the ever closing door

It's movie night at Wendy's, and as is now tradition Wendy has taken Dipper's battered old hat from its place of honor atop her dresser and donned it, just as Dipper has retrieved her former hat from his suitcase. Mabel usually joins in, but this evening she's off with Candy and Grenda and thus it's just Dipper, Wendy, and Pacifica. There's a terrible creature feature on public access that's ripe for ridicule and Pacifica has taken quickly to the practice, as mockery comes quite naturally to her (and the films provide a far more harmless target for her scorn, which is nice).

Wendy and Dipper have already seen this particular example of cinematic incompetence, so their attention is divided.

"Navigation is somewhere here," Dipper says as he and his older friend pore over a crudely drawn side-section map of Crash Site Omega. "Ford didn't usually go that deep because McGucket didn't want to, and it's risky to go alone. But we'll have the whole team, almost, so we should be fine."

"There's no actual aliens anymore, right?" Wendy asks.

"There were some active security drones in the holding section. Ford doesn't think there's anything like that still functioning, but we'll take some magnet guns just in case."

"Too bad. Guess I'll never clobber an alien."

"What if they were peaceful?"

"Then I'd make out with an alien! Get some tentacle action," Wendy says, wiggling her tongue and fingers as her eyes bulge.

"Wow, that's… incredibly gross," Dipper laughs.

"Don't judge."

Pacifica interrupts their planning with a loud scoff. "Do you see this? They just changed the actor in the middle of the scene!"

"Yeah, they do that, like, three times," Wendy says. "Major turnover, I guess."

Dipper circles another area of interest and then puts the cap back on his marker with a decisive snap. "Tomorrow, ten o'clock. We'll have plenty of time to get back before dark. There won't be any light at the bottom of the ship, though, so bring extra flashlights."

"I'll have flashlights out the butt," Wendy tells him with a thumbs up. "I mean, not literally… as far as you know."

"That's disgusting," Pacifica says.

Wendy rolls her eyes. "I'm not actually putting a flashlight up— oh, you mean this scene. Yeah, that dude's guts are just a garden hose, you can totally tell in a second."

"Keep watching the other guy. When the camera cuts after they go up the stairs, he trips on the top step and his wig falls off," Dipper tells Pacifica.

"You know it's bad when Duck-tective has higher production values," Wendy muses.

"I'm sure I'd notice even more if my boyfriend was actually watching the movie with me," Pacifica says tartly.

Dipper rolls up the map and scoots across Wendy's bed to join Pacifica at the foot of it. She's already versed in the plan, having been there when Ford drew the map. Wendy stretches her lean frame out next to them, cushioning her chin on her folded arms. They all laugh when the wig comes off, then again a few moments later when the film awkwardly cuts away from an actor who's clearly forgetting his lines.

"You really think there's anything left after all this time?" Wendy asks quietly when there's a lull in the action.

"I don't know," Dipper says. "I guess we'll find out."

The next morning, Dipper rises bright and early, double checking his backpack and making sure he has everything he might need. Everyone arrives not too long after breakfast, and soon the team is assembled on the porch: Dipper, Mabel, Pacifica, Wendy, Candy, Grenda, and Soos, who, in theory, provides some level of adult supervision. It's a full squad, the porch loud with conversation and the jingling and clanking of carabiners and canteens. Ford meets them there, stumping out the doorway on his crutches with papers held beneath his arm.

"A fine day for an expedition!" he notes, taking in the bright and cloudless sky. "I'll be brief so you can get underway." Extracting the papers, he hands out photocopies of the same map Dipper showed to Wendy the previous night. "Your goal is to access the central navigational computer of Crash Site Omega. It's deep inside the wreck, so it'll take some doing to reach it. You need to find any links to the maze hearts and their origin. We don't know if the hearts are related to the crash site, so you may find nothing; it's also possible that any evidence is long since lost."

"Question: Will there be Boss-Lobsters?" Grenda asks.

"Hmm, yes, the twins mentioned you encountered the creature on your last trip to the site. I believe you came across it in the upper decks, on one of the retractable landing shells. You'll be there only briefly; once you step off the ladder, there should be an exit ramp opposite you. It will take you to the central concourse, and from there you can descend to navigation."

"No time for gross ol' Boss-Lobsters, we're on a mission!" Mabel proclaims.

"Out of the way, Boss-Lobster! We are too important for you!" Candy says fiercely.

"If we see that thing again, I am going to flip out," Pacifica says tightly.

Soos shakes his head. "I don't know, dude… Three appearances is, like, the max. A fourth would be kinda repetitive."

Dipper is surprised when Wendy doesn't join in Soos' speculation. Instead, her focus remains on Ford; she seems to be taking her future position very seriously.

"We're on it, doc," she says.

Mabel leaps off the porch and points dramatically towards the tree line. "To adventure!"

"It's that way," Pacifica says, pointing in the opposite direction.

Mabel spins around, finger still in the air. "To adventure!"

They begin the hike to the crash site, up the back of the valley. With its view-obstructing trees and looming cliffs, Gravity Falls always feels bigger than it actually is. The crater isn't huge in diameter—if it were all open ground, an intrepid team could walk from one end to the other within a day. But in reality, that walk would be complicated by the difficulty of the forest terrain and locales like the Enchanted Forest, which Dipper is positive is bigger from within than its borders suggest. The valley is less about breadth than density; there are many obstacles and wonders packed within.

The hike isn't any easier than last time but at least the weather is better. There's barely a cloud above and it's warm, but not too warm. It's easy for Dipper to lose himself in the beauty of the valley, the trees rustling gently in the breeze beneath the bright atmosphere. They move through a verdant fullness, green grass below, blue sky above, tree trunks and undergrowth crowding all around.

Then they enter a small clearing and find a disabled robo-hawk sitting there in the dusty sunlight, a reminder that the nature here is not entirely natural. Grass and other small plants have already begun to cover its lower portions, making the tentative first steps to engulfing the craft. If the town never claims this wreck, then the forest will.

The sun is high overhead when they reach the hill, and after emerging from the shade of the trees the direct illumination is painfully bright. Far to the north, the mining trestle connects the jagged cliffs, forming nearly the exact shape of the enormous craft that lies buried beneath the mound on which they stand. It seemed impossible to Dipper before that no one ever noticed the craft's presence—it's not hidden especially well and lies just beneath the soil for a good distance in every direction. Now, of course, he knows why it goes unremarked upon. For outsiders, it's forgotten; for the locals, it's just one more pocket of Weirdness to avoid.

Grenda pushes aside the rock which hides the access panel. Once again, the group goes down, down into the dark, the ladder swaying with their movements over depths that are best not contemplated while climbing. Dipper keeps his mind on his hands and his feet and doesn't allow himself to think about the chasm beneath him.

Things have changed when they reach the bottom. What was once a chest-high reservoir of rainwater has become an ankle-deep reflecting pool, albeit one too muddy to reflect much of anything. Dipper's boots squelch in the shallow muck as he surveys what Ford called a 'landing shell,' a spot he hadn't examined too closely on his first trip and was distracted by a Boss-Lobster on the second. It's a large platform with raised sides and a roof like a concert hall, curving off into the darkness. It must retract, he reasons, to allow for craft to land within the upper hull.

"So far, so Boss-Lobsterless," Wendy says cheerfully. "Is that the exit ramp Ford was talking about?"

Dipper looks to where she's indicating and sees it, a spiral ramp that bends down and out of sight. Last time, the entrance would have been submerged, and the ramp itself a waterfall. "Looks like it. Come on, guys, we're going deep this time."

The ramp is much steeper than is comfortable, no doubt designed for nonhuman physiology. It takes a while to reach the bottom, and by the time they do, they are deep enough within the craft that the meager light from the entrance is too distant to matter. Their flashlights scroll across the strange, angled walls and floors, illuminating the hieroglyphs and the dust of ages. The floor here is covered in several inches of half-dried sludge. It doesn't smell great, reeking of mildew and decay.

Dipper tries using his compass to determine the right direction; the top entrance is roughly above the east side of the craft, so they need to go west. "Let's try that corridor," he says, aiming his flashlight at it. The hallway is broad, and its entrance is situated next to some smaller doorways, which Dipper hopes means it leads somewhere considered vital. Ford said that he and McGucket never made too much progress with the alien language, so without Ford's translator (a device that Dipper really wishes his great-uncle had the tools to duplicate) they can't count on signs for direction, not unless they find another sign like the one that Mabel found for the alien bathroom. Of course, even if they do, what does a navigation room look like?

Soos seems to be thinking the same thing. "So are we looking for one of those big wheels?" he wonders.

"A spaceship moves in three dimensions, and, uh, not in water… so I don't think a rudder would be super useful," Dipper says.

"Maybe they don't have a navigation room," Grenda theorizes.

"What if they steered with their minds?" Candy closes her eyes tightly, like she's trying to send the ship mental signals.

Mabel's eyes light up. "Yeah, they could control the ship with the power of their gooey alien brains!"

Candy opens her eyes and sighs. "My brain is not gooey enough."

Wendy just laughs. "Come on, guys. If Ford said it's down here, then I bet he's right."

Dipper concurs. Alien explorers would keep records. Whether those records still exist or not is up in the air, but they must have existed at one point.

They go deeper, descending a series of ramps that seem never-ending, curving off each other into odd, slanted hallways and enormous chambers steeped in total darkness. It's completely alien, and yet, it almost starts to feel familiar…

Dipper remembers the upside-down maze and its infinite, suffocating dark, and suddenly the impossible weight of the ship seems to hang above him, pressing him into the black. He freezes, unable to move as his breath catches in his throat and his vision narrows to the bright cone from his flashlight, its beam seeming to shrink as the ink of the depths begins to bury him. He clenches his jaw and squeezes his eyes shut against the nothingness, waiting for that swift and ghastly flash of green, for Emelia to scream at him and say—

"Are you okay?"

Dipper's eyes snap open. There's no green, and the darkness is cut through by a bevy of other flashlights, giving the corridor a dim glow. Pacifica is standing very close to him, her face near to his, and the shifting lights shimmer in her pupils. She has one eyebrow raised, her expression slightly creased with concern.

Right. He's in the crashed UFO. The whole team is with him. He's fine. Everything's fine.

The horror leaves him all at once, and with the force of a ruptured balloon. "Yeah," he squeaks in reply. Clearing his throat, he adds more convincingly, "I'm cool."

She doesn't look like she believes him, but before she can say anything else he steps around her and presses on, squeezing his fingers into tight fists to stop their trembling, not wanting to speak again until his heart ceases its jackhammer pounding.

He can keep it together because he has a mission, and he bends all his focus towards completing it. As the corridor twists to the left and bends downwards again, they run into their first real obstacle: A glimmering pool of water. It's collected on the ramp down, filling the entire hall up to the point where it starts to descend. The water is too dirty to see through, but there are windows on either side of the hall, and through them Dipper can see other rooms, which are dry.

He shines his light onto the pool, the greenish water glowing in the beam. "Look, I bet there's a door down there, and it must still be watertight. Otherwise, all this water would have just kept going down."

"What are you thinkin'? Detour?" Wendy asks. She goes to the left and puts a hand against the window, which is thick and has a reflective quality that makes Dipper think it isn't glass. She peers through it. "I can see another door. Maybe we can get through that way."

Candy is looking through the right window. "The door on this side goes the wrong way," she tells them.

"I could swim down and open the door," Grenda suggests.

Pacifica looks down into the murky water with her nose wrinkled. "You really shouldn't."

Soos strokes his chin. "How do you open an alien door, though?"

"Yeah, we haven't actually used a door yet," Wendy says, leaning back from the window. "Even if you dive down there, you won't know what to do."

"Ugh, how did Grunkle Ford open that bathroom last time? Think, Mabel!" Mabel says, pressing her palms to her temples.

"It may not be the same anyway," Dipper says. "Let's try to go around."

It takes them a few minutes to figure out how to open the side door; there's no power, so it's a matter of manually popping the interior latches open and pushing the door aside. The doors are all what humans would consider 'pocket' doors, which makes manipulating them that much more difficult. Luckily, they open to the side instead of upwards.

Instead of leading into the corridor immediately adjacent, a ramp takes them upwards to a room perched over all the other hallways, offering a commanding view of the situation. It's a sort of observation room, a terminal dominating the end of the space, surrounded by filmy windows. Dipper can only speculate as to its function, but it seems like a good spot to direct traffic from, perhaps for cargo transfer. Dipper goes to the front of the room and braces himself on the edge of the console; the floor is slightly tilted, which only adds to the already disorienting architecture.

Wait.

It's not just the floor that's tilted—the entire craft is tilted. The whole thing leans forward, its nose buried in the dirt from its apocalyptic crash, skidding to a halt through unimaginable tons of earth. It settled back when it came to rest, yes, but not completely. And that has interesting implications.

"Guys, check this out," Dipper says, gathering the group to him. "The ship is tilted downwards, right? See how we're all leaning a little bit? That means the water is collecting at the fore, but a lot of these doors are still watertight. If we can open the right doors, the water will run down ahead of us and clear the way."

"Isn't the thingy-ma-bob we're looking for down there though?" Mabel says.

"Maybe we can drain that too? I don't know, but we don't have any other way to move all that water. Either we take a chance, or we don't get to the navigation room at all."

"True, true," Mabel says.

Dipper turns around and approaches the console. "Parts of the ship still have power; me and Grunkle Ford learned that the hard way. Maybe this will work…"

He presses his hands to the console, the metal cold and slightly damp. To his delight, it responds, feeble light shining forth as it wakes up. Most of the display is dead, but there are a few buttons that are now glowing, if only weakly. Of course, there's a big difference between turning on a control panel and moving a door. And even if there's enough power, there's no guarantee the door mechanisms will function.

"It's crazy this thing works," Wendy observes as Dipper studies the console.

"They built stuff to last," Dipper says.

"Dude, if we ever get this kind of tech, I'm out of a job," Soos says.

"Nah, you'll be in charge of the Shack for good by then," Wendy assures him.

There are six squares on the panel, arranged in a loose half-circle. Two of them are dark, but the other four are outlined by dim, white light. Dipper tentatively presses the one on the far left—nothing happens. The next two in order are unlit, and also provide no result. But when he presses the fourth one, a distant grinding noise can be heard.

"Oh! That door almost opened!" Grenda yells, pointing through her observation window.

"It's stuck halfway," Candy explains.

Dipper hurries forward to look. Through the viewing window along the top of the mid-level corridor directly below, he can see a door that has opened halfway.

"Nice! Okay, so these are doors," he says, returning to the panel. "So, if that's for the corridor just below us, then this one must be for where we just came from, to the right."

He presses the button and they all run over to the righthand window, looking down into the descending corridor and its water-obscured door. As they watch, the water level begins to lower, going beyond the unseen door below. The door must not have opened all the way, because instead of it all rushing down, only half of it pours downwards, draining the rest more slowly.

"Bingo," Mabel says.

They file out of the control room and back into their original corridor. Ahead, the pool of water is gone, leaving behind a partially opened door and a green-slicked hallway dripping with slime.

Pacifica takes a step back. "Ugh, it smells!"

"Yeah, it's not great," Wendy agrees. "Bet you five bucks I can slide all the way down this."

"Bet you ten you can't do it backwards!" Mabel immediately chimes in.

"You even have ten bucks?"

"You'll never know, 'cause you can't do it."

"Better break out that piggybank, sister," Wendy tells her, and puts her back to the ramp.

Dipper quickly catches her by the arm. "Uh, how about you don't try to hurt yourself, okay? I don't know if we could carry you back up the ladder."

"Yeah… That's fair," Wendy reluctantly acknowledges, and proceeds to do a perfect front-facing slide all the way down the ramp.

"Easy does it, dudes," Soos tells the group, and follows Wendy's example with surprising grace.

Pacifica takes a ginger step forward, placing one hesitant foot on the ramp. It promptly squelches out from under her, sending her flailing to her hands and knees, her eyes wide as she slides down the ramp in a backwards crouch. Wendy helps her up at the bottom, where she vainly attempts to remove the thick coating of gunk from her knees and palms.

"This will be hard to climb back up, I think," Candy notes.

"Good call," Dipper says. He takes a coil of rope out his backpack and ties one end of it around a strut in the nearby doorframe, using it to lower himself down the ramp in a more controlled slide. Candy, Grenda, and Mabel follow suit.

Behind the half-opened door, the corridor is wet, but only slightly slimy, whatever muck there is having only just washed through with the water surge. As always, the strange shapes of the craft make the halls hard to track; though the floor is generally even (relative to the slight tipping of the whole ship), it doesn't always occupy the same amount of space, bending up into the walls at weird angles, the ceiling curved and tilted. It's sort of like walking through a gigantic metal seashell, or maybe many seashells all connected, though everything has distinctly engineered edges.

Continuing the gradual walk downwards, they soon find themselves in another junction, this one larger than the last. It splits off in three different directions, and instead of solid metal or glass between them, there's nothing at all, just open space revealing enormous caverns to either side. The beams from their flashlights disappear in the murk, unable to illuminate the space in any useful way.

Soos whistles in awe.

"Wow, it's HUGE," Grenda bellows, and her words are underscored by the lack of an echo.

Dipper looks over the edge. Shining his light down, it sparkles on water. "Oh, we must be at the bottom of the ship," he says. "See, the water isn't that far down, but the walls are way out there. We're looking at the whole ship, lengthwise."

"The ship is as wide as the cliff hole, so it is wider than the town," Candy calculates.

"Why is it empty?" Pacifica asks.

"It's the toilet tank," Mabel says confidently. "All the alien poop falls down here. It's a perfect system."

Dipper rolls his eyes and backs away from the ledge. "It's probably storage. The prison that Ford and I found might be at the other end."

"Yo, you guys see this?" Wendy asks. She's at the other ledge across the intersection, pointing in the direction the central corridor runs. "There's a light down there."

At first, Dipper thinks it's just the distant reflection of their accumulated light; where the group stands, they create an island of illumination in the darkness. Looking closer, however, he realizes that Wendy is right. There's something glowing in a room down there, if weakly.

A thrill of excitement runs through him. Like the prison drones, there's something down there, hibernating, dying a slow death of millennia as it succumbs to nature's inexorable decay. The fact that it still has some form of power suggests it's important. Dipper doesn't know why navigation, if that's what it is, is placed deep in the belly of the ship instead of somewhere up top, but this craft was clearly not built with common human conceptions of how a ship works—or how geometry works, how anything works—in mind.

"We need to get down there," Dipper says.

Initially, it doesn't seem like it'll be difficult. The central corridor curves down and to the right, leading them straight towards the glow. Soon enough, however, they encounter yet another roadblock. The alien doors are a marvel, either so watertight that the collected rain cannot pass, or watertight enough that the results of the Windigo's weather tampering are still slowly draining away, even all these weeks later. Either way, the result is the same: a pool of water that needs removing.

Dipper carefully walks down the ramp and shines his light into the water. He can see there's a catch this time: The ramp splits into three, with doors, left, center, and right. All three doors are beneath water. Dipper assumes that flooding whatever is still working down there will probably knock it out of commission, so they can't open the middle door without first shunting the water through the left or right.

The group convenes at the water's edge to discuss their options.

"So it's easy, right? We just open either the right or left door and let the water go to the side," Wendy says.

"The doors are, like, recessed though," Soos points out.

"He's right," Dipper says. "At least some of the water will stay against the middle door."

Wendy grimaces. "I get it. Who knows how much it'll take to fry whatever's in there."

"Well, these corridors are all snakey… maybe they connect?" Mabel suggests.

"Yeah, we should check. We don't have a good way to bail the water out," Dipper says, though he does give Pacifica's canteen, which happens to be in his line of sight, a speculative glance.

Pacifica places a protective hand over her canteen. "Don't even think about it."

The next step requires the tallest members of the party. Wendy and Soos walk into the water, swimming to the top of the right door, where the angle of the corridor makes the water shallower.

"Now the hard part," Wendy says, and takes a deep breath.

She sinks into the murky pool, disappearing beneath the greenish-brown surface. Having operated previous doors, she must now find the door's latch by feel alone. She comes up for air twice, blowing filthy water from her lips.

"How's that water tasting, buddy?" Mabel calls to her.

"Like soggy butt," Wendy replies. "Almost got it, though."

When she emerges for the third time, she signals her success. She guides the end of Soos' crowbar into the crack of the door so that together they can pry it open a sliver and let the water slowly drain through.

At least, that's the idea. The door proves to be in better shape than anticipated; the second they pull on the crowbar, it shoots open more than halfway and the water surges into the sudden opening. Soos manages to drop the crowbar and grab the door before he's sucked away—Wendy isn't so lucky.

"Oh, sh—" Wendy's shout is cut off as she disappears down the corridor like it's a waterslide.

Soos hauls himself up so that he's lying on the floor against the partially opened door. "Wendy!" he yells. "Say something, dude!"

Wendy's voice echoes back from the depths. "It's cool, I'm alive! Yo, I can see into the other room from here, it's definitely a computer! And there's a door!"

That could change things. "Should we come down?" Dipper yells.

"Hang on." Wendy goes silent for a minute. Then she shouts, "There's power to this door but there's another door behind it. Like an emergency seal or something, I don't know. I don't think it opens from this side."

"Darn. Alright, we'll send a rope down."

"Uh, about that." Wendy does something that makes a metallic rattling sound. "I think the water set something off in here. A gate came down behind me and I don't see any buttons."

"Like an emergency shutter?"

"Yeah, kind of. There's another door at the end of the room that I think goes further down and it's got the same thing."

Three entrances, three emergency gates. Something was tripped when the water went through. "You said the door to the computer room looks like it opens from the other side?" he yells.

"Looks like it!" she yells back.

"Okay, sit tight and we'll try to open it once we're in there."

"Copy that, commander. I'll just stand here being super gross," Wendy replies.

With most of the water gone, the left door only holds about a foot or two of slimy liquid against its recessed bottom. Soos pops the door and lets it drain before pushing it open the rest of the way, leaving a portion of the hallway relatively dry and easier to traverse.

It turns out that there isn't any door connecting to the navigation room. The left corridor has sustained damage, one of its windows missing completely, its setting crumpled and partially shattered. This damage is mirrored by the central hall at the point where they run side by side; it looks like something huge fell between the corridors, striking them both. If there was a door and connecting hall here, it's at the bottom of the water now.

"We're so close," Dipper says in frustration, glaring across the gap at the goal in sight. "Is there anything we can use as a bridge?"

Candy nods. "I have a plan!" she says, her teeth flashing brightly in the gloom.

Mabel, Candy, and Grenda climb to the top of the left corridor, where Grenda picks Candy up and hurls her across the gap to the central hall—this is not quite as dangerous as it seems, due to the rope connecting the two girls at their waists, and the second length of rope that Mabel has tied around a bent girder. From there, it's a simple enough matter to slide down the rope to the other side.

"Finally, we get to zipline!" Mabel yells as she speeds across.

Dipper goes next, trying not to think about the vast nothingness below his dangling feet. At least there's water down there, though at this height that might not be an advantage. Reaching solid ground, he turns to make sure Pacifica is doing okay with the crossing, but of course she's just fine. She was shot out of a pneumatic tube and opened a parachute from freefall; this isn't going to faze her. Still, he catches her hands as she lands, which is more about taking the opportunity to touch her than helping. She gives him a searching look as he lets go, and he knows she hasn't forgotten about his moment of panic earlier.

One more door. This one has power, a feeble red light shining from the panel at its right side. When Grenda hits the button, it slides open slowly with a weak buzzing. There can't be much energy left. The prison Dipper encountered with Great-Uncle Ford seemed fully powered, but that was on the other side of the ship. The craft appears to be in worse shape here in general.

"Whoa…" Soos says, eyes wide as he enters the room.

"Neat!" Grenda immediately starts taking pictures with her phone, with Mabel and Pacifica following suit.

Wendy's voice comes hollowly from behind the nearby window; her face is close enough to it to be seen somewhat clearly, the rest of her a blurry suggestion. "Is it cool? I can't see super well."

"It's cool," Dipper assures her.

Dipper moves to the center of the room. The device is, much like the majority of its surroundings, utterly alien in form. Tubes twist all around it, coiling and curving in every direction, making the computer's central screen look kind of like a mirror in a nest of snakes. Behind it, there are huge, transparent pipes running down the wall, though they appear to be empty. There's a raised panel in the floor in front of it, which Dipper assumes houses the controls. It and the screen are the only parts of the tableau that make sense from a human perspective.

Pacifica examines the panel with her flashlight. "I don't see an 'on' switch…"

Mabel pockets her phone and skips towards the controls. "Just hit the buttons! Let's get this baby going, I wanna play some Solitaire!"

Dipper quickly steps in before his sister can begin button mashing. "Careful, we don't know how much power is left!"

Looking things over carefully, he detects a slight glow coming from one of the buttons, so faint it's only visible when he points his light away. There's also a smaller, additional panel that looks just like the one from upstairs that controlled the doors. He's positive he can open the door to Wendy's righthand room. However, he doesn't do it just yet.

"Wendy, is there still a lot of water in there?" he yells to her.

Wendy understands what he's getting at. "Uh, yeah. It's not really going anywhere."

Dipper gives her a sympathetic wave. "We'll figure this out, just hold on." He puts his finger over the glowing button. "Cross your fingers," he says, and presses it.

With a loud pop and hum, the screen sparks to life, bringing a chorus of appreciative sounds from everyone. In the oppressive dark, the light from the monitor reflects off the walls of the room, making it look somewhat like the tunnel from Neon Ville. A few phrases in the alien language scroll across it, and then it displays what must be a menu, comprised of several colored blocks and more unintelligible markings. The panel beneath Dipper's fingers lights up, its colors matching the ones on the screen.

"Oh, cool. That'll make things easier," Dipper muses as he studies his options. He has no idea what each menu item is, but at least he knows what button does what.

"Do the pink one," Pacifica says.

For lack of any better guidance, Dipper complies. A long list appears, strings of text followed by an outline of an object. Most of them appear to be egg shaped, though he spots some exceptions. He finds a side button that scrolls and moves down the list, only understanding what he's looking at after a few moments.

"It's a manifest!" he exclaims. "See? Most of it is crates! Look for anything heart shaped. A real heart, I mean, not like a valentine heart."

"Their crates were shaped like eggs?" Pacifica says.

"I mean, I guess they could be actual eggs. But nothing else in here is shaped right," Dipper says, scrolling to the next page.

Mabel grins. "These aliens were weird. I respect that!"

The group peer intently at the screen as Dipper scrolls through the seemingly endless manifest, past a multitude of shapes that aren't easily interpreted.

"Are you guys making progress?" Wendy shouts through her window.

"I think so! These alien dudes really liked crates or eggs!" Soos yells back.

"Wait!" Pacifica snaps, bringing Dipper's scrolling to a sudden halt. "Right there!"

The screen is pretty blurry, either because of damage or because Dipper doesn't have the right kind of eyes to see it with. But Pacifica has managed to catch a small symbol that does indeed look like a heart, buried amidst a sea of crates. Dipper eagerly selects it.

In an instant, the screen comes to life with a wealth of information—Dipper has the brief impression of a planet, several blocks of text, and a picture of the heart itself, before all of it is just as quickly subsumed by a flashing message, stamped over the screen. The monitor flares red, apparently the universal language for a warning. A second later, an alarm begins to blare.

"What's happening?" Grenda says, backing away from the machine.

Wendy presses her face to the window. "What's going on? What's that noise?"

"Dipper broke it!" Mabel yells, covering her ears.

"I didn't break it!" Dipper says, hoping that's true. "It's an error message…" He looks down at the panel. One of the buttons is now flashing red, which he figures must correspond to the alarm. He presses it.

The alarm stops—and at the same moment, a deep, reverberating thud makes the floor quiver. He freezes with his finger still on the button, all eyes now on him.

"Uh… It was supposed to make that noise?" he says tentatively.

There's another sound now, growing louder every second, a low and constant grumbling. Then, with a tremendous series of additional thuds and a loud whooshing noise, water comes thundering through the heavy pipes behind the computer. As the flood stabilizes, the noise lessens.

"Coolant! It's just coolant, the system overheated," Dipper says with relief. "See, it was supposed to make that noise."

But there's another sound, now, this one muffled but still close by. It's a creaking sound, like metal under pressure. The pipes behind the computer seem fine, but as Dipper traces them, he sees that they run up and through the wall, into the room next door, where Wendy is. She must be in a pump room, or at least maintenance access for the cooling system.

Wendy taps on the window to get their attention. "Hey, so, there's some not-so-great sounds coming from—"

With a crack that's loud even through the wall, the pipes along the ceiling of Wendy's room burst, releasing a torrent of water behind her.

"Oh." Wendy looks downwards; even from his side of the filmy window, Dipper can see the water level is rising fast. "Well, that ain't good," she says.

"Wendy, it'll be alright," Soos tells her. "Now is not the time to panic!"

In response to the sudden flooding, the door in Wendy's room that leads back upstairs slams shut, covering the permeable gate and sealing the only outlet. Without the hallway to fill, the water begins rising even more quickly.

"Okay, now we panic!" Soos says.

"That's a lot of water! Lot of water coming in, bad, gross water!" Mabel says, panicking.

Grenda slams her fists against the window repeatedly, but it doesn't yield.

Dipper's eyes meet Candy's, the only other person in the room who seems to grasp the sudden conundrum.

"There is no choice," Candy says solemnly.

Dipper turns to the window. Wendy is looking at him, the force of the water filling her room pressing her against the divider; despite the flood threatening to engulf her, she is perfectly, preternaturally calm.

"It's alright, dude," she shouts. "Do what you gotta."

Jaw clenched, Dipper pulls his phone out of his pocket and takes a single, desperate photograph of the computer screen.

Then he brings his palm down on the button to open the shutter.

The shutter springs open and water blasts through it like the world's biggest firehose. The space floods almost instantly, taking Dipper off his feet and washing him towards the back of the room—he tumbles into Mabel, who is also riding the wave. Taking her hand, he uses the wall to struggle to his feet, helping her up. There's nothing to be done; he watches helplessly as the monitor goes dark with an electric pop and the smell of burnt electronics. The sound of the pumps ceases; water continues to pour from the pipes until they empty and the two rooms equalize, leaving both filled waist-deep with lukewarm coolant.

Silence reigns for a moment. It is soon broken by splashing and slopping as everyone rises from the water, soaked and stunned.

"Is everyone okay? Grenda? Candy?" Mabel says, getting a quick affirmative from both girls as Grenda pulls Candy from the water. "Pacifica, where'd you go?"

"I'm here!" Pacifica says. On her, the waist-deep water is almost chest-deep, and she awkwardly wades through it, coming around the back of the monitor.

"Still in one piece, dudes," Soos says, looking unharmed, though he is missing his hat. "Wendy! Say something!"

Wendy's voice comes floating through the opened shutter: "I will never be dry again." A moment later she sloshes around the doorframe and joins the rest of them, wet strands of hair clinging to her face.

Dipper splashes forward to confront her. "Do what you gotta?!" he exclaims, his fury heightened by his barely faded terror. "Seriously?!"

Wendy at least has the grace to look sheepish. She shrugs slightly, looking away from his incredulous gaze. "Alright, alright… It was a dumb thing to say. I guess I had my head a little too in the game."

"Yeah, it was dumb," Dipper retorts. "Did you really think I was going to let you drown on the chance I'd find something out?"

"No, dude, I just… it was super dramatic, it was a big moment! I thought, you know, maybe I'd drown a little bit and then you'd rescue me or whatever." She shrugs again, clearly embarrassed.

Dipper just shakes his head. "You are completely crazy," he says flatly.

Wendy doesn't even bother arguing that. "Hey, it'll make a great scrapbook moment, right, Mabel?"

"I prefer the scrapbook to be less horribly dark," Mabel says.

Dipper suddenly feels twenty years older. Exhausted, he readjusts his soggy backpack. "Let's go home and never talk about this again."

"I'm going home and never leaving the shower again," Pacifica mutters, heading slowly for the door.

The trek back to the surface is long, cold, wet, and miserable. After a rest at the bottom of the rope ladder, the group goes up one by one. Dipper hauls himself into the sunlight on shaking arms, his legs feeling like noodles. It's still beautiful out, a warm breeze gusting over the hill and the sky a gentle blue. It's like emerging into a different world after hours in the dark, metallic caverns below. Intending to stand, Dipper finds himself sitting on the ground instead, not sure he can get his body to cooperate. The thought of hiking all the way back to the Shack is daunting.

"Let's… Let's sit for a minute," he tells the others, breathing hard from the climb.

Soos immediately falls backwards onto the soft earth, spreadeagled in the grass; Mabel joins him, resting her head on his stomach. Wendy seems to be the least impacted of everyone, as expected, though even she sits down with a grateful sigh. As for the other girls, Grenda and Pacifica look tired, but Candy looks like she's close to or maybe at her physical limit. Sometimes Dipper forgets not everyone here has been equally active.

"You know what," Dipper says, taking his phone out, "how about we don't keep pushing it."

A little less than half an hour later, Grunkle Stan drives up in Soos' big truck, coming to a stop on a county access road not far from the foot of the hill. Everyone staggers gratefully to it and piles into the cab and back, making the trip home in a tired, but comfortable, silence. Stan says nothing to break it, looking a bit grumpy after having no doubt been dragooned into making the drive by Great-Uncle Ford. Still, he doesn't seem too resentful, and once the road becomes paved and they pick up speed, he puts one arm out the window and seems to enjoy the opportunity for a summer drive.

The whole group sticks around for an impromptu early dinner of ham and turkey sandwiches, but by the time the sun begins to set Candy, Grenda, and Soos have returned home. Pacifica, true to her word, disappears into the bathroom shortly after eating. Only Wendy sticks around for the evening debrief as she and the twins descend the hidden staircase to the basement, where Great-Uncle Ford is busily typing on the laboratory laptop. He looks up when they enter.

"Good, you've returned." He checks his watch. "A bit later than I expected."

"We wanted to eat first," Mabel explains.

"Understandable. Getting in and out of that ship is no easy task." Ford sighs, already looking disappointed. "I take it from your expressions that there wasn't any evidence."

"We found the navigation computer. It had a bunch of stuff on it, including a manifest, but…" Dipper shrugs helplessly. "There was a lot of water in the ship and the computer flooded. We tried to keep the water out, but—"

"It's my fault," Wendy interrupts. "He had to fry the computer to keep my dumb butt from drowning. That's on me."

Ford shakes his head. "Better to fry a thousand alien computers than for you to drown, Wendy. I'm sure Dipper only did what was necessary."

"We didn't come back empty handed," Dipper tells his great-uncle. He takes out his phone and plugs it into the laptop, transferring his desperate last shot of the screen.

"So it was from the craft," Ford says, staring intently at the image. "Were both hearts in the manifest?"

"We only saw this one, but it could have been," Dipper says.

Ford nods. "If they had one, they likely had both, but I wish we knew for certain. Still, this is a fantastic discovery!"

Ford picks up the laptop and moves it over to the projector, knocking several side projects to the floor in the process. He projects the photograph against the whiteboard while Dipper dims the lights. Most of the information is visual, showing the heart next to a picture of a planet that Dipper assumes must be the source of the hearts. Sadly, there's not much text, nothing that looks like an explanatory paragraph. The planet itself has continents and blue seas much like Earth, though the land is tinted red instead of green.

Ford connects his translator to the laptop and sets to work. A few moments later, the text on the image is obscured by English, superimposed by Ford's program. The characters below the planet form a single word:

AGORA

"So," Ford says quietly, leaning on his crutch, "now we know."

Dipper stares at the image and the name. Is this where the hawks came from? Had the voices that Ford inadvertently recorded been on this planet, tethering it to Earth across distances unknown? The name seems somehow familiar…

"Those numbers at the bottom, is that where this is?" Wendy asks.

"Coordinates, yes. But without a frame of reference, useless," Ford replies.

"Well, we still know something we didn't before we went!" Mabel says optimistically.

"But not nearly as much as we could have," Dipper says.

"Don't sell this information short, Dipper," Ford cautions. "We now know conclusively that the hearts are extraterrestrial in origin. We know the name of the planet the hearts are from, either their primary source or a place where one can find them. We know they were brought here by the Omega craft; we know that whoever sent the hawks could have something to do with this planet as well. None of this information may seem crucial at the moment, but, in the long term, any portion of it may prove vital."

That does make Dipper feel better about the whole thing. What they found isn't much, but it's more than they had yesterday.

When they return upstairs to the gift shop, Wendy pauses by the door as she's about to head home.

"Seriously, thanks for saving my bacon," she tells Dipper.

"If I do it ten more times we might be even," he says.

"Pffft, whatever," she laughs. "We're always even, man."

Later that night, after the sun has set and the house has fallen quiet, Dipper sits on the edge of his bed, feeling drowsy after an extra-long shower. He'd been the last one in, and by the time he got out the water was running lukewarm. His suitcase is sitting just to his right, its two halves lying open like bread waiting to become a sandwich. He's deliberately ignoring it, despite the fact that he's the one who unzipped it and put it there. He knows he should pack something, anything, just to get started on the monumental task of assembling everything he brought and everything that's new. There are probably a dozen things he's forgotten about already, scattered all around the Shack.

It's just that the act of placing anything inside it makes his imminent departure unbearably real. He had thought it would be easier the second time to walk away from this weird and wonderous little world. Instead, he's coming to realize that his greater understanding of what ties him to this place and what awaits him outside of it only makes it harder to let go again.

He's going home. He knows that. And he likes his house, and his bedroom, and his other friends, and he misses Mom and Dad. But none of it offsets that terrible distance which will exist between where he has to be and where he needs to be. He is haunted by a sense of incompleteness. There are still so many mysteries to research, so many places yet unseen. What's going to happen with the hawks and the portal? How can he just go back to California when the sky could open again at any moment?

At least when he left last summer, it was after the world was saved. This time, he's not finished. And, sure, he was never truly done last time, the work of Weirdness went on, but with Great-Uncle Ford sailing around the world, there wasn't much for Dipper to do but go home and wait. That waiting had been bad enough even when everything had been okay (because what was wrong was within him, and then, as he found out, with Pacifica—not with the world). What is he supposed to do if there's another hawk invasion while he's suffering his first awkward steps into high school? Tell the nurse he needs to go home sick so he can fight alien robots? It's hard to imagine that working. It's just as hard to imagine the consequences of ditching class and hitchhiking to Oregon.

Stuck again. Still too young, still not time. Another year spent waiting.

"Stinks, huh?" Mabel says.

Dipper blinks, the room returning to focus. At some point in his reverie, Mabel seated herself on her bed, opposite him. She's looking at his empty suitcase.

"Do you think we're letting Grunkle Ford down?" she asks. "Like, with Weirdness and stuff. There's so much to do besides go to cruddy ol' school…"

"Ford wouldn't want us to miss our education," Dipper says mechanically, the obvious, canned response that he knows is true but makes him feel nothing.

"Yeah." Mabel crosses her arms, her posture drooping, her gaze on the floor. "They have high school here, though."

"Sure, but…"

Dipper falls quiet as he tries to encapsulate the gulf of intractable reality that stretches between them and high school in Gravity Falls. Mom's job, and Dad's job, and a house with a mortgage, and every other stubborn stone of the impossible weight that would have to move.

"It's easier for us," he finally says. "It's just… summer vacation."

Mabel says nothing. She leans back on her bed and rolls over, putting her back to him and pulling her sheets over herself. Dipper knows she's not really upset with him, but it still stings a little. He puts his empty suitcase on the floor and turns out the light as a moody silence descends over the attic.

It isn't until later, when the room is still and the moon's shine is stamped upon the attic door, that she says, "It's not, though."

Halfway to sleep, Dipper's sluggish brain swirls around this thought, slowly failing to find the words to answer. Eventually, he stops searching, and forgets about it in favor of uneasy dreams.

The Ever Closing Door by Messes (Not On Label, 2018)