Mabel and Teek's Excellent Adventure

(July 4, 2014)

Chapter 10

"Dipper? You down here?"

Dipper and Ford had been bent over the crystal ball when they heard Wendy's voice. Dipper ran out of the lab room and said, "You got here fast!"

"Yeah," Wendy said. "Stan opened that crazy hidden door for me. So Ford's still using his lab, huh?"

"From time to time," Ford said from behind Dipper. "Come on in, Wendy, and don't touch anything."

Looking around as she stepped into the lab room, Wendy said, "Man, this reminds me so much of the bunker!"

"Grunkle Ford built that, too," Dipper explained. He pulled out a tall chair for Wendy beside the lab bench on which the crystal ball gleamed.

Wendy blinked. "Oh. Uh, Dr. Pines, I kinda took the fallout shelter sign from your bunker. If you want it back—"

"Fine, fine," Ford said, settling back on his own lab stool and carefully adjusting several goose-necked chrome-plated lamps, each with a different type of light bulb, around the tripod stand on which the crystal ball rested.

"He means you can keep it," Dipper translated. "He gets sort of wrapped up in these things when he's working. How'd you get here so fast?"

Wendy shrugged. "The cops pulled Dad over just as we left the hospital. The boys were ridin' in the bed of the truck, and that's illegal for minors, so he got a ticket. I let my brothers sit in the cab, and I got in the truck bed—you can ride there if you're not a minor, and just from lookin' at me, everybody thinks I'm older than I am—and Dad tore up the road between there and here, he was so mad about the ticket. It's a wonder he didn't get nailed for speeding, too."

"I'm glad you got here safely. Too bad the police spotted him."

Wendy smiled in a cat-like way. "Yeah, strange how that works. Apparently, some nosy person phoned in a tip to the cops to watch out for him just before we left the hospital."

"You didn't—"

Wendy zipped her lips and flicked away the imaginary key. "Wanted to get here fast, dude. So, what's this deal?"

Dipper explained about the crystal ball and the short glimpse he'd had of Teek and Mabel.

Ford, overhearing, muttered something about resonances and dimensionality. "I believe," he finished, "that if I can hit this orb with the right combinations of light frequencies, we may be able to use it as a one-way viewer and focus in on Mabel. She's inside the orb."

"No freakin' way!" Wendy exclaimed.

"No, I don't mean she's actually shrunk down and is inside it. Not literally," Ford said. "But she is in a slightly different dimensional plane from us, and the crystal is attuned to that plane of existence. It's probably not even a completely different dimension, not like the ones I visited on my travels, but a parasite dimension attached to this one, with its own set of space-time laws. We cannot directly communicate with it, but this orb can produce images of what's happening there. All right, put on your goggles!"

"Uh, we don't have any goggles," Dipper said.

"Fine, fine," Ford said, lowering plastic safety goggles over his glasses, and he flicked a switch.

With a low him the six gooseneck lamps flared on—and shone infrared, ultraviolet, wave-phase adjusted, syncopated, inverted, and null-photonic light on the orb, all at the same time. It shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow, except for red, orange, green, blue, and violet.

"Something's happening," Wendy said. The light reflecting from the globe pulsated slowly.

"Mm," Ford agreed. "Oh, by the way, Wendy, did you see Lorena upstairs? I'd meant to introduce her to everyone—"

"She's up shooting the breeze with Stan," Wendy said. "Bunch of the early barbecue guests are milling around, buying stuff already. And Mrs. Jones was born here and knows everybody in town. She's a nice lady."

"She is indeed. Ah, the vibration pattern is intensifying. I believe something is happening. Look closely, and don't remove your goggles!"

Dipper cleared his throat nervously. "Uh, Grunkle Ford, you never gave us any—"

"It's happening!"

Dipper saw a scene not exactly inside the crystal, more superimposed on the air around it and so transparent that he could see through the objects and people that shimmered in the vision: As if looking down from the ceiling of a round room, he made out a strangely-dressed, slender, tall man in a black cutaway coat with a frill at the neck and the tightest gray pants that Dipper had ever seen.

The thin-faced man with shaggy blond hair stood against one wall, and Mabel stood with her back against the wall opposite him. Teek was off to one side, and on the floor Little Soos crawled slowly but steadily toward the man with the shaggy blond hair. He had almost reached him—

"No fair!" Mabel said. "You used magic!"

"It's a prop," the Goblin King said, grinning and jangling the key ring he had summoned from thin air. "Props are allowed! And I didn't create it, I just took it by magic from the hook on the wall beside the back door downstairs."

Cooing and gurgling, Little Soos crept on hands and knees toward the Goblin King. Still about six feet away from him, just out of reach, the baby sat up, looked at the jingly keys, and clapped his hands and laughed.

"Keys are like baby magnets!" Teek said. "Mabel, think of something!"

"I didn't want to do this," Mabel said, reaching inside her sweater. "Grappling hook!"

The grapnel* whizzed across the room, and before Jahrkves could even react, it snagged the keyring and yanked it right out of his grasp. Mabel retracted the grapnel, the keys fell off, but following Newton's first law of motion they continued their arc, and with her free hand she reached up to grab them out of the air—

The Goblin King snapped his fingers and they vanished before she could touch them. "I hung them back up where they belong, Miss Malapert!"

Mabel glared at him. "What's that even mean?"

"Malapert? Um, impudent person." When she just looked at him, he sighed. "Smarty pants? Know-it-all? Wisenheimer?"

Mabel smiled a little. "Oh, sorry, I thought it was something bad."

"If I can't use the keys, you certainly can't!" he shouted. He started to coo at the baby. "Come to me, my fine little man! Come to the lovely Goblin King!"

"Hey, Soosie!" Mabel called. "Would you like to go for a ride on Waddles? Hmm? Would you like that? What does Waddles say? What does he say? What does the piggie say?"

Little Soos, two-thirds of the way to the Goblin King, sat up and looked around at Mabel, gurgling and drooling and perhaps saying "oink."

The Goblin King snapped his fingers and suddenly held a gold-and-silver music box. It tinkled a lovely lullaby, and the baby's gaze swiveled toward it.

Mabel began to sing and do a dance-in-place: "Am I blanchin'? Girl, we blanchin'! I live up in a mansion!"

The baby swung around and started to crawl toward her.

"Ugh!" Jahrkves said, making the music box vanish. "Now I'll have that in my head for the next hundred years!"

"I believe we're watching a competition of some sort," Ford said. "I suspect that the creature that looks as though his head got caught in a hay baler—"

"C'mon, man," Wendy said, "He's kinda hot!"

"Oh," Dipper said.

With a note of apology in her voice, Wendy added, "Well, not to me personally, too weedy, but I can see how Mabel might be attracted."

"Oh." Dipper said.

Wendy turned back toward the vision shimmering in the air around the orb. "Or even Teek, maybe. 'Cause this guy has that sort of bi kinda look—"

"I'm not understanding any of this," Ford said.

"Good," Dipper told him. Wendy stifled a giggle.

Ford resumed, "Anyway, I think that the, uh, man, I guess, is trying to abduct Soos's son and that the contest is to find whether the baby will go to him or to Mabel. I think I can even make out a chalk mark on the floor there between them."

"I wish we could get sound on this!" Dipper said. "Is there any way to help Mabel?"

Ford shrugged. "Improbable. Without the right combination of people on this side, we can't open the gateway into the parasite dimension. And I suspect that the orb's capacity is limited—only one group of three at a time. Hero, maiden, and child. It's classic."

"Scientific reasoning?" Wendy asked.

"Gut feeling. All we can do . . . is watch."

"Come on, Mabel!" Dipper said, leaning forward. "You can do it!"

The Goblin King was juggling three live pug puppies, who seemed to enjoy it.

Little Soos, still in the same place where he had stopped, watched in awe. Or at least he said, "Aw." Hard to tell with kids that young. He also started sucking his whole right fist.

The puppies vanished. With an evil smile, the Goblin King produced a six-foot long, live, bronze-colored snake from thin air, its hexagonal scales gleaming. It coiled around his neck and arm, the triangular head rearing from the final coil around his wrist, black forked tongue flickering like a small streak of infernal lightning. "Mustn't touch," Jahrkves cooed. "Stay away!"

Mabel clenched her fists. The Goblin King was trying reverse psychology—something she'd often used on Little Soos herself: "Don't fall asleep now!" "I know you're not hungry, so I'll eat this baby food myself!"

And it almost always worked!

"I didn't want to do this," she muttered. "It's really fighting dirty. But I guess I have to." Then she shouted out, "Hey, Soosie! Who wants bacon?"

The Goblin King knew nothing of Soos or of the baby's parentage. He didn't know that Melody had been a dedicated employee of Meat Cute or that Soos had once cooked an entire pound of bacon for Stan and the kids and not one strip of it had made it to the table, because he'd forked each one still sizzling into his own mouth, straight out of the frying pan. The Goblin King had no idea of the inexorable combination of genes in the baby he was trying to attract.

"No!" he shouted. "Come back!"

But Little Soos was already at Mabel's feet, reaching up both chubby arms. She scooped him up.

"Yes!" Teek said.

The baby started to cry. "Ba-ba!" he whimpered. "Ba! Ba!"

Jouncing him, Mabel said, "Um, GK, I won't boast about winning, but this is an emergency, and I'm gonna need one small strip of bacon, not too crisp. A real one, not a magic one. Cough it up or get ready for a tantrum."

With an irritated grunt, the king snapped his fingers and one appeared. Mabel snagged it out of the air before it dropped, and Little Soos started to suck on it. He never ate them, but he did like the taste.

"Mabel won! Send us back home," Teek said, walking over to Mabel.

"I can't," the Goblin King said.

"What?" Mabel's face turned purple. "You lied to us?"

"No! No!" the Goblin king said. "I can't magic you back to your home, but I can tell you how to get there. Come with me." He snapped his fingers again, and a spiral stairway wound itself around the round wall of the room. At the top, a door popped open, revealing the yellow-and-black streaked sky of this world.

"Couldn't you afford a handrail?" Mabel asked. "Safety first!"

"You can't fall off. It's magic," the king said. "Congratulations."

"First time you've been beaten?" Teek asked.

Looking over his shoulder—he had started up the stairway—Jahrkves said as though surprised at the question, "Oh, no. I'm beaten every time. I'm the villain. It's a rule of nature."

"Narrative convention," Teek said.

"But I'm usually not beaten this easily," Jahrkves said. "I mean, you two got through all the defenses with practically no effort. Knife through butter. Never have I ever known this to happen."

"First time you met Mabel," Teek said.

They ascended the stair and came out on a narrow parapet enclosing the very top of the tower, a roof like an egg-shaped dome with a flattened top. Mabel blinked. The interior of the heavens looked concave here, an immense dome over everything, near enough almost to stretch up and touch.

"Up on the central platform," the king said, and he led them up another set of steep stairs, practically a ladder, to a round dais atop the dome, the highest point of, well, everything they could see, including the castle. "Now, join hands. Ready to go? Teek, you're taller. Kiss the sky."

"What?" Teek asked. "No!"

Mabel squeezed his hand. "Do it."

"I'm not going to do that!"

"For me," Mabel pled. "Please."

"Oh—I won't like it! But OK."

And he turned to the astonished Jahrkves and planted one right on his lips.

*Yes, "grapnel" is a real word. It's a small anchor-like device with three or more flukes** and is the grappling part of a grappling hook, the thing on the end of the line that actually grapples.

**A fluke can be a digenetic trematode—that's a kind of flatworm, check it out on Google, I'm not adding another bloody footnote, too many of them already; or it can be an unlikely, random, odd or chance occurrence, like the kid that you have a secret crush on you walking up to you one day as math class is ending and saying very earnestly, "I need to get some serious French kissing practice in right away, are you busy tonight?"; or it could be the tail fins of a whale or dolphin***, or, and this is the important bit, it's the part of an anchor with an arrowhead-like hook on it that catches in the sea floor—or, by extension, the parts of a grapnel with hooks that catch on the tops of walls, tree branches, or, rarely, dangling keychains.

***One kind of dolphin is actually a fish, another kind is a spar or buoy used for mooring boats, but most commonly the word refers to relatively small aquatic mammals that, in fact, are compact-sized toothed whales.****

**** Oh, damn, that was another footnote when I said I wouldn't do one. Can't you please look some of this crap up yourself? Help a brother out!