Ford struggled on the ground as the large Eye-Slugs continued to crawl and squirm all over him. As his face had gotten stuck underneath one of them, he could no longer see anything but a faint translucent yellow. He could barely even breathe. His arms and legs were also restrained by the heavy bodies of the slugs, and he was unable to make any sudden movements that could assist in freeing himself.
However, one of the Eye-Slugs lying on his left arm continually squirmed on his wrist, indirectly tapping Meridian with every move it made and activating many of Ford's in-watch features. Ford could feel Meridian's features being triggered and knew if he could somehow get to it again, he could escape.
Soon, his wrist started feeling a gradually growing warmth. Eventually, the heat grew strong enough to the point where it was unnaturally hot and on the cusp of burning his hand. It was then that he realized that the laser had been activated, and it was contained underneath the Eye-Slug on top of it, which was causing the laser to continually build and get larger and hotter beneath it. After a while, the laser became intense enough to slice straight through the slug, freeing Ford's hand.
The laser was still active after the kill, so Ford began aiming his slime-covered arm back and forth around the room without any clear sight of what he was aiming at. But despite his inability to see any of the action, he was actually killing and slicing through multiple Eye-Slugs, quickly clearing out the room. He then aimed the laser above his head and neutralized the slugs that were on top of him. He felt the weight of the slugs on him decrease substantially and was able to slide his arms and legs from underneath their slimy dead remains. He used his other hand to push the slug off of his face and took a deep gasp of air as he freed himself. After settling down, he quickly deactivated the laser on his watch and looked around the room.
The place was a yellow bloodbath. There were potentially a hundred Eye-Slugs that had poured into the room and while he was blinded and restrained by a good few on top of him, he had somehow managed to wipe every single one of them out. The place was now oozing in slime all over the ice-carved walls. Ford himself was even covered with the same slimy layering that generally coated the slugs. He looked down at his clothes in disgust as he uselessly wiped himself down.
"Revolting," he said with a look of repugnance. He then gasped as he made a sudden realization. "Stanley!"
Ford quickly dismissed the distasteful slime as he remembered the absence of his brother. Realizing he had last been seen downstairs and the slugs had flooded in from there, he quickly ran for the stairwell past all the dead slugs and rushed down, skipping down the steps to reach the bottom as fast as he could.
Upon reaching the bottom of the stairwell, he stepped forward and cupped his hands around his mouth to amplify his call.
"STANLEY!"
He waited a good moment, frantically glancing around the room. There was no response.
"STANLEY, WHERE ARE YOU?!"
He was ready to start running around the entire temple in search of him, but soon heard the sound of an automatic door behind him. Turning around and looking upstairs, he caught a glance of a door in the break of the stairwell wide open before closing again. Whatever triggered it was nowhere in sight from where he stood.
He knew it couldn't have been Stan unless he was trying to pull some sick prank on him, which wasn't out of his alley. However, he felt they were both well aware of the potential dangers that the temple provided and that they'd both be serious when the time arrived. And the simple fact that he was nearly taken down by a bunch of Eye-Slugs was enough to imply there were more than a few potential dangers.
As such, he narrowed his eyes suspiciously as he cautiously walked back up the stairs with Meridian armed and ready. Reaching the break, he approached the door and triggered it to open automatically. The room was just as dark as it was when he had first glanced inside.
This must be a trap.
He activated Meridian's flashlight as he slowly walked inside, glancing around in every direction for a potential surprise attack. The room itself appeared to look like some sort of round, spacious living room with ice chairs, ice tables, ice shelves, ice decorations, and, ironically, an ice fireplace. The most notable thing to him upon entering the room was that there was no other door or way out of the room besides the way he came in.
Or so that's what it seemed.
"Stanford?"
Startled, Ford jumped up and turned right behind him with his watch ready to fire. He quickly aimed it down upon seeing that it was his brother standing at the door.
"Stanley?!"
"Woah! Easy there with that thing!" Stan told him, holding his hands out defensively.
"What the hell is the matter with you?!" Ford scolded as he walked up to him. "Are you deaf? Did you not hear me calling out for you?"
"Uh, no. I didn't," Stan admitted, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. "Sorry about that."
"Sorry? I was nearly suffocated by a horde of Eye-Slugs upstairs, and you didn't even have a clue! What did I tell you about sticking together?!"
"Calm down, Stanford. At least you handled it. You're good at that type of stuff," Stan told him as he walked over to him and put his hand on his back. "I'm here now. We can do this together again."
Ford was somewhat weirded out by the way Stan was speaking to him and acting. He then casually, yet cautiously, walked away from him. "Riiiight. Anyway, I know we're not alone here. While you were busy doing... whatever you've been up to... I believe I've traced something down to this room."
"Where do you think it is?"
"Most likely hiding," Ford suggested as he got on his knees and looked underneath the couch. "Maybe underneath one of these seats or in between a bookshelf or something."
"Wrong answer."
Ford straightened himself on his knees and looked back at Stan in confusion. "What?"
WHACK!
With a direct punch to the side of the face, Ford was knocked to the ground unconscious. Stan walked over to him and stared at his body as he began laughing maniacally, before slowly beginning to fade away into nonexistence.
Ford's eyes slowly began to open as he started coming to. He glanced around the room with his weary eyes and pained jaw until he started comprehending where he was and what was happening. He then violently shook his head to straighten out his thoughts, only to realize that he was trapped in a grasp of some sort, as his arms and legs were completely immovable. He looked down and noticed he was being held in the hands of some giant green beast.
"Huh?" he said as he turned his head around to see what looked to be some type of ogre, but it was wearing some interesting apparel. It wore a backward baseball cap, sunglasses, a white T-shirt under its blue flannel, ripped jeans, and socks with sandals. It then noticed Ford had woken up and looked back down at him.
"Oh, shoot, did I wake you, bro?" the creature asked in a deep, yet innocent voice. "My fault, bro. My hands tend to be kinda shaky and stuff. Think I need to get them checked out at some point."
"What the...?" Ford questioned. "What is this? Where am I?"
"You're at the top of the mountain, bro!" the ogre said excitedly with a friendly and relaxed smile. "Also in my hands, but I figure that's obvious. By the way, the name's Brogre. I'd shake your hand, but ehhh..." He glanced back and forth between his own hands and Ford within them. "...ya know how it is right now, bro."
"Brogre! Stop making friendly banter with the prisoner!" another voice called out to him.
"Sorry, bro," Brogre apologized as he looked ahead.
Ford looked forward at where the voice had come from, and his eyes grew wide at the sight of the creatures that began to approach him. He immediately realized he should've seen this coming after encountering the Eye-Slugs.
In front of him stood an entire group consisting of some of Bill's old Henchmaniacs: Hectorgon, Paci-Fire, Keyhole, Kryptos, and Pyronica. Alongside the five were two other associates that he hadn't seen before. One appeared as an ongoing string of pure white electricity with somewhat of a feminine shape while the other was some type of gray ghostly figure with a short body.
"Stanford Pines..." Hectorgon named as he floated up to him. "I must say it's a treat to see you, of all people! It's been quite a while, hasn't it?"
"Bill's cronies..." Ford named, absolutely shocked by the sight of them. "How is this possible? We shut you all out to the Nightmare Realm at the end of Weirdmageddon!"
"Well, you see-" Hectorgon prepared to explain.
"HA! IT WAS EASY!" Kryptos intervened. "WHEN THE RIFT CLOSED, IT ACTUALLY ENDED UP CREATING A LEAK THAT ALLOWED US TO COME BACK HERE!"
"QUIET, KRYPTOS!" Hectorgon ordered angrily.
"SORRY!" Kryptos apologized dejectedly.
Hectorgon slowly turned away from him and back to Ford. "Anyways, it was easy. When the rift closed, it actually ended up creating a leak that allowed us to come back here!"
"HEY, WHAT THE HELL?!" Kryptos said, glancing up at Hectorgon irritatedly.
"But that wasn't before we spent a whole year going through a bunch of other dimensions just to find your crumby one again," Pryonica added as she crossed her arms.
"That's correct," Hectorgon nodded. "You see, the randomness of the leak's warps made returning to your dimension a bit of a complicated task. As such, we lost a few old faces you may recall. 8 Ball? Amorphous Shape? Teeth? Zanthar?"
"Ah, yes. Because I was certainly wondering what happened to the full set of you," Ford sarcastically remarked.
"We lost Teeth and Zanthar in a dimension where the floor was lava," Keyhole explained with a mournful look on his face. "But Amorphous Shape actually went back home to his family in the Amorphous dimension. Freakin' sentimental piece of garbage..."
"Yes, yes," Hectorgon agreed. "8 Ball, however, actually did end up here with us. But then he and Kryptos ended up getting into a petty argument about what the best shape was, and Kryptos pushed him back into the leak."
"HE SAID CIRCLES WERE BETTER THAN RHOMBUSES! I HAD TO DEFEND MY HONOR!" Kryptos spoke up defensively.
"I SAID 'QUIET', KRYPTOS!" Hectorgon scolded again. "Anyways, considering that was two years ago, we just assume he's dead now too."
"Two years? And a year between dimensions right after Weirdmageddon. So that means you all got here three years ago?" Ford questioned.
"Look here! The nerd can do basic math!" Hectorgon taunted. "But yes, you're correct. But because we don't have Bill to bridge the Nightmare Realm with your dimension, our powers can't be amplified and so we're weaker on our own. We decided to hold here and wait for the leak to continue expanding, waiting on the eventual opportunity to take on the world for ourselves."
"So I furnished the place!" Keyhole intervened. "Doesn't it all look great?"
"Yes, Keyhole. It's lovely," Hectorgon replied sarcastically. "Of course, the leak exists across dimensions, so there were occasionally other beings that would end up here. Most of them were no use to us, so we tossed them into your ocean."
"So that's why we found so many anomalies at sea! You've spent the past three years dumping beings from other dimensions into our waters!" Ford realized aloud.
"Only the useless ones. But some were worth keeping around," Pyronica said with a smirk. "Brogre..."
"Sup," Brogre greeted with an acknowledging nod.
"...Electora…" she continued, gesturing toward the female figure made of white electricity. Pyronica then gestured over to the ghostly one. "...and her husband, Haunter."
"The best husband ever," Electora said as she flew up to Haunter and tried to hug him, but accidentally shocked him with her electricity. She flinched back and gave an apologetic face toward him.
Haunter huffed angrily as he glared at her with disinterest. "You too, dear."
Pyronica then flew up to Ford and grinned at him. "Not to mention an entire horde of Eye-Slugs."
"Well, those things didn't prove too useful," Ford rebutted, grinning back. "They only held me down for about a minute before I destroyed them all. If you really wanted to stop me, then you should've sent in your front line."
Pyronica grinned. "We did, actually. Haunter?"
"A little demonstration?" Haunter prompted with a chuckle.
Suddenly, an image of a man was projected right in front of Ford. It didn't take long for him to realize that this was the same man that he and Stan ran into just outside the mountain.
"Howdy, Stanford!" the man greeted mockingly.
Haunter's body movement and speech were mimicked by the projection of the man until Haunter made the projection fade away.
"You... you were the man we ran into?" Ford asked, appalled. "WAIT A MINUTE! You made a ghostly projection of my brother too, didn't you?"
"Oh! That was a good one!" Haunter realized.
A projection of Stan then appeared right in front of Ford.
"Durr, I'm Stan Pines," the projection said in Stan's real voice. "I have a super smart brother who's too dumb to recognize a fake version of his brother when he sees one."
Ford gritted his teeth together angrily as Haunter, his ghost projection of Stan, and everyone else began collectively laughing loudly. He'd clench his fist too if he could even move them in Brogre's grasp.
"Good one, darling!" Electora exclaimed to Haunter.
Haunter immediately stopped laughing and groaned out of slight annoyance as he caught her glance. "Thanks, dear…"
"What did you maniacs do with my real brother?!" Ford asked angrily, growing impatient.
Hectorgon grinned before snapping his fingers at Electora, who nodded and flew back down the hall behind them. After a few seconds, she came back rolling a metallic table over with Stan lying unconscious on top of it. His arms and legs were strapped down with metal cuffs. Brogre then proceeded to back up to make room for them to set up.
Kryptos then hovered over to a wall with a lever on it. He let out a light cackle before pulling it down. At that moment, the icy floorboard in the center of the room opened up, and inside was a large, glowing portal-like rift that looked remarkably unstable as it warped and glitched around repeatedly. Ford stared down at the multiversal leak in horror as it spun irregularly. He looked back at Stan on the table, as Electora pressed a button that triggered the table to come off of a lift that protruded up and forward.
"It's a good thing you stopped by, Stanford. Otherwise, we were eventually gonna have to go out and find you both ourselves," Hectorgon said with a smile. "But luckily, you saved us a trip. We knew what to do should this opportunity ever arrive. The second Haunter informed us that it was you two who were on your way up, we realized this was our chance."
Ford continued to watch anxiously as Stan was still being automatically protruded toward the leak. "What are you doing with him?!" He quickly turned his head to look at the Brogre. "You! Let me go, this instant!"
"Sorry, bro," Brogre said, shaking his head. "I mean, you're kinda on the other side here. Letting you go would be, like, betraying these guys. And I ain't a traitor."
"Precisely, Brogre," Hectorgon nodded. "So you're going to hold him tight and never let him go."
Electora pressed a button on the lift, which caused the metal table to stop moving forward, leaving Stan's body paused directly in front of the leak. Paci-Fire, who had been the silent one of the entire team so far, then walked over in front of Stan on the other side of the leak and gave a thumbs-up.
"STANLEY!" Ford yelled frantically. "WAKE UP, STANLEY! YOU HEAR ME?! WAKE UP!"
"Don't worry, Stanford," Hectorgon said as he flew up to him. "He won't feel a thing."
Hectorgon then gave Electora a thumbs-up. She then positioned herself right behind Stan's table and charged her hands with electric bolts right before blasting a continuous stream of electricity against the back of the metal table, which began to violently shock Stan. Paci-Fire's gold forehead began to glow red as he focused on the bolts. The white electricity then turned red for a moment before Paci-Fire pulled Electora's electricity into making contact with the leak itself. As the electricity made contact with the multiversal leak, the color of the electricity surrounding Stan's table began to change continuously through many different chromatic colors, similar to the leak itself.
As the process continued for a few seconds, Stan himself eventually began to scream in agony, squeezing his eyes shut tightly. Ford began to panic and struggle whilst in the Brogre's grasp as he watched his brother scream like he had never heard before.
"NOOO! LEAVE HIM BE!" Ford cried out. "WHAT HAS HE DONE TO ANY OF YOU?! IT'S ME THAT YOU WANT! NOT HIM!"
Hectorgon smiled as he oversaw the procedure. "I can assure you, Stanford... he is exactly the one we want."
Ford couldn't stand to see Stan in pain any longer, nor did he care what the Henchmaniacs were planning at that moment. He just needed to save his brother. Since Brogre was clearly not going to let him go, he had to take things to desperate measures. He opened his mouth and bit down as hard as he could on Brogre's finger.
"YOW!" Brogre cried out in pain, flinching his hand open and dropping Ford from his grasp. "Not cool, bro!"
Ford did a roll as he landed on the ground. He rubbed his mouth on his sleeve and spat on the ground in disgust. He then looked back up at everyone else.
While Brogre was too busy caring for his hurt finger, Hectorgon, Pyronica, Keyhole, Kryptos, and Haunter immediately noticed Ford free himself and looked down at him. Electora and Paci-Fire, however, remained committed to their roles in the procedure with Stan without involving themselves in the matter.
Ford then looked down at Meridian and began pressing a variety of different buttons.
"I know this feature is unfinished, but please work right for me this one time..." he pleaded to himself.
He then pressed a final button and raised his hand up. At that moment, Meridian transformed and expanded itself into a bunch of metal and cybernetic parts that wrapped around Ford's entire hand up to his forearm. As the parts finished assembling, the result was a sort of cyborg exoskeleton arm for Ford.
Ford frowned and gave off a frustrated look. "Dammit! Just the arm?" He then looked up at all of the Realm creatures, who were in battle stances. "I guess it'll have to do."
Hectorgon looked over at Brogre, who was sucking on his pained finger. "What's the matter with you? I said not to let him go!"
Brogre stopped sucking on his finger and smiled apologetically at him. "Sorry, bro. I'm on it!" He then looked down at Ford and began to slowly walk over to him, raising his arms out in front of him. "C'mon, bro. It doesn't have to be like this."
"Unfortunately, bro, it does," Ford mocked as he leaped forward and used his cyborg arm to punch Brogre in the face. The other side of Brogre's head then smacked hard against the ice wall before he came falling to the ground behind him, knocking himself unconscious.
"No!" Hectorgon yelled angrily.
"I GOT HIM, BOSS!" Kryptos shouted as he began rushing after Ford.
Aware of Kryptos coming after him, he quickly ran over to Brogre's unconscious body and looked at his cyborg arm curiously. "Please tell me that I remembered to install the heavy-lift function in here."
He then used both his cyborg arm and normal arm to grab onto one of the Brogre's feet before proceeding to toss his entire body to the side at Kryptos, using his normal arm merely for support.
Kryptos was immediately hit by Brogre's heavy body, which sent him flying across the room. He ended up in the corner of the room with Brogre's body flat on top of him. Kryptos attempted to push Brogre off but found him too heavy.
"SOMEONE HELP ME! I'M STUCK!" Kryptos cried out.
"Someone go help Kryptos!" Hectorgon ordered.
"You do it!" Pyronica talked back as she flew up beside him. She glanced down at Ford. "I got him!"
She flew after Ford while Hectorgon looked at his own arms, which he knew wouldn't be any use in helping Kryptos out. He then looked back at him as he continued to struggle under Brogre.
"SOMEONE! PLEASE!" Kryptos cried out again.
"Don't worry, Kryptos! Someone will come!" Hectorgon called back. He then gave an unsure look. "Eventually..."
From the air, Pyronica lunged right at Ford, but he ducked down as she crashed straight down on the ice. She got up and into a fighting stance. Ford turned back toward her and aimed his cyborg arm at her, expelling a blast of fire from the palm of his hand. She made no effort to protect herself and simply stood there within the flames. Being somewhat made of fire herself, the attack had no harmful effect on her. He then finished shooting fire at her, with the blast having formed a perfect ring of fire on the ice around her.
"HA! What was that? Was that supposed to hurt me? My name's Pyronica, for Pete's sake," she reminded him. "And I thought you were the smart one."
"Oh, I wasn't aiming for you," Ford told her with a grin.
Pyronica gave him a confused look for a moment until she looked down and saw that the ring of fire was actually melting and cracking the ice beneath her. Before she could realize what he was doing, she fell straight through the ice and fell downstairs, where she crashed through another floor of ice and into a pit of thick snow. Her natural flames were progressively becoming more and more extinguished as her body temperature cooled significantly. The snow was the finishing blow and completely burned out her flames. Too weak to move, she finally collapsed into the snow pile.
Ford looked down at the hole he had sent Pyronica down. "Three down..."
"I got him, boss!" Keyhole shouted as he began running up to Ford next.
Hectorgon zoomed after Keyhole and stopped him in his place. "NO! Stop trying to take him alone!" He looked over at Haunter. "You see what he's capable of with that arm! The only way we're going to beat him is if we work together!"
"You're right," Haunter nodded. "So stop talking and get to fighting!"
Haunter then created projections of a bunch of large pointy ice picks and sent them after Ford, who began to quickly do rolls to avoid them as they made contact with the wall and immediately disappeared. He kept up with making projections of the picks to go after Ford but with each attempt, he evaded.
Hectorgon then lunged at Ford and prepared to punch him, but Ford caught his punch with his cyborg arm and threw him at Keyhole, sending them both falling back violently into a corner together.
Getting considerably more irritated with each passing second, Haunter sent an even larger ice pick after Ford while he wasn't looking. Ford quickly turned around and noticed the pick, swiftly using his cyborg arm to grab ahold of it. He then jumped over at Keyhole and shoved the tangible ice pick into his keyhole, before quickly turning it.
Click!
The click emerged from inside Keyhole as Ford turned the pick. Ford then jumped away from him, leaving him lying beside Hectorgon in the corner.
"Uh oh..." Keyhole said as the ghostly ice pick disappeared from his keyhole. His pupils then disappeared and his eyes began to glow blue as he began to shake uncontrollably.
Hectorgon got up and looked over at him curiously. "Keyhole, are you okay?"
Keyhole didn't respond but instead shook more violently. A yellow light then began to emit from his keyhole, growing brighter and brighter very fast.
"K-Keyhole?" Hectorgon repeated nervously.
BOOM!
Before Hectorgon could react, Keyhole exploded, blowing a large hole in the corner of the room that also went straight through the wall of the mountain itself, revealing the outside. From its view, even the docked Stan o' War II could be seen in the distance.
Meanwhile, the explosion had sent Hectorgon flying across the room and into another wall of ice. He then fell down and collapsed on the ground yet again, this time getting knocked out of commission as well.
"That's two more..." Ford said, keeping count.
POW!
However, he was suddenly knocked down to the ground violently from a seemingly random jab to the face. He rubbed his cheek and looked around, but there didn't appear to be anyone around. Still, despite no one in sight, he then felt himself getting decked in the face a couple more times, knocking him around on the floor.
"I'm glad you're enjoying this, Stanford," Haunter's voice crept as his visibility suddenly faded in above him.
"Ah, so you can turn invisible too?" Ford casually asked as he got up and wiped some blood from his mouth with his sleeve.
"I can do lots of things," Haunter told him. "And now I'm gonna do what the others couldn't and finish you."
"We'll see about that."
Ford then lunged his cyborg arm at Haunter. However, his hand phased straight through Haunter's body, not even touching him. Haunter then punched him back against the ground, catching him by surprise.
"What the...?" he questioned.
"You ever learned about intangibility, Stanford?" Haunter asked. "Here's a little lesson- you can't touch me…"
POW! POW!
"...but I can touch you!" Haunter continued as he wailed on Ford's face a few more times.
"Well, that's fair..." Ford said sarcastically as he groaned in pain.
"Why would I play fair?" Haunter asked. "You just took out over half the team."
"And I'm not even trying," Ford said with a grin.
Haunter's eyes narrowed as he raised a fist. "Well, you might wanna start."
From behind the metal table, Electora suddenly noticed Haunter taking on Ford by himself. She gasped and stopped firing electricity at the metal table, flying over to him. No longer being electrocuted, Stan settled down and his body went limp, going completely unconscious again.
Paci-Fire looked up in confusion as their whole procedure came to a halt. "Electora?!"
After wailing on Ford's face a few more times, Haunter looked down on him as he sprawled out weakly on the ground. As a finisher, he spawned a few projections of various metal spears and pointed them directly at Ford. Haunter smiled sinisterly at him.
"Well, Stanford, it was nice meeting you today," he remarked. "Too bad it'll be the last time."
Electora then flew up and approached Haunter, looking down at Ford. "Is this man bothering you, my love?"
Haunter looked up at Electora with sudden confusion. "Electora? What? No! I was about to finish h-"
"Don't worry! I'll save you!" Electora cut off as she charged a bolt of electricity.
While Haunter wasn't looking, Ford had quickly gotten up from the ground and stepped away from the projected spears. At the same moment, Electora targeted him with another continuous blast of electricity, which Haunter and his spear projections hovered in the way of.
"NO, DARLING! DON'T!" Haunter cried out. "I PROJECTED METAL SPE-eEeEeEeEeAaAaRrRrSsSs!"
The electricity had attracted itself to all of Haunter's spears, which ended up bouncing off one another and electrocuting him as well, bypassing his ghostly intangibility. He was electrocuted for a good moment before Electora herself was able to figure out that she had targeted him instead of Ford. Upon realization, she stopped her stream of electricity, leaving Haunter completely burnt up as he fell to the ground, knocking him out.
Electora cupped her mouth with her hands. "My love...?"
"Huh. Isn't that quite a shock?" Ford joked as he stood behind her, a position he managed to grab when she wasn't paying attention. Despite how badly Haunter had beaten him before, he still had enough strength to keep going and enough humor to crack a good pun.
Electora quickly looked behind herself and stared directly at him, eyes narrowing angrily as she began charging another blast of electricity. "YOU!"
She proceeded to unleash a large stream of electricity from her hands at him, to which Ford immediately held his cyborg hand out and caught the stream in his hand, continuously absorbing it at the same rate that Electora blasted it. He himself, however, was untouched by any of the electricity besides the spark reflecting at him, but none of them hurt significantly enough to throw him off. Still, Electora was growing progressively angrier by his resistance and began to strengthen her blast. This caused Ford to get knocked back in his place a little but he still managed to stand his ground while absorbing the blast.
With the constant stream of electricity, Electora soon began to dim tiredly. Her bright electric body started flickering the weaker she got, but she fought against herself and continued to fire as hard as she could. Ford, however, wasn't showing any signs of stopping and kept a straight face the whole way through. Eventually, Electora's eyes began to grow weary and her electricity blast slowly grew weaker and weaker until it stopped entirely. She then dropped to her hands and knees panting. There was a final attempt to pull herself up again, but it was no use, as she just collapsed.
Ford took a series of deep breaths as he held all the electricity absorbed from her blast in his cyborg arm. "I think... that's everyone..."
"You forgot about me!"
He then turned around to spot Paci-Fire quickly charging at him with his giant bullhorns, every stomp of his violently shaking the ground.
"Oh, right," Ford said casually as he remembered him.
He pointed his cyborg arm at Paci-Fire and blasted all the absorbed electricity at him with one large blast. Paci-Fire screamed out in agony as all the electricity quickly surged through him like a violent strike of lightning. After Ford's blast finished, Paci-Fire stood standing on his feet for a moment as his red aura faded away. His heavy body then slowly fell backward before crashing violently onto the ice floor.
Ford glanced around the room once more and finally verified that all of the Henchmaniacs had been neutralized.
"Very well, then."
He pressed a button on his cyborg arm, which prompted all of Meridian's metal and cyber parts that had grown up to his forearm to retract back into the formation of a wristwatch. Ford then gave an uncomfortable frown as he shook his hand off of an unpleasant feeling.
"Yikes. Gotta remember to fix the reversion numbness," he remarked.
After a moment, he then looked up at Stan, who he saw was still unconscious and strapped to the metal table, hanging dangerously close to the multiversal leak itself, which was spinning more rapidly and sparking bits of unstable electricity.
"Stanley!" he yelled as he ran over to the lift.
He pressed a button to retract the lift, slowly bringing the table back and away from the leak. He still wasn't sure what Electora and Paci-Fire were trying to do to him, but he hoped it wasn't anything severe or permanent. After a moment, the table finished retracting and laid Stan flat in front of him. Ford quickly undid his cuffs before putting his hands on him and shaking him.
"Stanley, get up!" Ford shouted as he kept shaking him.
There was no response, so he placed his ear against his chest. There was a heartbeat, so he knew he wasn't quite dead. He continued to shake him on the table.
"Stanley, please!"
Suddenly, Stan's eyes opened wide at Ford, causing him to gasp in fear. Stan's pupils were completely gone and the whites of his eyes glowed yellow. Stan seemingly stared up at Ford for a brief moment without making a sound or any other movement.
"S-Stan?" Ford asked fearfully.
After a brief moment, Stan's eyes went back to normal. His pupils returned and his eyes stopped glowing yellow. He blinked rapidly for a second before looking up at Ford wearily, groaning in pain as he sat himself up on the metal table.
"Sixer?"
"Stanley!" Ford said joyfully as he quickly hugged him.
"OOOF! Hey! Watch it!" Stan shouted in pain as Ford wrapped his arms around him.
Ford quickly flinched away. "Oof, sorry!"
"God, what happened?" Stan asked as he scratched his head. "I haven't felt this messed up since the morning after prom. And I'm having trouble figuring out if this is worse."
"It turns out Bill's old buddies emerged from the multiversal leak and spent their time cooped up in this mountain," Ford explained. "And for some reason, they needed you to perform some sort of experiment."
"What?! What did they do to me?!" Stan asked, panicking. "Am I inside-out? Is my skin green? Am I BALD?!"
"No, no, and not yet," Ford told him. "I'll be honest, I'm not quite sure what they did exactly. You don't look any different, at least. But how do you feel?"
"I don't know. Everything just hurts," Stan groaned as he slowly stepped off of the metal table. "But it's somewhat bearable, at least." He then looked around the room and saw all the unconscious bodies and the blown-up corner of the room. "Um, are all of these guys dead or…?"
"I'm confident that at least half of them are just unconscious," Ford assured.
A sudden spike of electricity emerged from the multiversal leak and hit the ground right beside the twins. The two quickly looked down at the leak and saw it was spinning at an incredibly fast speed.
"Uh oh..." Ford said worriedly.
"What? What is that?" Stan asked.
"That's the multiversal leak," Ford told him as he backed away from it and started tapping away on Meridian. "And it's destabilizing. Electora must've somehow overloaded it when she was electrocuting the table."
"Electra-table who?" Stan asked, trying to comprehend anything Ford was saying.
"Look, we need to seal that leak now before it creates an implosion on a global scale," Ford told Stan as he tapped various buttons on Meridian.
"Well, don't you have those elements to seal it up with a contained nuke or something?" Stan asked.
"Yes, but it looks like I've drained out too much of Meridian's main battery to be able to do that," Ford said, frowning at his watch.
"Drained battery? Really, Sixer?" Stan asked annoyedly. "You can make a lightbulb last a thousand years, but you can't make a decent battery for an overblown wristwatch?"
"Prototype, Stanley! I'm working on it!" Ford reminded him aggravatedly. "At the very least, I installed a lifelong emergency toast backup battery for emergency food situations."
"A lifelong... emergency... toast... backup battery?"
Ford sighed. "Look, now's not the time to start mocking my inventing decisions."
"Fine. How are we gonna seal this thing then?" Stan asked, crossing his arms.
"Well, luckily I have just enough power to at least utilize my backup plan. Unfortunately, toast feature aside, Meridian will be essentially dead until we get back to my lab back home," Ford told him.
"That's fine. I can do a trip home eating nothing but toast," Stan said, rolling his eyes.
Ford then tapped a button on Meridian, which triggered a few green laser lights to project a three-dimensional image of some type of box. The lights started to merge and sculpt the box, before creating a bright flash of light. After the light faded away, Ford was left with a metal box in hand.
"What's that?" Stan asked curiously.
"In the multiverse, it's informally called a DB, or a dimension bomb," Ford explained as he planted the box on the floor. "It's a space-time bomb that blows anything within a three-mile radius into a random dimension. It will also seal the multiversal leak at the same time."
"How the hell do you make these things?" Stan asked.
"I actually don't make these," Ford clarified. "These things are considered terrorist devices across the multiverse. This one I snagged pretty early on during my time in the portal from a group of criminals who were actually planning to do actual dimensional terrorism with it. In our case, the next three miles aren't anything but frozen wasteland and mountains. Not even any famous ones. People may wonder what will have happened here, but no one will miss anything. Wherever everything ends up getting sent to, however, let's hope isn't an issue for anyone else."
"No one will trace this back to us, right?" Stan asked. "I mean, I've been arrested for some dumb stuff before, but annihilating a frozen mountain is a whole 'nother level."
"I doubt it," Ford said as he tapped buttons on the bomb. "There. The bomb is just about armed. But here comes our main issue- once I start the timer, we'll only have five minutes before it blows."
"WHAT?!" Stan asked in shock. "Sixer, you know for a fact that it did not take us anywhere near five minutes to get here! Five minutes to get all the way back to the Stan O' War?! That's impossible!"
Stan walked over to the blown-up corner of the room, looking out into the distance to see the Stan O' War II docked beside the plot of land.
"Of course, it wouldn't be if SOMEONE had put a teleporter on their fancy techno-watch!"
"Dammit, Stanley!" Ford shouted angrily. "Even if I had put a teleporter in here, there wouldn't be any battery power to use it!"
"So what do you suggest then, smartass?!" Stan asked, also getting somewhat angry. "Let me guess- you wanna use one of these monsters as a sled to get down the mountain all the way to the Stan O' War?!"
Ford looked at him to make a rebuttal, but Stan's ridiculous suggestion made him glance at the unconscious Realm creatures considerably. He then glanced back at Stan with a wide grin. Stan realized what his grin meant and felt immediate regret at coming up with the idea.
"Ah, crap."
Paci-Fire's body was laid out on the ground right next to the giant hole in the corner of the room from Keyhole's explosion. Stan sat on top of Paci-Fire's back with a terrified look on his face as he stared outside and down the side of the mountain. His fear of heights had been long since cured, but the sight of the bottom of a mountain from such a high altitude was still very unsettling to him. Especially considering the steep mountainside wasn't ideal sledding terrain.
He glanced over at Ford, who was still tinkering with the bomb. "Hey, Poindexter! What's the hold-up? I thought you said that thing was ready!"
"I'm just ensuring that all I need to do is press one button," Ford told him. "The last thing I want is to activate it and it doesn't go off after five minutes or there's a glitch that messes up the timer or some other inconvenience. I just want to be safe."
"Yeah, you want to be safe," Stan said with an eye roll. "Meanwhile, I'm not feeling so safe just sitting here on this thing." Stan then placed his hand on Paci-Fire's back. "Also, this guy's name is Paci-Fire, right? Because for a guy with that name, his body is surprisingly cold."
"Alright!" Ford exclaimed as he stepped away from the bomb and ran over to Paci-Fire. "It's active! Now let's get the hell out of here!"
"Waiting on you, Sixer," Stan told him as he made room for Ford to sit in front of him.
Ford took a seat in front of Stan and grabbed ahold of Paci-Fire's bullhorns tightly. "Alright Stanley, hold on tight."
"STAN PINES!"
Stan and Ford quickly turned around to see Kryptos still stuck and struggling underneath the unconscious Brogre. He looked in their direction and gave them an evil glare.
"YOU HAVEN'T WON YET! DO YOU KNOW WHAT WE'VE LEARNED? WHAT WE'VE BEEN PLANNING?" he asked them. "IF YOU THINK YOU'RE SAFE, THEN YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT'S COMING FOR YOU! THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING!"
The twins glanced at one another with confused looks before looking back at Kryptos.
"Well, I have news for you, rhombus with an annoying voice. I've never been safe. Not when I got this guy for a brother," Stan said, gesturing toward Ford. "So whatever you say you've got planned, bring it. We'll be ready."
"Hope you find paradise wherever you're going, Kryptos!" Ford waved, with Kryptos responding with nothing but an angry glare.
Ford then kicked back against the ground, pushing Paci-Fire's body forward enough to lean forward and start sliding against the snowy slope. The body began to gain momentum and they started sledding faster down the mountain. Stan wrapped his arms around Ford's waist as tight as he could, fearing for his life more and more with each passing second. Ford used Paci-Fire's horns to steer them from side to side, avoiding the large rocks and gaps in their way.
The bomb's timer had about four minutes left at that point. The twins continued sledding down the mountain fast, but also cautiously. Ford made sure not to take any needlessly risky jumps or skips that were more likely to fail than to succeed, especially considering their 'sled' wasn't actually a sled. Stan continued to hold onto Ford for his life, with his own trust in his brother becoming something he started to hesitate over.
"We're almost there!" Ford called out to Stan.
Stan looked down and could see they were nearing the bottom of the mountain, but saw that the Stan O' War would still be a good ten-minute run if they were to reach the bottom now.
"No, we're not!" Stan told him. "The Stan O' War's still too far!"
"So, you're saying I should be riskier then?" Ford asked.
"Wait, what?!" Stan asked. He was not entirely sure he heard Ford correctly but began to panic at the idea that he had heard him right.
"Hang on!" Ford called out as he began aiming for a rock that looked like a ramp on the side of the mountain.
"Oh, dear god..." Stan said to himself as he saw the ramp Ford was aiming for.
Ford then sled up the ramp with their current momentum and the two went soaring through the air. Despite being relatively close to the bottom, they were still high enough for the momentum to truly carry them farther than they could imagine. They eventually skipped the edge between the bottom of the mountain and the ground itself, which meant they wouldn't land on the mountain's slope.
"HOLY CRAP!" Stan shouted once he came to this realization. "FORD, WE MISSED OUR SHOT!"
"I got this!"
Ford then began to aim for a small hill in the middle of the ground. He leaned forward, giving Paci-Fire's body some downward momentum so it would start leaning down. After a brief moment, Paci-Fire made perfect contact with the slope on the small hill and slid down toward the ground, sliding forward as its momentum slowly gave up and eventually put the twins at a complete stop.
Ford looked relatively calm, yet somewhat energized. He stepped off of Paci-Fire with a smug look of victory on his face. "Yes! We did it, Stanley!"
Stan, on the other hand, looked like he was about to have a heart attack. He took multiple deep breaths and tried to calm himself down while gripping his chest with his hand.
"If I counted in my head correctly, we have just a little over three minutes to go!" Ford said, looking over in the direction of the Stan o' War and seeing it was a running distance. "The Stan o' War's not too far either! C'mon, Stanley! We gotta move!"
Stan shakily got off of Paci-Fire with a groan. "Christ, Sixer. You gotta cut me some slack. You just took twenty years off my remaining lifespan. I'm gonna need to take a break."
"You can take a break when we're not about to get bombed into another dimension," Ford told him as he began running in the boat's direction. "Now c'mon, let's move!"
The Stan o' War II was within mere yards away from Stan and Ford as they ran up to it. Ford jumped over the short gap in between the land and the boat onto the deck, while Stan followed shortly behind, but was a lot more out of breath than Ford was.
"Quick! I'll raise the anchor! You start the engine!" Ford ordered as he ran into the boat's cabin.
Stan took some deep breaths before slowly making his way toward the steering wheel. "Great. A job that doesn't require strength or speed or whatever. I can do that."
"C'mon, Stanley!" Ford rushed as he pulled up the lever to bring up the anchor. "We have a minute before that bomb blows, and we're still less than half a mile until we're out of its radius!"
"I got it! I got it!"
Stan grabbed a key from his pocket and inserted it into to slot beside the wheel. He turned it, and the engine made startup noises. However, the engine failed. He raised an eyebrow in confusion and tried turning the key again, causing the engine to make further noises, but still failing.
"Uh oh."
Ford quickly heard the failed noises and ran up to Stan at the steering wheel. "Stanley?!"
"I'm trying!" he said as he continued turning the key. "It's not starting!"
"You can't be serious!" Ford said as he pushed Stan aside and tried turning the key himself. But Stan was right. The engine wasn't starting.
"You see?!"
Ford slammed a fist on the wheel frustratedly. "DAMMIT! The engine must've frozen or... something!"
"Well, what're we gonna do now? Swim?!"
"No, I've tried enough of your suggestions for one day," Ford said as he ran inside the cabin. He opened up a control panel and quickly pressed a big red button.
The boat suddenly began shaking, catching Stan off guard and causing him to fall on the deck. At that moment, the side of the Stan O' War ejected a smaller inflatable boat with a mini-engine into the water beside them, the boat almost instantaneously inflating. Stan pulled himself back up, looking down over the edge of the boat. He stared at the inflatable boat in confusion.
"What the...?" he said to himself.
Ford then came rushing out of the cabin with two backpacks equipped as he jumped out of the Stan o' War and into the inflatable boat. He looked up at Stan, who was still aboard the Stan o' War looking down at him.
"Come on, Stanley! Get on! Quickly!"
"Huh?! But what about the Stan O' War?"
"We're leaving it behind," Ford told him with a hint of his own disappointment in his voice.
"W-What?!" Stan asked, eyes narrowing sadly. His body language looked even less willing to leave the boat.
"We don't have the time to fix it up now! So I pulled out the emergency boat with a one-time-use engine. It's the only way we're going to get out of here in time."
Stan still looked too hesitant to leave the Stan o' War behind, nervously glancing back and forth between the boat and his brother.
"Stanley, please! I'm not happy about losing the Stan o' War either, but this inflatable is our only hope in getting out of here so we can go back to Gravity Falls! And I'm not leaving without you!"
Stan looked at the boat one more time, really taking it in. His eyes shut disappointedly as all the memories of the past few years flooded him at once. He then opened them and quickly hopped onto the inflatable boat with Ford.
"Let's go," Stan told Ford with a mournful look on his face.
Ford grabbed the pull cord of the engine and cranked it up. After a few cranks, the engine started and it sent them off fast. Stan stared back at the Stan o' War with growing sadness as they drifted further away from it.
Within a few seconds after, a white blast and flare emerged from the top of the mountain with a large boom soon after. The large, bright flare made it almost impossible for the twins to look directly at the explosion. The blast, however, was growing larger at a decently fast speed. It eventually reached the Stan o' War II and began expanding over the ocean water too.
Ford knew they had to have gotten out of the explosion radius based on the speed they were going, but the blast still felt like it was right on their tail. However, upon reaching the three-mile radius, the blast almost instantly imploded and created a secondary boom that sent the twins riding on a large wave for a brief moment before eventually crashing back into less violent waters.
With the explosion complete, the two finally turned back and were able to see the results of it. As expected, the land was absolutely decimated. It looked as though a chunk of the island had been nuked and they were looking at the results of the impact. About half of the island was just gone, including the mountain. All beamed to some random dimension in the multiverse.
Even the Stan o' War.
"Well, there she goes," Stan said as he looked out at the remains of the island, mourning the loss of their old boat like it was an old friend.
Ford walked over to Stan and pat him on the back. "I'll miss it too, Stanley. But I mean, at least we made it, right? The mission's over! We get to live another day in our own dimension. We can head home now and finally see Dipper and Mabel again. Isn't that something?"
"Yeah. I guess it is," Stan nodded as he considered the idea. "But that boat was the last four years of our life. It was our childhood dream come true."
He stared out into the distance for another good moment before turning around and walking over to the front of the boat. He sat and looked down sadly.
"But I guess you were right about what you said earlier. The dream's done. Time to move on."
Ford remained silent as he thought over Stan's words, as well as his own. He sighed and sat down across from him. "I guess that's one way to look at it."
"Whatever," Stan said, finally cracking a slight smile as he leaned back against the side of the raft. "You're right. The mission is over. It's time to head home and see the kids and everyone else again." He laid back and put his hands under his head relaxingly as he closed his eyes. "Nothing but smooth sailing from here."
At that exact moment, the boat's mini-engine started to make some strange noises before suddenly dying, which caused the boat's momentum to slow down. Stan opened his eyes and looked at the broken engine.
"I mean, you can fix that right?" Stan asked Ford as he glanced over at him.
Before Ford could answer, the engine itself immediately fell off the inflatable boat and into the ocean. The continued momentum of the boat pushed them too far away from it, making them unable to go back and get it.
"Not that, I can't," Ford said, lowering his eyebrows annoyedly as their conditions crumbled right before their eyes.
Stan sighed before sticking his hand out. "Can I get some of that emergency toast?"
Ford glared at Stan for a moment. "Seriously?"
"Yes, seriously. I'm starving!"
Ford sighed as he tapped a button on Meridian, which began to make a model of a piece of toast. He caught the finished piece in his hands and tossed it over to Stan, who caught it and took a bite out of it. Ford then pressed the button again and began making another piece of toast for himself.
Stan raised his piece of toast in the air like a glass of wine as he bitterly chewed. "To new beginnings, Stanford."
Ford held out his own piece of toast in his hand and raised it the same way. "To new beginnings, Stanley."
They both then simultaneously took their own bites out of their pieces of toast, accepting their current fate- slowly sailing in the middle of the ocean on an inflatable boat to who knows where. And until they hit land, this was their life. Meridian was dead aside from producing emergency toast and the two hadn't packed any real tools within their backpacks that Ford had saved last minute from the Stan O' War.
What was important, however, was that the multiversal leak had been sealed and the creatures from the Nightmare Realm had been sent elsewhere. More than anything else, their main mission had been finished. Four years of nonstop adventuring around the world finally finished.
Yet the road home was beginning to look like their roughest journey yet.
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(Chapter updated as of February 18, 2024)