"Holy polenta! This freakin' stuffed moose head has six thou in its mouth!"
"Stanley, why were you sticking your hand in the moose's mouth?"
"I didn't hear anybody tellin' me not to stick my hand in its mouth."
"I WANNA STICK MY HAND INTO EVERYTHING!" Grenda bellowed, eagerly punching a meaty fist into the face of a stuffed lion.
The ascension to the surface was a slow, wobbly, difficult ascension. Susan trailed behind with increasing concern - not just because she had abysmal balance at the best of times, or was far from a mistress of fitness, or because her diner was most likely trashed for the second time that summer - but because she was getting her first, real, intimate look at the Northwest's family dynamic.
Underneath their feet lay family photos, paperwork, signage, books and taxidermy that laid the family bare. Portraits in which Pacifica wore a fake smile alongside her ever-smug parents. Portraits of Preston winning his wife at a yachting competition. Contracts and financial documents framed rather than a single, genuine portrait of the family's only daughter.
And not a single school certificate, not even a framed newspaper clipping - that was what struck the middle-aged woman. When she took Pacifica under her wing, she made a point of finding the girl's old newspaper columns and adding them to her scrapbook.
Yet there wasn't even a scrapbook in this pile of rich-person detritus and late-stage-capitalist accoutrement. It was just stacks and stacks of self-congratulation. As if Pacifica herself was merely an accessory, a planned license, an opportunity to increase the family's ideals.
Had Susan known that the heir had been set up for an arranged marriage with the Fundhausers, she'd have no doubt felt more than a little justified in her assessment.
"This rich person stuff is creepy." Wendy murmured. "I don't think there's like, anything here that's even slightly normal."
"I didn't even realiiise things were this baaad." Susan whispered back.
"Suse, let's face it, those guys were willing to let tons of folks turn to wood just to stop us getting into a party. Things were bad even before they raised a guy from the dead just to try and get their daughter back."
Susan furrowed her brow as she ruminated on the matter. All of her life, she had believed that people were essentially good. The diner had always been a meeting of people at their best - looking for cheap food and good service, something she excelled at. It was fair to say that Lazy Susan never particularly saw people at their worst.
To her, it simply seemed unthinkable that something like this could exist. She didn't really question gnomes, or manotaurs, or Toby Determined - not anymore - but the prospect of such a cold, uncaring, financially motivated environment… no, that she couldn't quite perceive.
The middle-aged woman grunted as she continued her increasingly painful climb, a life of diner proprietorship having hardly been sufficient to prepare her for this level of agility. All the same, Susan was nothing if not determined - especially if it meant standing by the Northwest heir and attempting - at least - to help her through her troubles.
When they finally reached the top of the crevice and clambered onto the shattered earth atop, she almost instinctively stepped closer to her deputy manager / would-be daughter, holding her shoulder warmly.
It was a woefully short tender moment in the face of what they were greeted with.
"Oh my god." Dan muttered, quietly. Everyone looked over their shoulders at the usually cacophonic lumberjack in surprise - though they couldn't help but mirror his feelings.
"Dude… " Wendy gulped.
"C-Candy feeling scared now."
"Gosh-durn. Ah guess ah'm gonna end up livin' in' a box again." McGucket sighed, as if he wasn't currently one of the world's richest men.
"MY MOM AND DAD LEFT ME A LASAGNA AND I THINK IT'S GONNA BE RUINED!" Grenda yelled.
Drenched in orange flames and smoke, underneath a tumultuous sky, with vapour and water funnelling into its centre, Gravity Falls was a burning monument to what could only be dubbed unbridled chaos. Gnomes were tossed from the wind-struck crawlspace, flying out of drains and swirling in tempestuous winds, while errant manotaurs stampeded into each other in horrified disarray, making high-pitched girly screams. Trees had been uprooted, gas stations destroyed, and independent businesses had toppled like stacks of cards.
And across every cliff face, every vertical visage that loomed over the Oregon town, lay familiar blue ferns - each one climbing skywards like a beanstalk and drenching the valley with an ethereal, endless glow.
Behind them, the Northwest Manor was little more than a pile of kindling. The once grand structure, a wide-winged family manor house that had demonstrated power for over a century - piled into a squat lump of rubble that smoked and groaned under the forces of nature - bent to the whims of the chaotic influence it had so sought for so many decades.
The unlikely group of allies stood, watching over the grave scene from atop the manor's partially-piled-in hilltop. It was a difficult thing to really absorb - Weirdmaggedon had been such a spectacle because the town was, at least, in control of something.
Thanks to the presumed destruction of Bill Cipher's latest shambling, disastrous rebirth, there was no control. This was, if anything, more chaotic than the relative organisation of Weirdmageddon. The silence was chaotic - the emptiness was chaotic. The glowing blue plant life was certainly chaotic. But it had all been so uncontrolled, so spontaneous, so overbearing and yet silent - it hadn't been manually twisted by any one hand, it didn't boast a villain towering overhead…
No, this time, it had all just been triggered… and left alone. Left empty. In the face of sudden - quite literal - uprooting, the town now seemed deadly still. A sunken disc of populated concrete, sitting low in its valley, smouldering and swirled by an enormous funnel cloud.
The townspeople were scared - piled up atop the courthouse - while others stayed cooped inside their homes, guarding against the floods, the storms - the seeming outright betrayal of the land they had loved (or tolerated) so well.
It was a bizarre, barren scene. No maniacal overlord. Nobody to take the mantle that had been created for them - for the creature it was intended for had been speared by a piece of a chapel created in dedication to them.
Instead, it was simply an empty, chaotic, swirling stage. Full of theatrics, empty of actors.
No, here it was simply the town that was the star - or, more to its point, the liquor of life that had become so twisted. The Gravity Falls. The lakes. The rains. The streams. Every single one, filled with interdimensional rocket fuel. A viscous, watery mutagen. An extra-terrestrial inter-dimensional infestation.
And it was everywhere. Unwrangled, uncontrolled, unmanipulated, this was all nothing more than the nature of Gravity Falls' darkest secret coming to life.
"How ironic." Ford murmured. "The ultimate chaos, and it's not from Bill Cipher. It's from his absence."
"How the hell do you haul a damned town out of a pit?" Stan huffed, hands on his hips.
"We need eighty-seven thousand particularly powerful geese." Trembley retorted, with his usual sincerity. "Perhaps eighty-seven-thousand-five-hundred, at a push."
"Sure, slick."
The valley rumbled as with a rattling, groaning thud, the town sank once again - cutting away part of the cliff surfaces and revealing those glowing blue tracks, wrapped around the township like a noose.
Dipper grimaced as he remembered his encounters with the Great Frilly all over again. He pulled out his battered little blue book and read along, murmuring quietly.
"Silence, Pines, the end is near,
You'll soon wake up - so while you're here,
I must insist that you take heed,
And beware of Northwest greed.
Listen loud, and listen true!
The fate of all will lie with you,
Pacifica and Dipper Pines,
It's time that you read between the lines.
The tracks you build are but a scrawl,
A circle that enrobes you all,
Within time, the worlds will split,
And then you'll be thrown into the…"
"What are you whispering?" Pacifica asked, interrupting his quiet recital.
Dipper's mind was racing. There was no doubt that they were left filling in the blanks - enrobed by a circle of track, while the town they loved was splitting and separating from the world around it, becoming a realm of its own.
"It's… it's all coming true." Dipper gulped. "The axolotl, he-"
Pacifica's eyes widened, recognising the description of the ethereal figure and instantly swallowing hard. "Great. Not… not just a dream, huh?"
The group glanced at each other as Fiddleford's government departmental helicopter arrived - ready to take them back down the valley. For the first time in her life, Pacifica really wasn't sure if she wanted to go into Gravity Falls.
"I've never been in a helicopter before!" Mabel said. But even her usually chipper tone and rosy cheeks had been drained of all colour. She held her brother's hand and tried to keep a brave face. "T-that's kinda exciting, huh, Dip?"
"Y-yeah, Mabel. Yeah, it's super exciting."
"We're gonna - we're gonna make all this right."
"T-totally."
Meanwhile, down below, the water lapped into the remains of the chapel. And began to smother the black, slimey mass that lurked within, wrapping around it with waves and splashes that began to dilute it.