June 6th
The day dawned crisp and unseasonably cool after the heavy rains last night, but the Pine twins weren't able to witness its golden-pink splendor because they slept right through it. They had been so tired from yesterdays driving and their fitful night that they didn't actually awaken until they heard the maid pounding on the door saying that checkout time was coming up in 10 minutes unless they felt like paying for an extra day. Dipper and Mabel quickly dressed, unfortunately missing out on the chance for a morning shower, and found themselves driving into the heart of the small town looking for breakfast. They had both had enough of the trail mix that Dipper had packed on the road yesterday to last them for quite a while and needed something more filling if they were to spend another day driving up through the long twisted back-roads that lead to their great-uncles home up in Gravity Falls. Mabel spotted a small diner that looked like it had fallen right out of the Fifties and practically yanked Dippers arms from the steering wheel to pull them into the parking lot.
The interior was an odd mixture of modern and old fixtures, with a brand new LCD television on a bracket above the lunch counter, but with an abundance of old fashioned neon lights and chromed swivel chairs that were some old time architects idea of what the future would look like. The few locals inside turned curiously when they saw the twins come in through the door but soon turned back to their breakfasts and conversations. The large balding man behind the counter took their order with a grunt and left them at the counter with two mugs of scalding hot black coffee.
"I don't know why you always want to stop at these kinds of places Mabel." Dipper groused quietly as he sipped the bitter coffee, which tasted like it had been stewing all night.
"For the atmosphere! Not to mention the suspense."
"The suspense?" he asked with a tilt of his head.
"Yeah, you could eat at a McDonalds anywhere and always know what you are going to get and how it tastes, but when you stop somewhere like this you never know what to expect." she said perkily as she sipped her coffee, cringing faintly at the taste.
"That's true. I, for one, didn't actually know it was possible to make coffee out of battery acid." he said, whispering the last part quietly as she stifled a giggle.
"C'mon, its not that bad you baby..." she took a longer sip and shuddered, "ugh.. battery acid and cat pee more like. Maybe some sugar will help?"
Dipper smiled as he watched his sister screw off the top of the sugar shaker and pour a very generous heap directly into the mug as she stirred it slowly with a look of concentration not unlike some mad old alchemist working on a potion. She'd always had an iron stomach, and enough optimism about the limits of what could be considered edible to need it. When she started coughing and spluttering from her first careful sip of the new mixture he hastily turned up at the television to avoid the sight of Mabel scrubbing her tongue against the sleeve of her poofy fuchsia sweater.
The program appeared to be the local news station, with a plump reporter with an obvious comb-over standing in a field surveying the damage caused by the storm the night before (which Dipper personally had thought of as more of an enthusiastic drizzle, but figured that in a town this small that they were desperate for news to fill the airtime). The volume was turned too low to really hear anything that was being said, but he saw the reporter was interviewing a rail thin white haired old man who looked like he could have been the long lost brother of old man McGuckett. He seemed wild eyed appeared to be talking excitedly, and the screen text revealed him to be Jeddidiah Stevens, local farmer. Stevens was making wide and frantic arm gestures and pointing to a spot on the roof of his faded sky blue ranch house where the wind appeared to have torn off quite a few of the roof tiles. Dipper was about to turn away when he noticed the scrolling news banner which now appeared along the bottom of the screen didn't mention storm damage, but instead said "Mysterious Attack from Above?". Intrigued, he watched as the focus of the screen shifted to a large indentation on the ground at the reporters feet. The camera zoomed in blurredly as the reporter knelt in the mud, placing a chubby hand beside the large depression and as the focus cleared Dipper realized it was a foot print. A very large and very strange three toed foot print. Dipper excitedly nudged his sister and she looked up from her current coffee improving experiment (adding cherry flavored gummy koalas to the brew) and followed his eyes to the screen.
"What do you think it is?" she whispered to him, "Bigfoot? Dinosaur? UFO?"
"Mabel, how could a UFO leave a footprint?" he asked incredulously.
"I don't know, you're the conspiracy expert – not me!" she said with a quick smile.
"Well whatever left it didn't leave it too far from here, I recognize some of those hills that are in the background as ones that we passed by on the way up here and I swear that I saw a blue building in the distance near one... would you want to go check it out?"
"What about your super anal-retentive driving schedule?"
"I think since its a surprise visit that Stan wont mind if we are a few hours late... what do you say – time for the Mystery Twins?" he said with a smile.
"Mystery Twins are go." she grinned back at him.
–
The spot mentioned wasn't as easy to find as Dipper had first expected and it was actually almost an hour before the two managed to trudge and stumble their way through the underbrush until they spotted the blue farmhouse from the news report.
"So, how do you want to do this? Do we just sneak on and try to find the tracks or should we go up to the house and ask Mr. Stevens to show us?" Mabel asked as they walked through the thicket with the farmhouse coming closer into view.
"Well I don't want us to get shot for trespassing... but at the same time he might not be too open to some curious tourists poking around his farm. We should probably think of a cover story."
"Journalism!" Mabel said excitedly, snapping her fingers.
"What?"
"We pretend that we are reporters for a magazine coming to interview him about whatever it is that he saw." Mabel said with a bright smile.
"That might work better if he hadn't just been interviewed by a television crew – maybe he's all interviewed out?" Dipper replied skeptically.
"Hey, you never know till you try Dipping-sauce... besides, our magazine is offering a bona-fide cash reward for proof of monsters, right?" she said slyly.
"I think Stan might have rubbed off on you a bit too much," Dipper said somewhat disapprovingly, "... but then again he rubbed off on me too and I don't have a better idea, so I'm all for it. Which magazine are we with?" he asked, beginning to feel his interest in the scheme grow.
"I don't know, how about one of those weird ones that you subscribe too? You know, the ones that are all like 'Bigfoot Stole My Truck!' or 'Aliens behind Cubs losing streak!'"
"I don't subscribe to that junk! I just pick it up sometimes at the supermarket when I'm bored... Its not like I read them that often."
"Sure, sure – and I'm sure those other magazines that dad grounded you over a few years ago were there because you really liked to read the articles." she teased back with an exaggerated wink, causing him to blush slightly and adjust the brim of his hat while loudly clearing his throat.
"Ok, focus time – lets put on our game faces. You have the camera?" she nodded and held up a heavy black monstrosity with an enormous lens and colorful stickers dotted across it, "Very professional. I've got my notebook here... wish we had some sort of press pass or ID or something... no matter, lets do this!"
The twins walked up the worn dirt path leading up to the house, and as they came up closer Dipper could see the spots along the roof where the tiles were missing – as well as some long scratches left along the exposed patches of wood. Very big scratches he thought nervously. They spotted the farmer coming around the side of the house with a wheelbarrow, and he stopped and stared at them quizzically for a moment before saying:
"Morning. Can I help you kids?"
"Good morning sir, I'm Tyrone Spruce and this is my associate-" Dipper began before his sister interjected,
"I'm Mabel!" she said brightly. Dipper turned at her and grunted slightly. "Mabel...Pinesanopolis."
"O...kay." the farmer replied slowly.
"We're here with Conspiracy Weekly, we heard all about your terrifying encounter last night and they rushed us over to get an interview." Dipper said quickly.
"Conspiracy Weekly? You the fellas what did that story about JFK being in league with the Loch Ness monster to fix football games?"
"Um... Yes." Dipper said, looking away as Mabel turned toward him with a grin.
"Well fantastic! I was just thinking of calling you guys up – been a fan of your work for years. How did you hear about it so fast though? Damn thing happened just last night."
"Oh an organization this... organized... always keeps its ear to the ground. They had us on the road right away." Mabel said confidently with a nod and Dipper was relieved to see the old farmer nod along with her.
"So, sir, why don't you tell us in your own words what it was that you saw?" Dipper asked, his pencil poised on the paper and a look of concentration on his face.
Stevens turned out to be a rather poor storyteller, he began by relating exactly what he had been watching on the television that night during the rain (as well as the plots of some of the shows and trying to hum out one of the theme songs), segued into telling them about a rainstorm that happened when he was a boy that he swore had lifted up one of the family cows and thrown it onto the roof of his house and then started telling them about the cow that it had happened to. The twins stood with smiles frozen on their faces and Dipper nodded and pretended to be writing down the endless stream of nonsense that the old man was prattling about.
"FASCINATING!" Mabel practically shouted, startling the aged farmer out of an anecdote about a different cow that had won blue ribbon at the state fair, "However Di- um.. .Tyrone and I are on an extremely tight schedule and we need to get this story back to headquarters so they can get it all printed up. They especially wanted to make sure that I got a good shot of the heroic farmer who survived last nights deadly encounter... for the front page."
The old man had looked somewhat flustered at his diatribe being interrupted, but at the words 'heroic' and 'front page picture' he brightened up. "Well why didn't you say so! You big time journalists are always in a hurry... can't let an old man talk your head off all dang day! Where should we take this? Should I put on my good suit?"
"We were thinking that a shot of you next to the footprint would be good, very dramatic!" Dipper replied as he shot a grateful look to Mabel for managing to dam up the seemingly endless stream of babble.
Stevens lead them along the field through a somewhat muddy patch of field until they reached a spot where branches from the nearby trees and other debris had been scattered around and disturbed in a wide circle, and there was the print. It was at least two feet long from the huge middle toe to the tip of back claw and looked like a very strange birds foot. Dipper thought back to the pterodactyl he had encountered all those long summers ago at the Falls but couldn't remember if their feet had looked quite like this. Mabel was busy fussing with Stevens, having him pose in various ways near the print to get "the perfect shot", and while they were distracted he made a quick crude sketch of the print in his notebook and then started poking around the debris circle. While he wasn't an expert it reminded him of the way that helicopters kicked up quite a bit of dust and blew objects around in a wide cirlce when they came in for a landing. This thing must be pretty large, he thought to himself as he examined the thickness of some of the branches, if it was able to move things this large with just the wind from it coming in to land. Something odd poked out from beneath one of the branches and Dipper knelt down to check it out, and found to his surprise and delight that it was a feather. A very large feather, with a quill almost as thick as his pinky that stretched out at least a foot long. Though it was soaked from last nights rain and somewhat ragged from being buried in junk he saw that its colors were a beautiful black with a sheen almost electric blue when the sunlight caught it just right. He quickly stuffed the discovery into his jacket and turned back to Mabel and the farmer who, for some reason, had switched places with Stevens holding the camera and Mabel posing enthusiastically next to the footprint.
"Mabel, I think its about time we headed back – we've taken up enough of Mr. Stevens valuable time." Dipper said as he walked up to his sister and clapped a hand on her shoulder.
The two thanked their host for his time before they started trekking back down to the farmhouse and the path near it which lead back to Dippers car. When they were out of sight of the house Dipper pulled the feather out of his jacket and showed it to Mabel who examined it excitedly.
"This is pretty fantastic... Tyrone." she said with a grin.
"Its an alias! Anyway its not like its any sillier than 'Dipper'." he said defensively.
"Good point." she replied. "So whats the next step?"
"Well normally I'd say we should check the local library to see if there are any old newspaper clippings or legends about a giant bird in this area -" Dipper began before Mabel groaned, "but we've already taken enough time on this, so lets just get back on the road to Stans. This little souvenir is enough for now."
When they reached the car Dipper had an idea and pulled the old map out of the glove compartment and found the town on it and made a careful mark on the town in pen and wrote "Giant Bird?" next to it. Might be worth checking out sometime later. Satisfied, Dipper slipped the map back and turned the key on the car, the engine sputtered and coughed its way to life and the twins were once again on the road to Gravity Falls.