Chapter 7

Unified

Luz had to admit that working with the government had some sweet perks. Mr. X's special FBI jet powered away on the latest futuristic technology, taking them LA up to Gravity Falls within minutes. Now that she heard the whole story of Frogvasion and how it was real and not a movie, a lot of the modern world made way more sense.

Amity squeezed her hand and asked, "How are you doing? You've been looking out of the window nearly the entire trip, lost in thought."

"I'm just appreciating how things are finally making sense."

"They are?" the witches asked together.

"Luz, we're basically in a human spaceship, something that is supposed to be a work of scientific fiction," Hunter said.

"Awesome sci-fi," Gus corrected.

"Riding alongside a bunch of talking frogs. Talking frogs just like the plushies back in my old room!"

"Ahhh, you had plushies? That's so sweet!" Willow said.

"The last time we were on Earth, we were trying to hide the fact that we could use magic, and now we're open about it in front of the same people that your mom and dad's old VHS collection always said were dangerous and should never be trusted!"

"That's the CIA," Mr. X corrected. "I'm part of the FBI! We're definitely the good guys!"

"See? I'm not even sure what makes sense anymore!" Hunter wheezed. He definitely looked as if his mind was about to break. His flustered blush clashed harshly with his multiple scars.

Luz smiled sympathetically at him and replied, "It's alright, Hunter. Honestly, I'm kind of freaking out deep down, but I'm taking a moment to appreciate how some things are beginning to make sense. Like the sudden advancement in human technology. Or where my mom's taxes go!"

"Taxes! Yuck!" Eda spat. "The only reason I bother paying mine is so I can go and rob it from the government later on."

"It's so satisfying!" King shouted happily.

"And it's way easier than trying to commit convincing tax fraud," Eda concluded.

Mr. X spoke into his watch, "Note to self, we must restrict all travel visas for the inhabitants of the Boiling Isles."

"Anyway," Luz said, trying to get back on track. "Some questions that were always bouncing around in the back of my head were answered. And now I have others. Like, why did you, the Golden Guard, have plushies of talking frogs?"

"I didn't know they talked," Hunter said, side-glancing at the Amphibians. Ivy, Maddie, and Sprig were all watching intently.

Amity laughed. "Yeah, it's all bonkers. I get it! Anything that makes sense, it feels calming and okay to latch onto it. I sometimes did that when I encountered really hard questions during tests! I would fall back to happier memories of studying stuff I enjoyed."

"That's so Amity," Luz giggled, snuggling up closer to her girlfriend.

Amity blushed a little and said, "Anyway, this is a new experience for us, Hunter. It's kind of scary, but also really exciting. Remember, we're altogether and nothing can beat us when we work together."

"And if things get really bad, Luz will discover some new magic or powerup," Willow laughed.

"Yeah, we already know how that goes!" Sasha called out from the other side of the plane.

Luz leaned against Amity and listened to the chatter. This was all okay. Amity was right; so long as they were together on this adventure, even though they were flying by the seat of their pants (which was a very odd expression for witches flying on their palismen), there was no way they could lose. But it would probably be better to snap out of her inner thoughts and try to make better friends with Anne and her buddies from Amphibia.

She turned around in her seat and called to other girls, "Soooo, what was the most important lesson you learned by getting stuck in another world?"

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Sasha waited patiently for Marcy to finish her explanation of the portal fantasy genre and how Luz was so correct to pinpoint that every "isekai" protagonist had a core lesson they needed to learn. Unless it was a sloppy power-fantasy, harem-driven piece of derivative slop.

What I really want to know is why nerds have a higher chance of going to another world than most other people do. If more jocks like myself got zapped to other dimensions, humanity would rule the roost! Not that was exactly a good thing when Grime and I tried…

It was with a shock of embarrassment at past mistakes and a little sadness that Sasha processed that the Grime wasn't with Sprig and the others. According to them, Grime was one of the leaders of the while expedition to explore the new continent revealed by the moon's absence and subsequent lack of gravitational pull. According to Maddie, a lot of weird things were now happening across Amphibia as a result.

But Grime was back there, protecting students traveling abroad from Newtopia and cataloging everything they discovered. Even though he was missing an arm and getting older, with a very impressive beard Sprig said, Sasha would have loved to have him along. They understood each other and he always found ways of boosting her confidence and pushing back against her brashness.

I guess the three of us and all of these crazy weirdos will have to do!

"Hey Sash! What's the most important thing you learned from our time in Amphibia?" Marcy asked, finally throwing the question her way.

Sitting up straight, Sasha shook her head. "I don't even know where to begin."

"What!? But Marcy was yammering on for like an hour!" Sprig protested.

"Yeah, but seriously though, there was so much that we all went through! I guess the most important thing I learned was how important my friends are, and that I don't need to be in control to keep them." Anne and Marcy beamed back at her, tears of fond memories in their eyes. "I learned to let go. I learned that it is okay to forgive myself. I learned that I needed to control my temper. Manipulation is not okay, even when you think you're helping someone. And lying is going to get you double-crossed by a cyborg newt and collective of consciousnesses."

"Wait, what!?" the witches all said together.

"I'll admit, I'm still having a very hard time understanding this Core guy. Or guys," Gus amended quickly. "Even with everything I've read about sci-fi villains, The Core sounds very different from the Gorb. Cybernetic sludge guys who go around assimilating everyone," he explained to the other witches who still didn't understand.

Sasha laughed. This was the kind of nerd stuff that Marcy and her long-estranged uncles would get into, but not her.

"The Core was a collection of Newtopia's greatest minds, trying to cheat their own deaths and achieve immortality through intergalactic and interdimensional conquest," Marcy hurriedly explained. "They all had different personalities and voices, but they moved according to consensus."

"What Mar-Mar said," Sasha replied. "It's clear that we all went on very different adventures, but I think we can all agree that jumping over to other worlds helped open our eyes to who we are and the best people we can be."

"Couldn't have put it better, dude," Anne said appreciatively. "It makes me wonder if these Pines folk have had their own off-world adventures."

"Girl, trust me when I say that you lot are not prepared for all of the things that the Pines have done!" Mr. X harrumphed. "Gravity Falls is not for the faint of heart, and that dratted Stanford Pines has done his best to keep all authorities away from the tantalizing weirdness there!"

"Sounds like they haven't been off world," Anne said. "But you make them sound like we can't really trust them either, X."

"You'll see and find out for yourselves."

"Hey, I bet that these guys have nothing on the collective weirdness we've got riding in this plane, Sasha said confidently. "10 bucks say so!"

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"Can I also get ten bucks?" Sprig asked, holding out his hand to Sasha.

"Arg! Fine! A bet is a bet," Sasha answered, grumpily handing out ten dollar bills to Anne, Marcy, Luz, Guz, King, Eda, and now Sprig. And it was clear why. The strange gopher man baby standing before them was so weird, he belonged on the Boiling Isles!

Soos (the strange man's name) just laughed and said, "These people are definitely from another planet! They haven't seen a proper human before. Which is weird, because so many of them look like humans… That's some good cloaking technology and disguises!"

"Soos, those are humans! At least, some of them are," A younger man groaned. He wore a weathered coat and hat with a pine tree emblazoned on it.

Hunter watched the Pines closely. They were an interesting collection of individuals. Their was Soos, who horrified and enthralled the others, and the other young man named Dipper. Okay, that was weird. His twin sister Mabel had immaculate teeth and sweater that must have been made all from glitter. Hunter made a mental note to ask her how she managed to pull that off. He had so many plans for more wolf sweaters and shirts in the future!

Then there was the laidback girl with her red hair cut short and choppy. She was dressed in rugged, dirty plaid with a couple of axes belted at her sides and wearing a really odd hat. The woman noticed Hunter starring and winked at him. Hunter averted his eyes, trying not to blush. I would upset Willow.

Another girl with dazzling blonde hair stuck close to Dipper. She had an air about her that reeked of privilege and self-importance. It reminded him of Kikimora at her worst. Her name was Pacifica, and she was eying all the girls, sizing them up as if they were potential enemies. She had quickly dismissed Luz and Amity, which Hunter believed was a severe mistake on her part!

But the man in glasses and hanging out in the back had Hunter's most acute attention. The elderly man was gruffy, tough, wearing a coat even more roughed-up and tattered than Dipper's. Everything about him said that his was a man of action and experience. He an intimidating aura and there was a flash of keen intelligence in his eyes.

He reminds me of Belos, Hunter realized with no small amount of discomfort. He's just a few bad decision away from becoming a megalomanic killer, just like him… And this is the guy we have to work with? I'm going to have to keep my eye on him for sure.

The older gentleman noticed Hunter observing him and strode forward. He said, "I've always been fascinated with making to the Boiling Isles. I'm happy that I can finally meet a whole group of witches in person! It's a pleasure to meet you."

He extended a gloved hand with six fingers on it. Yeah, these people were definitely weird!

As Hunter carefully took his hand in a firm shake, Luz gushed, "Oh, Eda! This is your ex? I mean, I love Raine to the moon and back, but dang girl! Despite some of your exes, you do have good taste in exotic people!"

"Oh, I apologize, you must be referring to Stanely," the older man said, breaking off the handshake. He blushed awkwardly. In a moment, Hunter felt a certain sense of kinship with the stranger.

"Wait, this isn't him?" Luz asked.

"Nope!" Marcy said, tapping the side of her head. "I might be forgetting lot of those infinite details now that the potion's worn off, but the guy who have been Eda's dreamboat is-!"

"URP! Oh! Ouch! Everything hurts!"

Everyone turned to see an exact duplicate of the dangerous man stumble out of an outhouse, dressed as a gruff sailor and holding his bulging gut. All of the young witches reacted with an identical, "UGH! No!"

"Eda, what were you thinking!?" Luz shouted.

"Hey! It was Vegas! All my mistakes were supposed to stay there! But that's when I realized that Earth doesn't have any real magic," Eda said defensively.

"Earth has plenty of magic, but it's all weird and inconsistent," Ford Pines sighed, pushing up his glasses.

"Wait, there is supposed to be magic here?" Hunter asked. "When we were stranded back in Luz's hometown, we couldn't find anything credible anywhere!"

"That's because a lot of that stuff is dismissed by credible sources, or it finds its way here," Dipper explained, holding up a shattered bolo tie gem. "We had to retrieve this after a shady crow sold this to some even more unscrupulous gnomes smuggling illegal squirrels. Anyway!" he said, suddenly looking uncomfortable, probably from saying too much. "That's not as important as this!"

Clenching the gem, he was able to magically levitate Stan Pines.

"Hey, kid! Put me down!"

Dipper obliged and grinned. "See, superpowers! Magic!"

"Wow… You know, our adventures might have turned out way more different had we come this way," Luz murmured.

"Well, we're all together now," Mabel Pines said. "And this isn't a bad looking group either. And if we're dealing with exes, the potential for shipping has just gone way, way up!"

"NO!" everyone shouted together. Hunter was surprised to find even the other Pines joining in. But why were the three frog girls and their friends also getting in on this?

"I think we're all good," Amity said, taking Luz's hand.

"I agree," Pacifica seconded.

Hunter jumped a little when Willow took his hand. "Then let's get down to what really matters here."

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The Mystery Shack's living room was completely crammed with people. Dipper noticed how they were all packed in three distinct parties, though. The people who went to and came from the world of Amphibia were on the other side of the fish tank. The three large, anthropomorphic frogs, Sprig, Maddie, and Ivy were checking out the small axolotl in the tank oohing and awing at it. Their three human friends, Anne, Sasha, and Marcy were next to them and Dipper thought they might just be the biggest sore thumbs in the group.

Across from the Pines and their friends, clustered around the television, were the witches of the Boiling Isles. The strained history between Grunkle Stan and Eda was sparking all kinds of awkward tension. Furtive looks kept flying between his grunkle and his ex-wife. Who knew that that story, all of them, was the truest!

These were the people that they needed to work with to save the world from magical aliens? Getting that message from another timeline's Grunkle Ford made more sense to Dipper than how they were supposed to all get along. Three different groups, three different worlds, all working across three different timelines and hopping throughout the multiverse?

Yeah… I can't see the thousands of ways this will go disastrously wrong…

Mr. X tried to stand in the center of the room and address the assembly. "If I can everyone's attention, look to the watch."

"This guy," Grunkle Stan said behind his hand to Ford. "He really think he can upstage you."

"Just pay attention Stanely."

The FBI agent pressed a button on his compact watch, summoning a hologram. The frogs oohed and awed while Gus and Hunter began quietly geeking out. The red hologram depicted the whole earth.

"Please, I need your attention, not your interruptions," Mr. X said in an almost sing-songish voice. "I know that some of us are meeting for the first time, and we have been given a truly bizarre mandate from the Pines and a magical hallucination to save the world, but we need to get over our differences as quickly as possible. We've been warned that an alien species known as the Archivists is coming to Earth. The U.N. has caches of special weapons and ships around the globe at specific locations."

With another tap on his watch, X summoned little green lights to indicate the locations of each base. There were a dozen, with one not too far away from Gravity Falls. Ford narrowed his eyes. Dipper remembered how his grunkles had fought to not have the U.S. government put such a risky and powerful site too close to the Falls. The crazy valley was a nexus for all kinds of weirdness to make its way to Earth. Bill Cipher's incursion proved that Earth was not completely safe from invasion. If any enemy found out about a cache of special grades weapons near Gravity Falls, it could make the sleepy town even more of a hotbed for strangeness and violence.

Ever since Frogvasion, Ford and Stan have been working around the clock to make sure that new manifestations of weirdness have been subdued or corralled peacefully towards this place. But there's also been a boom in technology that is making it easier for people to catch on to what they and the rest of us are doing, Dipper thought.

If we're not careful and attract too much attention, who knows what kinds of people and problems will come rolling into Gravity Falls?

Dipper and Mabel had taken some time during their teenage years to get educated by Ford. With his help, they had a leg-up on going to college and graduating early. Even though Mabel was pursuing a wonderful entrepreneurial career with fashion, she had returned to the Falls with Dipper to help keep the Earth safe and assist their great uncles in keeping the peace with all things strange.

And they continued to support themselves and all their endeavors with the time treasure that had taken with Blendin Blandin. Grunkle Stan was still not allowed to know anything about that!

Mr. X continued, saying, "We are going to use this charming tourist trap and the nearby cache as our bases of operations while we communicate with the other timelines. The older versions of the Pines will be on the hunt for Ms. Corduroy's mother and whatever other answers they can find to our current predicament while the younger versions of ourselves in another, soon-to-be-spliced timeline will seek to defeat this William Cryptic."

Dipper and Ford shared a look before he scoffed, "William Cryptic? That's really the big bad's name?"

"He sounds like a big deal if you ask me," Sasha interjected. "He's important enough that dead guys and people from other timelines are asking us for help."

"The guy sounds like a poser," Pacifica asserted. "We've dealt with the real Bill Cipher!" She made a triangle right before her left eye. "He made his way into our dimension and took over the whole town, turning the place into a hellscape."

"We've already seen that with Belos. We can handle a guy like Bill Cipher," Amity said.

Mabel shook her head. "Could Belos lock people away in worlds made of their own dreams and nightmares? Could he possess people at the drop of a hat? Could he melt off a man's face or rearrange every orifice with a snap of his fingers?"

"Kinda," Willow said with a shrug.

"Children!" Soos snapped, striking a prayer-like pose. "We shouldn't be fighting among ourselves, comparing who fought the greater evil. We have all been chosen because we have proven ourselves capable of saving the world."

"The gopher-man is not just shockingly mesmerizing to stare at, he's full of wisdom," Sprig gasped.

"Well, he is the world's most perfect," Stan said, making quotes with his fingers. "Or something like that. Whatever."

A beam of light fell on Soos as doves alighted on his shoulders. Melody was watching nearby and giggled behind her hand.

"Whatever the reasons, we are all here," Mr. X said in a cool tone. "We do need to get together. Mr. Stanford Pines and I have already exchanged plenty of disagreements in the past, but now we all have to put such stuff aside. I think we can take a moment to all get to know each more properly, but I propose that we first contact our younger selves and get them acquainted."

"I've already talked to my other self," Ford said. "Thanks to their communication machine and the power from the Collector, we can get around the nasty side effect of meeting our parallel selves."

"Ooooo! What's the nasty side effect?" Sprig asked eagerly.

"You are instantly obliterated and cease to exist."

Sprig and Anne made incredulous, horrified faces and glanced awkwardly at each other.

"Were you really looking forward to messing around with your other selves?" Ford asked.

"Kinda," they said together.

Dipper smirked. Amateurs. However, he liked the Amphibia gang. Sasha reminded him of Pacifica, which was only a good thing is his book. Anne and Sprig had a good thing going, that was obvious! In all, there were good vibes radiating off the three girls and their froggy friends. But there was a little barrier between his family and the witches. And it ran a little deeper than maybe just Stan and Eda having once been married.

"We will use the basement," Ford said. "Though I don't think everyone will fit into the elevator at first. I also think it will be good if everyone stays here in the Falls rather than going to the base outside. X., you can go and make sure that supplies and necessary manpower are wrangled from the cache, but we will be safer here. This is our home base; let's use the homefield advantage."

"We don't even know where or when the Archivists will strike though!" Luz protested.

"That's not exactly true," Dipper said. "All weirdness is attracted to Gravity Falls. Eventually, the stronger the weirdness, the more likely it is that it will make its way here. You all being here is an example of that! We can be pretty certain that the Archivists will come here. When is the bigger question."

"Then what are we wasting time for?" Mabel asked, jumping up and striking a typical Mabel power pose. "Let's do what the dapper man says and get in touch with our younger selves! We can even make a team building exercise out of it!"

"How?" Gus asked.

"Oh, don't worry… I have a plan!"

Dipper immediately had a bad feeling in his stomach. Oh boy, here we go again!