won't be leaving here today
After raining all through the night, the weather shows no signs of relenting the next day. If anything, it's only become worse, trading the fine mist and fog of yesterday for a driving rain that hits the Shack with wet bullets, slapping against the roof and clattering on the windows. It's a deeply unpleasant day to be outside, every burst of wind a slap to the face, each drop of rain a missile. The only thing taking the edge off is the risen temperature, which makes for a lukewarm rainstorm that lacks yesterday's chill.
Despite this, the Shack is not only open, but doing booming business, and Dipper knows this is due to the very strange position the valley is in.
The Woodstick Festival was intended for the weekend only, cut even shorter by the robo-hawks Saturday afternoon. While most of its attendees no doubt planned to leave either Sunday evening or Monday morning, this has become complicated. Programmed to prevent escape, the hawks tore up every tire they could find and sometimes did even worse, turning cars into jagged wrecks. The streets in town are jammed with stranded automobiles and shiny with scattered safety glass; the highway out of the valley is utterly impassable. The few people who have working vehicles can't go anywhere.
The authorities are only beginning to come to grips with the situation. The highway needs to be cleared enough to bring in replacement tires, or at the very least let the buses back in (Dipper heard that Manly Dan volunteered his rig for a tire run). The process of hauling cars to the sides of the roads has begun and will not be ending any time soon.
In short, Gravity Falls is full of people who came to have a good time and now they can't leave.
Long term, this can only be bad. The sheer number of festivalgoers will put a significant strain on Gravity Falls—while many of the attendees have their own campers and trailers, many more bussed in from outlying towns or took the three-hour trip from Portland. In a small town with one hotel, housing is fast becoming an issue. The longer the highway remains closed, the more frustrations will mount.
However, for the moment, Gravity Falls is cashing in.
Only forty-eight hours removed from the invasion, the valley still holds an air of victory, of forged-by-fire comradery. There's still the sense that they are all in this together, and that quality of bonhomie—additionally buoyed by the pure relief—is keeping things not only civil, but downright festive.
Gravity Falls is a very small town; there's not a whole lot to do here. The festival was the main target of the hawks and they wrecked almost everything; trying to pick up where things left off is impossible beyond maybe some food vendors and t-shirt tents. Therefore, the few things there are to do in town are benefitting enormously from a captive audience.
The theater is packed, every showing completely sold out for the entire day. Gravity Malls has more customers thronging through its small complement of stores than it probably gets the entire rest of the year. And even though the valley sits beneath the roiling clouds of a deluge, the public pool is so crowded that a line has formed outside the chain-link fence, the throng kept at bay only through the vigilance (and sheer fury) of Mr. Poolcheck. The restaurants are crammed, the arcade is buzzing, laser tag requires a reservation, and good luck getting into the bowling alley or the mini golf course. Even more pedestrian destinations like the museum and the library are full. Every raincoat, jacket, and umbrella in town has probably sold by now.
And, of course, the Mystery Shack is open for business.
In an unprecedented move, Grunkle Stan has slashed the admission price by a whopping (by his standards) ten percent. In an entirely typical move, this is meaningless because he's also raised the base price by twenty-five percent. But the ten percent discount signs he's slapped all over the place certainly make it look like he's lowering prices for the trapped crowds.
The Shack is operating at maximum grift. Stan and Soos are both running tours, staggered just enough to keep from running into each other; Stan has closed off part of the museum to funnel the walking wallets into the giftshop in the shortest time possible. The weather has given Stan an excuse to halt all outdoor tours of the grounds so that he and Soos are able to run indoor tours back-to-back in a never-ending chain of profit.
Pacifica is at the cash register while Melody moves through the museum between groups, resetting it for each tour. Mabel and Wendy are restocking as fast as they can, taking boxes out of attic storage when necessary. There's even an additional revenue stream in the form of all the people who paid to park RVs on the Shack's back lot and now need amenities like snacks and ice and trashbag ponchos and maybe a Mr. Mystery bobblehead to go along with. Stan is selling through goods and merchandise that's gathered dust for months, if not years.
With the rest of the crew occupied, this leaves Dipper with the very wet task of putting up signs outside and making sure the stream of people walking from town know where to go. He's already parked one of the golf carts near town on Gopher Road with a sign pointing the way and added a few more signs along the route for good measure. The rain erases the distant world and makes any trip through the woods, even one down a gravel road, that much less appealing. Not that it seems to matter. Dipper is starting to think that the Shack could be perched up on one of the cliffs and the tourists would still try to get to it.
A family of four huddled beneath a blue tarp comes up the road; the rain hitting their makeshift shelter is so loud that Dipper almost can't understand one of the women when she speaks.
"Is this the way to the Mystery Hack?" she asks.
Close enough. "Yep, just a little further," he says, pointing towards the bend in the road that obscures the Shack grounds. Every attempt to fix the 'S' on the Shack's sign has proven unsuccessful and by this point Stan should probably ask Ford for some of that alien adhesive.
Dipper risks a glance upwards and receives a well-timed snap of wind to the face in return. Mopping water from his eyes, he notes that the sky looks a bit lighter far to the west. Maybe the rain will finally blow over tonight.
Tired of getting pelted, he plods through the puddles back to the Shack, trusting that the signs will do his work for him. He'd like to go inside for at least a few minutes, get something to drink, something to eat, maybe watch Pacifica handle customers because that's usually amusing. He'll even help out with the tours if that's what needs to get done, he just wants to be out of the rain for a while.
He hasn't forgotten about yesterday, or the day before, or all the questions that demand answers. The work is familiar but none of this is actually normal—the Shack is host to an audience who has nowhere else they can be and the whole valley hangs in the silence after the shock. But there is still a comforting sense of routine in performing chores for Stan, in dealing with the day to day, the business side of things. This is how it was in the beginning—before the journal, before the gnomes—and Dipper finds a precious kernel of stability in knowing that no matter how weird things get, people still want to waste their time and money at what a very serious man once described as a 'goofy, fun knickknack house.'
Trying to avoid the flow of tourists, he enters the Shack via the door to the residence instead of trying to get into the giftshop directly. Even in the front hall, separated from the public areas of the building by several rooms, he can hear the buzz of unfamiliar voices filtering through the walls. He's tempted to go upstairs and take a long break in the isolation of his attic room, but his conscience won't allow it. Grunkle Stan is too tied up with tours to come looking for him, so he'd probably get away with doing nothing indefinitely while everyone else worked, and that's a pretty lousy thing to do.
He allows himself a solitary moment in the kitchen, downing a cup of orange juice before making his way to the giftshop. He crosses the living room and peeks through the swinging door; there's a lot of people browsing the shelves and a long line at the register. Pacifica looks calm, though, so she must have it under control. Dipper pushes through the door and squeezes past a group that's clustered around one of the t-shirt racks.
Pacifica is too busy clanging away on the register to notice Dipper's arrival. Trying to make himself useful, he begins to rearrange one of the display tables, setting up some boxes of Burpin' Stanford Pines pull toys that have been knocked over. Ford is not fond of these toys (to put it mildly, considering he once burned an armful of them); maybe he'll be glad if they sell out.
It's as if this thought is a summons, because a few seconds after Dipper straightens the last box, the vending machine swings open—several tourists jump back with startled shouts. Ford's head pokes around the edge and scans the room.
His face lights up when he spots Dipper. "Ah, there's my protégé. Dipper, I require your immediate assistance!"
Dipper is quick to seize the opportunity, abandoning the merchandise to slip behind the vending machine and descend to the lab.
"I've only just finished testing the new configuration," Ford says as he takes the stairs carefully on his crutches.
Dipper doesn't know what Ford's talking about, but he's about to find out. When they emerge from the elevator, there's a large console in the middle of the room; Ford has somehow managed to wrestle it onto a handcart. Attached to the console by a thick cable is a helmet that Dipper immediately recognizes as the one from Project Mentem.
"One of these days I need to invest in some additional modern computers," Ford notes as he goes over to the handcart. "These old consoles are hardy, but not exactly mobile."
"What are we doing with this?" Dipper asks.
"I've taken the core components from Project Mentem and cut the boards down to just the essentials. This unit will still read thoughts, but it works for surface thoughts only, at the forefront of the mind, and only when directed towards the unit itself. I've added some additional instrumentation for recording purposes."
Dipper frowns, confused. "We're recording our thoughts? Couldn't it already do that?"
"Of course, but we aren't recording our thoughts—or any thoughts, for that matter. Mentem will now record brain activity." Ford snatches a piece of paper off a nearby bench. "I'll need your help to get the unit up the stairs. Once we reach the giftshop, take this release form to Stan's office and make some copies."
Dipper has many more questions, though he can see that Ford is in a hurry, so the questions can wait. He helps Ford haul the handcart up the steps and then runs to Stan's office to make a few dozen copies of the release form. Finished, he returns to the giftshop, but Ford is no longer there.
He approaches the register, dodging patrons as he goes. "Pacifica, did you see where Great-Uncle Ford went?"
"The museum," Pacifica says shortly, her eyes never leaving the register as she punches in yet another transaction.
Soos is leading a large group through the drapery of the museum exit right now, so Dipper doubles back and cuts through the living room, exiting via the front door and circling around the Shack to come back in through the museum entrance. He follows the museum's main corridor until he finally spots Ford; his great-uncle is grappling with the console, trying to move it into an empty space beside the Sascrotch. Dipper steps in to help, and together they manage to drag it into place.
"That will do," Ford says, wiping sweat from his brow. "I'd rather not be in the shadow of that monstrosity—" he indicates the Sascrotch in all its whitey-tighty glory, "—but there's an outlet here. You have the copies? Excellent." Ford digs into one of his pockets and pulls out a fistful of pens, which he deposits, along with the release forms, on a small table nearby. "Finally, we need to borrow Stanley's television. It's an outdated model, so take the handcart."
Stan's TV is an obsolete beast of a machine, its only semi-contemporary feature being that it can produce colors, washed out and fuzzy though they are. When Dipper reaches the living room and attempts to move the television, he quickly discovers that there's little comparison between it and a modern TV. The old CRT has a thick glass screen and is nested in a wooden cabinet that through the passage of decades has melded with the TV and become one extremely heavy piece. Dipper gives up on separating the TV from its enclosure and instead works to get the lip of the handcart underneath so he can use leverage to do the rest.
When he returns to the museum with his inconveniently heavy cargo, Ford is about finished setting up. He has the console plugged in and additional wires are running to the edge of the Sascrotch's dais, which Ford is using as a makeshift seat with his laptop in his hands as he connects a USB adapter. Together, they manage to get the TV positioned on top of the console. Dipper doesn't know exactly how this new, slimmed down version of Project Mentem works, but he can see the cable that's supposed to go to the TV's antenna in. He connects that and also connect the power.
Ford turns the TV on and hits a few switches on the console. The screen comes to life with a green grid on a black background. "There's the standby pattern. Give the helmet a try, Dipper."
Dipper removes his hat and places the metal device on his head. He expects his thoughts to appear on the TV like they did last time, but instead the standby pattern begins to slowly scroll to the left. No words come into being.
"The machine is much less sensitive than you're accustomed to; it won't pick up anything from your subconscious or even your moment-to-moment processes," Ford explains. "Instead, I want you to think at the screen. Think loudly!"
Dipper focuses intently on the screen and thinks, I want these words to be on the TV!
A second later, the green grid is filled with large, green letters: I WANT THESE WORDS TO BE ON
"Uh, I guess I stopped thinking hard enough at the end there," Dipper says sheepishly.
Ford tweaks a few settings on his laptop. "No matter. We don't need perfectly accurate thought reproduction, the novelty of it will be enough."
"But didn't you say we weren't recording thoughts?"
"We aren't. The words are unimportant—what we want is a scan of the user's brain while they're doing the thinking. The data will be anonymous, but I wrote up those release forms to keep things ethical."
As always, Dipper is impressed by his great-uncle's ingenuity. "Wow, I wonder what we'll learn…"
"At best, we might finally crack one of the valley's greatest secrets. At worst, we'll give the tourists something to talk about." Ford sets the laptop aside and levers himself up on his crutches. "That must be Stan now with a tour. Monitor the recording, would you?"
Dipper trades places with Ford, picking up the laptop and making sure the program is ready and waiting for input. While the software is fundamentally the same program that they've been using to record most of their data, Ford has made additional adjustments for Project Mentem and Dipper spends a few moments familiarizing himself. The sound of footsteps and voices grows closer, and then Stan leads a large group of tourists around the hallway corner and into the next section of the museum. There are several exhibits prior to the Sascrotch, but when Stan spots Dipper and Ford, he does a double take and heads right for them.
Stan thrusts his eight-ball cane at them accusingly. "Hey, hey! What the heck are you—"
Before he can say more, Ford hops forward on his crutches and spreads his arms wide. "Folks, today is your luckiest of days!" he says in a booming voice. "Standing just behind me is a genuine marvel of science, a device advanced beyond your wildest dreams! Utilizing the cutting edge in neurological technology, this machine is capable of reading your very thoughts! Unbelievable, I know… and yet, completely true! You have my word as a man of science: Sign one of these release forms and you will witness the power of your own mind!"
Sometimes Dipper forgets that, like Stan, Ford was a child born of the boardwalk and raised in a pawnshop.
The tourists gape at Ford for a moment, then surge forward in a mindless crush towards this new attraction, a school of fish with hooks firmly in mouth.
Stan doesn't require even a moment's pause to orient himself to this sudden opportunity. "That's right! And it's only twenty— uh, forty dollars per person! The line starts here, there you go. You in the back, you need to use the john? Only five bucks—ten if it's number two."
Initially, it's slow going. It's not easy to broadcast a thought to this reduced version of Mentem, and the tourists must be coached. As the line grows shorter, however, Ford learns how to approach the task and winnows out the most effective words of guidance. Phrases scroll haltingly across the screen, often incomplete and muddled, invariably trite—a lot of declarations of familial and romantic love and about a dozen variations of 'I am thinking at this screen.' But it doesn't matter what the thoughts are, and Dipper happily watches the data accumulate.
Grunkle Stan's acceptance of Ford's new attraction has steadily waned as the minutes tick by. Instead of moving swiftly towards the giftshop, his customers are now gathering around Project Mentem, awaiting their turn. This puts Stan's schedule in jeopardy; sure enough, Dipper can hear Soos' next group further down the hall.
Ford has noticed Stan's growing discontent. "We need a change of venue," he tells Dipper. "Try to keep the line moving as quickly as you can."
With that, Ford stumps off into the private reaches of the Shack, leaving Dipper to handle a crowd that's just doubled thanks to Soos' arrival. Despite his disgruntlement at the wrecking of his perfect schedule, at least Grunkle Stan sticks around to help out after he sends Soos running back to get the next tour group before people get tired of waiting and start to leave.
Dipper thinks Stan is probably worrying over nothing. The folks outside can stand out in the rain and wait here, or they can go back to town and wait there—the whole valley is nothing but waiting. There's no downside to waiting here, especially since Soos has extended the Shack's eves at the museum entrance with a makeshift canopy of tarps.
Not quite half an hour later, the situation is becoming impossible. Most of Stan's attractions aren't worth more than a twenty-second gawp or chuckle; Project Mentem is proving so novel that it's far too popular to be situated in the midst of the museum, jammed between the Sascrotch and the Clocktopus. Tourists are piling up in the middle of the hall, craning their necks for a look. Dipper cannot move people through fast enough, because despite Stan's attempts to shorten each person's turn, there's a threshold for reliable data collection that needs to be reached before the helmet goes on to someone else; and Dipper isn't going to jeopardize the data for the sake of commerce. Science has standards.
But he realizes it's just a matter of time before Stan does something drastic, which is why he's relieved when Ford reappears, skirting the crowd on his crutches and waving to get everyone's attention, which isn't working.
"Folks, I need you to— hello? Hmm." He turns and approaches Stan instead.
A few seconds later, Stan's abrasive voice cuts through the hubbub. He bellows a phrase guaranteed to hook the attention of every price-aware tourist: "LIMITED TIME OFFER! Get to the giftshop within the next five minutes, and you get a whole ten percent off any ten or more purchases!"
The questionable worth of this deal does little to deter the crowd, who immediately begin to head towards the shop as Stan points the way. Some of the tourists have already paid for their turn with Project Mentem, and Ford gestures to them.
"We're relocating this attraction, it'll be up and running again shortly," Ford assures them.
Dipper is trying to figure out how to get the console back on the handcart when Wendy shows up to help, making it far less of an ordeal. Together, they tip the machine up and wedge the cart beneath it.
"Be cool if Ford could make some stuff that's less chunky," Wendy notes, swinging her arms back and forth to stretch them.
"Yeah, I know. He's working with what we've got, since we don't have grant money right now," Dipper says.
"What about McGucket?"
Dipper checks the room to make sure Ford isn't within earshot. "That's, uh… complicated."
Wendy knows a bit about Ford and McGucket's fraught history, so she just nods. "Gotcha."
It takes two trips to move the console and the television down the hall to the floor room, where the dance floor has been converted to a theater with the addition of a screen and an old projector. Dipper recognizes both as coming from the museum, where Stan uses them to display spooky images for Summerween. Ford also brought Mabel in to help, and she's just finishing adjusting the lens to fit the screen when Dipper and Wendy bring Project Mentem in.
"I heard this thing's a hit!" she says as they wheel it into place.
"I'm not the showman that Stan is, but I know a thing or two about impressing committees," Ford says. He begins organizing Mentem's many plugs and cables. "Dipper, see if you can't find some chairs to go along the walls; I expect we'll have quite a few people waiting."
"Soos keeps those under the house," Wendy informs Dipper.
The racks of folding chairs are in the cellar, and there's a helpful slab of plywood along the stairs to serve as a ramp. The rain still makes things difficult as they fight to push the carts along the sodden, muddy ground. When they make it back inside, Ford has finished setting up and is testing the apparatus with Mabel's help. Dipper is startled to see an extremely pixelated dog dancing across the projector screen.
"An unexpected ability of the project," Ford explains when he sees Dipper's surprise. "It appears that with a strong enough imagination, the user can project rudimentary images. But it's quite difficult, as you can see—if Mabel can only manage this with her imagination, I doubt the rest of us could even approximate it. I think it's best we keep this feature to ourselves."
"Things are slow enough already," Dipper agrees.
"Our new location should make a difference."
"And Grunkle Stan is okay with us using it?" Dipper asks as he unfolds a chair.
"Oh yes. He plans to route tourists here after they finish the standard tour… meaning they'll exit through the giftshop a second time," Ford notes drolly.
Dipper can see how that might appeal to Stan.
With room to work and a crowd eager to supply craniums from which to source data, Dipper and Ford continue right up to close. Stan has kept the Shack open hours past its usual closing time, but even such a rich gravy train must eventually roll to a stop. As darkness closes in over the forest, the tourists finally begin to thin out, most trudging to town through the persistent rain and others retiring to the back lot where their vehicles are. Stan has been kept energetic by the sheer profit he's amassing, but by late evening there are dark rings beneath his eyes (Soos is passed out on one of the empty chair carts, his snores providing an odd ambience for the tourists still at Project Mentem); he finally opts to flip the signs over to 'CLOSED.' Over the next thirty minutes the remnants of the day's last tours slowly filter out of the giftshop and then the Shack is finally quiet.
Retreating to the dining room, Dipper and Ford go to the table to contemplate their bonanza.
"Yes… Yes, this is excellent!" Ford exclaims as he scrolls through the new files. "Finally, we have real, substantive data to collate. The more the better, of course. I expect we'll have the chance to gather additional scans tomorrow."
Dipper knows something is still missing. "What's our control group?"
"We are!" Ford begins writing in his journal, the motion of his pen sharp and excited. "We'll scan the whole crew, ourselves included, and as many resident townsfolk as we can. Eventually, we'll scan some baseline subjects who live at a sufficient distance from the barrier's influence… I wish we had the means when we visited Portland. For the time being, our own scans will act as the point of comparison."
That makes sense. It would be nice to have some non-Weird brains as a basis, but the denizens of the Shack and the larger valley will do for now. Dipper is enthusiastic to get started, but it's getting late; he's spent the last couple minutes fighting a tremendous yawn.
Ford shuts the laptop with a satisfied motion. "Tempting, I know, but the data can wait. Tomorrow, we'll collect even more."
After such a long day, the crew of the Shack disperses without much in the way of commentary. Soos and Melody go home—Wendy must have done the same at some point, because she's gone—and everyone else retreats to their own spaces to get ready for the night. Dipper doesn't see Pacifica or Stan in the time it takes him to prepare for bed, and he doesn't see Mabel again until he walks into their attic room. She's on her phone, lying with her head hanging off the edge of the bed, her hair falling to touch the floor.
"Did Brendan swing by today?" Dipper asks, realizing that the other teen might have.
"Nope, he's grounded. Sort of. He's not really sure if he's grounded or not? I guess things are weird with his parents right now," Mabel says.
"Yeah, they'd have to be…" Dipper says, glad that he and Mabel's parents are far away in Piedmont.
Mabel lets her phone rest on her stomach. "So did you and Grunkle Ford get all the juicy science you were squeezing out of people's skulls?"
"We weren't juicing people, Mabel." He pauses. "…Not physically, anyway."
"Hah! Well, you'll have more chances at all that sweet brain juice tomorrow. I think Grunkle Stan has big plans!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah, he's been on the phone forever."
"Really? Huh. He hates talking on the phone." Dipper flops into his bed and reaches for the lantern. "I'm sure we'll find out whatever he's up to when he makes us work on it."
"Preach!" Mabel says, then sighs wistfully. "I miss our work strike."
Dipper puts the light out and lies back on his bed, listening to the house creak as it settles in the night air. It's true that he does miss being able to shirk his chores, but what he misses a lot more is the freedom he had before the second maze. Back then, the chores had been worth it, because they were just temporary obstacles on the road to adventure. Now the road is closed; and yet, adventure arrived anyway. Grounded or not, the danger came to them.
With any luck, Grunkle Stan is realizing the same thing.
Won't Be Leaving Here Today by The Holdout (Grafton, 2021)