, coming through the trees, blonde hair framed in the light of the heavens shining down, was Pacifica Northwest. Her hair was bedraggled, and her party dress was torn in places that, in any other circumstances, like the one's that had obtained before this lunatic situation came out of left field, would have made him want to finish the job. As it stood he was just glad she wasn't' dead in that hypothetical ditch.

"Paz!" He said, relief blooming in his voice.

"Dipper!"

As if she'd teleported through the distance between them, Dipper's arms were now full of leggy blonde. Dipper crushed her against him, and Paz wrapped her arms around him.

"Oh Dipper," she moaned against his shoulder. "I didn't know where in hell you were. You could have been anywhere, or…"

"I know," Dipper whispered against her hair. Dipper tilted her head forward and pressed a desperate kiss to her lips that Pacifica returned earnestly.

After a long moment, Pacifica broke the kiss, and cupped the side of his face with her cheek. "Well," he said breathily, "now that we're sure we're both alive let's figure out a way of getting back home."

"Actually," Pacifica began, her eyes narrowed in concentration. "Now that I think about it, we're probably better served bivouacking here for the night. We have no clue where across the entire breadth of Africa we've ended up, I doubt we're near enough to any significant town to have cell coverage, and neither one of us has a sat phone."

"Well," Dipper said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his iPhone. "Let's see, shall we." Then he looked down at his screen, and his heart sank. It was cracked. More than cracked, it was smashed in at the center, with a spidery wave of cracks across the entire screen visible in the starlight. "Shit."

"And I think I dropped my purse when we were," and she swallowed visibly.

Dipper's face flushed. He'd felt how wet she'd been. He'd known they had been aroused to the point that one of them probably would have stabbed the other if they'd tried to stop. If they'd just gone up to one of their rooms…"Yeah. So…we'll go with your plan."

Pacifica sighed, her head moving up and down like a bobble head doll. "Yeah. We should get a fire going."

Dipper blanched. "Are you sure that's wise? We don't know where we are. And depending on where we've ended up, those mountains up there could be lousy with anything from Islamist militants to 'rebels' that are little more than gangbangers."

"Or they might not," Paz countered. "And in case you haven't forgotten, this is almost certainly Africa. There are little things like lions and leopards. And African wild dogs. Animals that are usually are most active at night. Who hunt at night. Absent guns, fire is our best defense. Plus, it'll keep the mosquitos from eating us alive." And very possibly infecting us with malaria while they're at it. "So yes, absent any idea where we are precisely, and without any of the usual medicines or survival supplies usually employed out here, the risks of not building a fire, far outweigh the risks of putting out a signal to any potential hostiles to come over and kill us."

Dipper's mouth, still open, to argue that whole point, closed it with an audible pop. She was right, of course. And there really was nothing to choose between bleeding out from a terrorist's bullet or being mauled by a lion or leopard. Or, God forbid, that three-ton death machine called hippopotamus: the most dangerous mammal in Africa (aside from their own race). Despite their seemingly ungainly barrel-shaped bodies, a roused hippopotamus could gallop up to thirty kilometers an hour on land, and adult females had a bite force of over eighteen hundred pounds per square inch. And the fact that they only had data on females made it even more imperative that they avoid getting too close to them while they were here: the males are simply too aggressive to test.

"Let's get to work building that fire," Dipper said quickly.

Sometime later, Dipper found himself sitting on a log next to Pacifica, sighing as the heat radiated towards them from the firepit they'd put together from hastily gathered rocks and what pieces of dry wood they could find.

"You know," Pacifica said after a moment. "Us being out here is our fault."

Dipper sighed, his face heating with mingled embarrassment and lust as the memories of what they'd been about to do returned. "Yeah. Yeah it is."

"I mean, if we'd just, oh," and her face flushed and she suddenly started looking very intently at the fire. He swallowed the lump in his throat that had appeared as he thought about what had almost passed between them in that lab.

"What happened back there, Dipper? Where were we going with that?"

A few years ago he would have been tongue-tied by what he'd wanted to do. But he was not some kid talking to his first crush anymore. "I was about to lift up the hem of your party dress and fuck you," Dipper said unwaveringly, his tone belying the knots his stomach was happily tying itself into. "I think that's answer enough." Pacifica's face flushed, visible even in the red light of the fire. "And I don't think you would have said no to me."

"No," Pacifica said, after a moment, meeting his gaze defiantly. "I wouldn't have."

"Though," Dipper said, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. "I probably should have dragged you into bed to do that."

Pacifica nodded vigorously, her face somehow managing to blush even further. "That probably would have been the wisest course, Though," she said, a hint of a mischievous tone on her voice, "it would have been an undeniable spice if you'd done me somewhere else."

"Oh?"

"That sitting room with that silver inverted fleur-de-lis on a white carpet is exactly as my parents left it after they pulled out. Honestly, I can't think of a better screw you to my unlamented parents if you'd done me there."

Dipper smiled. That was just the sinfully evil suggestion he would have expected out of her…and something he should have thought of. "I suppose I can make love to you on that sofa when we get back."

She snorted. "Please, I know your reputation. I don't think soft style is your thing. And it isn't mine either."

"Oh really?" It was his turn to blush again, he did like it rather rough. And so did most of the girl's he'd hooked up with and dated during his time in high school.

She winked at him. A knowing, saucy wink. "For now, though," with a faintly disappointed sigh, "we should focus on surviving where we are. We don't have the luxury of giving in in for all we know is hostile territory."

Dipper gave a frustrated sigh, and nodded. She had a point after all. And he couldn't very well have made a stink about the fire giving away their position and then insist on doing something else…extremely ill-advised in the current situation. But in the meantime, they were in Africa. The home continent of humanity. Everything about who and what he was had evolved in relation to the ground where he stood right now in some form. Humanity on this continent had the greatest amount of genetic variation out of the entire population. Most genetic variation outside Africa was a subset of genetic variation within Africa. Contrary to the impression given by home DNA ancestry kits that only looked at a few of the differences that did occur, using testing methods that tended to exaggerate the level of differences that were there. Even the fact that a few of the ancestors of all non-Africans had interbred with the humanoid species they shared the planet with hadn't changed that fact: the interbreeding events themselves had only involved a small handful of individuals mating with members of species' that themselves had their origins in Africa. Giving the human race only a few novel genes. The rest was identical to what modern humans already had. Everything they were, they owed to where they stood. If he wasn't so tired he could weep.

Dipper sighed and looked up at the vast panoply of the heavens opening up above them, the great glowing band of the Milky Way running along the sky, formed from every star in the galaxy that could not be distinguished from the naked eye. He smiled almost despite himself. He'd always loved seeing a night sky unimpeded by any source of nearby light pollution…and vast swathes of Sub-Saharan Africa simply didn't have the light pollution fingerprint to really block it out. Which admittedly didn't say anything good about the infrastructure the hundreds of millions of people living there had to rely on but there wasn't much they could do about that. Not right now. What he could do right now was sit back, relax, and watch the night sky with Pacifica.

Huh, he thought, staring up at that beautiful, awe-inspiring sight. That's strange. I don't see any of the constellations. Constellations were generally grouped together into two groups based on their visibility in relation to the equator. Northern Hemisphere constellations and Southern Hemisphere constellations. However, the closer one got to the equator the more the skies that were visible to astronomers began to overlap. An observer sitting right on the equator could theoretically view both skies at once. On a clear, moonless night like this, he should be able to pick out something. But he couldn't. Not Taurus, or Perseus, or Triangulum or any other constellation that were visible from anywhere north of the equator including Gravity Falls, or the Southern Cross or Centaurus, or Musca, visible from the south. He could see the Galactic Center, but that was about it. Nothing else was where it was supposed to be. And he'd been on vacation in more remote areas both north and south before. Enough to be generally familiar with the sky to be able to pick out constellations with relative ease.

"Oh, my God," Dipper said softly, a cold chill running down his spine as the implications of what he was looking at, a sky on which no contemporary astronomer had ever seen, hit him.

"What?" Paz said, tearing herself away from the sight to look at him, concerned. "What's wrong?"

"I can't find any constellations. Can you?"

"Well," she said, looking up at the sky. She'd accompanied Mabel and their family on a few of those vacations, she was as good as he was at looking for those stars.

Paz let out a horrified breath as the realization finally hit her. "Oh no," visibly trembling even in the half-light of the fire,"Oh, no, no, no!"
The constellations were not fixed. They shifted and changed with time as their solar system moved through the galactic disk in relation to everything else. The fact that they could not orient themselves by anything…

"I think," Dipper said, swallowing the lump that appeared in his throat at the cost. "I think that we not only need to find out where we are, but when."