Pacifica narrowed her eyes and smiled daringly at Mabel as she held the pie she had given her in her hands. The idea of eating the diner's pies without paying and not getting caught was appealing to her. However, she had another idea at that moment that she found just a tad more interesting.
"What're you waiting for?" Mabel asked, holding the pie forward. "Dive in!"
SPLAT!
Without warning, Pacifica had taken the pie pan and threw it at Mabel's face, sending her falling back her rear. A giant splat of cream and pie chunks came apart from the impact as the pan attached to her face. As such, Pacifica immediately burst out laughing in the most childish way she's laughed in years.
However, Mabel didn't react in any particular way other than just standing there with the pie pan stuck to her face, but she made no momentary effort to take it off. Dipper stood with his mouth hung open in shock before paying Pacifica a disapproving glance.
"Woah, what the hell?!" he questioned. "What'd you do that for?"
Pacifica's laughter started to die down with his reaction. Her amusement slowly changed to concern as she noticed the lack of reaction from Mabel.
"What do you mean? I was just... That wasn't meant to be mean!" she defended as her face flushed red out of embarrassment. "I was just messing around!"
Dipper kneeled beside Mabel and pulled the pie pan from her face, but a fair amount of the pie's shape still held on to her. "Mabel, are you okay?" he asked as she began to pull apart the pieces of pie from her face.
"Mabel, I'm sorry," Pacifica apologized. "I didn't mean to…"
She stopped her apology short as Mabel suddenly started laughing herself. She wiped most of the major pie chunks from her face so she was visible, and it became clear that she was amused by what Pacifica had just done rather than upset about it. Even Dipper looked a bit surprised for a moment.
"That was a good one, Pacifica!" Mabel praised through her laugh. "I didn't know you had it in you!"
"Wait, you're not upset?" Pacifica asked, raising an eyebrow.
"About a pie to the face? What am I? Six?" Mabel said with a chuckle. "Of course I'm not mad! This is the kind of rise I was always hoping to get out of you!"
"Really?" Pacifica asked.
"Yeah!" Mabel nodded enthusiastically. "You still have a lot to learn though."
SPLAT!
Immediately, Mabel had placed her hand into the open pie spinner and pulled out another pie, swiftly throwing it at Pacifica's face without giving her a second to react. Her throw was also harder than Pacifica's, which, paired with her lack of expectation, sent her falling back onto the floor.
As she sat up, the pie pan fell off and pieces of the pie began falling off her face onto her outfit and the floor. She looked up at Mabel in complete shock and disgust.
Dipper stood back awkwardly away from the two. While he knew now that it was all in good fun, he also knew from the look on Pacifica's face as she rose from the floor that things were about to get messy.
"You. Are so. Dead," Pacifica said menacingly to Mabel as she stood back on her feet.
"Alright, well you two have fun. I'm just gonna step aside," Dipper said as he stepped away from the anticipated warzone. "Washing this hoodie is enough of a pain as is, so I'd rather be left out of this."
Mabel and Pacifica's eyes darted toward him. They then glanced back at one another and grinned with mutual understanding as they mentally exchanged thoughts.
"Sure thing, bro!" Mabel said, suspiciously cheery.
"We wouldn't want you to get messy..." Pacifica added in a similarly suspicious tone.
Dipper narrowed his eyes, not oblivious to their tones of voice. "You two are gonna throw pies at me anyway, aren't you?"
"Oh yeah..." Mabel nodded as she held two pies, one in each hand, while Pacifica held one herself.
The two girls then pelted the pies right at his face and body while he made absolutely no attempt to avoid them, standing completely still as he took the hits, slightly irritated. The irritation quickly faded, however, and he found himself laughing. Mabel and Pacifica were obviously amused by the whole thing too, laughing fairly hard themselves.
Pacifica soon calmed down from her laughter as she walked over to the counter and grabbed a towel from the other side. "Alright, as fun as that admittedly was, we should probably move on," she said before wiping her pie-covered face with the towel. "Now that I think about it, I'd rather not spend the rest of the night attracting ants with my pie stench."
"Well, we're all out of pies, so it's not like we could continue anyways," Mabel said as she pointed to the now-empty pie spinner.
"Yeah, and you can't even eat any of them now," Dipper mentioned, looking at the messes of pie all over the floor and themselves.
"Says you!" Mabel said as she grabbed a chunk of chocolate pie off the floor and ate it with zero hesitation, much to Dipper and Pacifica's immediate disgust.
"You guys don't clean the floors here, right?" Dipper asked, glancing over at Pacifica.
"This place hasn't had a health inspector in over a decade, what do you think?" Pacifica asked back.
"Woo! I already got the feeling tonight's gonna be one for the history books!" Mabel said as she walked between the two and threw her arms around both their necks, pulling them in. "C'mon, Pacifica! You're our host! What else is there to do around here?"
Pacifica placed the towel on the counter once she finished wiping off all of the pie from her face. She then thought for a moment and considered some possibilities of other fun things the three could try.
She smirked daringly. "I have some ideas..."
Within the hour, the three had made a basic setup for a hot dog eating contest, with a batch of microwaved hot dogs prepared on the table and some condiments to the side. Dipper and Mabel sat as contestants while Pacifica stood back with a timer ready to go on her phone. She had it set for ten minutes, ensuring the twins were ready before she set it off. Mabel looked as though she was ready to dive straight in while Dipper sat back with a relaxed and confident look on his face.
Pacifica started the timer, beginning the contest. Mabel immediately began stuffing her mouth with hot dogs, gorging through them. While Mabel took the playful contest seriously, Dipper sat calmly beside her at the table placing the provided condiments to his liking in an orderly fashion. Rather than treating the 'contest' competitively, he figured this was a decent opportunity to eat a proper meal for the night.
Upon finishing covering his hot dogs in condiments and toppings, he held it up to his mouth to eat normally. He took a bite, enjoying his creation. However, ketchup and mustard soon splattered over him at once as Mabel had taken bottles of both condiments from the table and began squeezing the tops at him. Dipper leaned back defensively as he began laughing, despite knowing how annoying laundry was going to be later. To get back at her, he took one last big bite of his hot dog before jumping up and smearing the rest of it on her face.
Pacifica spectated this chaos from afar, feeling repulsed by the mess that was being made. However, despite her disgust, she couldn't help but laugh at the two, finding Mabel getting a messy hot dog smeared across her face and Dipper getting coated in ketchup and mustard to be legitimately hilarious.
As the night went on, several other similarly messy activities ensued. Back in the kitchen, Mabel had gone up to a soda fountain and popped open the top to pull out one of the soda tubes. She immediately began to drink straight from it without hesitation. She then looked down and saw Dipper holding a cup with his eyes narrowed at her, having attempted to get a drink from the machine before seeing what she had done. She looked back and forth between him and the soda tube before taking it out of her mouth. She then aimed the tube at him and sprayed, the pressure of the soda knocking him down to the floor as she laughed hysterically.
The three had also broken out a couple of boxes of French toast sticks and structured them up around the counter like a chain of dominos. The sticks led to a small catapult-like contraption put together with a spoon and some small boxes. Dipper placed a cherry on the spoon, studying it and fixing up its position as necessary. He then gave a thumbs up to Pacifica on the other end of the counter.
Leaning over the counter casually, she effortlessly flicked the French toast domino on the edge with her finger and began the chain reaction. The chain eventually led to Dipper's spoon catapult, the final french toast falling on top of the spoon's handle, which was enough weight to fling the other end upward, launching the cherry through the air. On the other side of the room behind Pacifica was Mabel, who rubbed her hands together anxiously in preparation for the incoming cherry. She studied the trajectory of the cherry as it flew toward her, noticing how it was about to fly overhead in her current position. With a booth right behind her, she dove back in the seat with her mouth open as the cherry made contact.
Dipper and Pacifica ran over to her as she sat up in the booth. She stuck her tongue out, revealing the perfectly intact cherry. Dipper and Pacifica both clapped their hands for her success as she delightfully ate the cherry. This was before remembering that she wasn't a fan of cherries, to which she quickly spat it out in disgust.
A little later, the three found themselves standing in the kitchen as Mabel ran around collecting various boxes and cans of food while Dipper and Pacifica stood back and watched what she was trying to do. Each piece of food that Mabel had grabbed was actually an ingredient for something she was preparing in a blender.
"Mabel, would you hurry it up a bit, please?" Dipper asked, getting slightly impatient.
"Yeah, we've been standing here waiting for you to finish for like twenty minutes now," Pacifica added bitterly.
"Alright, alright," Mabel settled as she finished putting together items in the blender. She turned toward the two with an excited smile on her face. "So, Dipper, being my brother, I'd say you're familiar with my ability to make exquisite drinks, such as Mabel Juice."
"Exquisite is the last thing I'd call Mabel Juice," Dipper said, recalling the drink and its dreadful effects on those who drank it other than Mabel.
"And Pacifica, I don't believe you're familiar with Mabel Juice," Mabel said.
"Thankfully," Pacifica remarked as she crossed her arms, finding the idea of ever drinking something called 'Mabel Juice' incredibly sickening.
"Well, today, I present to you the newest creation on Mabel's menu!" Mabel said as she placed her finger on the blender. "The Mabel Smoothie!"
Before she pressed the button, Dipper's eyes bulged as he noticed that she was about to start the blender without putting the cover back on. He desperately reached his hand out, despite being across the kitchen.
"Mabel, wait! You forgot to put on the cov-"
It was too late. She pressed the button to blend and the blender went off, with its blending power strong enough to immediately begin creating a mess without the cover. Everyone tried to shield their faces with their arms as they stood back from the blender, with its mixed contents spraying everywhere throughout the kitchen. In an effort to correct her mistake, Mabel quickly dove into the blender's eruption and aimed for the plug for a much quicker solution. Ripping the cord from the wall, the blender immediately slowed until it shut off entirely, ending the fountain of horrors.
At that point, the walls, floorboards, and other kitchen parts were covered in Mabel's attempted smoothie. Dipper and Pacifica unshielded themselves to view the result of the mess and found their wardrobes also didn't get away unmarked by the smoothie. However, Mabel was nearly drenched in it due to her sacrifice in turning off the blender.
"Heh, well, at least the smoothie came out good!" she awkwardly chuckled as she licked off some of the drops around her face. However, her smile quickly faded distastefully. "Nope. I take that back. It's awful. This was a mistake. I regret everything."
"Well, I guess this is more for us to clean up later, then," Dipper said as he looked around the kitchen.
"Right. Later," Pacifica emphasized as she waved her arms down to rid herself of some of the smoothie dripping down them. "How about we just dry up and hang out for a bit without making any more messes?" she suggested as she walked over to the freezer.
"I mean, sure, but sooner or later, we're going to have to clean all this up," Dipper told her. "You know that, right?"
"Aw, relax, Dipper," Mabel said as she walked up to him. "The night is still young. We'll have plenty of time to clean up the place."
"How's the night young?" Dipper asked, looking down at the time on his phone. "It's 3 A.M."
"Uhhh... yeah? And for party people like us, that's considered young," Mabel said as she playfully punched him in the arm. "Just chill out."
"Yeah, Dipper," Pacifica said, her voice grabbing the attention of both twins. The two looked over at her and noticed her holding ice cream popsicle bags. She grinned as she tossed two of the bags over to the twins. "Chill out."
Dipper and Mabel then smiled at one another excitedly before turning back to Pacifica, who stood confidently with her hands on her waist.
"Ice cream!" Mabel cheered as she opened up her bag and stuck the popsicle in her mouth. "Thanks, Pacifica!"
"I don't know what's happened to you, Pacifica, but you've been absolutely legendary tonight," Dipper said as he opened his popsicle bag more casually than Mabel. "Everything that we've done tonight seems like stuff you'd almost never do last time we saw you."
"I don't know," Pacifica said as she thought about it and opened her popsicle bag. "I guess after living by the same rules and routines by my parents and this job, I just felt like being a bit more rebellious tonight."
"No thanks to us, that is," Mabel commented, nudging Dipper.
"Sure," Pacifica hesitantly agreed as she sat up on the counter. "I guess I kind of owe it to you guys in a way for pointing out that I could get away with a lot more when doing these shifts."
"Still can't believe after all the times you've done this, you never thought you could get away with eating a pie or something while you were all alone," Mabel said with a chuckle as she ate her popsicle.
"Hey, you try having as much on your plate as I do!" Pacifica scolded. "Ever since we got rich again, it's not like I suddenly started living an easy life. Think of how much time I have to actually live when I've been stuck between school, work, dance classes, singing classes, mini-golf training, tennis training, and taking care of my pony. And soon, I'm also gonna have to worry about going back to croquet training. People think I have it easy again now that I have money, but it's more complicated than they think."
"Hold up!" Mabel jumped in, raising her popsicle in the air. "You have a pony?!"
"Is that seriously the only takeaway you got from everything I just said?" Pacifica asked, eyes narrowing.
"I mean, yeah, I feel bad about you being overloaded with all the classes and stuff, but I thought that was a given," Mabel said. "Now tell me about the pony! I NEEDZ TO KNOW!"
"I mean, there really isn't all that much to know," Pacifica said, trying to think about it. "His name is Mason, and I got him not too long after you guys left Gravity Falls. I was supposed to get like thirty of them, but then we lost our money, so I ended up getting only one. But I've grown pretty attached to him over the years. He's, like, the sweetest thing in the world, and he's been great to…"
Pacifica stopped herself upon hearing Mabel snickering. She looked up at her and saw that she was visibly trying to cover up her laugh. Dipper, on the other hand, stared forward with the most serious look on his face that she had ever seen from him.
She glanced back at Mabel and narrowed her eyes. "What?"
"No, no! I'm sorry!" Mabel apologized, trying to shield her amusement from her. "But if I may ask- what did you say you named your pony again?"
"Mabel, please…" Dipper pleaded without daring to make eye contact with her.
"Uh... Mason?" Pacifica replied, confused.
"PFFFFT…" Mabel said as she tried to cover up her mouth and prevent herself from laughing. But at that point, she couldn't help herself and she just burst out laughing harder than she felt she ever had.
Pacifica stared at Mabel with the most confused look on her face, not having a clue what she was laughing about. It obviously related to the name of her pony, but she had no idea why it was so amusing to her.
"What's so funny?" Pacifica asked her.
Mabel turned to Dipper mid-laugh. "You hear that, Dipper? She thinks Mason is the sweetest thing in the world!"
"Mabel, I'm begging you…" Dipper said as his face reddened.
"I guess she's spent the last four years getting pretty close to Mason, huh?" Mabel joked before she continued to laugh uncontrollably. The joke prompted Dipper to grab onto the ears of his hat and pull it down over his face.
Pacifica's face began to redden angrily as she continued to not understand what the joke was, starting to believe that Mabel was just making fun of the name she had given her pony.
"Hey, you sure have some nerve laughing at a name when yours is Mabel!" Pacifica struck back as she crossed her arms.
"Please! You wish you knew why this is so funny to me!" Mabel exclaimed as she continued laughing.
She then found herself laughing so hard that she fell back against the counter behind herself and Dipper. She had fallen back so uncontrollably hard that it violently shook the entire counter. The violent shaking of the counter caused a pair of keys that was laid on the edge of the counter to then fall right off. Rather than falling onto the floor, the keys fell straight through a hole in the floorboards and underneath the restaurant.
"MABEL!" Pacifica shouted in sudden panic as she saw the keys fall through the floorboards.
Mabel's eyes were shut from all the laughing and failed to notice the keys fall through the floor. She wiped a humorous tear from her eye as she looked back up at Pacifica. "Relax, Pacifica. I'm just having a laugh." Pacifica then hopped down from the counter and ran over to the hole in the floorboard, violently pushing Mabel out of the way. "Hey!"
Pacifica then looked through the hole to try to spot the keys, but due to the darkness of the night outside, she couldn't see anything below the floor.
"Dammit, Mabel!" Pacifica scolded. "You bumped the keys to the diner through one of the holes in the floor!"
Realizing the shift in conversation, Dipper lifted his hat from his eyes and placed it back on his head normally. "Wait, one of the holes in the floor? You mean the holes are normal?"
Pacifica sighed. "Lazy Susan keeps holes in the floor around so she has a place to send the rats that come in."
Dipper stared at her blankly. "But wouldn't that mean they could just-"
"I know it's contradictory!" Pacifica cut off angrily. "That's not the point! The point is Little Miss Laughs-A-Lot lost me the diner keys!"
"Calm down, Pacifica. They're just keys," Mabel said.
"Easy for you to say! I'm already risking my job by having you two here and making a mess of the place!" Pacifica continued. "Lazy Susan told me not to lose those keys. She may be dim-witted, but she's not dim-witted enough not to fire me for this!"
"Well, for the record, you helped cause just as much of a mess as us," Mabel reminded her as she crossed her arms. "And you kept us around rather than kicking us out!"
"I tried to tell you both to go away when you guys got here!" Pacifica argued. "But I figured that I could trust you two enough to not risk screwing me out of my job - which is the only escape from my family's rich life that I have left! Now you two are going to be the reason I lose it!"
"Okay, enough!" Dipper intervened. "No one is losing anything yet, alright? And if you two wanna argue about the issue instead of solving it, then go ahead."
He walked over to the side and grabbed a crowbar that was lying on top of a counter, holding it firmly in his hands.
"I'm just gonna pry the floorboard open and reach for the keys. Problem solved," he said. He then looked down at the crowbar in his hands and back over at the counter it was originally set upon. "Also, that is a very open spot for a crowbar. Also, why do you guys even have a crowbar?"
"What? No!" Pacifica said before quickly swiping the crowbar from his hands. "I can clean up a bunch of goops and glops on the walls overnight, but I can't replace a floorboard! Prying is not an option."
Dipper paid her an irritated glare. "Seriously?"
"So what do you suggest then?" Mabel asked. "Because none of our hands are fitting through that hole."
Dipper walked over to his backpack on the side and pulled out a flashlight. He then returned to the hole the keys fell through and kneeled next to it. He turned on the light and aimed it through the hole, lighting up the dirt ground beneath the diner so he could see what was under. However, he somehow couldn't spot the keys.
However, he soon looked straight down and noticed that there was actually a small, yet deep hole in the ground directly underneath the floorboard. Glancing around, he verified that there was no other place the keys could've possibly gone.
"Do you see them?" Pacifica asked hopefully.
He kneeled back up and looked over at the girls. "Well, here's the issue- there's another small hole in the ground right below that the keys must've fallen into."
"Are you serious?" Pacifica asked before groaning frustratedly.
"So, who feels like crawling under the diner and pulling a pair of keys from the ground?" Mabel asked, believing that was their only choice at that point.
"You mean crawling through dirt and all the other garbage that has fallen through floorboards over the years? Absolutely not," Pacifica refused.
"You realize we're already covered in a bunch of different dried-up junk food and drinks, right?" Mabel said.
"Then you go crawl underneath and get the keys," Pacifica dared.
Mabel stared at her blankly as her eyes slowly started to narrow hesitantly. "Touché..." she admitted. "Dipper! This one's all yours, buddy!"
"Riiight..." Dipper said, walking over to his backpack again. "Well, that might be one idea, but luckily..."
He opened his backpack and pulled out a long rope and another flashlight. This flashlight, however, had a shiny blue crystal tied to the front of it. Holding it out in his hand, he grinned confidently.
"...I have a better one."
Within the next few minutes, Dipper stood by the hole in the floor with the long rope knotted tightly around his waist. Mabel was testing the knot's strength by tugging on the long leftover end of it, pulling Dipper lightly, but not seeming to loosen up the rope itself. Pacifica was in the background, pacing around nervously as she thought over the current plan they were about to execute.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Pacifica asked as she walked back over to him. "Because I'm starting to agree with Mabel's suggestion. Maybe we should just crawl under the diner. This... just seems like overkill."
"It'll be fiiiiine, Pacifica," Mabel assured.
"Yeah, trust me. I can handle this," Dipper nodded confidently. "I'm just gonna shrink down so I can fit through the floorboards and go into the burrow below. I'll shrink the keys when I find them and then Mabel will pull me back up when I'm finished. Then we'll just unshrink me and the keys back to normal size. Piece of cake!"
"Yeah, that definitely sounds like overkill," Pacifica repeated, crossing her arms skeptically at his attempt at reassurance.
"Well, it's not the first time I've done this kinda thing, so just don't worry," Dipper said.
"Yeah, and I'm sure it'll be a trip down memory lane back to when you were the short twin!" Mabel jabbed as she nudged him in the arm.
Even if Dipper had long since outdone her in terms of height, she would never let go of the time she had a millimeter over him.
"Ha-ha," Dipper laughed sarcastically as he put on his backpack. "Anyways, are we gonna do this or not?"
"Well, this reflective fridge is probably the closest thing to a full-body mirror we have," Pacifica said as she walked over to the fridge, gesturing toward its metallic surface.
"That should do," Dipper said as he walked over to the fridge, readying the height-altering flashlight in hand. "Got the rope, Mabel?"
Mabel bent down and held onto the other end of the rope, getting a tight grasp on it. "Got it! Oh, and remember to use your walkie!"
That was an important heads-up for Dipper, as he remembered to take out his walkie-talkie from his bag for communication purposes when under the diner. "Oh right. Thanks, Mabel."
He then turned back toward the fridge and sighed nervously at the thought of shrinking down again, but knew it had to be done to help Pacifica out, so he couldn't back down now. He stood right in front of the fridge and aimed the flashlight at its reflective surface and his slightly distorted reflection.
"Here goes nothing..." he said.
He flipped the switch of the flashlight, which shot out a light with a pink hue as the light collided with the crystal, prompting Pacifica to leave the kitchen in fear of something possibly happening to her. Luckily, as Dipper planned, the light bounced off the surface of the fridge and shined on him and everything else he had on him. He slowly began to shrink down the longer he held the light on himself. After a brief moment of shrinking, he turned the light off and found himself to have become relatively small, tinier than the leg of the fridge.
"That should do it," he said to himself as he looked around.
He was then startled by a sudden stomping on the ground, which sent him bouncing in the air for a brief second. He turned around and looked up to see a giant Mabel walking up to him. Despite knowing it was his sister, she looked quite menacing as this giant towering over him. That was until she had the instinct to pick him up by the rope that was still tied to him and view him up close, putting on a wide grin that instantly made her less intimidating.
"Haha! Wow! I think he's even tinier than when we first got shrunk down!" Mabel chuckled as she looked at him.
Despite not finding her to be as intimidating, the height she had raised Dipper to relative to his current size was absolutely terrifying. He felt as though he was about to get dropped into the middle of the Grand Canyon.
He quickly grabbed his walkie-talkie in panic and turned it on. "MABEL! MABEL!"
Mabel heard her walkie-talkie going off on the counter beside her and grabbed it, listening to it intently.
"MABEL! PUT ME DOWN!" a high-pitched voice exclaimed from the walkie.
Mabel snickered at the voice. "Aw! Your voice is so cute at that size! You sound like a chipmunk!"
This statement confused Dipper. To him, his voice sounded fine. However, as he heard himself through the walkie-talkie, he noticed his pitch was higher just as Mabel said. He was unsure if this was an issue with the walkie itself or if the smaller size he had shrunk down to had a greater effect on his vocals when making contact with certain radio frequencies. Nonetheless, he didn't find it all that amusing, especially when he was still hanging from such a height.
"Hilarious," Dipper sarcastically said through the talkie as he rolled his eyes. "NOW PUT ME DOWN!"
Mabel quickly did as he requested and placed him on the counter. "You can come back now, Pacifica!" she called out from the kitchen.
Pacifica reentered the room cautiously, glancing around to see what had been done. She didn't notice any particular changes right away until her eyes darted toward the counter Mabel stood beside, spotting tiny Dipper.
"Oh my God," Pacifica said, both dumbfounded and also slightly amused as she walked up to the counter.
"Yep. That's Little Dipper," Mabel said. "Same ol' Dipper at a not-so-same ol' size."
"I used this flashlight, which I customized to be able to function with a height-altering crystal that we found in the forest," Dipper explained to Pacifica through the walkie-talkie. "The way it works is by taking the light and-"
"Pffft... I'm sorry, I cannot take you seriously with that voice," Pacifica said, beginning to laugh at Dipper's high-pitched voice as well. "Not that I even cared about what you were saying in the first place, but hey, it's nice to know your big, dork brain is still intact at that size."
"Heh, yeah!" Mabel chuckled. "Glad to see he's not... short... on his knowledge! HEY-O!"
She raised her hand for Pacifica to high-five. However, Pacifica just stared back at her distastefully while she kept her hand in the air.
"Hey, when you two are done joking about my height, could someone please put me in the hole so we can get this over with already?" Dipper asked as the constant height jokes were beginning to make him feel like he was twelve again.
Mabel picked him back up by the rope he attached to himself, which to her was like a piece of really long string at its shortened size. She and Pacifica walked over to the crack in the floorboard, where Mabel kneeled down on the floor and hovered Dipper right above it. She gently began to lower him down, slowly letting go of his end of the tiny rope.
As Dipper was lowered down, he held onto the rope with one hand and reached for his normal flashlight with the other. The lower he went underneath the diner, the darker it got. Not that his tiny flashlight would be able to provide enough illuminance in the giant space he was being dropped into, but having some sort of light to help guide him was better than nothing.
Eventually, he touched the ground, having been lowered below the hole and into the burrow the keys had supposedly fallen into. He unholstered his walkie. "Okay, I'm in."
He took a few steps forward before suddenly being yanked back violently multiple times. He was thrown backward until he fell on his face when the yanking suddenly stopped. He groaned in pain as he pulled himself up from the ground, grabbing the walkie again.
"Mabel, what the hell was that?!"
He waited a second for a response. "Sorry! I started laughing again when I heard your voice."
"Just put the rope down for now," he ordered. "Watch it instead. I know it's long, but just in case, make sure the other end doesn't fall in here with me so you can pull me back up when I'm done."
"Roger that, Lil' Roger," Mabel replied jokingly.
Back above, Pacifica swiped the walkie away from Mabel. "Hey, now that you're down there, do you see the keys? They can't have fallen that far."
Below, Dipper pointed his flashlight ahead before aiming around the burrow. He expected to see the keys pretty instantly as Pacifica said, not believing it could've gone that far either. However, he didn't see them anywhere. At his current size, they couldn't have been hard to miss. But still, he found nothing besides the dirt walls of the burrow around him.
"Uhh, no," Dipper replied through the walkie as he kept looking around. "I don't see them."
"What?! How?" Pacifica asked. "They were dropped straight into the hole. Where else could they have gone?"
"I don't know," Dipper said, wondering himself. "I'm just gonna keep walking a bit and see if they somehow went farther than we thought."
"How would they? It's not like keys have the ability to bounce or anything," Pacifica said.
"I don't know! Maybe your diner keys happen to have slightly bouncier physics than most normal keys! Just let me do my thing, alright?" Dipper snapped at her constant questioning.
Pacifica narrowed her eyes at Dipper's snarky response. "Fine. Just... you know... don't die."
"No promises," Dipper replied, with the walkie's static returning to Pacifica at the end of his transmission.
"Awwww! Look at you... Showing how much you care about my brother," Mabel said as she pressed her own cheeks together.
"Yeah, because if he dies, then that means I have to send you after the keys instead," Pacifica said. "And given the already little faith that I have in him, putting any faith in you is just kissing my job goodbye."
"Aw c'mon, Pacifica. When are you just gonna admit that you love us and that we're your friends?" Mabel asked. "We may have been kinda-sorta enemies a few years ago, but we were kids then! We've matured and grown past all the bad times, haven't we? Can't we just call ourselves friends at this point?"
"I'm not too convinced friends make fun of the name they gave their pet and then childishly knock their work keys into an unreachable hole," Pacifica said as she folded her arms.
"Oh boy, we're going back to this, aren't we?" Mabel said under her breath. "Firstly, the 'keys falling into the hole' thing was clearly an accident. Second off…" she continued before chuckling again. "...I wasn't making fun of the name of your pony."
"Then what were you laughing about?" Pacifica asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Well, you probably don't want to know, otherwise it would probably be really awkward for you," Mabel tried to explain. "Also, I'm kind of not allowed to tell you."
"Oh, so a 'friend' who also keeps secrets, huh?" Pacifica said, not satisfied with her answer.
"Trust me, girl, I think this is a secret you'll greatly appreciate being kept from you," Mabel chuckled, understanding what she was trying to do. "But hey! You finally called me a friend, so that's something!"
"What? I was being sarcastic!" Pacifica said defensively.
"Friends are always sarcastic with one another! You should see me and my friends back in Piedmont," Mabel said, putting her hand on Pacifica's shoulder. "Sometimes, we really lay it out on one another!"
Pacifica pushed Mabel's hand off of her shoulder. "We are not friends."
"Reeeeally?" Mabel skeptically asked.
"Yes! We aren't, and we never were!"
"Why'd you get me and my brother birthday presents last time we saw each other then?" Mabel pressed.
"I don't know," Pacifica shrugged. "Because you two had just saved the world, so it was me saying, 'Thanks for that, by the way.'"
"Alright, well, what about you allowing us into your job tonight? Besides the key nonsense, is all the fun we've had tonight just you hanging out with non-friends?"
Pacifica sighed. "Fine, I admit…"
"Ha! So we are friends!" Mabel jubilantly cut off.
"...that we're close acquaintances."
Mabel's jubilance immediately shut down with the finished statement, and she found herself slightly disappointed. But she still felt determined to get Pacifica to admit they were friends at some point. She knew that she was too afraid to admit that it was true, but she clearly wasn't going to get to her now.
"You know... you're pretty good at this," Mabel commended.
"Thanks," Pacifica nodded with a smirk. There was a brief moment of silence between the two before she felt the need to clear the air. "We're still not friends."
"MABEL...chhhhhhhhhh...PACIFICA?!" Dipper's high-pitched, panicked voice emerged from Mabel's crackling walkie-talkie. "HELLO?!"
Mabel quickly grabbed the walkie-talkie from the counter. "Dipper?" she asked, concern rising in her voice. "What's happening?"
"THERE ARE...chhhhhh...EVERYWHERE! THEY'RE CHASING AFTER...chhhhhhhhhhhhh...NEED HELP...chhhhhhh...THE KEYS...chhhhhhh...THEY GOT ME...chhhhhhh...MABEL!"
A bunch of odd crumbling noises came from the walkie-talkie after his cries, with no more traces of his voice before fading into normal silence. Mabel's eyes displayed worry, not knowing how to react.
"Dipper?" Mabel asked nervously. "Mabel to Dipper. Do you read me? Over."
She waited for a response, but silence was all that emerged from the walkie.
"Quick! The rope!" Pacifica reminded her, pointing down to the shrunk-down rope on the floor that was being dragged into the hole at that very moment. Mabel turned her head down to see that the other end of the rope had slipped down into the hole, meaning it was too late.
"Uh oh," Mabel said nervously.
"Uh oh?" Pacifica asked, panic growing across her face. "Your brother may have just gotten eaten alive by a bunch of big, ugly bugs and all you have to say is 'uh oh'?"
"Dipper's fine. Most likely," Mabel assured her as she holstered her walkie-talkie. "I'm not worried about him. What we need to worry about now is going down there ourselves and saving him."
"Ourselves?" Pacifica repeated. "What makes you think I'm going down into an insect-infested dirt hole with you?"
"I mean if Dipper and I do die and you're cool with cleaning the whole diner up on your own, as well as having no way to get the keys yourself, then feel free to stay behind," Mabel said, completely unbothered as she started organizing her backpack and stuffing various foods from the diner into it. "Meanwhile, if we go together, we can back each other up instead of going through this alone. Besides, it's all-in-all a generally better idea anyway, but hey! You do you."
Pacifica processed the points Mabel was trying to make and realized she was right. She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Fine. I'll go with you. But I'm not gonna have fun."
"Who said anything about having fun?" Mabel asked, raising an eyebrow.
"I know how you are. You're always trying to lighten up a situation with your forced happiness and silly ideas. Just like during the weirdpocalypse."
"Hey, that's just how I am," Mabel said with a smug smile as she put on her backpack. "I'm not forcing anyone else to partake in my ideas. Sure, they might save your life and all, but that's your call to make. Not mine." She walked into the kitchen, gesturing for her to follow along. "C'mon. Let's get going."
"Wait, doesn't Dipper have the shrinking flashlight thingy?" Pacifica asked.
"You see, Dipper likes to make it seem like he's got the only tools for everything," Mabel explained as she pulled out her own height-altering flashlight from her bag. "But since we got back to Gravity Falls, he's been having me hold onto spares for our adventures just in case." She pointed the flashlight at the reflective fridge and pulled Pacifica beside her so she would be in the flashlight's effective range. "Buddy up!"
She flipped the flashlight on and a pink light hit the reflective surface of the fridge, bouncing right off and hitting the two girls. The two began shrinking down until Mabel stopped the light, making sure they were at about a similar height to Dipper when he shrunk down.
"Look! We're so puny!" Mabel said as she looked up and around at the giant diner.
"This is terrifying," Pacifica said as she looked around in horror.
"Ah, don't worry. At least there's no one else around to step on us," Mabel told her.
"Yeah, it's all fun and games until one of the possums shows up..." Pacifica timidly remarked. "Can we just get on with this already?"
The two walked up to the hole, which was a few normal-sized feet away from them, making for a bit of a walk. However, once they got there, they peeked inside from up above. It was dark and they couldn't really see what was down there. Luckily, they could barely make out the entrance into the small burrow they had to reach in order to follow and find Dipper.
"That's a long way down," Mabel pointed out.
"Yeah, so how are we gonna get down there?" Pacifica asked.
"I have an idea," Mabel said, as she stroked her chin. "You're probably gonna hate me just a bit for it though."
"What are you talking..." Pacifica began to ask before Mabel suddenly wrapped her arm around Pacifica's waist and pulled her along as she jumped straight into the hole without warning. "...ABOUUUUUUT?!"
As Pacifica screamed in terror, Mabel pulled out her old grappling hook and aimed it upwards before firing. The hook went soaring back up before latching itself onto the top of the diner's wooden floorboard where the hole was. It stuck as they kept falling, slowing down their descent.
Pacifica's screaming stopped and she looked up at Mabel's grappling hook and how they were falling slower. She then narrowed her eyes angrily at Mabel, giving her the most fed-up look.
"I really don't like you..."
Mabel smiled smugly as they descended. "Yeah, I kinda figured you wouldn't," she admitted. "Although, I knew there was no way I was going to convince you to grapple down with me, so I kind of had to force it this one time."
"You're right. You wouldn't have convinced me," Pacifica admitted, although that didn't make her any less bitter about it all.
The two then entered the burrow, slowly coming up to the bottom. Once her feet made contact with the ground, Mabel promptly let go of Pacifica, who stumbled a few steps with the slight shock from Mabel's sudden actions. Mabel then recovered the grappling hook back from above before putting it away. She then took out her own regular flashlight and turned it on, aiming around the burrow.
"Yeesh, this place is kinda creepy looking," Mabel said as she looked around.
"Is there any sign of Dipper?" Pacifica asked as she stepped beside her.
Mabel bobbed her head forward and gave a few audible sniffs, prompting Pacifica to give her a weird look. After a few more sniffs, she started walking forward in one direction of the burrow. "He's this way."
"How do you know?" Pacifica asked, raising an eyebrow.
"After sixteen years of living with a brother, you eventually come to identify him by the distant scent of his B.O.," she explained to her as she kept walking.
Pacifica gave a slightly disgusted look at this statement before she started following her. "Glad I'm an only child."
Mabel and Pacifica continued their way through the tunneling burrows, not finding anything particularly strange, dangerous, or worth pointing out so far. Mabel's ability to trace Dipper's B.O. was the only thing guiding them. She was relatively calm during the mission, but Pacifica was becoming progressively more uncomfortable and nervous as they kept walking.
"Is his scent, like... getting any stronger?" Pacifica uncomfortably asked. "Actually, forget that. Are we getting any closer?"
"You know just as much as I do, sis," Mabel told her. "I'm just following my nose."
"What?!" Pacifica asked. "So we don't even know if we're going the right way?"
"Oh no, we're going the right way," Mabel reassured. "I just have no idea how close we are."
"God, it feels like we've been walking forever," Pacifica said, trying to ignore the growing soreness of her feet. "Dipper was only in here for like three minutes when he called for help. We've been here longer, and we haven't found or seen anything! Who knows what made these tunnels? We could be walking for ages!"
Before she could respond to Pacifica's ramble, Mabel suddenly stopped walking in place and started paying attention to her nose. She then bobbed her head forward again to sniff around.
"What are you doing?" Pacifica asked, weirded out yet again by Mabel's sniffing.
"Answering your first question," Mabel told her, as she stopped sniffing. "Dipper's scent is getting stronger."
"That's a question I told you to forget about."
"Well, that means we're getting closer after all," Mabel said, smiling confidently. She then started running through the tunnel. "C'mon! Let's go!"
"Ugh..." Pacifica groaned as she followed quickly, albeit more cautiously behind Mabel.
It wasn't a long run, as Mabel turned a few round corners in the tunnels before reaching a crossroad section between multiple tunnels. Being under the diner, the light inside slightly illuminated through the crevices in the floorboards into the burrow wherever there may have been holes above. She stopped in place as she gasped at what she spotted in the center of the intersection.
"Pacifica! Look!" Mabel called out behind her.
It took a moment before Pacifica caught up to her. But once she did, she had just about the same reaction and gasped once she saw that in the center, the giant diner keys lay.
"The keys!" Pacifica said happily. However, her happiness immediately paused in favor of curiosity. "But how did they get so far inside from where you dropped them?"
"Who knows and who cares? Let's shrink 'em, grab 'em, and then move on to finding Dipper!" Mabel told her.
Pacifica turned to her and nodded, but her eyes suddenly bulged as they darted to something behind Mabel.
"Uh... Mabel?" she said fearfully as she pointed behind her.
Mabel looked over her shoulder and noticed a black figure standing right behind her. She quickly turned all the way around to face it directly before fearfully and quietly backing up a few steps beside Pacifica. Emerging from the shadows of the tunnel was none other than a giant ant.
"What do we do?" Pacifica whispered to her, suppressing her urge to panic wildly.
"Relax! It's just an ant!" Mabel whispered back. "They're nothing to be scared of!"
"That ant is bigger than us!" Pacifica quietly snapped at her. "And why are you whispering too if there's nothing to be scared of?"
"Better to be safe than sorry," Mabel shrugged.
Suddenly, the two looked up at the tunnel the ant came from and saw that more ants were crawling on the walls and the top of the tunnel. In the current view, there were about a total of twenty ants making their way toward them, with countless more on the way.
"Actually, I think I'd rather be sorry than safe!" Mabel said, breaking out from her whisper as she started walking backward again. She then turned around and started running. "RUN, PACIFICA!"
Pacifica followed her call and started running with her as well, but noticed that they were running past the keys. "Wait! What about the keys?"
"We'll come back for them!" Mabel called back as she started running toward one of the other tunnels. "Let's just head this way!"
"MABEL, LOOK OUT!" Pacifica shouted, pointing ahead at the tunnel she was running toward.
As Mabel turned ahead again, she parked her heels down and skidded forward a bit before coming to a stop. In the tunnel, many more ants began to emerge and walk toward her.
She glanced at one of the other tunnels at the crossroads as she started walking backward yet again. "Alright, let's try that one instead!" she pointed out to Pacifica.
"You sure about that?!" Pacifica questioned as ants suddenly began to emerge from that tunnel as well at that same moment.
"And the other…?" Mabel asked, looking at the final accessible tunnel. But soon, ants began to spout from it as well, leaving the girls with no means of escape. "Aw, come on!"
The girls began walking backward to the center of the crossing tunnel paths where the giant keys lay. From all four tunnels, the ants continued to pour out and surround the girls. Pacifica shakily looked around, convinced they were just about done for.
She then glanced over at Mabel and noticed her backpack. "Do you not have anything else in your bag that we could use?"
Mabel's eyes went big. "Wait, maybe I do!"
She quickly took her backpack off and opened up one of the zippers. Diving inside, she grabbed an armful of wooden stakes. She looked at the surrounding ants and threw the stakes one by one at them as they got closer. However, each stake just uselessly bounced off of the ants without seeming to cause any sort of reaction. She eventually ran out of stakes and noticed how they had done nothing.
"What was that?!" Pacifica asked frustratedly.
"Those were like the only other weapons I had packed for the vampire hunt!" Mabel defended as she took out her normal flashlight again. "I still have my flashlight! We could use that, right?"
"Maybe if we had a giant magnifying glass!"
An ant suddenly stomped right in front of Mabel, startling her, and causing her to flinch as she grabbed her backpack and retreated toward the keys in fear. She and Pacifica grouped up as the ants continued getting closer.
"So you have absolutely nothing else that we can use against them?" Pacifica asked frantically, close to just giving up.
"I packed a bunch of food from the diner, but that was for me to bring back to the Shack when we were done!" Mabel told her. "Other than that... yeah, that's about it."
"Great. I'll be the first Northwest to die by giant ants," Pacifica groaned.
"Hey, at least that'd be another great Northwest achievement, right?" Mabel asked cheerily, which Pacifica responded to with nothing else but a gloomy face.
The two looked back up and saw the giant ants stomping directly in front of them, and their panic reignited. They screamed in fear, instinctively grabbing one another as the hundreds of giant ants flooded the tunnels to approach them.
(Chapter updated as of February 21, 2024)