Ha ha ha, take that, writer's block! For too long you've kept me pinned down by indecision and malaise, but despite your best efforts, I have written another chapter to appease my long-suffering readers!


Brilliant, Stanford.

Of all the ideas you've had in the last forty years, up to and including making that utterly idiotic deal with Bill, offering to find the truth teeth which were thrown into the BOTTOMLESS PIT has to be at least in the top ten. How exactly would you expect to find them? If they don't reappear within 24 hours, they're gone for good-you know that!

It was the first idea that sprang to mind!

Yes, well, it was a dumb idea.

Not for the first time, Ford wondered if Bill had somehow managed to re-infiltrate his mind, and had to tap his skull so the reassuring clank, clank would reassure him that that was impossible.

Speaking of Bill, as long as he was in the basement he decided to take a moment to check on the rift; he had seen neither hide nor hair of him since arriving back home, but Ford knew from experience that that in no way meant the little monster wasn't watching. And it was a strange mixture of startling and oddly satisfying to realize that this was the first time since yesterday that he'd given him much thought.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that the snow globe-shaped containment unit had remained intact.

For now, at least. Something as commonplace as this probably won't be enough to cage something so powerful as a rift in time and space. I'll have to decide on a more permanent solution at some point…perhaps some sort of adhesive coating?

Out of morbid curiosity, Ford picked up the rift and held it up to his ear, like he used to do with sea shells that he and Stanley would find on the beach; instead of the ocean, however, he could hear a pulsing, thrumming noise…and perhaps he was imagining it, but it seemed to be accompanied by the faint echo of a familiar high-pitched, mocking cackle.

With a shudder, he quickly put the rift back in its cupboard and locked it away.

Then he began to pace up and down the lab in an effort to help himself think.

Maybe if he could solve at least one problem, it would make it easier to focus on coming up with an answer to the other one.


To his own surprise, Stan had managed to have a semi-decent, dreamless sleep.

And when he opened his eyes, he failed to feel a fresh round of pain in some random area of his anatomy like he usually did first thing in the morning.

I mean, sure, he still felt old and decrepit, and for some reason his mouth was a little sore…but on the whole he felt less like he was about to fall apart at the seams any second than usual.

Huh. Maybe Ford's bio-doohickeys really work.

With a yawn Stan slowly sat up, swinging his legs to the side in a familiar motion; with one hand he grabbed his glasses and slipped them onto his face, and with the other reached for the glass of water containing his dentures. He pulled them out, shaking the excess water off, and tried to put them into his mouth-

Except that something was already in there, blocking the way.

No no NO PLEASE tell me Stanford didn't sneak in and put those stupid truth teeth in my mouth while I was sleeping, I'm gonna kill him-!

He dropped his normal dentures back onto the table and reached into his mouth to try and pull the gold ones out…but they wouldn't come out. And they didn't even feel like dentures.

They felt a lot like his normal, regular teeth used to.

What the Sam Hill?

Stan raced for the bathroom, checked in the mirror.

No signs of gold, or anything else outta the ordinary. Just a relatively normal set of big, off-white teeth, exactly like the ones he used to have.

"StanFORD!"


"...Remarkable," Ford finally said, tapping a finger against Stan's teeth before straightening and rubbing his chin. "The bio-nanites must have viewed their loss as a significant injury, and decided to recreate them." He looked at Stan with a small confused frown. "...I didn't even realize you needed dentures."

It was only due to the kids watching from the gift shop doorway with worried little frowns that Stan bit down on the retort he wanted to give about that; instead he asked, "So should I be worried?"

Ford shook his head. "No, I don't think so. The nanites' purpose is to repair damage, not cause it."

"Are they still…in me?" Stan looked down at his arm uncomfortably, wondering if he'd ever be able to sleep again if he had to think about hundreds of tiny green doodads living in his bloodstream or whatever.

"Generally after they repair whatever damage they can find, they dissolve naturally."

Rats. Guess that means I can kiss any hopes of selling tourists the Elixir of Life goodbye.

"Awww, so that means I wouldn't get to have hundreds of tiny friends living in my blood?"

No prizes for guessing who asked that.

Ford chuckled as he looked down at Mabel, who along with Dipper had stepped fully into the room. "Unfortunately, no. As handy as it would be to have them exist in perpetuity within your system, the scientists who created them believed there were too many inherent risks involved."

Dipper tilted his head. "It, um, sounds like they're kinda like an advanced version of the healing spirits that can be summoned up by clerics in…" he stopped, blushing, before muttering, "...than this one game."

Ford's pen, which had been diligently scribbling in his journal, screeched to a halt, and his gaze snapped to meet his nephew's. "Do you mean the healing spirits that can be conjured in Dungeons, Dungeons and More Dungeons?"

Dipper let out a shocked squeak, then cleared his throat and said, trying to make his voice sound deeper, "You know about Dungeons, Dungeons and More Dungeons?!"

The way Ford's eyes brightened was like watching tiny light bulbs turning on behind them. "Children in this dimension still play that?! I was worried that it had gone out of fashion while I was traveling the multiverse!"

"Are you kidding?! It's one of my favorite games!" Dipper didn't seem to notice that his voice had immediately gone up an octave again. "Especially since exploring the woods has given me hundreds of ideas for campaigns and characters and stuff!"

"Believe it or not, I've actually done that once or twice, because you're right, this is the perfect place for such inspiration!"

When both of them began reciting the dorky theme thingy together, and then burst out laughing, Stan and Mabel glanced at each other in a way that said without words, Great. Now there's two of them.


As freaky as it was having teeth again and having to hear two mega-nerds talking each other's ears off about "natural 38s" and "rolling for strength checks," the day had to go on.

Stan and Mabel slipped away to the kitchen as their respective siblings started talking about campaigns, and quickly fried up some bacon and eggs.

It felt…weird, being able to chew with his own teeth again. Not in a bad way, just…weird. It kept startling him whenever he took a new bite.

He was startled out of his thoughts by Mabel's voice.

"Grunkle Stan? Are you okay?"

Stan glanced at her, and smiled. "Yeah, thanks, pumpkin. Just peachy."

…Okay, okay, it wasn't his best lie ever. And he could tell from the look Mabel gave him that she wasn't buying it.

"It's okay if you're not," she told him, far more seriously than usual. "Cuz if I thought Dipper had tried to kill me and I didn't know whether to believe him when he said he didn't, I'd be pretty upset too." She reached over and patted his arm.

Stan's hand clenched around his fork, but he just finished eating wordlessly, then headed upstairs to get dressed.

He was buttoning up his shirt when he heard the heavy tread of boots outside his door, followed by a knock.

"Stanley?"

Stan didn't answer, hoping Ford would take the hint and go away. The wounds from yesterday's talk (or from the last forty years, if you wanted to get technical about it) were still pretty raw, and he needed to get into his normal routine (sans working on the portal, obviously) to help him feel a little more like himself before he was ready to deal with them.

Naturally, Ford did no such thing.

"...I've given it some thought, and the truth teeth are most likely not a viable option, under the circumstances. So instead I've narrowed down two other possibilities for…making it easier to talk," Ford said after apparently realizing he wasn't gonna get an answer. "I wasn't sure which one to choose, and thought you would appreciate the option."

What does that even mean, 'possibilities for making it easier to talk'?

It's never a good sign when he says stuff like that.

…On the other hand, Stan had to concede that it sounded like at least he was trying. And he had agreed to let Ford try, and unlike some people around here he actually made an effort to keep his promises.

So he replied at last, "Hit me. Not literally this time."

He regretted the cheap shot as soon as it came out, but after a moment of silence all Ford said was, "...The simplest equivalent to the truth teeth would most likely be alcohol. If you don't have any of your own, from what I recall the Corduroy family has their own very potent brew known as scumble-"

Stan opened the door enough to give him a flat stare. "I'm not gettin' either of us drunk when there's kids in the house."

Ford did a slow owl blink, before sheepish realization set in. "...Right."

"What's the other option?" Stan stepped out, tying his tie and slinging his suit jacket over his shoulder.

Ford swallowed, and held up one of his journals to an open section. "The Evitceles Truth Spell. In principle it's very similar to the truth teeth, except that there's an option to cast it so that the afflicted party, or parties, are only compelled to tell the truth to one specific person, or to each other." He pointed to a few incantations he'd written down thirty-plus years ago. "All I'd need is a sample of your DNA, some lapis lazuli stones, two purple candles, and some chalk."

Ford chuckled as he turned the book around to face himself. "It's fascinating, honestly. I'm not certain if this was created by whoever was responsible for the truth teeth, or if there was just a phase in Gravity Falls's history in which multiple people wanted to create situations that rendered others incapable of lying."

On second thought, getting drunk is sounding better and better.

Stan chewed his lip thoughtfully, and again was startled by being able to feel the sensation through his own real teeth.

Ugh, that probably meant he was gonna have to start brushing again, didn't it? One of the nice things about having dentures had been that the only cleaning you had to worry about was soaking them in-

"Mr. Pines!" Soos's voice called from downstairs, "We got tourists, and they're all looking a little freaked out by the damage from your epic robot battle yesterday!"

Eh, nothing Stan couldn't work with.

He glanced at Ford as he finished buttoning his jacket, and pushed back his fez to a more comfortable angle.

"I'll think about it while I'm suckering these yahoos."

Without waiting for a response, he headed downstairs.


In the show, Stan's denture care is honestly kind of terrible. We only see him putting them in water once; the rest of the time he just sleeps with them in.
Either that, or Hirsch never originally meant for him to have dentures and just included them in the Bottomless Pit episode as a hastily-thrown-together explanation for how Mabel would get him to stop lying for a while.
Knowing the show, it could probably go either way...

Also, the healing spirits is my own idea. I was thinking that they're kinda similar to a Patronus, in that the cleric who conjures one does so based on their level of positive relationship with whoever they wish to heal, and if their relationship is more negative or whatever then they have to roll a strength check to see if it's strong enough to heal them...but I'm too lazy to try and write that into the chapter.