One Week of Wonder
13. Frantic Friday
(August 28, 2015)
Part 1: Anty Gravity
During his thirty years as owner, promoter, manager, and presiding Mr. Mystery of the Mystery Shack, Stan always said, "Ya can't ever be sure how any day in the Shack is gonna go, until it's gone already."
Which if you didn't think about it too hard made a kind of sense, like some of his other pearls of wisdom:
"Kids, sometimes in life you'll come to a fork in the road. Always take it."
"I'm sick of gambling in Vegas. It's so popular these days, nobody goes there."
"Listen, kid, on days when you think you're gonna get up on the wrong side of the bed—slide down and off over the foot."
"Pumpkin, life is like poker. Ya got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, and know if the other players are so dumb you can cheat."
Anyhow, aside from the sayings he stole from Yogi Berra, Stan sometimes offered advice that really helped. Not often, mind you, but he had his moments.
Like on that Friday morning—for no reason except his instincts, he and Sheila came over for breakfast, and as he had his second cup of coffee, he said, "Something's gonna go wrong today, I can feel it. Soos, your call, but you want, me and Sheila will hang around to help. I got a premonition you're gonna have a busy day."
"Sure, Mr. Pines," Soos said, giving his beaver-toothed grin. Ever since the summer of 2012, Stan had insisted that as the new Mr. Mystery, Soos should call him "Stan," but a habit formed over ten years is hard to break. "In fact, that'll let Abuelita and Melody have a day out with the kids. Would you lady dudes like that?"
"It sounds wonderful!" Abuelita said.
"If you're sure you can spare us," Melody said.
"Oh, sure, with Sheila's and Mr. Pines's help, we're ready for anything! Hey, Mr. Pines, you want the fez and the eyepatch today?"
Stan waved him off. "Nah. You be Mr. Mystery, I'll do the Museum walk-throughs, Wendy and Dipper will mind the gift shop, Teek and Mabel will take care of the snack bar. Sheila will help as needed. I think we got this covered."
It sounded like a plan. And, to be fair, it ran as smooth as could be. Until about ten o'clock.
The buses rolled in then. About a dozen of them.
Loaded to bursting with . . . kids from summer camp!
School was about to start again, and that Friday was the last day of the last week of summer camps all around central Oregon. Somehow—it might possibly have been the good idea that Mabel had talked Soos into accepting, making a TV ad and an Internet one that welcomed campers in for a flat fee of ten dollars per bus load—somehow, suddenly, every camp for miles around packed their kids into buses and drove them down to Gravity Falls for a day of fun and mystery.
It would be easy to blame Mabel.
OK, it was Mabel's fault. See how easy that was?
However, let's be fair. Mabel had never worked as a camp counselor responsible for a hundred eight- to twelve-year-olds. She had never even been to summer camp—mainly because her mom wouldn't let Dipper go to summer camp because, up to the time he was twelve, she fretted over letting him out of the house if there was a chance he'd run into kids his own age. He was, she thought, a fragile, sensitive child who could easily fall victim to bullies.
Which in itself instantly made him a bully magnet, but that was beside the point. Mom vetoed summer camp for him, which meant that Mabel couldn't go, either. Their stay in Gravity Falls during the summer of 2012 had been their first venture away from Mom and Dad, and it bore no resemblance to a summer camp, unless the summer camp you went to was run by a borderline nutcase with a predilection for petty larceny.
Anyway, with that lack of experience, Mabel did not know that going to camp has a strange effect on the tender minds of the young campers. At the lower end of the scale, it meant that eight-year-olds would make and accept dares that would give Superman pause. At the higher end, it meant that hormones danced their way in, making the girls boy crazy and the boys just plain cray-crazy.
It's a well-known fact that zits drain thinking ability from the brain.
Also, camp has side effects. Congregating in groups has a way of sticking a kid's volume control at eleven. Being in the presence of girls made the eleven- and twelve-year-old boys want to pinch, trip, or kiss the girls, sometimes all at the same time. The girls found themselves tempted to tease the boys until they started hitting each other, because they wanted to hit the girls, but you can't do that, so slug Bobby instead, and he'll pummel you in return.
Punctuating everything were farts, both real and pretend, jeers of laughter, shrieks and squeals, and general pandemonium. "Pandemonium," by the way, is a word coined by John Milton in Paradise Lost to describe what hell sounds like. It comes from Latin words meaning "All the Devils." Milton probably thought it up the year he was an assistant counselor at a summer camp.
Anyway, once the campers poured off the buses, it was like being invaded by an army of hyperactive Munchkins high on Smile Dip. Wendy quickly became frazzled, zipping around and gently suggesting at the top of her lungs, "Don't touch that! You! Take that out of her mouth! No, no, those aren't meant for juggling!" and the like. Meanwhile, the counselors were crowding the lawn and the picnic tables, drinking sodas and trading stories about how their brats were brattier than your brats, making plans to hook up after the kids had been sent home, and so on. They were as much help as a prairie dog would have been in a cattle drive. Maybe less.
Meanwhile, inside the Shack, one kid had gone through the staff only door, unnoticed, and came running out again screaming, closely pursued by a hopping, quivering, living photocopy of his butt. "I got this!" Mabel yelled, running over with a glass of ice water.
Amazingly quickly, about a dozen boys and girls had met for the first time ever, become acquainted, and organized themselves into a shoplifting ring. The ice-cream freezer was completely emptied without anyone ever spotting a suspect.
Soos came staggering back in from the first Mystery Trail tram tour yelling, "I can't take it! They're, like, everywhere!"
Wanting to help, Stan swapped with him and took the next tram tour out himself. But thirty hyper campers managed to drown out even his rusty-chainsaw spiel, so he started just making things up at random: "That's the haunted outhouse. Crap comes alive in there. Literally! It's the place where a dump takes you! See those little guys in the red hats? They're cannibal Gnomes! Let me stop and they can have you over for lunch."
Nobody seemed to hear anything he said over the din of their own yelling. On the way back, Stan started to formulate a plan: haul 'em all out to the Bottomless Pit, shove 'em in. Maybe by the time they re-emerged, in 22 minutes, the bus drivers would take them all away again.
The climax didn't come until a total of maybe seventy-five kids were on the verge of rioting in the Museum and gift shop, though. Over the years, Soos had added exhibits and artifacts that he had found (often through Ford or Stan) up for sale on Shh-Bay, the Dark Web's auction site. In some cases, the seller had paid him to take the cursed curios.
Anyhow, one of the new exhibits was an antique bottle, not glass but earthenware, a strange green shade, with the patina of centuries and arcane symbols that had been impressed in the clay and baked in the kiln.
There are no corresponding symbols in any known type font, but let's substitute: #^-! [ *#) !-. Not horizontal but inscribed in two side-by-side vertical lines. Something like that. The jug was sealed and if you shook it, it felt completely empty, though if you shook it and pressed your ear against the side right after, sometimes you heard a little skittery sound, as if something small but many-legged were running around in there.
The inscription remained a mystery. Neither Ford nor Dipper had been able to find any known cuneiform, alphabetic, pictogram, or other linguistic pattern that would give a clue even to the language of the inscription, let alone its meaning.
Soos had decided that the bottle was a MAGIC WISHING JUG that would grant a person's wish but would LIKE CURSE IT, SO IT CAME TRUE IN AN IRONIC DEAL OR SOME JUNK, according to the label he had slapped on the shelf beneath it.
However—and here we venture beyond the knowledge of anybody in the Shack or indeed of anyone on Earth—the enchanted vessel did not grant wishes. It did bestow a kind of curse, depending on one's definition of cursedness. It dated back to the mythological pre-history of Ancient Greece, and it figured obliquely in the Iliad, as an explanation of how Achilles picked up the warriors who followed him during the Trojan War.
It goes back thousands of years before Achilles, even, to the island of Aegina, which had an underpopulation problem, and to its king, Aecus, who asked Zeus to help him find a few good men, like ten thousand or so, because he was a king and would like to have people to bow and say "Yes, your majesty," and go invade the next country over if he felt like it.
And Zeus granted Aecus's request, and the bottle was the means of—oh, you can look it up yourself.
Anyway, be it known that Soos had acquired the so-called MAGIC WISHING JUG from a small European college's archaeology department that had never displayed it, studied it, or even understood how ancient it was, and know also that no one had ever, ever removed the long-fused stopper from the bottle, not since King Aecus had done it for the first and last time millennia ago.
So of course, a couple of brats grabbed the jug from the shelf and played tug-of-war with it, and that's when it happened.
Silence rolled through the shack like a reverse thunderclap.
"Where'd everybody go?" Mabel asked from the snack bar.
"Whoa!" Dipper said. "What happened?"
"Yuck!" Wendy said. "The place is, like, overrun with ants!"
Sheila knew where the ant spray was kept and ran to get it. Fortunately, Teek, in flicking some of the critters off the counter, suddenly bent down and focused on a few. "Wait!" he yelled in the nick of time. "These ants are wearing clothes!"
Dipper, who had acquired a bleeding enormous magnifying glass during his first summer in Gravity Falls, rushed upstairs and got it.
It was true that ants swarmed all over the place.
However, under the magnifying glass, all the ants clearly did wear little tiny tee shirts in varying colors—lime green, yellow, orange, blue, red, and so on—that corresponded to the camp outfits the kids had been wearing.
"Oh, my gosh!" Dipper said. "I think—something turned all these kids into ants!"
"Good!" Stan said, grinning and rubbing his hands together. "Somebody—find me the swatter!"