Boss Lebam
The next few days Lebam stayed hidden in the closet. She didn't want to come out and face the stairs. Finally her natural sure-footedness on heights began to recover. By then Mabel and Dipper had gone through an adventure of being shrunk and captured by Gideon. Fortunately, Mabel was not affected by Lebam's acrophobia, or the flying escape from Gideon's house would have been much more difficult.
They had also faced and defeated the Summerween Trickster with the help of their friends and the enormous appetite of Soos.
The next opportunity for substitution came when Mabel gave Lebam the chance to run the register at the Mystery Shack while Dipper was occupied with being a "wolf boy" for the crowd.
"Behold! Mystery Shack bumper stickers! You can stick them on your bumper, or over your husband's mouth. Am I right, ladies? She knows what I'm talking about!" said Lebam.
"Oh! You are bad! How much?" asked a woman customer.
Tickled by the complement, Lebam said, "Hey, it's on the house. That's the Mabel difference!"
Grunkle Stan came out from behind a cardboard cutout of himself. Angry with her for giving away merchandise, he took her off cash-register duty.
"But, but..." stammered Lebam.
"No buts, except yours out the door," said Stan. "Now shut your yap and get to work."
"Grunkle Stan, whatever happened to 'please' and 'thank you'? Hmm? Oh wait. Here they are!"
Lebam stuck stickers with those words on Stan's face. He transferred "Please" to the cash-register and "Thank You" to Soos' back.
"'Please' never made me any money, kid. In fact, just saying the word gives me a burning sensation," said Stan.
Dipper came up to the counter and complained about his itchy wolf boy costume. "I think I'm getting hookworm."
"Yep. Gluing dog hair to your body will do that," said Stan.
Dipper and Lebam agreed that Stan should look for real attractions instead of fake ones, and that he should be nicer to the employees.
"Look, you guys have a problem the way I run the Shack, take it up with the complaint department," said Stan, offering a trash can.
Lebam knew he was being sarcastic, but she decided to play it straight to spoil the joke.
Grabbing a piece of paper, she said, "I'm going to write them such a letter."
Stan snorted and walked off.
Dipper said, "You know there isn't a real complaint department, right?"
Lebam said, "Of course I do. I wanted to spoil his sarcasm."
Dipper said, "The funny thing is, you're writing with your left hand."
Lebam realized she had done this out of habit. She instantly scribbled out her neat left-handed writing and turned it into a scrawl that said, "I'm pretending to write something."
She showed the note to Dipper. "See, pretending to write with my left hand was all part of the joke."
"I get it," Dipper said with a smile. "Pretty good, sis."
Soon Grunkle Stan demanded that all the employees get up on the roof and paint the sign with glitter to attract more tourists. Lebam excused herself for a moment and got Mabel. She was gradually getting over her acrophobia, but not enough to climb up on a rickety roof.
Later, Mabel came to visit Lebam in her closet.
"The workers got talking on the roof, and I found out that Grunkle Stan nixed a really good idea Soos had to be Questiony the Question Mark of the Mystery Shack. I went to complain to him," said Mabel.
"What happened?" Lebam asked.
"We ended up making a bet," said Mabel. "I have three days to run the Mystery Shack while Grunkle Stan goes on vacation. If he earns more money on his vacation than I do here, then I have to wear a shirt that says 'Loser' for the rest of the summer. If I win, he has to sing an apology song and do a dance, and I get to run the Shack for the rest of the summer."
"I'll help," said Lebam. "If you have to wear a 'Loser' shirt then so do I."
"This is going to be easy," said Mabel. "I've written an inspiring speech that will make everyone more productive. As for Grunkle Stan, how much money can he earn on vacation, anyway?"
They soon learned that Stan had got himself on as a contestant on Cash Wheel and he was raking in thousands of dollars in cash showers and cash floods.
Meanwhile, everything was going wrong at the Shack. The Soos Questiony suit was too revealing and scared customers away. Wendy got to have her friends in the Shack, but they just messed things up and customers got hurt. Dipper brought in a real Gremoblin, but its powers of making people see their worst nightmares had driven two customers insane.
By the third day, Mabel had collapsed in exhaustion and Lebam had taken over. She was overworking herself too, since Wendy and Soos had been given time off. Then she made another bad mistake: she gave the Gremoblin a key for a five-minute break, and soon it was out wrecking the store.
"What'll we do Dipper?" Lebam asked. "He's awarding himself stickers he didn't even earn."
Dipper got out his Book 3, "When fighting a gremoblin, use water..."
Lebam grabbed a glass of water and tossed it over the Gremoblin with her left hand.
Dipper continued, "Only as a last resort, since water will make him much, much scarier."
The Gremoblin grew larger, with spikes on its back and the added ability to breathe fire.
They hid again and waited for it to go away. Unfortunately, it became obsessed with making the talking fish say: "I'm da singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin' ".
Then it tried to eat the jar of profits, and Lebam ran out yelling, "Stop! Stop!"
It grabbed her and caught her in its gaze and Lebam was in her worst nightmare, back in the clutches of Gideon Gleeful. Dipper saved her by showing the monster its own eyes in a mirror.
It moaned, "You've become your father" and ran away.
"Well, at least it didn't do that much damage," said Dipper, as the monster flew off, smashing the top of the totem pole onto a tourist's car.
"Dipper, we only have seven hours to earn back all our profits, or I'm going to have to wear that Loser shirt all summer," Lebam wailed.
Then Soos and Wendy showed up.
"Wendy, Soos, am I glad to see you," said Lebam. "We have a lot of work to do, but if we hurry we can still beat Stan."
"I've got a little headache," Wendy said. "Maybe I should, like, not work today."
"I just met this pack of wolves," Soos said. "I think they're gonna, like, raise me as one of their own. I really should be at the den right now."
"But, but..." said Lebam.
"But hey, see you on Monday," said Wendy, as Soos asked to eat two popsicles that had melted on the floor.
Lebam got angry, turning on the fighting spirit of a charging llama.
"ENOUGH!" she shouted. "I fought a monster to save this business, and this is how you repay me?"
She ranted, drawing on all the harsh words Stan had used to compel his lazy employees to work. Her pounding fist shook the hat-rack and Stan's fez fell onto her head.
She looked in the mirror, and saw the fez, with its symbol un-reversed, exactly as it appeared when she looked at Stan.
"Dipper, what have I become?" asked Lebam.
"What you had to, Mabel," said Dipper, looking at her a bit oddly. There was something strange about how she looked, but he couldn't quite place it. He put it out of his mind: there was work to be done.
Working nonstop for seven hours, they just managed to turn a dollar of profit after paying for all the damages.
Stan showed up with nothing, having bet all his winnings on a final answer he couldn't get: the word "Please."
Stan said Mabel had won and she could run the Shack for the rest of the summer, but everyone begged Stan to take his job back. He did, but he still had to do a "sorry dance" for Mabel and Waddles.
In the middle of the dance, between takes 29 and 30, Stan's hat fell off and Gompers the goat grabbed it. In a blink of an eye, the symbol on the fez blanked out and was replaced by a different shape, with a sharper angle and a dot in the "mouth" of the fish-like symbol.
Lurking within the goat, the demon Bill Cipher chuckled. Lebam's putting on the symbol and forcing it be un-reversed in the mirror had weakened the symbolic connection and allowed Bill to replace it with his own symbol. This new symbol, with an inverse profile of Bill embedded in it, would give him greater access to the mind of Stan Pines in the future.
Everywhere the symbol appeared in the shop, it changed. It changed on Stan's bobble-heads. It changed on the wax head of Stan that Mabel had put back together with its body. The change spread farther and altered even the drawing of Cipher's Wheel in Book 2, held by Gideon. The change then spread to the memories of all who had seen the fez before. Nobody remembered the change had even happened.
Except in the back of Lebam's mind, in her subconscious, the old symbol remained. Her innocence and newness to this world made Bill's grip weaker, but he vowed that would change. He had a place for both of them on his Wheel, and he was watching the Shooting Star and the Backwards Llama... very closely indeed.