"Holy palooka." Stan muttered, starting at the twisted animal. "What th'hell-"
"The water." Quentin said, firmly. "It all goes back to the water."
Dan, with a slack-jacked expression, helped hoist the madman's shambling shape higher, tying the cable against the building's north-facing pinnacle. Necessary though it may have been, nobody was particularly eager to thank him.
Nathaniel Northwest twirled in the coiled grappling cable, twitching and leaking a thick, black tar that dripped from his nostrils and followed the soaked lineage of his beard and moustache. His eyes were filled with that turquoise glow, and a strange - familiar - scent of fennel seemed to permeate from his scrawny, contorted, multiplied limbs.
Everybody gathered around slowly, staring in awe at the remains of Nathaniel Northwest. His multiple patches of thick, black hair sprouted from torn seams and tears in his fine velvet suit, and his tongue seemed to trail out from his bulging jaw in a grim, blue ribbon.
Kevin gripped Mabel's shoulder and gained a distinctly stoic look in his eyes.
"H-he's horrible…" Mabel gasped.
"Cool." Gus added.
Pacifica felt faint. She almost wished she'd left him to drown. Things developed a very pensive, grim silence as if people were slowly coming to terms with just how otherworldly the situation had turned before their eyes.
He really was a reanimated corpse. He really was a twisted alchemy nightmare. The water really was dangerous. And now, a man who had once stood before them, a man who had spoken, who had stepped, who had explored the reaches of the courtroom - admittedly not well, but he had done it - was nothing more than a particularly grotesque mockery of humanity. Like a strange, boney sea urchin that had been uncovered from the deepest, darkest depths.
Wheezing. Spitting. Twitching. And, as he slowly twirled in his makeshift noose, they could swear - he was smirking. And staring. And mocking them with every glance.
"I'm no longer the ugliest man in tooooown!" Toby piped up, hitting an impromptu dance number and completely breaking the tense silence. "This is the best day of my liiiife!"
"Your feet are like creepy little monkey hands, Toby." Stan snapped.
"Oh, Marbles."
Preston pushed the people aside as he rushed to view his ancestor. His misplaced loyalty simply refused to give, and upon first sight of Nathaniel, his first instinct was to simply fall to his knees and stare, wide-eyed with pupils like pin-dots.
"G-great grandfather?"
The creature gurgled and, with a lap of its long, blue tongue, managed to sever the reinforced-steel cable that wrapped around its limbs, a long, boney arm stretching out and gripping the window frame. Like a series of slinkies, every arm and leg from the urchin-esque beast gripped the roof tiles and - without a word - skittered away like a giant arachnid.
"G-great grandfather!" Preston protested. "Stop! Stop right this moment, I-"
He stared as the twisted form of Nathaniel Northwest vaulted away across buildings and walls, screeching manically as it headed towards the looming silhouette of Northwest mansion.
"...That can't be good." Dipper muttered.
Pacifica's father seemed momentarily paralysed, staring at the bounding, swinging silhouette as it jumped and skipped over the murky, blue flood waters - from half-submerged building to lamppost,
How was one meant to react to all of this? The magnate was hardly the most emotionally sound at the best of times - but in such a time of tension, of the utterly bizarre, that bubbling knowledge that he had just watched his flesh and blood bound away in a form not dissimilar to a mobile, spindly sea anemone…
He did what he almost always did to his family. He blamed somebody else.
"Look at what you did!" Preston roared to his errant daughter. "That's your flesh and blood, Pacifica, and look at what you did to him!"
"What did I do?!" She snapped back, far louder than she'd have been capable of only two months ago.
"If it wasn't for you and your - your stupid obsession with these useless, lazy country hicks, I'd have never had to-"
"What, Dad?! Go insane?! Go absolutely bonkers and raise our mad ancestor back from the grave?!"
"Look at what's happened to him! Have you seen the price of Quail eggs lately?!"
"I tried to save him!"
"You and your - your morality is nothing but trouble!" he retorted. "You should have left him to die in an honourable way, by chewing on tree bark, as nature intended!"
"What the hell do you know about what nature intended, Dad? You brought him back to life!"
"I did what I needed to get you back! To keep this family together!" He replied, louder.
"And you failed, Dad. I'm not going anywhere."
"You- you - How dareyou! I did this to please your mother and-"
"And I am sick of all of this, Pacifica Elise Northwest!"
Everybody turned to face Priscilla. Except for Soos, who was preoccupied with eating his emergency sandwich.
For quite some time, she had been watching events unfold with a distinctly bored, mildly irritated countenance. However, this was no longer the case. She was cold. Soaking wet. Miserable and - most of all - she was furious.
Whether it was the argument, the fact they practically ignored the fact she was part of the family too, or the simple fact that it had all been too much, she had snapped. And the result was fearsome.
She was frazzled. Her hair was a mess, her eyes dark, mascara running down her face in a combination of furious tears, sweat and the rain. Her court outfit, previously pristine, was now a shocking arrangement of bleeding dyes and a creased, stained collar. Her face, usually distinctly static and unwieldy, was now pink and contorted in anger.
"When this is all over, you are coming home, and I won't hear another word!" She snarled, snatching Pacifica's arm. "This has gone on for long enough. I'm sick of playing the good cop to your father and I'm sick of giving you so- so much rope to hang yourself with!"
Pacifica's eyes were wide. "M-mom, you're hurting me-"
"You don't get to say a word about hurt after what you've done to this family!" She screeched back. "Look at my hair, Pacifica! Look at your state of you! Disowning Oregon's most powerful family and going around with the remains of a cheap pink-dye job on your tips with a smelly old fraud and his working-class family!"
"I- don't I get to make my own choices?! I thought you wanted me to do what I needed-"
"I was expecting you to throw it all in the moment you went without the things we buy for you!" Priscilla snapped, wrenching Pacifica's arm again and causing her daughter to wince. "I was expecting you to do the sensible thing and pack it all in when you realised they have nothing for you!"
Pacifica was trying to prevent the tears from welling up in her eyes as she struggled to remove Priscilla's sharp-nailed grasp. "Mom, I thought you were-"
"You thought I was the nice guy? I was. And I'm done. You're responsible for all of this, no matter how you try to protest. And after this Summer, I'll personally see to it you never step outside our house again. And you'll see it as a damned favour that we even let you live with us!"
Stan rolled up his sleeve. "Alright, that's enough, ya crazy broad. Get the hell away from-"
"From your what?!" Priscilla remarked. "Your kidnapped child?!"
"Kidnapped? Man, you really are bonk-"
SLAP!
The town erupted into shocked gasps and scandalised chatter as Stan reeled backwards, holding his cheek. "Jeez, calm down lady!"
"Don't tell me to calm down, you fraud! Don't you dare tell me to calm down!" She roared, by now her mascara resembling over-the-top, bourgeois corpse paint. "All of you, you're all disgusting! You're all horrible human beings! You- you took my daughter, you polluted her mind, you have her working in a disgusting little diner made of rusted railroad parts and-"
"Hey!" Pacifica interrupted.
"We just passed a health inspectionnnn!" Susan said indignantly.
"Shut up, daughter." Priscilla replied, sharply. "And you, you- you- greying cyclopean kook!"
"You DON'T talk about my mom li-" Pacifica froze and didn't finish her sentence, going a deep shade of red. She had just called Susan 'mom' for like the fourth time this Summer and had said it in front of the worst possible goddamned person.
Priscilla's eye visibly twitched. She clapped a hand firmly over Pacifica's mouth with a dull slap that made her daughter wince.
Mabel, Kevin, Dipper and Soos all stepped forward, only to be held back by the scowling Grunkles, who - for the first time - were beginning to feel some genuine trepidation over the two Northwest parents. Things were getting increasingly erratic, and part of them…
…Well, part of them couldn't help but think that Pacifica might get hurt.
Preston held onto one of his lapels proudly, his other hand clenched firmly - painfully firmly - on Pacifica's shoulder. "Quite right, Priscilla. This has all gone on long enough. And we shan't take no for an answer."
As if to illustrate her point, Priscilla slipped off one of her stilettos and furiously pointed the sharp heel towards the Pines family, her hand shaking while a clap of thunder echoed across the flooded landscape that surrounded them.
"Don't you dare try and take her back, any of you! Nothing's going to change our minds!" Priscilla snapped. "I'm warning you!"
Pacifica stared at Dipper, pleading for him to make a run for it while he could.
They were at a stalemate, and in the dark of the stormy skies, nobody knew what to expect. The townspeople backed away slowly, soaked to the skin and on quaking legs. The entire population of Gravity Falls seemed shell-shocked and fearful.
All except Quentin Trembley.
Quentin was focused quite elsewhere.
Quentin's eyes were on Northwest Manor.
And he was certain that, under his feet, he heard a strange, reverberating hum…