5: Getting Nowhen
(?)
"What the heck?" Mabel asked as the world vanished around them.
"Whoa!" Dipper held onto the pen and pad, but his tattoos vanished, and suddenly he was in the same outfit that Lolph had provided them. So was Mabel. Their disguises were gone, too, along with the bonfire clearing.
Instead, they had boomped down on their butts to the floor of a white room, cubical, eight by eight by eight feet. No windows, no doors, but it had light—coming from the ceiling or the walls or everywhere. "What happened?" Mabel asked, rubbing her injured pride.
The wall behind her told them, in a patient, uninflected voice: "Your time limit for this part of the investigation has expired and you have been returned to the ready room or time-prison cell."
"Which one is it?" Dipper asked.
"Its exact status yet to be determined."
"Prison?" Mabel asked, springing to her feet and pounding on the wall. "No prison can hold Mabel Pines! Get me a mouthpiece! I was framed!"
"Your antiquated moving-picture references have been noted. And that tickles. The Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squad has a message for you: Determine the next stage of your investigation and enter the coordinates and engage the time-travel device and you will be released."
"Great," Dipper said. "Look, uh, wall, all we have so far is a mess. Uh, can you see?"
"Each wall is embedded with photoreceptors."
Dipper rolled his eyes. "Oh, good. Look, here's the clue we found. Numbers, see, like a cipher? I thought it was an A1Z26, but that makes no sense. Here's my first attempt to decipher it."
He held up the sheet with the gibberish:
hdct hlbbdt cqh pcfdo
vdty jrrh
akd hdvlgd yru qrw kcvd hdadgae cqcgktrqlepe lq alpd olqde
yru wloo qddh la irt yrut qdxa alpd odcb
hrq'a oda cqy abcde cjdqae iroorw yru
wd qddh c bocq ar tdegud akd pdq glbkdt hdeatrydh cqh alpd fcfy arr
l krbd yru kcvd c bocq
qdxa goud le wkdtd cqh wkdq yru awr wdtd frtq
jrrh ougn
fodqhlq
"Can you help?" he asked. "Like run this through a supercomputer—"
"Negative. The TPAES analysis has indicated that any helpful input from TPAES will contaminate the effort and result in your never being able to locate the target."
"Target?" Mabel asked. She mimed holding a shotgun. "You mean as 'Be vewy, vewy quiet. I'm hunting Bwendins?'"
"Your humorous reference to a trademarked animated cartoon character is noted. For the record, ha ha. There is no intent to shoot the target. The target must be persuaded to remedy the situation of which you are aware. You are authorized to know the code word for the operation is Boughbreak."
Great. As in when the bough breaks, the baby—"I'm liking this less," Dipper confessed. "Can we have privacy?"
"No. Your actions must be monitored."
"And, uh, reported?"
"No. No human agent of TPAES may be made aware of your actions before the outcome is decided by success or failure. That is to avoid contamination."
"Gotcha." Dipper clicked his pen. "Um. OK, have to trust you on that one, so I'll work on this. Please don't interrupt."
The wall answered with silence. For a few minutes Dipper scribbled.
"What's wrong, Brobro?" Mabel asked. They both lay on the floor on their stomachs—more comfortable than sitting with their backs against a wall—and she looked on.
Dipper showed his work, not that it seemed to mean anything. "Well, see, in the cipher, 1 ought to be A, 2 should be B, 3 C, and so on. But that produces nothing except this mess. Something's off. The letters have been shifted or something. Let me do a count."
He clicked the ballpoint so the point was inside the barrel, then tapped each number as he went through the cipher. He did this twenty-four times, then scratched his head. "Huh. This doesn't really help."
"What's the deal?" Mabel asked.
"Well, I'm doing a frequency count," Dipper explained. "See, in normal English—maybe this isn't English! No, wait, I have to assume it is or I'll get nowhere. In normal English, the letter that appears most frequently is E. That means that in the cipher, E would be number 4. Normally, see, it would be number 5, because it's the fifth letter of the alphabet. In order, the next most common letters are T, A, O, N, R, I, S, H, and D. OK, so if the numbers were shifted back, making 5 4, then A should be 2. Instead of 26, Z would be 1—what's wrong?"
"I think I'm going stir-crazy," Mabel said. "Or you are. This is like living in a bowl of alphabet soup! Why can't we just do this like Grunkle Stan on Cash Wheel? Maybe it says 'Shut your yaps!'"
"We can't just guess. Have some patience," Dipper advised. "I can't see the pattern yet, because I don't think 2 can stand for A. Not enough appearances. Looks like 3. But how could 3 be A and 4 be E? I'm missing something."
"Man," Mabel muttered, "I don't understand any of this. I really do feel like Elmer Fudd."
Dipper was chewing on the pen. "Hm?"
Mabel nudged him. "You know, 'Be vewy vewy—"
"Mabel! You can't just cross-reference characters from Warner Brothers like that!"
"Deadpool does it."
"You're too young to see Deadpool. It's rated R."
"No, I'm the older twin, remember. You're still too young to see it. I snuck out last February and caught it. They didn't even check my ID. If Deadpool can do it I can. Elmer Fudd! Elmer Fudd! Elmer Fudd!"
"Shush, that's so distracting—but wait a minute, wait a minute, let me try something. Oh ho!"
She slapped his shoulder. "Don't you dare call me that! I'm your sister!"
Dipper flinched, but said, "No, that only was an exclamation of surprise. Look here—this word." He copied it out: -22-4-20-25. Under it he wrote his conjecture: V-E-R-Y. "I got that from your reference: vewy. Very in non-Fudd speak."
"And that works with the number thing?" Mabel asked.
"No. And yes."
Mabel rolled on her back and covered her face with both hands. "Gah!"
Dipper sat up and said, "Look, the V should be 22 normally, and it is. But the E should be 5, and it's 4. The R should be 18, but it's 20. The Y is normal again, 25. Some of the letters' numbers are different, but some are the same."
Still through her hands, Mabel asked, "Are we both the same, you and me? I mean both of us insane?"
Dipper clicked his pen. "I think I see what's going on. Blendin inserted a key word at the beginning of the alphabet, one that didn't repeat any letters. Like, oh, WHITE. Then he started the alphabet, but he skipped the ones already in the key word. Like W-1, H-2, I-3, T-4, E-5, A-6, B-7, C-8, D-9, F-10. Because E has already been used, see?"
Mabel still didn't move her hands from her face and said in a muffled way, "No."
"Hold on, I think I have an idea." Dipper looked at his frequency count. "What if the first word is 'dear?' Look at the first line."
Mabel leaned her chin on her hand and stared at 8-4-3-20-/8-12-2-2-4-20-/3-17-8-/16-3-6-4-15. "I see it," she said.
"It looks like the 4-3 in the first four-letter word is E-A. Let's assume that 8 is D, 4 is E, like the frequency suggests, 3 is A, and 20 is R. If I substitute—" he wrote quickly—"I get D-E-A-R. That makes the next word D-12-2-2-E-R. Next is A-17-D, see? D something double letter E R. Dipper! Dipper and . . . "
"Me, Mabel!" she said happily as she finally sat up and looked. "Yeah, the A and the E are in the right place!'
"Next word is the one you mentioned, 'very,' and the next one, with a double letter and ending in D, is probably good."
Mabel frowned. "Yeah, but what is it?"
"Good! Very good, see?"
Mabel bounced on her butt. "That kind of good! Yay for us! High five!"
"Ow!"
"You know I high five hard!"
Dipper was again scrawling letters, crossing some out and changing them. "Mabel, I think we can figure this out!"
Mabel crossed her arms like Grunkle Stan when he oversaw them dusting the gift shop. "Do it. You figure. I'll supervise!"
And that was how they discovered where and when to go next. Oh, and that the key word at the beginning of Blendin's cipher was TPAES.