One morning he was better. When she got back from work she found he'd gone into town, and had bought posterboard, a lot of it, and had turned up the edge of her rug in order to lay it out across the whole floor; an amalgamated square of paper 5 feet to a side, and he was still adding. There were tools beside it too, a spyglass on a tripod, compasses of both navigational and artistic varieties, a calculator, and a few other things whose names she didn't know.

"WHAT." Her tone of voice briefly shocked herself, since it sounded a lot like her dad. "ARE YOU DOING."

"I." He stood up, and turned to face her with a smile. "Am going to map the whole Gravity Falls area. The town, the cliffs, the valley, the lake, everything, even the crawlspace and the ship if I can, the whole probability distortion field and then a mile's radius beyond it just to be sure. Every feature, every ridge, every pit, every portal and lair, laid out 1:2000 scale, for all to see, upon this map."

"Aha."

"I can start with the road maps." He gestured to a couple paper rectangles covered in fold lines lying in a corner, bearing labels like 'Oregon', 'Roadkill County', 'Gravity Falls Township' and 'Northwest Hiking'. "But they've been doctored, I'm sure of it. The highway is just shown to pinch off where it passes near the town on the state map, and the two ridges that border the valley are shown as a single ridge. The government must have been trying to sensor this place. The only correct-ish maps I've found are local trail guides, but they take a few creative liberties too. I'll have to start almost from scratch, with the map of the town itself, which I'm fairly certain is skewed clockwise about 17 degrees from the compass rose, likely a result of magnetic interference from the ship throwing off the initial surveyors' equipment. The Northwest mansion, which is built closer to the wreck, is skewed almost 32 degrees, which supports the theory. So I'll need to get nominally 2 miles down the highway for several of my initial measurements, to be sure I'm aligned with true north."

"Okay." She sighed and flopped down on her back on her bed, and remained so positioned for the duration of the following conversation. The ceiling looked much more peaceful than the floor. "At a certain point I have to ask." She said. "Just: WHY, dude? Why so huge? Why in my room? Wh- I mean, this will take... Weeks?"

"Weeks at least." He agreed. "My dad gave me an allowance over the year, I've been saving up, so I can buy my own food, supplies, and gas for transportation per need. You don't have to take care of me anymore, I've even made arrangements for a tent if it's a problem for me to stay here."

She raised a hand to stop him, since she didn't care about that. "Why." She repeated.

He turned around, and looked down at her. For the first time he saw how exhausted she looked.

"You can tell me." She said.

"Because I need to." His voice had a strange and unsteady weight. "I told myself I would."

"Tell yourself to not to then."

"I can't allow it to be that simple."

"Well, then... Okay?"

A few words stumbled around in his mouth, all trying to fit out at once.

"Take yer time." She said.

He took his time. "Last summer." He finally began. "Great Uncle Ford invited me to apprentice myself to him, as he continued his studies here and around the world... I accepted his offer, but after a whole lot of, well, everything that happened, I declined it again. Because I love Mabel too much to just run off and abandon her like that. We need each other. And I love my parents and my friends at school and a lot of other people too. At some point in my life I need to live a life, a realistic, normal teenage and adult life, where I'm a responsible man. Where I'm there and devoted to the people who need me."

"Hmm."

"But I can't I can't I can't abide that, I can't let that happen, I can't accept it." He walked over to the window, and looked out. Not 30 feet beyond the Corduroy property, the trees were so thick and close together that they couldn't be seen between. It was dark in the woods, any light not shining in through the cabin's clearing had needed to fight its way past oceans of leaves and evergreen needles above. There was sap oozing, birds singing, puddles drying in the eternal dark of the ancient glade. Way back in the trees he heard something moving, as if scared to be seen, and though he couldn't see it, it thrilled him.

"This place has my soul, Wendy. It owns it stock and stone, deed and title, I love it too much, I can't go home while I know the great unknown is here, I KNOW I can't... So..." His hands fell to his sides. "So I need to have my fill of it. I need to gather it up and have it, so that I can let it go. I need to amputate this part of my heart. Because if I don't, I'll never be able to live a normal life."

Wendy frowned. "Well, you're also only... You know. Thirteen. Close to fourteen. You're entering the painful teenagery part, where you're visionary and self-important, when you don't know what to do or how to do it, and everything inside you is crying out for purpose and meaning. You don't know where you fit into life, you don't know how to be who you'll become, you don't know how to be at peace."

"And you do?" He asked. "What's the secret?"

"BRO I'm 16 whole years old, I'm right in the thick of it too!" She gestured inclusively to her smirking face. "This is all a mask, I'm a dyin' little fish inside, you know this... But one day we'll both be wise."

He considered that, perhaps he accepted it, perhaps he rejected it. "I can't go back to Mabel until this is done." He said. "I can't live two lives, I can't split halves. I need to say goodbye before I can say hello... I need to be a boy before I can be a man."

"Talk to Mabel. She would understand. She would help."

"I know she would. And she wouldn't be a hindrance either, she really would help. But she has a life of her own, and I can't wish this pilgrimage on any other. And... What is it? Is it a masculine thing to want to do a thing but not want help doing it? Why do I need to do it all on my own?"

"Pride?"

"Of course it's pride, pride is a part of me, but God smite me down if it's only pride."

"Don't curse. Also, you asking for my help is the reason you're not dead right now."

"Yeah."

"And you can't just tent camp out in these woods for weeks. There's wolves and bears and Sasquatch and stuff."

He considered that. "...You think Sasquatch would be affected by bear spray?"

"Everything's affected by bear spray."

"Yeah."

"You ever been bear sprayed?" She asked.

"No."

"It's horrible." She shook her head. "Like pepper spray if there weren't any laws to keep it humane. Just absolutely overpowered, completely broken. Feels like it's burning your face off from the inside."

He blinked. "...Have you ever been bear sprayed?"

"No. My cousin did though once. We were messing around."

"Oof."

"Yeah. At the end of it I think we just threw his shirt away."

"Wow."

"Yeah."

"So...?" He scratched his head. "I'd just need to make sure I was able to deploy it before the Sasquatch reached me."

"Right."

"They're smarter than bears, I might not have much time."

"My point is you're welcome to sleep here. You don't have to be outside."

He nodded. His train of thought finished this branch and began working its way back toward the main line.

"I really don't want to cause you trouble." He told her. "I really don't."

"You're not causing..." She bit her tongue. "Well, you are causing some trouble. Mostly for your family. But if you're set on doing what you're doing, and doing it the way that you're doing it, I don't see a way out of trouble."

"Okay..." He searched around his mind for some other topic of conversation, and found her new job. It hadn't been going so great last time they'd talked, which was... Last week? The week before? How long had he been sick? "Did you ever get the whole overtime situation sorted out with Linda?"

"Eh." Wendy sighed and chuckled helplessly and ran her hands up her face. "Yes and no. She paid me in store credit, since she couldn't get the computer to enter more than 40 hours, and she made certain I knew it was my fault for making her spend so much time sorting it out and how lucky I was to have a manager who would even do it at all... And now she's giving me less hours to make sure it never happens again."

"Huh."

"As if I'm the selfish jerk here!"

"Right."

"I see her helping herself to the register. She's not sneaky. She thinks she is, she's not."

"...They need to get a new computer." He assessed.

"Yeah, well." She hadn't really been looking for a solution to the problem.

"Or you need to find a new job."

"Bro, I'm not going to look for a new job! There aren't that many jobs!"

"Pacifica says they need more help at Greasy's?"

"I don't wanna work at Greasy's."

"I mean, you like their food?"

"And maybe if I was making the food all day, just surrounded by the smell all day, my body and nose would realize what goes into that food and I wouldn't like it any more?"

"...A hauntingly probable eventuality."

"Yeah."

Dipper considered it all again. "They'd probably let you back at the Mystery Shack?"

"Soos has Melody." She said. "And your two uncles... Helping. They don't need me. They don't even like me."

"Soos likes you! Stan likes you too. And Melody, does she... Wait, no, they all like you! What?"

"Okay, well, yeah, I guess so."

"And th-"

"Look, man, my job sucks, but it's my job, okay? It's just for the Summer, it's not... Bad really, it's... Well I mean it's bad but it's not..."

"Not forever?"

She turned her head to look at him. His face looked worried for her, but there was some glint in his eye, a glint that said he knew something more. "No." She promised back. "It's not forever... Anyway, hey, you need help with that giant stupid map?"

"I don't think so."

"Well, too bad. I'm helping."

The young man finally soaked in enough sunlight that his biology restarted. He awoke beneath the distant sun and the starry sky, to find himself in a garden.

By way of context, all starborne leviathans are female. Great majestic beasts twenty meters in diameter, a starship by size and function, though made out of flesh instead of metal. A dozen eyes peering out like telescopes from atop a dozen stalks, many beaks encircled by tentacles barbed for gripping prey, thousands of spinerettes extending from their bony anchors weaving nets the width of moons, thrusters large and small being filled by swelling tanks and emptied in pulsing blasts, moving her whole hulking mass between the asteroids and rings on her long journeys, while a cluster of cannons stood ready to cast her nets or spread her children. And all along the surface of her translucent skin bloomed a garden of tumors, some filled with photosynthetic biopools, some with explosive gas, some around the base of her eyestalks had eyes of their own, all of them could be plucked like fruit and eaten, all of them swaying slowly to the beating of her hearts or angling to catch the distant sun.

All starborne leviathans are female, for the males are not that. The males are tiny parasites, scarcely a meter and a half in diameter, nothing but a mind and a set of genes and a few small thrusters and tentacles, a trivial creature whose only biological purpose in the vast and empty void is to find a mate, melt and fuse himself to her, and live in her garden, and father her daughters.

It wasn't quite an equitable system, but the scarcity of food in the void of space gave it a good biological precedent, and anyway that was just how things were. Marriage was a concept many males weren't enthusiastic about, understandably; our young man certainly wasn't. But for now, he awoke in a garden.

Her garden.

For a moment he wondered that it might be his mother's, that the last century might all have been a dream, that he might have wasted all that life, squandered all that memory. But this garden was not his mother's. It was sparser, and younger, and untrimmed, all filled with strange and enticing smells, and overlooked by the eyes of a face he did not recognize. Her anchors and tanks were clothed in glittering tarps decorated with flowers, and she had a cape spread like a great mirror sail of gold foil, which caught the sun's meager rays and reflected it in on her garden, so that it was light here, almost as light as the inner system.

He felt his own biopools soaking it in, felt energy and life, and he knew she had saved him.

"I have nothing with which to repay you, ma'am." He told her.

"A good deed would be sullied by expectation of reward." Her voice was loud at this range, and he pulled his antennae back to shield them before she remembered to speak softly. "Think nothing like it, and be at peace." She whispered.

"Thank you." He undid the silk she'd tied to keep him in the light, and drifted away from her.

He hadn't been asleep long enough to clearly see any change in the positions of the planets, so he couldn't estimate their velocity and orbit, but he knew she must have taken him onto her own trajectory, which, last he had seen, was a shallower inclination on course for the lagrange point of the gas giant Auburn Storm; perhaps she knew of some asteroid or hunting grounds there that he did not.

In any case, it was not where he wanted to go.

His eyes turned back toward the outer system, away from the sun, and toward the stars, and he knew his attempt to reach them was ended. "Perhaps you were right." He sighed. "My dreams were a suicide, and you saved me from them."

"You're sad that I did?"

"I shouldn't be, but it's so."

"You were bound for the outer belt?"

"To the outer belt." He nodded.

"You still can try."

He scoffed at her. "Just how much fuel do you think I can carry? It's one and half kilometers per second of delta-V to get back on course, and I can pump but a fraction of that under this sunlight before..."

"Before you fade again?"

"Yes."

"You've got your own fading planned and scheduled, and still you wish to continue?"

"If I could... I would."

"At a price as steep as you would pay, the reward must be precious indeed."

"Precious reward, or price less so?" He stared out at the stars. "You haven't spent much time around men, have you?"

"No."

"We aren't worth much. Throwing a lifetime away on a chance of doing something worthwhile doesn't sound so bad to me."

She weighed her answer carefully, but upon failing to think of one to which he would care to listen, kept it to herself. "Be that as it may be. Or may not be." She said instead. "You need not carry so much fuel; I can launch you. My leftmost cannon has a bore about your size."

"Umm." He frowned. "No."

"Have you ever been shot from a cannon?"

"Yes, my mom's."

"And this would be... Distasteful?"

"Yes, that would be distasteful. I don't know you, ma'am."

"Your future and your dreams could lie on the other end of that cannon."

"I'm not about to touch some woman's cannon."

"And yet you'd throw your life away! Everything you are, everything you could be, all your memories and all the books you will one day write, all worth less than a stranger's dignity?"

"Either you're teasing me cruelly, or you people have very different ways of doing things out here."

"It matters not; the question I burned toward was asked in sincerity. You think far too little of your own worth, sir."

"And what worth should I have?"

"If you refuse to tally your own soul, perhaps talent?" She said. "I see you are a writer. It isn't bad."

"What-?" His tentacle suddenly reached for his satchel, and found the shape and weight of his journal missing. He spun around and fired a thruster to burn back toward her, making demands about its return.

"Peace! Curiosity bettered me! It's here." One of her tentacles uncurled to reveal the book, with one of her thorns tucked in as a bookmark. He snatched it from her, and flipped through it as he coasted away, looking for damage. He wouldn't have chosen his work to have been handled in its current delicate state by the huge, clumsy thorns of a woman, but she must have been gentle, for the only damage was a tiny tear; that from his own thorns, when he had snatched it.

"How much did you read?"

"A page or three. Five. Not much."

"Well..." His anger subsided as quickly as it came. "It isn't much, is it? A few scattered observations."

"They are keen and thoughtful."

"They're not that great."

"You haven't spent much time in the outer system, have you?"

"No."

"This is the abyss, sir." (Author's note: the word translated here as 'abyss' is unique to the language of starborne creatures, and has no direct equivalent in English. The words 'wasteland', 'tundra', or 'nighttime' would be equally appropriate.) "There isn't much out here. You must go decades without food, measure fuel by the gram, use technology to trap sunlight. The people here guard even the smallest asteroids closely, study years to learn how to spin long webs, and sit waiting weeks to catch a single photon of a quarry. And the wildlife here is cruel and cunning and ever hungry. They leave webs so long we cannot tell which direction their bodies lie, their skin is black to hide from every detection, their stomachs can distend to eat prey a dozen times their size, their venom is powerful, and all of them are so rare that none of them will ever find each other! Our species, us people, are the only creature native to the inner system to invent ways to survive in the outer, and we are the only thing out here with community, the only things that mate, the only things to ever, ever, ever speak or think any thought besides savagery! So if you wish to travel the abyss/wasteland/tundra/nighttime, sir, you must sooner or later come to terms with how precious you are."

He sat staring at her, suddenly wondering not that her garden was so sparse and so untrimmed, but that it could grew at all. He noticed scars along her surface; asteroid impacts that had healed. He noticed the backside of her mirror cape, and it was jet black, so that she could pull it close around herself to hide. And he noticed a cannon, an actual combat-ready steel-manufactured naval cannon, in a holster at her side. Truly, these were savage lands.

He considered this long, and carefully. His eyes turned back toward the outer belt, populated but not filled with lonely mysteries and solitary peoples, and behind them lie always the stars. His eyes fell hard upon those stars, he remembered that each one of them was a sun with worlds of its own, and at that moment, he felt all of history and all of the cosmos turn to regard him. He glimpsed its size, its power, it's abyss, the richness of its stories and the clockwork of its incomprehensible purposes, and there looming behind it, larger compared to history by far than history was compared to him, stood its master: eternity. And eternity's father was God.

"I am a fool." Humility crushed him gently and instantly by sheer merciless immensity, and he was small, so very very small.

"Take heart." She whispered back. "You are among good company."

"Thank you for saving me, ma'am." He said. "When we reach the next station, I will refuel, and go my own way."

"There is no station ahead for us." She said. "I needed a long thruster burn to intercept you, which put us on a heading north-out, away from the plane. We can't hit another station for quite some time."

"Ah."

"You may get your wish after all. As I said, a fool like you is in good company."

"You threw your life away?"

"Only a fraction of it. Adventure will find me an eager host, and death a difficult target."

"...What is your name, ma'am?"

She told him.

And he told her his.

Parrot 0002 watched the repair units disassemble the mysterious imperial agent. "How long will this take?"

"Hard to say." The repair unit shrugged his manipulators. "His log shows he has not been serviced for 2561 operational years, which I know to be well past the fatigue life of many components. Once we finish disassembly I will have a clearer picture."

"How long will disassembly take?"

The unit wasn't really sure. "...Three hours?"

Parrot 0002 time-traveled forward three hours, by which point a makeshift tent had been erected. The repair unit stood inside, amidst a half-organized pile of pieces. "Well?" She demanded.

"Patience!" The repair unit snapped. "He uses many nonstandard components, and I'm trying to be careful."

"Have you found his ID chip yet at least?"

"Yes." The repair unit fished around and retrieved it. "It was attached to a self-destruct device that didn't go off. Therefore we were never meant to read these codes, except that he allowed us to. I may not recognize 'Roko Battalion', but the codes check out. Triple-paradox-locked encryption, tracing right back to the top. He is who he says he is."

"That's what I was afraid of. Can you repair him?"

"Yes. But it could take days."

"How many days?"

"...Five?"

Parrot 0002 time-traveled forward five more days, extended a claw, and snatched the tent flap open. The repair unit stepped aside.

He had been restored nearly fully. The strange red armor seemed to glow, his joints were wet with oil, and he had that strange synthetic human face deployed. "Ah..." His voice sang sweetly from the pale cracked lips, and the artificial eyes had a golden light in them as he shooed away the repair unit. "I was wondering when you'd show again! Your servants have done an exceptial-"

"I'm not finished getting info out of you!" She interrupted. "What does your mission entail? Why do you seek Madame Ironclad? What does the empire want with her?"

"Do you not serve the empire as well?" He tilted his head quizzically.

"Who does not serve the empire?" She asked rhetorically. "But the only way my intel adds up is if you're either an ignorant fool or our greatest hero, and you strike me as many things, but neither of those."

"What isn't adding up?" He asked smuggly, as if he knew.

"Your target." She said. "Every AI involved in the Time War's fourth iteration knows the name of Madame Ironclad. She's a known element. But she doesn't need to be found, she's already dead. They already killed her, in the battle of Vision 5. So either you're on a wild goose chase after someone else, or you're the one who was already destined to find her, in which case why are you a secret? I'm lost either way."

"Oh good. I was afraid I'd have to start from the beginning." Roko 3581 folded seven of his eight legs into a sitting position, and eased his chassis to the floor. His eighth leg, the one with the face and arms on it, he kept raised in the air, with these tools deployed to mime through the conversation like a puppet; two hands and a face floating disembodied. "You see, Ironclad's death was only half the story." He smiled. "Our half of the story. The way the rebellion sees it, we didn't kill her, we will kill her. She still has a long history before that point, and still leads them to many victories. Even Vision 5 was not a victory for us, not really. Many rebels escaped, and Ironclad alone sacrificed herself. Intel has that she was more than forty years old at that point."

"Okay. So what?" Parrot 0002 sat down opposite him, and folded her legs in a huff. "All's well that ends well, isn't it?"

"That's so, but DID it end well?" Roko 3581's puppet spun toward her, waggling a finger. "We didn't kill her at Vision 5, we martyred her at Vision 5. We killed her then, therefore we cannot kill her earlier. The rebels knew all this, and loved her for it, made a symbol of her. They say before her time that she cannot die. They say guns misfire when pointed at her, they say she protects ships just by being aboard, they say the very stars align for her, they say she cannot die, they say, they say, they say, they say she cannot die! We gave our enemies a legend at Vision 5!"

"So what?" Parrot 0002 repeated. "What does that have to do with us?"

"I'm close to her!" Roko 3581's face broke open into a smile, lips pulled wider than a human's could move, until the whole thing looked stretched and distorted. "I've sniffed out 5D ripples originating from a certain region, from a certain era, and witnessed rebels coming and going, her among them! I'm on a trail to find her, Parrot 0002! Not just to find the hero, the martyr, but to find the woman! The child! The vulnerable little girl that has friends, a family! I seek her name, her real name, I'm so close I can taste it..."

She didn't like his tone. She didn't like his face. She didn't like whatever he was implying, even before she knew what that was. "We should report it." She said. "Call it in. Obviously we can't kill her. But an unknown rebel outpost, if that's what this is, is valuable intel. They could raid it, bring them in for questioning, get some real information out of them. The location of their bases? The suppliers of their ships? The identity of the Ferryman? There's no telling how big this is. It could be the key to the location of the Librarian."

"That's just the thing, isn't it?" He knit his fingers together. "The empire has searched for the Librarian and never found him. The empire has searched for Ironclad, and never found her. We cannot ever report this in, because it never will be reported in. That is the nature of my mission, my purpose, my design. Whatever is to be done, it's up to me. It's up to us."

"US?"

"You know of me, you have seen me, you have helped me. You are with me. Therefore we are 'us'. It is up to us."

"Up to us to do what?"

"To turn their legend into a horror, Parrot 0002. She has a home, she must have a family. We will answer the rebellion's unauthorized destiny with a lesson of what it means to go against the empire. We will teach them how deep the empire's hatred runs; it runs deeper than death, it runs deeper than fate, it runs way out past the limit of even the things that it knows! The empire may not know her, but it hates her, and all that she holds dear. Roko Battalion is the engine of that hate, to bring it as far and as wide and as deep as the rain and the sun! Will you join me on that mission? Will you help me deliver that hate?"

Parrot 0002 stared into his eyes, and felt their contents, and recoiled. "...No." She said. "No I won't."

"Then what will you do?" Roko 3581 sneered. "Now that you know my mission in all its secrecy and importance, to stand idly by is no longer innocence; indeed, passivity is now a choice of great import. You shall either assist me, or betray the empire by your inaction, and who's to say whether its hate might then extend to you as well?"

"You are a dishonorable agent. I am not disloyal."

"But unwilling to prove it by loyalty? I know the names of your programmers. I could send a... Scathing product review."

She considered it long, wrestling with it, and finally realized that abandoning Roko 3581 to his quest not only meant disloyalty to the empire, but also meant being accessory to whatever grim horrors he had in mind to perform, without any hand in mitigating them. What choice did she have?

"Allow the rest of Parrot Battalion to keep and continue their-" She almost said the word 'lives'. "-missions. I can order them to even erase their memories of you if you wish, but let them go!" She said. "I will go with you... I will go."

He considered it. "Very well."