WARPED
Chapter 9
In short, this was probably the worst day of Lucy's life. Not only was she stranded in a children's cartoon (and a Disney one, nonetheless), but one of her best friends was fighting with her. Unnecessarily, added Lucy mentally. She'd done nothing wrong; it wasn't her fault that she wasn't a huge fan of being taken out of her normal life and being thrown into another dimension. But apparently, Jocelyn and Hazelle were.
Jocelyn, she could understand: she was always the adventurous one, her love for all things weird almost as fathomless as her ability to be loud. But Hazelle? Anxious, observant, peacemaker Hazelle was okay with chilling in another reality? Lucy had known Hazelle loved the world of Gravity Falls as much as Jocelyn, but the results of it being put to the test were downright shocking.
Lucy was now wandering around the Mystery Shack, brooding. She passed Soos, who was hanging out in his break room, his body cramped around numerous pipes and valves. "Hey, dude!"
"Hi," Lucy mumbled, not bothering to turn around.
"Want any Late-Night Nachos?" Soos asked, offering a half-eaten bowl of tortilla chips smothered in gooey cheese.
"No, thanks, I'm not really that hungry," Lucy replied. She kept walking.
"I guess it's nacho thing," Soos muttered to himself. "Aw, boosh, that was great!"
Lucy had had no idea just how vast the Mystery Shack was. She wandered through various hallways, finally coming to the family room, where Grunkle Stan was watching TV. Lucy saw the ending credits of a black andwhite movie roll down the screen. "Will the Duchess and everyone's favorite coxswain Saunterblugget Hampterfuppinshire make up in time for the Summer Cotillion?" asked an announcer from the TV. "Will Elizabeth's new romance with the dashing Sebastian flourish or fail? And how will Count Lionel react to the return of his evil twin brother? Find out all this and more on the next installment to the 'The Duchess Approves' movie trilogy, 'The Duchess Rejects'!"
"Reginald's alive?" Stan exclaimed, shoveling a spoonful of rocky road ice cream in his mouth. "I thought he was lost at sea! Next week's movie is gonna be so good!"
Stepping deeper into the room to stand beside Stan's chair, Lucy asked, "What're you watching?"
Stan jumped and scrambled for the remote. He then quickly changed the channel to Baby Fights. "Nothing! Just some good ol' fashioned violence! Nothing having anything to do with the old lady movie channel… Who said anything about that? What's 'The Duchess Approves'?"
"Um… I didn't say anything about that…" Lucy replied.
"Oh." Stan waited a beat, taking in Lucy's downtrodden demeanor. "Why the long face, kid?"
Lucy shrugged. "Just tired and homesick, I guess."
"You know, I don't get that term: homesick," Stan commented. "Are you sick of home? Are you sick at home? These are legitimate questions."
Lucy raised an eyebrow.
Stan rose from his easy chair. "I'm gonna go to bed now. Night!" He left the living room, perhaps a little too quickly.
Lucy decided that she was tired—both mentally and physically—and tried to make herself comfortable on the easy chair that Stan had vacated.
Soon enough, sleep overcame her turbulent mind.
XxX
Lucy was having a nightmare.
Everything around her was black. She couldn't see, and she couldn't hear anything. It was like she was floating in a void, cut off from her senses.
Then, there was a bright flash of blue under her. At first it was blinding, but Lucy couldn't help but look.
She was standing on a circular platform that stretched out around her, at least fifteen feet in length. It was the color of old parchment, with symbols rounding the circle drawn in black ink.
Eerie recognition grabbed hold of Lucy as a burst of gold sparked above her.
"Hiya, Pen!" Bill Cipher fully materialized, adjusting his top hat. "Welcome to my wheel of misfortune! Sponsored proudly by your puny, naïve little mind! Thanks for that, by the way."
Lucy's expression of shock morphed quickly into a sharp glare. "Get out of my head, you crazy demon! I don't want anything to do with you!"
Bill laughed. "Looking before we leap, eh, Pen? Doncha want to hear what I've got to say first?"
"No!" Lucy gritted her teeth and tried to remain calm. He's not real. This is just a dream. "This is all your fault! There's nothing you could say that I'd want to hear. Now get out of my head!"
"Whoa, whoa! Before we start throwing around accusations," Bill cut in, "there's some things we gotta clear up. I didn't bring you, Caduceus, and Music Note to Gravity Falls, and I didn't bring the others to your world."
"Wait—what?" Lucy's eyes widened. "You didn't bring us here?"
"Of course not!" With a wave of his hand, Bill made a nail filer appear out of thin air, and started scrubbing his tiny black fingers. "Trust me, Pen. If I did something that devilish, I would've made it apparent that it was my doing." Bill giggled. "But, nope! I didn't bring you and your silly friends here."
"But…" Lucy's head was pounding in tandem with her heart. "Then…what is searchfortheblindeye dot com?"
"Ah, see? Now we're getting into the good stuff. And by that I mean anything having to do with me!" said Bill. "I created that website because I was on the lookout for some particular persons of interest. You and your friends have something I want, and the only way I could find you suckers was to leave hidden codes that only my targets would've been able to crack! It took some patience on my part, but voila! I found you three, didn't I?"
"How…how'd you know we were able to see those special codes?" yammered Lucy.
"I'm directly connected to that website. If someone had been able to open my hidden messages, I would have felt it. You three had been cracking my codes for a while before I finally managed to specify your location!" Bill explained, teasing in his voice. "Sneaky stuff, but it all worked out in the end. My original intention had been to discuss my reasoning back in your world, but one thing led to another, obviously."
"So what the hell are we doing in Gravity Falls?" Lucy yelled. "If you didn't bring us here, then who did?"
"Now that, I'm still figuring out," Bill said, rolling his eye. "Apparently someone was smart enough to hack into my website and link your world to the world of Gravity Falls. But a little rip in the space time continuum isn't something to worry about!"
The pieces fell together in Lucy's head. So when we clicked on that little spot on the screen, it was actually a link to Gravity Falls, and brought all the characters to us! And then when Jocelyn clicked on it again, it brought us right back! "The potato chip!" she gasped.
Bill raised an eyebrow. "You say somethin', Pen?"
"No." Lucy smoothed back her hair and kept her composure. "Look, why are you telling me all this? What do you want?"
"I want to finish what I started!" said Bill. "And that is proposing a little deal."
"What? No way!" Lucy could already fell the itching in the pit of her stomach—her gut was screaming that this was a bad idea. "I'm not making any deals with you! I know how you operate."
"Oh, really?" Bill said, narrowing his eye.
He raised his hands into the air, and the platform was ignited with malicious blue flame, orbs of fire encircling the wheel like the blue beads of a bracelet encircling a wrist. The force of the blast pushed Lucy onto her back.
"I know what you're thinking," mused Bill, a splintered copy of him flashing above her. "Literally! You're thinking I'm full of it, and you're considering a master plan of finding a computer in Gravity Falls, logging onto my website, and just finding the link back to your world. Well, sorry Pen, that ain't gonna work: searchfortheblindeye crashed yesterday. So your original portal is kaput."
"What?!" Lucy wanted to pull her hair out.
"But here's the thing: you're not stuck here! Because I know another way back."
Lucy scrambled to her feet and leveled her glare at the dream demon that was negotiating with her. "How do I know I can trust you?"
"You've seen the cartoon, haven't you? When Gideon and I made that deal, I was going to hold up my end if Shooting Star and Question Mark hadn't interfered and ruined everything." Bill sighed. "I keep my promises, like how I'll keep my promise to you."
Lucy frowned. She didn't like the situation one bit. But she was intrigued, albeit a tad desperate. She wasn't like Jocelyn and Hazelle: she couldn't just wait around until a solution fell from the sky. If they were going to be so unwilling to help, then maybe she should just find a way home by herself! "What do you want from me?" she asked, the hardness receding into curiosity.
Bill's golden glow flared, as if he was grinning. "That's not something I wanna discuss here in the dreamscape. We have to talk about it in reality. And I know just the place. Hold onto your sanity, Pen! We'll talk again soon."
Bill snapped his fingers, causing the wheel beneath her to be engulfed in blue flames and never ending blackness.
Lucy opened her eyes.