One year you guys. One. Year. I honestly can't believe it's been a year since the show ended and this story was started. And I am glad to be releasing this chapter on the anniversary. This was one of my favorite episodes EVER, and writing it was interesting to say the least. I'm not gonna waste much more time, so let's get to the shout-outs.
Female Fantasy Freak- You have no idea how hard I was laughing at your review! That was HILARIOUS! It definitely made my day, so thank you. Sorry I made Bill mad, but taking it out on your Percy Jackson book is a step too far! I'll say this, Willow's reaction when Ford shows up will be interesting, and I can't wait to get there. And if you want me to take Bill off your hands for a while, I will, but I make no promises I'll be able to return him how he was, or return him at all. ;) Thanks for your review! And HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Gamelover41592- I'm glad you liked what I did with the chapter. Soos' POV was interesting to write, and it made a lot more sense than having it in one of the kids' POV's, because then there would have been a lot that was missing. Thanks for your review!
AzelmaandEponine- Thanks for your review! I've gotten that suggestion before, but thanks anyway! It's appreciated! Counting this chapter, four more until Ford comes, and five until we get to see her reaction! It should be interesting, and I can't wait for you to read what I have planned.
Cutie Patootie- I have an anniversary chapter planned for them between Dungeons, Dungeons and more Dungeons and the Stanchurian Candidate, so that should give you some of what you're looking for. Thanks for your review and cooperation!
Disclaimer: I only own Willow and anything you don't recognize. The Society and everything else belongs to Alex Hirsch.
Willow's POV (July 30th)
"Alright Author, who are you?" Dipper said, chewing on the end of his pen. Man, it felt good to be wide awake. After the show, we had gone to sleep for a good twelve hours straight. The past three days we hadn't done much. Yes, there was that thing with Soos and .GIFfany, but Soos dealt with most of that on his own, giving us time to get things figured out. And now that we were rested, we were ready to get back to trying to figure out who the hell the Author was.
In the middle of the web we had made was a silhouette of a face. Along the border were pictures of people in town who could be the Author, considering he was still in town. There were a few women, but we both thought the Author was male; the women were just there because they were suspicious. Around the center picture was anything we thought could be a clue to his identity. There were already a few connections, but nothing solid enough to give us anything. And in case you were wondering about the laptop, I've already tried. I can't fix it. The parts that are needed haven't been made in almost thirty years. What was left of it was sitting in a box as together as we could get it.
"BLAH! Not again!" Dipper yelled, throwing his pen into the trash can and attempting to wipe the ink off his face. If you've ever exploded a pen before, you know how well that works.
"You have got to stop doing that," I told him, handing him a baby wipe from the container. He wiped his face off, then we went back to staring at the board. After a few minutes where we did nothing but stare, Mabel ran in, flopping down in the bed, a green bottle in her hand.
"Look what I got!" She yelled, waving the bottle in our faces, answering before we could. "It's a bottle message from Mermando! Remember? He was part fish, part shirtless guy." She gasped and her eyes got really big. "What if he wants to get back together?"
"I wouldn't get your hopes up Mabel," I told her. This was the first time in almost a month that she had gotten a message from him, and I had a feeling that it wouldn't be good news. But Mabel, ever the optimist, uncorked the bottle, squealing like a dolphin.
"Too late! Hopes are way, WAY up!" She yelled, unrolling the letter and reading it out loud. "'Dear Mabel, it is with a heavy heart that I must inform you… I'M GETTING MARRIED!?'"
"And, there it is," Dipper whispered to me, Mabel rushing through the letter now.
"'In order to prevent an undersea civil war… arranged wedding… Queen of the Manatees?' And she's so beautiful!" She held a picture out to us, showing an awkward-looking Mermando behind a manatee in a dress (this is my life now). "This can't be happening!"
"Mabel, you'll get over him eventually," I told her, knowing she would. She had the strongest heart out of all of us, bouncing back repeatedly.
"You don't understand," she said, pulling one of her scrapbooks out from under the bed. She opened to a page with pictures of Norman, Gideon, Sev'ral Timez, and Gabe. "On our first day here I made this page for summer romances, and look at my luck. Turned out to be gnomes, child psycho, made out with his own hands. And now…" She taped Mermando's picture over all of them, taking out a red marker and writing FAILED at the top of the page. "I wish I could forget about them forever."
"If it's any help, we're not having much luck trying to figure out who the Author is," I told her, pointing to the box the laptop pieces were in. "With the laptop gone, we've lost any lead we had in finding him."
"Bill did say we would eventually see that he followed through," Dipper reminded me, not that I wanted to think about Bill right now.
"Guys…" Mabel said slowly, looking at us in shock. She passed the bottle to Dipper, pointing at a piece of the laptop. Dipper took it and put it up to his eye, looking at what Mabel was pointing to. When he saw it, whatever it was, he looked at me, then at our web, then at Mabel.
"We saw the same thing, right?" He asked her.
"What is it?" I asked looking at the piece Mabel had been pointing to. It looked like there was something written on it, but I couldn't make out the words.
"You don't think…?" Mabel said, both of them looking at me like I had grown a second head.
"What's going on?" I asked slowly. Instead of responding, Dipper passed me the bottle. I held it up to my eye, looking down through it, the words that were written on the piece coming into focus. I froze, the bottle slipping out of my hand and shattering (yes, shattering) on the floor. Even though I could no longer see the words themselves, the image was imprinted in my mind. The second word, LABS, and above it, a name. McGUCKET.
"Wills…" I heard Mabel say my name and felt her touch my shoulder, but it seemed like we were underwater. I looked over to Dipper, who was rearranging the web at light speed. McGucket's picture was now at the center, yellow lines intersecting everything, but two things were obvious. 1) No piece of evidence on the board was left untouched, and 2) somehow, EVERYTHING lead back to McGucket's picture in the center of the board.
"Old Man McGucket wrote the Journals." Dipper said that as if in a daze, the words having an air of finality to them.
"We're going to the junkyard," I said firmly, closing the box that had the laptop in it and putting it into a backpack, along with the Journal. We all started running around, packing backpacks with flashlights, water bottles, walkie-talkies, snack bars, our Swiss Army knife (I put that one in my pocket), necessities. We were running on auto-pilot now. We knew what do to without thinking about it, which was good because my brain kept repeating Dipper's words over and over and over.
We ran downstairs and to the gift shop where Soos and Wendy were, knowing they would want to be a part of this. "Guys, we need to go see Old Man McGucket! We'll explain on the way!" Mabel yelled, grabbing their arms and dragging them outside, Grunkle Stan yelling after us. The five of us piled into Soos' truck and Soos started driving into town, going slow so we could explain what was going on before we got there. I let Mabel and Dipper do most of the explaining. I was still in shock.
McGucket wrote the Journals. McGucket was the Author. In the few weeks I've actually known him, I had NEVER assumed that he could be the person we were looking for, but the pieces fit. I SAW the pieces fit on our board. His sixth finger had been taken off, hence the cast he was always wearing. In the PROPERTY OF F label on the laptop, the F stood for Fiddleford.
I wasn't sure how to feel about this. I mean, knowing who the Author was, that was AMAZING, but the reason we had wanted to know who he was had been so we could get ANSWERS. I had tried to help him remember something from his past, but it hadn't worked. Everything before the 80's was gone, so getting answers would be hard.
Then I remembered what Dipper had said to me just before we found the label. "Bill… followed through." I didn't know what that meant for us, but Bill had told the truth, at least about that.
"Wills, you okay?" Dipper asked me, snapping his fingering in front of my face. I looked around and saw that everyone was looking at me. I just shook my head slightly.
"I don't know," I told them honestly. "Just thinking about… everything. Look," I said, looking all of them in the eye. "When we get there, let me handle things. We know each other. Just trust me, and whatever you do, don't say anything about the way he acts. Got it?"
"Got it," the four of them responded, Dipper squeezing my hand in a way that said more than what words could say. Soos pulled into the parking lot by the junkyard and we climbed out. Like most junkyards, there were large piles of trash everywhere. But unlike most junkyards, in the middle was structure made from sheets of scrap metal that served as McGucket's house. Once I had asked him why he lived in the junkyard instead of a real house, he had said that the junkyard had everything he needed.
"Where is he?" Mabel asked me.
"Don't worry, he's around here somewhere," I told her, then brought my hands up around my mouth. "McGucket! It's me! I brought some friends! We need to talk to you!"
"That's good," I heard someone say. We came around one of the trash piles and saw Lee and Nate spray-painting the side of McGucket's house. The word they had put on there was McSuckIt.
"Took an hour to think of this, but it was worth it," Lee said, the two of them high-fiving. McGucket came out of his house, stick in hand, and started chasing them off.
"McGucket!" I called, the five of us stepping into sight. He turned to us, smiling at me.
"Hey Dolly. Y'all come on in." He turned around and walked back into his house. After looking at me, I nodded and we followed him in.
"'Dolly?'" Dipper asked me as we went through the curtain that served as a door.
"He's from Tennessee. I don't hate it," I told him, looking around the familiar space. Sheets of metal and small pieces were scattered around. McGucket had given me permission to take anything I wanted whenever I visited, so on our way to the back, I did grab a few odds and ends and put them in my pockets.
"Y'all are just in time for my hourly turf war with the hillbilly what lives in my mirror!" He turned around and yelled at himself in a metal bathtub. "Quit starin' at me when I bathe!"
"Every time I visit," I muttered to the others, pulling the Journal out of the backpack. "McGucket, look at this." I held the journal out to him, flipping it open, going slow and letting him look at all of the pages. "We found this in the woods. I know you don't remember much, but we believe that you studied the mysteries of this town and wrote this book."
"Sorry Dolly," he told me, but at least he was looking at the pages. Something in there might jog his memory. "I've never done nothin' worthwhile in my life. Everyone knows I'm no good to nobody. I can't remember what I used to be, but I must've been a big failure to end up like this." As he said that, he looked at the news clippings he had on the back wall. They all showed him acting like a crazy old man. This was why I had wanted to handle this; I knew him and what the best way to handle this was. You had to tell him what you believed to be true in a way that left it open to be false.
"We also found a laptop that has your name on it," I told him, tucking the Journal under my arm and pulling the box with the laptop pieces out of the backpack. When he saw it, I knew there was something in his eyes. His pupils dilated just slightly and there was a small flicker of recognition in his eyes. Good, we were getting somewhere. I opened the Journal again, holding it close to him. "Look at this closely. Are you sure you didn't write it?"
"I told ya I don't recall. Everything before 1982 is just a blur. Just a hazy…" I flipped to one of the more mysterious pages. On one side was a man in a robe, his face hidden in shadow. On the other side was an eye with a large red X over it. It was one of those pages that needed some of the pages that were missing to make sense, but it meant something to him. He shrieked and crashed on the floor, curling up and covering his eyes. "The Blind Eye! Robes, the men, my mind! They DID somethin'!"
"Who did?" I asked softly, bending down next to him. He just shook his head. I nodded and glanced back at the others. "Nothing," I told them, knowing that pushing him to remember something wasn't going to help anything.
"You poor old man!" Mabel told him sympathetically. "No wonder your mind's all…" She blew a raspberry. "You've been through something intense."
"What if McGucket learned something he wasn't supposed to know, and someone, or something, messed with his mind?" Dipper theorized, looking at me. "We've got to get to the bottom of this."
"McGucket, I want you to think," I told him gently. "What is the earliest thing you can remember?"
"This is," he told me, pointing at one of the news clippings. The headline was DISORIENTED MAN FOUND AT MUSEUM.
"The History Museum?" I asked, confused as to what that has to do with anything, but whatever.
"Then that's where we're going!" Dipper decided. I nodded and looked at McGucket.
"We're gonna help you get your memories back," I told him, taking his arm and leading him to Soos' truck. There wasn't enough room for the four of us in the back, so McGucket and I climbed into the bed so we could talk. I told him the short version of everything, from finding the Journal to the laptop being destroyed and the discovery of the label with his name on it. A lot of it was just met with blank stares and confusion, but there were some things, like the Bunker, where there were flickers of remembrance in his eyes. He said he couldn't remember, but I knew what I saw. The memories we were looking for were in there somewhere. We just had to get them out, and the Museum was where we could do it.
"We're here!" Soos told us, pulling into the lot. We were lucky that it was closed (renovations), because having people walking around would have made things harder for us. Although it did mean that the doors were locked, not that it was a problem. We just found an unlocked window in the back and climbed through.
"Hello?" Soos called as we climbed in. "Anyone-" I reached up and covered his mouth.
"We don't want anyone to be here, remember?" I reminded him, taking my hand off his mouth. Then louder to everyone, but still quiet, I said, "Remember to keep it down everyone. And Mabel… never mind." I had been about to tell her not to pet the mountain lion that was on display, but she was talking to Wendy and looking at a poster of Gabe, not even looking at the cat.
"And keep your eyes open for anything suspicious," Dipper added to everyone, walking up to me and McGucket. "So your last memory was here. Anything coming back?" Before he could answer, Soos pointed down a side hallway.
"Guys, look!" He yelled. We all looked in the direction he was pointing just in time to see the shadow of a person run out of sight.
"HEY! Who's there?!" Dipper yelled, the six of us running down the hallway, Dipper in the lead. We rounded the corner and entered a room with a fireplace on one side, shadows dancing around the room. The walls and tables were covered with depictions of eyes. But the person we had seen was nowhere to be found.
"Well kettle my corn. He vanish-ified!" McGucket said, spinning around. The only thing in his eyes was confusion, just like the rest of us.
"It doesn't make sense," Dipper muttered, looking around. "Where did he go?"
"He couldn't have just disappeared," I agreed. Something about those eyes was off. And not the way I'm-in-a-room-of-eyes-and-it-feels-like-I'm-being-watched off. It was the off where you know something is important but you just couldn't put your finger on it.
"I feel like all these eyeballs are a watchin' me," McGucket whispered, backing against the wall, saying how we were all feeling.
"Wait a minute…" Dipper brought his fingers up to his eyes, looking between McGucket and the displays. "They are! Move over!" McGucket took a step to the side, revealing an eye engraved in a piece of stone. Dipper walked up and pushed it into the wall. The shadows danced even more. We looked at the fireplace and watched as it moved into the wall on the left, revealing… "A secret passageway!"
"We'll have to be stealthy. I'll hambone a message if there's trouble!" McGucket then started slapping his arms and legs. He had been teaching me (don't ask me why) so I knew what it meant.
"I have no idea what that means," Dipper told him, glancing at me.
"Coyotes are coming for our sweetbreads," I told him, looking at McGucket for an explanation. "Although I don't know what that has to do with anything."
"Just making sure ya know what you're doin', Dolly," he told me, crawling through the tunnel, the rest of us following behind him. It only took a foot or two before we could stand up fully. Dipper took the lead, the six of us going down a flight of stairs that lead to a thick curtain. We crept up to it, not talking, and Dipper and I pulled the curtain aside, revealing what was behind it.
There were three steps leading down to a spot on the floor about ten feet across. In the middle of the floor, there was a pedestal with a small treasure chest on it. Off to one side was an old chair with the cushioning coming apart. Around the pedestal were people in red robes, their faces hidden in shadow, chanting something Latin over and over.
"What are they saying?" I whispered to Dipper, who had been learning Latin to try and figure out some of the spells in the Journal.
"New order of the ages," he translated to me, whatever that meant. They reached their hands in and touched the chest, then from the shadows another robe guy appeared.
"Who is the subject of our meeting?" He asked, a thick British accent in his voice. From the opposite side of the room, two other robe guys appeared, a woman in a pink dress and apron being led between them, a bag over her head.
"This woman," the two of them said, leading her to the chair and pulling the bag off her head.
"Lazy Susan?" Mabel asked, all of us recognizing the woman.
"What is it you have seen?" The British guy asked her.
"Speak!" the other eight said, their voices echoing around the room.
"Uh, well, uh, I was leaving the diner, and I saw these little bearded doodads, and I was like, 'Bwaaa?'" She told them. I glanced at Dipper.
"The gnomes?" I mouthed to him. He nodded, then turned back to the robed figures.
"There, there," the British guy, who I assumed was the leader, said, reaching to the chest and opening it. He pulled out an odd contraption. The main part was gold with a chamber on the top and a dial on one side. On the opposite end was a blue-ish lightbulb, a piece of red glass separating the two parts. I glanced at McGucket and under the shock and confusion in his eyes was recognition, still barely noticeable, but the strongest yet.
"You won't be like 'Bwaaa?' for much longer," he finished, turning the dial a few times, the other members pulling their hood down further. The Leader aimed the… device at Susan, hitting her head with a weird blue light. The light disappeared and Susan's pupils returned to their normal size, one eyelid slipping down. "Lazy Susan!" The Leader said loudly. "What do you know of little bearded men?"
"My mind is cleared, thanks to the Society of the Blind Eye," Susan responded, almost robotically.
"It is unseen!" The Society said in unison. The six of us glanced at each other, shock, confusion, questions and concerns all clear in our faces, and in McGucket's case, a bit of remembrance. He hamboned something quietly that I shouldn't translate, then we all looked back at the group that, thankfully, hadn't noticed us yet.
"Lazy Susan, how do you feel?" The Leader asked her. She stood up and smiled, the robe guys who had brought her out beginning to lead her away.
"I feel great! I can't even remember what was wrong, or what I'm doing here, or if I'm a man or a woman!" With that, she was out of our sight. The Leader pulled a tube out of the top chamber and started writing something on it.
"Your memories will be safe with us, buried in the Hall of the Forgotten."
"Into the Hall of the Forgotten. Into the Hall of the Forgotten," the others chanted, making a kind of path for the leader. He put the tube into some piping like you would see at the drive-through of a bank. The tube followed the piping up the wall and across the ceiling… coming towards us!
Dipper and I yanked the curtains closed, holding our breath, not moving an inch. Any second I was expecting the robe guys to come looking for us, but they all just began saying, "Un-see you later," to each other and walking around before silence. After a few seconds, I turned around and pulled the curtains open just enough to see through.
"They're gone!" I told the others, pulling the curtains open all the way and walking down the steps. I opened the chest and saw the memory gun. It was pretty simple. The dial set what would be erased, then somehow the tube that was put in the top chamber would hold the memories. I held it out to McGucket, letting him look over it. "Anything?"
"The trigger," he told me, holding the ray comfortably in his hand. He was even able to spin the dial using one finger. It wasn't a memory exactly, but it obviously felt normal, and we were desperate for anything, even muscle memory. We were getting somewhere.
"No wonder the people of this town are so clueless," Dipper realized, taking the memory gun. "There's been a secret society of mind erasers here for who knows how long. I'll bet they erased your memory a long time ago. If we could find where your memories have been hidden, they could be the key to getting the answers we're looking for. Mabel, Wendy, I want you two to stay here and make sure those robe guys don't come back."
"You got it, Dipping Sauce," Mabel said into a walkie-talkie.
"The rest of us are going to go find the Hall of the Forgotten." Soos, who had been looking at the piping while we talked, got his hat sucked into the pipes. "Follow that hat!" Dipper yelled, the four of us running out of the room, watching the hat move along the ceiling. We had just rounded the corner by the dinosaur skeleton when Dipper stopped short, the rest of us crashing into him. Down at the end of the hallway were two of the robe guys.
"Who's there?" One of them said, his voice kind of familiar. We ducked back around the corner as the two of them started heading our way.
"What do we do? Where do we go?" McGucket asked, looking around. I noticed a covered wagon, mannequins standing in front of it.
"In here!" I yelled, ducking through the tarp and going as far back as I could, the others squeezing in beside me. We froze, listening to the robe guys talk to each other.
"I could've sworn I heard someone," the guy who had spoken earlier said to his companion.
"Probably just the janitor kissing that wax settler woman again," the other person said, his voice also vaguely familiar.
"Remind me to erase that from my memory," the first one said, their footsteps getting quieter. Soos, who had been the last one in, climbed out first, hitting the floor hard before standing up. Thankfully, the robe guys didn't come back. The rest of us climbed out, returning our gazes to the pipes in the ceiling. Soos' hat flew by, taking us away from the direction the robe guys had gone. We took off again, and it was only another minute until we came to… a trash chute?
It looked like a trash chute at least. But the piping went down it, so whatever. Dipper climbed on first, sliding down it like a fireman's pole. I followed him, McGucket and Soos behind us. We landed and ran down the hallway to a set of giant double doors, decorated with an X'd out eye design, the pipes leading through what would be the pupil. Dipper and I each grabbed one of the doors and pushed them open, revealing the Hall of the Forgotten.
"Honey fogelin' salt lickin' skullduggery," McGucket stated, which, although it didn't make sense, pretty much summed it up. For starters, the room was the size of a swimming pool. On the far side was a wooden statue of one of the robe guys, his arms outstretched like the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, Soos' hat dropping from a pipe and landing on its head. In the ceiling, dozens of other pipes intersected each other, opening toward the floor. And on the floor were hundreds, hundreds, of tubes. There were piles, some as tall as I was, in the middle of the floor and along the walls. Crates and tables were overflowing with them. None were broken, and all were labeled.
"This," I stated. "Is going to take a while." And it did. We looked for who knows how long, throwing the tubes behind us as we read them. Some of the names I recognized, but most of them I didn't. And from what I saw, there were no repeated names. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But at least it gave us time to talk to each other, something we hadn't had a lot of time to do since getting here.
"How's he holding up?" Dipper asked, coming over and bending down next to me, continuing to look at the tubes. I glanced to the other side of the room where McGucket was in a pile of tubes, his head sticking out of the top.
"I don't know," I told him honestly. "He's kind of hard to read and I don't really know how he's taking all of this. He wants his memories back, I know that much."
"Have you had any luck?"
"I told him everything on the way here. He still doesn't remember, but there have been flickers in his eyes. And the gun felt comfortable in his hand."
"What does that mean?" I was about to answer when Soos called to us.
"Hey dudes! Come check this out!" We stood up and went around the corner to where Soos was standing in front of a table. On the table was a small TV, a piece about the size of one of the memory tubes in front of it. Dipper picked up a tube labeled ROBBIE V. MEMORIES and put it in the front part, the TV screen showing Robbie sitting in the chair.
"…What is it you have seen?" The Leader asked him from off screen.
"So I was attacked by this magic Kung-Fu guy that was throwing, like, balls of fire at me," Robbie told them. "I kicked his butt though."
"Robbie, speak honestly," the Leader told him.
"I was saved by a twelve-year-old," Robbie admitted. Dipper pulled the tube out of the machine and put it back in the pile.
"I still don't get why they're erasing peoples' memories. It doesn't make sense," he said, half to himself, although he had a point. Wouldn't it be better for the people to know about what was going on so they could prepare for some of the craziness? Then I realized something.
"Why haven't they erased our memories?" I asked. Dipper and Soos turned to look at me. "Think about it. We're just staying here for the summer, and yet they haven't touched us, and we've been through more than all the other people in town put together."
"I doubt that," Dipper interrupted me, glancing around at the tubes scattered across the floor.
"Probably true, but my point is-"
"Lookie fellers!" We looked behind us to where McGucket was standing in front of the statue, pointing to one of the tubes that was on display. "It's those words what people call me!" Sure enough, on the tube were the words McGUCKET MEMORIES.
"Good, now we just have to watch them and get out of here," Dipper stated, pulling a walkie-talkie out of his backpack while McGucket climbed up the statue and grabbed his tube. A very faint beeping sound came as he turned around.
"Uuuuhhhh…" I pointed behind him. An eye insignia that was on the wall above the statue had moved, a glowing red X appearing. McGucket turned around and jumped, dropping the tube into my hands as a loud alarm went off. From behind us, the doors opened and the robe guys came running in.
"RUN!" Dipper yelled, taking off, Soos and I following him. "Mabel, Wendy, get out of there! Meet up outside!" He put the walkie talkie back in his pocket and we ran around the corner, ducking behind stone replicas of Egyptian Gods as the robe guys passed.
"Okay, I think we're safe," Dipper whispered before everything went black.
I must've been unconscious because when I woke up, I had a small headache and five of us were tied to a stone column in the Hall, the robe guys standing in front of us, saying the same Latin nonsense over and over. The good news is, it didn't look like they had taken anything from us.
"You shouldn't have come here," the Leader told us, taking McGucket's tube from Dipper's hand. "We do not give up our secrets lightly."
"Who are you bathrobe-wearing freaks?" Wendy asked them threateningly.
"Why are you doing this?" Dipper added as I slowly started reaching into my pocket.
"And what's with your creepy British accent?" Mabel questioned. The Leader shrugged to himself.
"Well, I suppose we are going to erase your minds anyway." He glanced behind him, giving me the time I needed to pull it out of my pocket. We looked up as the other robe guys took their hoods off, revealing…
"Toby Determined?" "Bud Gleeful?" "Farmer that gave me Waddles?" "Tats?" "Dude who married a woodpecker?" Some of those sort of made sense, but Bud Gleeful a part of this?
"And you've never met me before. And if you had, you wouldn't remember," the Leader told us, reaching up and pulling his hood down. He was right when he said we had never met before. At least, I thought he was right. I think I would have remembered meeting him before, but these guys do erase people's memories, so I don't really know anything anymore. He had a square jaw and big ears, deep shadows around his eyes. Over the right eye was a red scar in the shape of an X. But the weirdest part was his head. It was completely bald and COVERED in blue tattoos. It was like someone divided the parts of his brain into sections and labeled them on his head.
"I am Blind Ivan, and we are the Society of the Blind Eye," he told us, the group covering their right eye with one hand then stretching their arms out to the side. "We were formed many years ago by our founder… our founder… Does anyone remember who he was?"
"We been usin' that ray on our own brains an awful lot," Bud told him as I opened the blade.
"Why would you do all this? What do you have to gain?" Dipper asked them, taking their attention off me. Here comes the explanation-y monologue. At least we would get answers.
"As you have no doubt discovered, Gravity Falls is a town plagued with supernatural strangeness. No one knew how to stop the things that went bump in the night, so our founder invented the next best thing: a way for us to forget. We took it upon ourselves to help the troubled townsfolk by erasing the memories of the strange things they've seen. Now the people of Gravity Falls go about their lives ignorant and happy, thanks to us. And as a perk, we help ourselves forget things that trouble us." As he said that last part, his expression narrowed. "Everyone has something they'd rather forget. In fact, your own sister was about to use that ray on herself. Isn't that right?"
"Mabel? Seriously?" Dipper asked her as I thought over everything. These guys weren't evil exactly, they had helped people live normal lives, but there was still McGucket.
"What about Old Man McGucket," Dipper asked, reading my thoughts. "He lives in a hut and talks to animals because of you. Don't you feel bad about that?"
"Maybe a little," Blind Ivan admitted before shooting himself with the gun. He aimed it at us, spinning the dial. "We were going to wait until then end to do this and erase it all at once, but you've learned too much here today. It's time to say goodbye to your memories." He turned the gun around, showing us what he had set to erase. It was one word, but at that point in time, it was the worst word that could have been set. SUMMER.
Two weeks ago, I had thought the worst thing in the world was that we had to leave town early and we wouldn't be able to come back to it how it was. But sitting here, back literally against a wall, I realized that leaving wasn't the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world would be forgetting. I glanced down at the knife I had been hiding behind me, and brought it up, ready to throw it at Blind Ivan and hit him, knock the gun out of his hand, break it, do something, anything, that would stop this from happening, when something, I think it was a mining pan, flew around the corner and hit Blind Ivan's hand, distracting him just enough to give me the time I needed to cut through our ropes.
"Hey Dolly!" From the direction the mining pan had come from, McGucket came running up, dragging a bunch of weapons in a trash can behind him. "I raided the mining display for weapons! Now fight like a hill-billy, fellers!" Not needing to be told twice, we all grabbed a weapon and ran into the fight.
Wendy, of course, grabbed an axe, Soos took a sledgehammer, Dipper and Mabel each grabbed a shovel, and I took a crowbar. Because they were for display purposes, they were made of mostly wood and blunted metal, but we could still do some damage. Wendy, Soos and I (the better fighters) stepped forward, knocking half of the members unconscious in five seconds. Like I said, it wasn't much, but it was enough.
"McGucket's memory tube!" Dipper yelled, running forward to where the tube had been left when the fight started.
"Oh no you don't!" Tats yelled at him, bringing his fist back. I ran up behind him and brought the crowbar up between his legs, sending him to the floor. Dipper winced and tossed the tube to me. Wanting to have my hands free, I tossed it towards Mabel, but it was intercepted by the farmer.
"I'll take that, thank you," he stated, turning around and coming face-to-face with Soos, who had grabbed the memory gun and was holding it at the ready. "Give it up boy. You're no match for the unstoppable power of-" Wendy had been able to pull one of the tubes off the wall and had sucked his robe into the tube. I'm not gonna go into detail, but he had let go of the tube and it was now back in my hands.
"Time to erase that forever," Soos stated, bringing the gun up to his head just as Blind Ivan came up and snatched it out of his hand, leveling it at us.
"Give me that tube!" Yeah, that would happen. I glanced up at the piping, one of which was directly above me, McGucket up in the rafters, holding it in place. I threw it into the air, slipping it through the hole in the pipes. There was half a second of nothing, then Blind Ivan took off after the tube. Dipper and I threw our weapons to the ground, taking off after him, Dipper literally half a step in front of me, the others starting to come after us.
"Those memories belong to McGucket!" Dipper yelled at Ivan as we rounded a corner and started heading for the statue.
"The Society's secrets belong to us!" Blind Ivan responded, putting on more speed. He paused, sticking his leg out, Dipper tripping over it, me tripping over Dipper, the two of us sliding along the floor. We sat up quickly, just in time to see the tube drop into Ivan's hand. He turned around and aimed the gun at us again.
"End of the line!" He stated calmly as the others reached us, staying well back. "By tomorrow this will all seem like a bad dream. Say goodbye to your precious memories."
"NNNNNOOOOO!" All of us yelled at once, but it was too late. He pulled the trigger. On reflex, I crossed my arms over my face and closed my eyes. They say when you almost die, your life flashes before your eyes. On the back of my eyelids I saw everything that had happened to us in the space of two seconds. The Journal, Gideon, Bill, the laptop, today and everything in between was there. I could still see the light from the gun, getting brighter and brighter and…
Disappearing? I peeked open my eye and saw another blast from the gun heading towards us, but it never reached us. Instead, standing in front of us as a human shield, was McGucket.
"Are you okay?" I asked him, lowering my arms. For some reason, he started laughing.
"Okay as I'll ever be, Dolly!" He said happily, walking forward to Blind Ivan, taking hits and laughing the whole way. "Hit me with your best shot, Baldy! But my mind's been gone for thirty odd years! Ya can't break what's already broken!" He reached out and slapped the gun out of Blind Ivan's hand, sending it flying over his head and into Dipper's hands. He grabbed Ivan by the collar. "Say goodnight Sally!" He jerked Ivan forward and head-butted him, sending Ivan crashing to the floor, the tube rolling across the floor and stopping at my feet.
GFF
"They're gone!" Mabel called, running up to us. We had thought it best to erase the Society members' memories of the Society itself, so we had brought them all up to the main part of the Museum and blasted them with the ray, effectively making them forget everything. And now that they were gone and didn't remember anything, it was time for the moment of truth.
"All right McGucket," Dipper said, turning the TV we had found earlier on. A green Blind Eye symbol appeared on the screen. "Are you ready to see your memories? Find out who you really are?"
"I'm not sure," he admitted, looking at us guiltily. "What if I see something I don't like? What if it doesn't help y'all? What if…" I stepped in front of him, looking him in the eye.
"We've come all this way. We're in this together. We're here for you, whatever we see." He nodded and stepped forward, putting the tube in the machine. The screen went staticy for a second before clearing. "Sweet sarsaparilla," our McGucket whispered, staring at the video in shock.
DAY 1 was in the corner of the screen. The video showed a room with charts and diagrams on white-boards and chalk-boards. And standing in the middle of the room, staring at the camera, was a young McGucket. He was probably in his mid-thirties, and even though the difference was drastic, it was clearly the same person. Young McGucket had the same nose, although there was now a pair of small glasses on them. He was clean-shaven with longer hair, a few shades lighter than mine. And there were five fingers on each of his hands.
"My name is Fiddleford Hadron McGucket, and I wish to un-see what I have seen," Young McGucket started. "For the past year, I have been working as an assistant for a visiting researcher. He has been cataloging his findings about Gravity Falls in a series of journals." Dipper pulled the Journal out of his vest and flipped it open, going to the page that had the blueprint we had never been able to figure out on it. "I helped him build a machine which he believed had the potential to benefit all mankind, but something went wrong. I decided to quit the project. But I lie awake at night, haunted by the thoughts of what I've done. I believe I have invented a machine that can permanently erase these memories from my mind. Test subject One: Fiddleford." He held up the memory gun and shot himself with it.
DAY 5 appeared in the corner, a happy McGucket on the screen. "It worked! I can't recall a thing!" There was static and we were now on DAY 22. The room he was in had lost all the diagrams. They were now replaced by Society of the Blind Eye symbols. McGucket was writing something on the cover of a notebook. "I call it the Society of the Blind Eye! We will help those who want to forget by erasing their bad memories!"
DAY 74. McGucket now had stubble and the room he was in had been totaled. "Today I came across a colony of little men, very disturbing. I would like to forget seeing this." He brought up the memory gun and shot himself with it again.
DAY 189. The room was even more of a mess than it had been before. McGucket's hair was starting to go gray. There was a bandage on his chin, his right arm was in a cast and sling, and one lens of his glasses was cracked. "I accidentally hit another car in town today. I feel terri-bibble, t-terrible! I been forgettin' words lately. I wonder if there are any negative side effects…"
DAY 273. Instead of being in the room, McGucket was now in a motel. The sling was gone but his arm was still in a cast. He now had a full beard, not as long as it was now, but it was getting there. "I saw somethin' in the lake! Somethin' big!" He yelled, grabbing two fistfuls of hair and pulling it out, his glasses falling off his face.
DAY 618. He was still in the motel. His beard was longer and he had his normal hat on, covering his head. "My hair's been a-fallin' out so I got this hat from a scarecrow! Hey, are my pants on backwards?" There was another few second of static, then McGucket, looking how he did now came on screen, the junkyard in the background. The day was unknown. He spoke a bit of gibberish then got close to the camera, putting the thumb and pointer finger of each hand around his eye in the shape of a triangle before the video ended completely.
So, all that just happened. I had no idea what to make of all that, and it didn't look like anyone else did either. But the gist was obvious. McGucket was not the Author, and he had founded the Society.
"McGucket," Mabel whispered, patting his shoulder in sympathy. He brushed her off and pulled the memory tube out of the machine.
"Ya kids helped me get my memories back, just like ya said. After all these years, I finally know who I was. I might've messed up in the past, but know that I know what happened before I can begin to put myself together again." He tucked the tube into his overalls and started hamboning.
"Thanks for opening my eyes," I translated to Dipper. He nodded and handed the Journal to him.
"So you weren't the Author, but you worked with him. Do you remember who he was?"
"It's beginning to come back, but I need some time," McGucket admitted. Dipper nodded; we hadn't really been expecting him to remember something so quickly. McGucket looked behind him. "And readin' glasses! Heck!" He grabbed a pair of gold-framed glasses with a green lens and put them on before spitting happily. "I got some rememberin' to do!"
"So Mabel, you still wanna erase those failed summer romances?" Wendy asked, holding up the memory gun. Mabel looked at McGucket and smiled.
"No one likes having bad memories, but maybe it's better to remember the bad things and learn from them than go all denial-crazy trying to forget."
"That's some mature junk right there."
"Yep. Miss Mature, that's me," Mabel said happily before pulled out a poster of Gabe. "You guys wanna help me vandalize this picture of my jerky ex-crush?!" Dipper and I pulled out pens and passed them around, the six of us putting mustaches, buck teeth, an eye-patch, unibrow, and other stuff all over the poster, laughing the whole time.
We grabbed our stuff, including the memory ray and the TV that came with it, and left the Museum. Soos and Wendy got in front, the rest of us climbing in the back. Yes, it was crowded, but after all that happened today, we didn't care. McGucket had climbed in first, going in through the window, so when we got there, he was solving a Rubix Cube. In five seconds flat, it was solved.
"It's comin' back," he whispered to me as we pulled out of the parking lot and started heading towards the junkyard. "Can I see that book you found again?"
"Yeah, here," Dipper said, pulling the Journal out of his backpack and handing it to him. McGucket started leafing through the pages. He stopped on one with a few diagrams and blueprints on it.
"It's all so familiar," he whispered, running his hand over a picture of a fuel gauge. "It's almost like I can remember…"
"It'll come back to you sooner or later," I assured him. There was no doubt in my mind that it would come back. It was only a matter of time…
Stan's POV
"Alright, you're getting closer," I said to myself, pouring fuel into the tank. I had no idea where the kids had run off too, but they had been gone all day, so I wasn't complaining. It had given me a lot of time to work on the portal without being worried about them finding out. I grabbed my coffee mug and the notebook I had been using and walked into the portal room, watching the symbols around the center light up different colors. They say the most beautiful things in the world are often the most deadly, and the machine fit that criteria to a T.
"Every day it's getting stronger," I muttered. Just then, the power surged, yanking the notebook and mug out of my hands and taking my fez off my head and the pen behind my ear with it. I reached out and grabbed my fez, putting it back on my head as the other items entered the center of the machine. "Yes!" I yelled, backing up and throwing my hands into the air.
"GAH!" The thing was so powerful it pulled an old piece of pipe into the air, cutting the back of my hand before the portal took it in. I shrugged; I had felt worse. I went back into the control room and grabbed a role of bandages, starting to wrap my hand in them, talking to myself. "I don't care if it's dangerous. I don't care how long it takes. I'm gonna…"
I noticed the picture of me and the kids I had on the table. They were smart. If they got word of what was going on down here, how would they react? Would they help me or would they try to stop what I was doing? How much would I have to tell them? Would they be able to trust me again? Did they even trust me now? But they hadn't found out yet, and there was only a month left. I could do this. "I'm gonna pull this off and no one is gonna get in my way."