Mabel and Teek's Excellent Adventure

(July 4, 2014)

Chapter 2

"What happened?" Teek yelled, jumping up from his knees to his feet and spinning around like a top as he frantically scanned the whole lawn. "He was right here!"

"Gravity Falls weirdness!" Mabel said, getting up from the tablecloth, where the yellow crystal ball still lay gleaming in the morning light. "Sometimes I get so tired of it. OK, calm down and let's think."

Teek grabbed her upper arms, and behind his round glasses his brown eyes were wide with alarm. "Think? Let's get Soos!" He let go and took a step toward the Shack.

Mabel grabbed Teek's arm, stopping him. "Whoa! No, no, no—bad idea, Teek! You don't want to get Soos involved. I've seen him in action before, so trust me on this one. Heck, I already have one bad mark on my record as a babysitter, and I don't want another one! Listen, Teek, we can't tell anybody yet—not even Dipper, 'cause he'd tell Ford or Stan or both, and then everybody would be upset for no reason."

"Uh—Little Soos just disappeared! That's kind of a reason!" Teek protested.

Mabel patted his shoulder encouragingly. "It's so sweet of you to worry, but really it's probably no big deal. These things usually work themselves out, Teek! Like the time I was held prisoner in a dream bubble, or the time when I got bit by a butterfly and went all cray-cray!"

"But what are we going to do when they miss him?"

"Got that covered." Mabel put two fingers in her mouth and gave a sharp whistle—a skill she had picked up over the past year and one that Dipper envied but had never mastered—and then rummaged in the diaper bag.

Widdles, her newer pig, came trotting. "Here you are, you little angel," Mabel cooed. She quickly did what she needed to do, then asked, "How does she look?"

"Like a pig in a diaper and T-shirt and cap," Teek said.

"Perfect!" She picked Waddles up and hurried into the Shack, while Teek sweated it out, wondering what was going on.

When Mabel emerged, she said, "It's cool. I gave Widdles a bottle and put her in the crib and turned the baby monitor on. Melody says she'll peek in from the door now and then, but until Little Soos wakes up, she'll let him sleep—he likes long naps."

"You—gave Widdles—a bottle—of—"

"Not people milk, silly!" Mabel said. "Regular milk with a little corn syrup in it. It always makes her sleep for four hours, minimum. The room's dim, and Melody won't notice the difference, so that buys us some time!" She knelt again on the tablecloth and picked up the crystal ball. "Let's see. He was playing with this thing when he just popped out of sight."

"You think it's magic?" Teek asked, hunkering down close to her, so close that as they stared at the crystal their heads almost touched. He whispered, "I thought all the stuff in the Shack was, you know, just tourist crap!"

"Not all crap is created equal," Mabel murmured, turning the yellow sphere this way and that, noticing how the sunlight sometimes glinted off it, sometimes simply streamed through it. "You know what I mean? Some crap is crappier than other crap. This may not even be crap. It could be the genuine article. Maybe it's a wishing stone."

Teek turned to stare at her, so close that she could have kissed him. Which she did. But it was just a quick peck, and in the middle of it, Teek started to ask a question: "A what now?"

Mabel licked her lips. "Wishing stone. Like Aladdin's lamp. Let's see." She held the sphere up at eye level, stared commandingly into it, and said loudly, "I wish that Little Soos was back, with a top-of-the-line crossbow. I've always wanted a crossbow of my own!"

Instantly the baby, plus a state-of-the-art Killshot 3000 crossbow, complete with carbon-fiber body, special tension-steel bow, quiver of precision-engineered 18-inch Speed Demon arrows, cocking assist and night scope, all spectacularly failed to materialize out of thin air. "Shoot," Mabel muttered, disappointed. She held the crystal up close to her eye and peered through it, slowly turning it in her hand.

"See anything?" Teek asked anxiously.

She turned toward him. "See you, upside down and sort of stretched out. Not a good look for you." She twirled the sphere, still looking through it. Teek's nose seemed to be as big as the rest of his head in the distorted image she saw. "Must have little irregularities in the crystal, 'cause it kinda deforms everything, sort of ripply, if you know what I mean. Here." She handed the crystal to Teek. "You were rolling it all over your hand just before Little Soos got hold of it. Maybe, I don't know, you charged it up or something? Powered up its batteries? Do some tricks with it."

Teek put it on his right palm and let it roll to his fingertips, where it promptly dropped off. He barely managed to grab it with his left hand before it hit the ground. "Sorry. I'm nervous."

He manipulated the crystal more carefully, succeeding in getting it to roll down his palm, across his fingers, flipped his hand over, and rolled it on the back of his hand before sending it around his wrist and back into his palm.

"Feel anything?" Mabel asked.

"Yeah!"

"What?"

His hand cupped the crystal. "I feel silly! Mabel, we have to tell Soos, or Melody—"

"Hey! It flickered just then!"

Teek looked down in surprise, releasing his grip and holding his hand flat. On his open palm the yellow crystal lay in the sun, but it looked no different from before. "I didn't see anything."

Mabel took it back in her hand and held it so the sunlight streamed through and focused on the tablecloth. She had to bend over and move the crystal closer and closer until the spot of light from it contracted and sharpened.

"Don't set the tablecloth on fire," Teek warned.

"I'm not gonna do that. Look close. Is something moving in that spot of light?"

Teek adjusted his glasses and peered intently. "Uh—sort of flickers of shadows? I think that's what's happening. I don't see any shapes. Let me try."

He reached for the sphere, Mabel tightened her grip and said, "Not yet—"

The instant both their hands touched the globe, the world turned inside-out.

That's what it felt like to Mabel, anyway—it was as though the crystal expanded suddenly, a transparent yellow shell taking both her and Teek in, and then, well, unfolded somehow—the curved walls around them unbending impossibly in all directions at once, changing everything.

"Oh, no," Teek said. He let go his grip on the crystal and instead reached to hold Mabel's hand.

They were still on the lawn.

But the Shack had vanished, and everything looked wrong. The sky was yellow, for one thing, and the light from the sun was yellow, giving everything a weird shifted spectrum of color. And everything smelled yellow, too. That should have been impossible, but Mabel, whose senses were unusually unusual, immediately could tell the difference.

"Where are we?" Teek asked in a shaky voice. "I don't think this is Gravity Falls anymore!"

"Maybe," Mabel said, thinking hard, "maybe it's Kansas."

Dipper finished with the tables and asked, "Hey, Soos, want me to spread out the tablecloths on the lawn?"

Soos wiped his forehead. "Naw, dude, 'cause we don't want them to blow all over the place if it gets, like, windy? What you an' me can do, though, is to get the big grill all set up. It probably needs washing and junk, and there'll be ashes to haul away."

"Gotcha," Dipper said, and so at nine he did not go around the Shack and spot the lone tablecloth on the front lawn.

"How long's she gotta stay in the hospital?" Manly Dan asked a nurse.

"She should be able to go home tomorrow, I hope and pray," the nurse said. She was a thin, jumpy-looking woman, and when the patient in Room 113—Wendy's aunt—simultaneously pushed her call button and bawled, "Nurse! Where the heck are ya? Now!", the poor nurse jumped as though she'd seen a cobra.

"Aunty's got some lungs on her," Wendy observed mildly.

"Hah!" Manly Dan said. "You oughta've heard her in high school when she won the hog-callin' contest. Hogs were still comin' in a week later!"

Wendy nodded, but she was thinking, Dang, she'll be home tomorrow! I could've stayed in Gravity Falls with Dipper and maybe driven over to see her at home this weekend.

However, she knew better than to say that out loud. Instead, she went to deal with her younger brothers, who were racing rolling gurneys down the hospital corridors, which wasn't all that bad, except for the two terrified, screaming patients on them.

Stanley had just made the rounds of the gift shop with note cards folded into pup-tent shapes, on which he'd been scrawling with a marker: JULY 4th SALE! HALF OFF REGULAR PRICE.

Of course, earlier he'd gone around with a pricing gun putting stickers on all the merch that had doubled the regular price. He'd also piled select merchandise—stuff that had been in the Shack so long without selling that they had squatter's rights—onto a table with another sign: TWOFER! Buy ONE at regular price, get ANOTHER for regular price! HURRY!

For a moment, he stood back and admired his handiwork. "I oughta be ashamed of myself," he muttered, but he was grinning. "And I would be, too—if this didn't work every single time! Hah! Bring on the suckers!"

Melody and Abuelita were in the snack-bar kitchen, making hamburger patties and mixing bowls of potato salad, baking big casserole dishes of beans, pouring mustard and ketchup from gallon-sized industrial pump jars into table dispensers—the normal junk for preparing an outdoor feast.

The baby monitor occasionally made soft sounds—contented grunts, little snores. Abuelita beamed. "He sleep like angels," she said.

Another noise, followed by a contented sigh.

"Angels with tummy gas," Abuelita corrected.

In the yellow-tinged world, Mabel had just said, "Hey, the globe didn't come with us!"

"I think we're inside it," Teek told her.

"Hm. That might make getting back home a little bit harder. I mean, if it's not here, how can we both put our hands on it at the same moment? Oh, well, first things first. Where'd that baby go?"

Though the landscape looked fairly familiar—they stood in a grassy patch with pine woods very much like those surrounding the Shack, and they could glimpse bluffs and mountains beyond—they saw no trace of civilization. No Shack, no parking lot, no driveway.

But Mabel knew where the drive and the road should be. "Come on," she said, leading the way. "We've got four hours!"

It took them five minutes to walk down the driveway—now a sloping, grassy lane—and arrive at the oxcart trail. Or at least that's what it looked like: two muddy wheel-ruts running down the center of a more or less clear and grassy pathway. "Town should be that way," Teek said.

"Let's go. We're bound to find something sooner or later!"

They walked for about a mile—that should have put them on the outskirts of town—but saw no buildings, not even the familiar old water tower. However—

"There's somebody!" Mabel said, pointing ahead. "We'll ask them where we are."

It was, technically speaking, only one person, not two or more, but the gender of the figure was not clear from a distance, and Mabel felt justified in using the plural pronoun. "We'll ask him or her where we are" sounded clunky, and anyway, the figure might even prove to be an it.

However, it turned out to be a tall, skinny woman dressed in raggedy black, with straggly gray hair and a beak of a nose. "Hi," Mabel said. "Uh, we're kinda lost and we're looking for a baby. Can you help?"

The haggy woman grinned. "Yes, I can aid you in your task if you can answer the riddles I ask."

"Huh?" Teek said.

"You must answer riddles three," the woman said, "before any help you'll get from me!"

"That's a crummy way to get a rhyme," Mabel observed. "Inverting the sentence, I mean, instead of saying 'Before you'll get help from me.' And even that's awkward. What's wrong with 'Before I'll help you?'"

"Look, kid," the woman said with obvious exasperation in her voice, "you think it's easy, making these things up right off the top of my head?"

"No. No, I don't," Mabel told her with a big, friendly smile. "Next riddle, please!"

"Very well, I—what do you mean, 'Next riddle?'"

"I mean the second one," Mabel told her. "Which I just answered correctly! Hey, I'm good at this!"

"A simple question isn't a riddle!" the woman said. "It has to have an element of puzzlement in it, a misdirection so the ordinary person can't easily guess it! Perhaps a metaphorical reference that the hearer misperceives as literal! Like 'What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs at sunset?'"

"A dog that learns to walk on his hind legs before breakfast but gets hit by the 12:30 bus to Oakland when he accidentally steps into the street because he's so clumsy, and then when he gets out of the vet's in the late afternoon, he has a broken leg!" Mabel shot back. "Yes! I'm rockin' this game!"

The woman stared at her. "Please go away."

"Ah-ah!" Mabel said. "We had a deal. Tell me where to find Jesús Ramirez. He's seven months old and the size of a half-grown pig."

"But you never answered a riddle!"

"I answered three!" Mabel insisted. "Look, lady, we both know how this goes, right? I answer the riddles, you grumble but give me directions and hold some vital information back, then we go our way and you get out of this dumb riddle business—no offense, hon, but you're not that good at it—and open a home-décor shop or something."

"I've dreamed of owning a shop," the old woman confessed.

Mabel gave the woman a high five, leaving her staring suspiciously at her own hand as if it had committed an act of treason. "Chase the dream, baby! So where do we look for Little Soos?"

"That way," the woman said, giving up and simply pointing. "You must trace the ways and thread the maze through dangers dire and never tire! The King has tricks, so, uh—I'm kinda stuck here—"

"So hit the bricks!" Mabel said. "Yellow bricks, I'm sure! Thanks, lady! Come on, Teek!"

Teek lingered a moment. "She's nice, really," he said. "Just wound a little tight. She's Mabel, and I'm T.K., by the way."

"I'm the Sand Witch," the woman said. "If you two really do find what you're looking for and discover a way to get out of this land—"

"Yes?"

"Do me a favor and never come back."

"You got it! Hey, Mabel, wait up!"

The Sand Witch watched the two go down the lane, around a curve, and out of sight. "Never in two thousand years has this happened," she muttered. "Ugh, a migraine. I need a nap. What a world, what a world!"

And she turned into a pillar of sand and then fell to the earth with a patter like a million suicidal ants leaping to their doom from a tall tree.