Apparition
(October 25-31, 2014)
2 Out of Time
Thursday after school, Dipper went to his usual guitar lesson. Then when he got back, Mabel spent the afternoon working on altering his costume, much to his annoyance. "Why do I have to model it?" he asked.
"So it'll fit perfectly, duh!" Mabel shot back. "Hold still." She pinned up the trouser cuffs, stepped back, shook her head, and then knelt to re-pin them, while Dipper stood on a low step-stool. "I think one of your legs is shorter than the other one."
"It is not. I'd know," Dipper said. "I mean, I'm on the track team and all!"
"Then it's the way you're standing." Mabel stuck a bunch of pins between her lips as she undid the fold and then refolded the cuff. "Ff oo'd us an ill iss oo'd o asser."
"If you'd take those pins out of your mouth, I could understand you," Dipper returned. "Come on, you're usually faster than this!"
Mabel re-pinned the cuffs, then knee-walked backward to tilt her head and examine her handiwork. "Are you standing straight?"
Dipper adjusted his stance. "This is as straight as I can stand!"
"OK, that'll do. Take 'em off and I'll hem them!"
"This is embarrassing," Dipper said, stepping down from the stool and stripping off the trousers. "Ow! One of your pins scratched me!"
"Don't blame them—they're straight pins. Jut be more careful. OK, I got 'em. Take five, Bro!"
"I'll take more than that," Dipper said, pulling on his jeans. "Seriously, why's it taking you so long?"
"I usually make our costumes from scratch!" Mabel reminded him. "With these, I have to work with what we've got. Hey, how come your costume isn't haunted?"
"I don't know. Maybe because it was made for a college production of Anything Goes and wasn't worn by a real person, just an actor."
"How'd you know that?" Mabel asked.
"It's on the label inside the jacket—'Manufactured by Hennessey Costumes for Brainard College production Anything Goes.' It's in permanent marker, faded but readable."
Mabel turned the jacket inside-out. "Huh. I didn't notice that. But actors could be ghosts. I mean, they're real people."
"But the one who used this didn't die tragically."
"You don't know that."
"I checked it with the anomaly detector. Nothing."
"Oh." When he started out of her room, Mabel asked, "Hey, in case I need to redo anything, where you gonna be?"
"On my laptop. Got some stuff to look up."
"OK, long as I can find you."
He glanced at her. "Ghost hasn't been back?"
"Not sure," she said. "Crazy dreams."
"Mindscape-type dreams?"
"Yeah, like that." Mabel took the jacket—already pinned for a tuck—and trousers to the corner where her sewing machine waited. One good thing about their impending move to the bigger house: there would be a room between her bedroom and Dipper's, and she could put her craft stuff there on one side and Dipper could put his music stuff on the other, and their bedrooms would be less crowded.
Though to tell the truth, she wasn't sure she'd want to be sewing at the same time Dipper was doggedly chasing the elusive guitar chords he still had trouble with. She suspected they'd get on each other's nerves. Dipper went out as she bent over the sewing machine and, humming to herself, finished one cuff. She started on the other—and the machine froze in mid-stitch. "Come on, come on," she grumbled under her breath. "What now?"
The needle had stopped a fraction of an inch above the fabric. Mabel leaned in close to see if it had caught on something, but it looked OK. Impatiently, she pushed back from the sewing table, and a spool of thread rolled off the edge.
And hung in the air.
"Oh, fine," she said, turning around. "Hi. Who are you?"
"My name," said the strangely-costumed woman standing behind her, "is not important."
She wore a sort of gray bodysuit, tight, with darker gray armor over her shoulders, chest, and legs. Black flexible boots, green gloves, and a helmet that came down over her eyes and included green goggles that concealed her eyes. A strip of silver duct tape above her right breast seemed to conceal a name plate, and above the right was a neon-green image of an hourglass.
"Time Paradox Avoidance and Elimination, huh?" Mabel asked. "New uniform design, though."
"Old uniform design," the woman corrected. "This is the first-gen. I come from not very far in your future. They recruit us from all eons, you know."
"So—what are you doing here? I'm busy, Duct Tape."
"That's not my name."
"Yeah, but it's what you covered your name badge with," Mabel pointed out reasonably. "Come on, is there something I gotta do to wear my costume, or what?"
"You can't wear the costume," the woman said. "I was sent back to warn you about that."
"By Time Baby?"
"Um, no. Actually, T.B. will not is have been thawed out when I am have been recruited—Major Blandin is my immediate superior."
"Major Blandin? Guy with brown hair and thick goggly glasses, goes 'I-I-I' a lot?"
"Well, yes, he does. I've met Time Baby, of course, because we're pretty free to zip around the time-lines as needed. But he really won't have been will be fully in charge for—wait a time-minute, this is all beside the point! You can't wear the dress, OK?"
"Because there's a ghost attached to it."
"Because—what? You know already? Shoot, did I miss my time-mark? What day is today?"
"October 30," Mabel said.
"The year's 2014, right?"
"Yep."
The woman looked around. "This is the old house. Huh. I could've sworn the family moved—never mind. Tell me what's happened. How did you know about the ghost?"
"Sit anywhere," Mabel said. "It's kind of a long story."
The woman sat on the foot of the bed. Mabel kept thinking she was familiar—though about all of her face that she could see consisted of chin, mouth, and nose, the helmet covering the rest, as well as the hair. Mabel spun around in her desk chair—as long as she was touching things, they could move, but otherwise they were frozen in time and space—and told about the visitation.
"Covered herself with a sheet?" The TPAES agent said. "That's pretty old-school!"
"Classic, I'd call it," Mabel told her. "So what's the big deal with the dress? If I wear it, do I turn into a ghost or something?"
"Something," the woman said. She sighed. "I have to go back to HQ. Now that I've located the disruption in this time line, paradoxes may will have been to be piling up! Keep juiced, I'll be back."
"Keep what?"
"Juiced. Huh. Don't you say that in 2014?"
"I don't."
"Huh. I could've sworn—well, never mind. I'll make it back in a time-jiffy if I can."
"Why wouldn't you be able to?"
"Always in motion the future and past are," the woman said with a grin. "You're the one who helped Major Blandin rescue Time Baby from being wiped out during Weirdmageddon. I remember that from training. We'll owe you one and I'll do my time-best. Expect me back in a few seconds or a hundred years. That's a time-joke."
"Time ha, time ha," Mabel said. "That's a time-laugh."
"I like your sass, kid," the woman said, and she vanished.
However, time did not re-start. Mabel wandered from her room over to Dipper's, where he lay propped up in bed, his laptop in front of him. She got up the nerve to peek at the screen—sometimes Dipper's Internet searches could be sort of disturbing—and saw that he had pulled up a record of obituaries from the 1920s. "Doing it the hard way, Brobro," she murmured, but of course he did not seem to hear or react.
She caught the ghost of a flash coming from behind her, from the open door to the landing, and a couple of seconds later, the woman walked through the doorway, muttering, "Where'd you go, where'd you go—there you are! I told you to wait!"
"I just came in to see if my brother was OK," Mabel complained.
And then, as the woman approached, behind her Mabel heard Dipper come to life, muttering: "Nope, she's too old, this one's too old, too—wait, what?"
The time traveler sighed. "OK, he's in on it now, knew he would be, but it's too late to explain everything, take these and change into them, hurry!" She thrust some clothes into Mabel's arms, while Dipper said, "Mabel? What the heck?"
"You're going on a trip!" the woman snapped. "It didn't start with you, but looks like it's gonna finish with you! Quick, get into these outfits! It's bad to hold a time stasis field too long!" She tossed a pile of clothes onto the bed.
"I'll explain later," Mabel said. "Maybe after I find out what's going on. Whoa, these are kinda weird!"
"Period clothes from 1927," the woman snapped. "Including underwear! Change, change, change!"
"I can't do that with you two in here!" Dipper said.
"You get on the other side of the bed and turn your back! Mabel, you stay on this side and turn your back to him! Now change before you make me time-mad!"
"OK, OK," Mabel said, pulling off her sleep shirt. "Sheesh! Better do as she says, Dip! Wait, this thing's a bra?"
"Buttons on underwear?" Dipper asked from behind her.
"Figure it out!" the woman snapped. Come on, come on. You do this for me and I'll bring you back to this exact moment in time! Hurry!"
"These pants are way short!" Dipper complained.
"They're plus-fours!" the woman snapped. "You wear them with knee socks!"
"The fly buttons!"
"Just deal with it, Dipper!" the time traveler ordered.
Meanwhile, Mabel had figured out the bra. "Is it supposed to be tight?" she asked.
"In 1927 girls didn't show much figure!"
"What, a slip, too? Where are we going, Greenland?"
"No, a place called Greentown, Illinois! Here, let me pull that straight—now the dress, slip it over your head, don't step into it—now let me pull it down—right. Get on the stockings and shoes. Quick, let me brief you!"
Dipper had put on a loose, blousy shirt and was fooling with a tie. "This is a bow tie!" he complained. "I can't tie a bow tie!"
"Oh, for—come over here! Don't worry, she's decent!"
Dipper came around the foot of the bed, and the woman quickly and deftly tied the bow tie and then glanced downward. "Don't forget your fly!"
"I won't, but I keep misbuttoning it! Where's the zipper?"
"Not common in men's trousers until the 1930's! Do you want me to—"
"No! I'll figure it out!"
"Listen: We don't have much time! Well, we do, but I'm using up my allotment fast! I'm sending you guys back to Monday, October 31, Greentown, Illinois! We've done the time-groundwork already, so you'll spend the day in school. There you'll meet a girl called Angelique Flannigan! If you can't change history, she will die in an auto-train crash! Mabel, you give her this! Oh, shoot, I forgot it. One second!"
She flashed out of existence. Dipper asked, "Is that your ghost, because she—"
The woman flashed back in and handed Mabel a cardboard box, flattish, about fifteen inches square. "Give her this. It's her party dress that she's supposed to wear for her sixteenth birthday party on November 2, if she lives that long. Tell her you're delivering it from the seamstress who did the alterations. We took care of that already. Let me look at you. Hmm. Wish we had time to do something with hairstyles. Dipper, where's your cap? Where's your jacket?"
Dipper reached across the bed and retrieved a tan flat cloth cap and a matching jacket. Mabel, now wearing a white blouse and skirt with red and blue stripes and a long red woolen jersey, plus a matching, baggy wool cap, asked, "How do we look?"
"Authentic enough to pass if nobody examines you too closely," the time traveler said. "Ready to time travel? Hold hands!"
She took out—not a time tape, as might be expected, but a gadget that looked a little like a cell phone. "Where's the tape measure?" Dipper asked.
"Don't get those until you're second class. I'm just third. This mission may get me my promotion. Let me see . . . set the coordinates . . . set the year, month, date, time . . . set the automatic return—oh, I forgot! You have only until midnight on that Monday! Make sure that Angelique doesn't get in the Stutz!"
"Get in the whaaa?" Mabel asked.
But too late. The twins felt the weird tug and jerk of time-travel, and suddenly they found themselves standing outside the Greentown High School building—three-storied, brick, and old-fashioned looking. Kids were streaming in.
"I don't like what you did to us," Dipper told Mabel.
"I just bought the dress!"
"Not that!" Dipper said. "Didn't you recognize the time traveler?"
"She was a little familiar," Mabel admitted. "But I couldn't place her."
He stared at her. "Mabel—that was you!"