#how i feel whenever i briefly imagine a world where it was the battery instead of the passenger

[codylabs]

Chapter 5

Mabel shone the beam from the laser pointer all around the floor. Juan chased it to and fro joyously, his saws scuffing up the floorboards whenever he thought he’d caught it. Always it eluded him, always it escaped him, always he gave chase. He was just like a cat. A heavy metal cat, but nonetheless just as smart, playful, energetic and eager. Mabel laughed at his antics.

When he finally got tired, Mabel turned the laser off, and sat down next to a wall outlet. Juan crawled up on her chest, and stuck his hooks into the socket beside her. A few sparks fizzled, and the robot relaxed.

Mabel petted him. He wasn’t quite as fun to pet as normal animals, since he wasn’t soft or furry in the least. But he was warm, and he was active and squirmy, and if she closed her eyes she could aaaaalmost imagine he was something nice to cuddle.

He finished recharging, and curled up in her lap. She petted his antennae, and they extended and retracted at her touch. His red eyes looked up and met hers, and for a moment, she felt they shared a deep, spiritual bond.

His claws plucked at her sweater as he stretched, and aperture-like eyelids twisted shut over his cameras. He wiggled around one more time to get comfortable, and then he was asleep.

Such a sweet thing.

Too bad she couldn’t talk to him. He spoke and heard in radio signals, and since she hadn’t figured out how to do that with her own body, she had to speak with the walkie talkie. She would listen in on his ‘distress signal’, and add words of her own onto the same frequency. She hoped he could hear her, and she hoped he understood that she was just trying to be friendly.

She pulled out her walkie talkie again now, and turned it over to his usual frequency.

But for some reason, the line was quiet. She cycled through all the other channels, but those were all quiet too. Mable frowned at the robot, and the realization slowly dawned on her.

Sometime in the last hour, Juan had stopped sending out his S.O.S.

He thinks I’m his mommy.

He’s happy here.

He loves me.

But it broke her heart. And she put her hands to her head, and her heart began to race, because another realization was close behind the first.

He doesn’t want his real mom anymore.

His real mom is looking for him, but now she’ll never find him.

I’m his mom now.

“Oh no…” She told the creature. “No… I can’t do that… I can’t keep you… This isn’t right for you… I’m not right for you… This…” She shook her head, and brushed aside a tear. “This was never what I wanted…”

Meanwhile, ten miles away, Dipper and Wendy ventured deeper into a hidden valley. And as they did so, they realized they’d stepped into a different world entirely.

“Okaaaay.” Wendy nodded. “We can tell them apart, at least. The trunks here aren’t bark-colored brown. They’re more like rust-colored brown. And the newer, smaller branches are totally grey.”

“Probably is rust. The newer shoots just haven’t had time to rust.”

“And, of course.” She added. “If we’re ever unsure, we can always just touch the leaves. If they feel like leaves, you’re good. But if they lay you open, chances are they belong to the robot trees.”

“Ha ha. Yeah.” Dipper laughed nervously. “Robot trees.” He echoed. He looked around him again, just to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. But he wasn’t. Before today, he never would have imagined using the words ‘robot’ and ‘tree’ in the same sentence, but there you have it. Those words had passed his lips. And as ridiculous at it sounded, it was nonetheless true. “Robot trees.” He repeated, and liked the sound of it. “I guess this is a thing now.”

“Man, you can smell it!” Wendy commented on the air. “Like oil, or the school’s metal shop after somebody’s been grinding… It’s not normal.”

“Yeah… Wow.”

“So how do we do this whole ‘science’ thing?” She asked, dragging them back to the mission. “I mean, we could just walk around, but shouldn’t we be doing… ‘Experiments’ or some junk?”

“Uh… I dunno…” Dipper bent over to examine a smallish sort of weed. “I guess we take pictures and stuff… And cram as many samples as we can into our backpacks.”

“Sounds good…” Wendy slipped on some gloves, grasped a tuft of grass, and pulled. And then she pulled some more. And then pulled some more. “Oh, okay, want to play it like that, do ya?” She grumbled at the plant. She pulled out an axe, and chopped it into the roots beneath her hand. The tuft finally came out with a snap. She shoved the plant into her backpack.

Dipper peered down at the hole where the grass had been. He poked his finger inside.

A tiny spark of electricity arced between his roots, directly through his finger. He yelped with pain, and brought back his hand.

“You okay? What got ya?”

“Oh, these… The roots zapped me. It must have its power cells down below ground. The panels charge up sun during the day, the batteries power it at night…”

“Wear gloves mate.”

“Yeah.”

This time he wasn’t zapped, and he brought out a handful of soil.

“Dirt?” Wendy frowned curiously.

“Soil.” He clarified, and he dumped the sample into a plastic bag. “Metal plants are growing out of this soil. That… Doesn’t happen. Ever. And that means this soil must be special.”

“Fair enough.”

He pulled out a disposable camera. Ford had suggested no electronics, but this model was so simple that it wouldn’t count. Nothing could detect this bad boy. Dipper took pictures of Wendy’s sample, his sample, and the hole they’d removed it from. Then they moved on.

Careful to dodge the leaves, they made their way up to the trunk of one of the larger trees. Wendy began tapping lightly on the surface with the back of her axe, looking for irregularities or hollow spots. The metallic clanking echoed through the silent forest.

Dipper was hit by a sudden sense of deja-vu, as he remembered his very first adventure in Gravity Falls. He’d found Ford’s hollow, fake metal tree, and a mechanism inside had opened the way to the journal. It was the thing that started it all. The one event that made the way for his entire life since. He took a minute to reflect. He… Or rather they… Had come so far since then. So very far. They knew so much, had done so much, conquered so much, become so much… It was amazing.

“Hey, this part sounds hollow.” Wendy remarked, and tapped again.

“Cool…” Dipper nodded. “Wonder what’s in there… Do we have a way to cut through?”

“Well… The trunk looks like it has a sort of grain to it, like regular wood. Maybe an axe will work?”

She took a swing at it, and made an impressively loud sound.

The axe didn’t work.

There was a dent in the tree, but there was also a dent in the axe.

“Awe…” She ran her finger along the defaced blade. Suddenly she laughed. “Look at me! I’m a scientist! Whacking a metal thing!”

Dipper laughed too. “Who’s the greater scientist? The scientist who whacks, or the scientist who watches whack?”

She groaned in mock-misery. “Waaaah… Why does science feel so much like the chain gang?” She struck the tree once more.

Then they heard movement inside the hollow spot, and took a step back. Something was alive in there. They could hear it scuttling around, clacking against the inside of the tree. Then the sound moved upwards through the trunk. Their eyes followed it up, and landed on a small hole, about 10 feet up. A tiny robot peeked its head out of this hole, and looked down at them with red eyes. It had a vaguely similar design to Juan, but with several different specializations. It was thinner than Juan, and longer, as if for fitting through tight spaces. And instead of buzzsaws, it had a system of small drill bits, which it spun at them in an angry, threatening sort of way.

“Guess we know what the hollow spot was.” Wendy observed.

“Robot squirrel.” Dipper smiled. He held up his camera and took another shot. “Cool.”

Irritated by the flash, the robot climbed out of its hole and up the tree away from them. It had long hooks on the ends of its legs, and a small sort of hollow cone where a tail would be.

As they watched, this cone began to emit a loud wining sound. Dust began to spray and billow around the animal. Then it let go of the tree, and hovered through the air off toward another tree. It grabbed onto a branch of the new tree, pulled itself up into a better position, and looked back at them.

“Robot rocket squirrel.” Wendy noted as Dipper snapped another picture.

“Just too cool.” He nodded.

They continued on.

“Hey, have you seen any other tracks recently? Any sign of the lion?”

“Naw, man. I can’t track anything here. Can’t make heads or tails of this grass, and all the tree roots just cover the mud and dirt.”

“All right.”

“Are you picking up any radio signals? Like Juan makes? Or from the decoy we put on her yesterday?”

“No, nothing from the decoy.” He said. “The tracker we put on her stopped transmitting sometime last night. I guess she found a way to get it off.”

“Dang it… Well, any signals at all?”

“Uh…” He turned on his walkie talkie briefly. It became to click and whistle with noise. There were hundreds of signals around here. All of them weak, quiet and brief. Like the chirping of crickets, or the singing of birds. Dipper realized this forest wasn’t silent. It was filled with life, but all of it was silent to human ears. He turned the device back off, and returned it to his vest. “Yeah. None as loud as Juan, but… Yeah. They’re there. And they’re everywhere. But they’re all so quiet that they’re undetectable from far away. Probably why we never detected this place before.”

“Huh. Say!” Wendy pointed ahead. “What’s that up there?”

She gestured toward a nearby stream. Bright, bulbous white flowers were growing all along its banks, some of them the height of trees.

“Woah. Giant flowers.”

“That’s science, right?”

“Yeah…” He approached the nearest one, and circled it slowly. Nothing much to see… But this plant didn’t have any leaves; no solar panels. All the other trees had solar panels. How was this one getting its energy?

He looked inside the bulb of the flower, and slowly put it together. Although they wide pedals were white on the outside, they were extremely shiny on the inside, like so many separate sections of a bowl-shaped mirror. And each one shared the exact same shape: that of a geometrically perfect paraboloid. And in the exact center of each ‘dish’, there was a tiny metal bud, attached to the wider stalk by what looked like tubes.

“Solar thermoelectric power.” Dipper nodded.

“A what now?” Wendy frowned.

“Instead of using plain old solar panels, like the trees do, these plants use the flowers.” Dipper explained. “The flowers are giant mirror dishes, and concentrate sunlight into those little buds. Those buds must have steam turbines or something inside them. The sunlight is all focused into the bud, that boils the steam, the steam spins the turbines, the turbines generate power, and that’s what powers the plant.”

“Woooooah…” Wendy scratched her head. “So ‘flower power’ is a real thing… I always thought those stupid hippies were insane…”

“Solar collection is actually much more efficient that normal photovoltaic systems.” Dipper continued. “It’s not used much in the human world because it’s so expensive to build, but these things just grow that way, so I guess expense isn’t an issue… And that’s probably why they only grow so near the creek. They pump up the water to refuel their turbines and dispose of waste heat.”

Wendy considered this.

“Is that why you were so tired this morning?”

“What?”

“You stayed up super late studying weird science.”

“Uh… Yeah. Why?”

“Okay… Hey wait a minute, why the heck were you studying thermoelectric solar power anyway? That’s such a randomly specific thing…”

“Well… I figured that these things would have to live without fuel, so I just started researching self-sustaining power, and clean energy… Parabolic solar collectors came up at some point so I read about them… And anyway, it came in handy, didn’t it?”

Wendy scratched her head. “Of all the millions of people in history who’ve ever gone out looking for trouble, only two of them have ever happened upon a thermoelectric solar flower. And one of those people just HAPPENED to thoroughly research that same thing the night before.”

“It… Seemed prudent.”

“Why are you wearing long pants instead of shorts today? As if you knew we would be walking through razor grass.”

“Well… You mentioned my… Habits… Yesterday… And it seemed… It seemed like a good idea?”

Wendy seemed suddenly suspicious for some reason.

“Dipper.” She asked. “Are you psychic?”

Why was she so suspicious? He went on the defensive. “No…”

“Do you have any psychic friends?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Is being psychic a thing?”

“Not that I know of…”

“Have you always been this randomly lucky?”

“Definitely not.”

“Do you consult oracles?”

“No.”

“Do you own a crystal ball?”

“No.”

“Does a future-Dipper travel back in time to give you advice?”

“What?? No…”

She gave him a hard stare. He frowned back at her, in a confused way. What was she thinking? What did it matter? What was going on? Did she seriously believe whatever that was? Why? Huh?

Then Wendy just smiled and shrugged. “Ah, never mind.” She turned back to the flowers. “Flower power. The hippies were right. Whatever we do, we can’t tell my dad about this. Got it?”

“Umm… Yeeeeeah… Got it.” Dipper yanked one of the smaller stems out of the streambed. It weighted about 3 pounds. Wow. He never thought he’d ever hold a 3-pound flower, but hey, there’s a first time for everything. He put it in his backpack. “This sample is Ford’s eyes only.”

Seeing as how there was less razor-grass in the water, they followed the creek up deeper into the woods. They kept a look out for lion-bot tracks, but nothing was visible.

Before long, a loud roar echoed through the trees. It was like the sound of a massive motor, grinding, tearing, ripping.

“Woah.” Wendy said. “Cliché giant monster sound. That might be our girl, huh?”

“She never made noise before… What was that?”

Now there was a new sound, the whizzing of small motors, and the scraping of metal-on-metal. The teens looked up to see several monkey-octopus-robots swing through the treetops above them, moving away from the cliché monster sound. Each one had a spherical torso about the size of a basketball. The torso had an eye on the top, another eye on bottom, and 5 long tentacles around the rim. They were using these tentacles in much the same way that normal monkeys use their arms. (Except, judging by the way they were swinging and flipping, they had very little concept of right-side-up and upside-down.) Dipper thought they looked strikingly like the evil robot from the movie ‘The Incredibles’ but he kept this to himself, as it would make him seem like a total dork.

One of the monkey-bots stopped to look down at them, and spun one of its claws in their direction. Dipper noticed it had smaller monkey-bots latched onto some recharge sockets between its arms. Nursing babies; Mabel would think that was adorable. The mother seemed to decide they weren’t a threat, and followed its companions off into the distance. Dipper took several pictures as they went.

“Good grief, they look just like the robot from ‘The Incredibles’.” Wendy frowned.

“You’re such a dork.” He replied.

“And among present company.” She retorted. “I need not feel ashamed.”

The monster noise sounded again, and they continued to follow it up the creek. They were moving even more carefully now, silent and alert. Eventually the noise was very near, just on the other side of the next thicket. They stopped and hid themselves to prepare. Dipper got his camera ready, Wendy took her axe out, and they both tightened the logging chaps on their arms.

“This could be it.” Dipper whispered.

“Don’t engage.” She reminded him. “Just take pictures. Be ready to run.”

“Yeah.”

They stepped quickly from behind the thicket. She leveled her weapon, he leveled his camera, and they both came into view of the sound’s source. And then they both frowned, disappointed.

An adorable little round robot had been cutting down a small tree. Now it paused in its work, and looked up at them. It had a flat paddle tail, little chubby legs, and a gigantic cutting blade built into the front of its head. The blade slowed down, and the noise died off. It tilted its head at them curiously.

“Aw man…” Wendy groaned. “All that noise! All that noise, and it turned out to just be a chainsaw beaver.”

“Come on!” Dipper sighed, taking a picture anyway. “Man, who knew?”

The chainsaw beaver cavorted back toward the creek, and disappeared beneath the water.

“Well.” Dipper shrugged, and noticed the tree the beaver had been chewing on. “Hey! At least we can get a picture of the inside of these trees. For science!”

“Yeh science!”

As it turned out, there wasn’t much for science to see. The trees had bark on the outside and growth rings in the middle, just like normal trees. The only really different part was all the pipes and wires, but even those weren’t all that surprising.

“This is boring.” Wendy decided, after Dipper took his 4th picture of the tree’s innards. “Let’s keep going. Gotta be more to see!”

They left the creek now, and steered into the trees. Toward what seemed like the center of the robot forest.

The trees were getting closer together now, and the grass was getting thicker. All the leaves were still razor sharp, so they proceeded ever more slowly and carefully. Dipper had taken the precaution of wearing long pants today, so his legs were mostly shielded. And the chainsaw chaps kept the worst of it off his arms. But he was still getting pricked and sliced, just a little bit, here and there. On his exposed hands, or through his socks, and even a couple times on his face. It was always just light brushes or pricks, but even that was enough to sting. Sometimes he would stumble or let his arms get clumsy, and a branch would contact his pants or chaps hard enough to pierce through. He would make a face, pull himself free, and soldier on.

Good grief, this was miserable! Dipper felt he was made of paper, walking through a world made of scissors and knives. Dying slowly and surely, just by walking. Once he wiped the sweat off his face, and there was traces of red among the moisture. He looked at Wendy. Her face had some slight damage as well, though he couldn’t tell about the rest of her body. Their eyes met, and they silently shared their misery.

This place wasn’t a good place.

This place wasn’t okay for people to live.

This place wasn’t suited for flesh.

Well, it explained one mystery at least: why they hadn’t seen any ordinary animals or birds around here. Everything soft that ventured in here carelessly (or without clothes) probably just DIED.

“When we come back tomorrow.” Dipper said. “We need football pads and helmets. And bigger boots.”

“We need something more like knight armor.” She agreed.

“And a diamond-tipped weed-eater.”

“Or a tank.”

“Or one of McGucket’s robots.”

Wendy thought about this. “Say.” She said. “Are we seriously coming back tomorrow?”

“Uh…”

“You have a hot date tomorrow, and I just need a day to rest and… You know, take a bath! Don’t want to go through this two days in a row…” She rolled back the chaps to show him the scratches and cuts on her arms. “Plus, dad wants me looking for a job and stuff…”

“Oh yeah… Yeah…” Dipper remembered his date. “I guess I probably shouldn’t show up to some fancy dinner looking like I got ambushed by a pencil sharpener…”

“Pacifica would NOT appreciate that.” Agreed Wendy.

“No, she would NOT.” Dipper glanced around. “Say, speaking of eating, you want to take a break somewhere?” Dipper asked. “Have some lunch?”

“Ugh.” Wendy nodded, and stopped walking. “Yeah actaully. I just need to sit down.”

They found a hollow trunk from some massive fallen tree, and Dipper ducked inside. Apparently, small animals or micro-organisms in this ecosystem found the inside easier to eat than the outside. Although the outer crust and bark was mostly intact, the inside had been cut completely away. A few small robot bugs scampered away as he crawled deeper.

The metal wasn’t particularly smooth, but it was sure better than the grass outside, so he got himself comfortable in the narrow space. Wendy ducked in after him, and took off her backpack. Dipper took off his hat and chainsaw chaps, and wiped his face with his shirt. All his tiny cuts stung as he did so, and he remembered not to wipe again. Now he removed a map and a sandwich from his pack, and leaned back against the metal to chew thoughtfully and inspect the map.

Wendy peaked over his shoulder at the map.

“We’re somewhere around here, right?” She pointed to some contours in the southeast.

“Yeah.” He made a small black mark at his best guess. “And the robot forest is… Well, we crossed in somewhere about here: the northwest border…” He drew a short line.

“Oh wow. We haven’t come very far have we? Maybe a half mile. How big is this forest anyway?”

“I’m not sure how far it extends south and east, but it can’t be much more than about 20 miles wide and 50 miles long, since there’s a highway over here, and the cliffs over here, and there’s hiking trails all along the cliffs…”

“Yeah…” Wendy nodded. “I’m thinking this place has to be pretty small, y’know, since nobody’s ever noticed it before. A couple miles at most.”

“Yeah, or very new…” Dipper began to chew his pencil. “Say, what if something we did caused the creation of this place? What if we… Released it from somewhere, somehow? What if it came in through Bill’s rift, or…”

“I doubt it. It doesn’t look new.” Wendy shrugged. “Some of these trees are dead, some of them have all fallen over, like this one, and… And most of these trees are gigantic! Just like the normal forest. How many growth rings did we see in that tree the beaver was sawing on?”

“Uh… 16, I think…”

“Yeah.” She said. “And that was a really small tree. So, assuming growth rings here mean the same thing they do in the normal forest, that means this place has to be a couple hundred years old at least… Right? Before the white man settled here, for sure…”

Dipper nodded, slowly, and chewed his pencil even harder.

“What if they’re not robot trees?” He asked. “What if they’re just normal trees… And normal mountain lions, squirrels, monkeys, and beavers, for that matter? What if there’s some virus that turns things into robots?!?”

Wendy’s eyes got wide. “Dude… We’d be infected then!”

“Oh dang!” Dipper looked at his hands, rolled up his sleeves, and blinked his eyes. Everything seemed normal… He stuck out his tongue. “Weny! Iz ma tug a saw yeh?”

She looked. “No. Not a saw yet. Show me your feet.” He took off his right shoe. “No.” She reassured him. “Not a tank track yet… Maybe it takes a while… Or starts on the inside and works its way out… Maybe you have a robot liver by now? How would we check?”

Dipper put his shoe back on. And then he put some serious thought into the virus theory. “No.” He finally answered, after a minute or two. “That can’t be it… A conversion virus doesn’t make sense…”

“Why not? There’s been weirder things.”

“Because… Because the creatures here are all made of straight-up metal.” He tapped the tree trunk next to his head, and the resounding clang proved his point. “But normal living bodies don’t have any metal in them, not more than a few grams at least… So we’d have to start eating metal, gorging on it, if we wanted to transform our bodies into that. And then, the only way we could actually chew or digest that metal is if we already had a body like that… So… So the conversion process can’t happen. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of thing.”

Wendy thought about this. “So… I guess that begs another question: where’d all THIS metal come from anyway?” She asked. “This forest is made of metal, but where did it come from originally? There’s not that much metal in the ground, there’s just rock…”

“A lot of rock is actually aluminum by weight…”

“Really?”

“Yeah…”

“Well… You’ve held Juan, and those plants. They’re heavier than aluminum. Gotta be partially steel, at least.”

“Yeah…” Dipper scratched his head, and turned back to the map.

“Hey, what’s that big circle?” Wendy leaned over and pointed to a mile-wide disk he’d drawn on the map, centered around the hill above the town. “That’s the Weirdmageddon radius, isn’t it?”

“The Weirdmageddon radius was a little bigger. That’s actually…” He suddenly hesitated. That circle was the giant, buried alien spaceship. But should he tell her about that? Ford had definitely told him to keep it a close and guarded secret from anyone outside the inner circle… But then again, who would he ever trust more than Wendy? She would probably run across it on her own eventually… Right? It would be safest and best to tell her all about it up front…

That was when Dipper got a new idea: he wouldn’t tell Wendy about the UFO. He would show her. One of these days, he would show it.

But for now, he still had to tell her what the circle was. “That’s uh…” He decided on a half-truth. “That’s the epicenter.” He said. “The focal point of weirdness in Gravity Falls. Ford’s been studying the ‘weirdness magnetism effect’ of this place, and as it turns out, this place exerts a pull on anything unusual. Sometimes it manifests as a psychological pull, which is how six-fingered Ford and I guess Trembley found it. Sometimes it manifests as a literal magnetic force, as it was for ethereal beings like Bill and his goonies. And sometimes it’s just quantum probability. For instance, gnomes could theoretically live anywhere. But they’re very improbable, which makes them very probable to be here. And brain-switching carpets? Or eye bats? Those things probably don’t exist. So when they do exist, they probably exist here.”

“That probably makes sense.” Wendy joked. “And that circle is where it’s strongest?”

“Yeah.”

“Man. The town’s right on the edge of it.”

“Hence why we get mermaids, living video games, and ghosts popping up underfoot all the time.”

“Makes sense… Makes sense…” She turned back to her backpack, and began removing her lunch.

Dipper looked back at the map, and his eyes caught on the ship

Could the crashed UFO have anything to do with this robot forest?

It didn’t seem like it could. The forest didn’t start until about 12 miles south of the crash site’s furthest radius… If this was aliens, it would have to be a separate crash entirely…

Worth an investigation, anyway.

Wendy extended her hand with some food in it.

“Bacon?” She offered.

“Oh yeah! I could go for some bacon right now…” Dipper took a piece from her.

“Smoked sausage?”

“Oh… Sure.”

“How about some jerky?”

“Um… Did your dad pack you this lunch, by any chance?”

“What makes you say that?” She asked.

“Oh you know… It’s just your dad’s sort of… Style. I mean, meaty, high-protein everything… And this.” Dipper held up the package of jerky, with its ultra-manly mascot, and its ‘YOU’RE INADEQUATE’ slogan. “I haven’t seen anything less than a manotaur try to chew this brand.”

“It sure takes a mighty resolve, doesn’t it? Well, surprise! I packed this lunch! That’s just the Corduroy style, mate! Gotta keep your energy up, and keep your jaws strong.” She ripped open the bag of jerky, removed a stick, and tore off of a piece with her teeth. “And hey.” She continued with her mouth full. “Don’t be intimidated by a little bag of jerky, dude. I bet you can chew it. Take some.”

Her encouragement suddenly made Dipper feel very motivated to chew it. He took some from Wendy, bit off a huge piece, and he chewed it.

And he kept chewing it.

And he kept chewing it.

A minute later, he paused briefly, frowned, and kept chewing it.

And he kept chewing it.

About 5 minutes later, it was finally chewed, and he swallowed.

He rubbed his jaw, and stared down at the rest of the jerky. “I don’t… I don’t really want to do that again.” He decided out loud.

“Hmm.” She snickered. “5 minutes. Not bad.”

“’Not bad’…? What’s ‘good’, then?”

“I can chew it in 2 minutes. My brothers are between 3 and 6. My dad can do 45 seconds. I saw a manotaur do it in 5 seconds once, but I think he mostly swallowed it whole, and that’s totally cheating.”

“Oh totally. Those guys are bogus.” Dipper rubbed his jaw again. “So… I ate the jerky. Does that… Prove I’m manly, then?”

“Eh.” She shrugged. “There’s better ways to measure manliness. Mayor Tyler, for instance, can giiiit, giiiit that jerky in about 4 minutes, and he ain’t no man. So…”

“What’s a better metric?” Dipper perked up. “Wrestling bears…? Jumping over cliffs…? Plunging your fist into holes filled with pain…?” (He had done all these things at some point, and thought he’d done all right.)

“Uh…” She frowned, and scratched her head. “That third one is super random, but yeah… That’s kind of the stuff my dad uses… But I’ve got another little method. A little more… Personal. You wanna try?”

“Okay!”

“Awesome. Do you have a spider phobia or anything?”

“Uh… Well, no not really… I mean kinda. Not as bad as some people, but I’m not a huge fan of spiders anyway…”

“Awesome!” She smiled. “Well then, if you wanna prove your manliness, would you go ahead and describe what you see?”

She turned around. When he saw what was on her back, Dipper gave a scream nothing short of girly. “AHH! UH. Yeah! Spiders!”

“Describe them.”

“Uh… There’s about, like, 7 maybe. They’re all about 4 inches across. They… Ooooh… Wow. They’re pretty spiky and… Wow. They’ve got drills and everything. You know what, until today, I wouldn’t have honestly believed that robots could look quite that scary.”

“Good to know.” She nodded, and began to hold perfectly still. “Now would you do me a solid and pick them off for me?”

“UHH?”

“Come on, I can’t see back there.” She hissed. “Grab them and pull them off. Be a man, man.”

“I’m not sure…”

“And they’re sharp little legs are starting to get on my nerves.”

“Uhh…”

“Literally on my nerves. As in past my skin, and down to my nerves. Come on man, you got this.”

Dipper summoned up every ounce of manly courage he had in his reserves, reached forward, and gripped one of the spiders by the thorax. It panicked, waved its drill around threateningly, and began to grip into Wendy’s skin with its legs.

“OW.” Wendy grimaced.

“Sorry!” Dipper stuttered. “Uh… I don’t want to hurt you…”

Wendy’s cool demeanor broke, just for a second. “Just yank it, wimp!”

He yanked it, hard.

It didn’t yank.

Instead, it dug in further. The skin on Wendy’s back stretched up in eight points as Dipper pulled, and each point began to bleed badly.

“OW!” She screeched, and doubled over in pain. Tears came to her eyes.

“UH!” As his heart thundered out of control, Dipper let go of the spider, and turned to his backpack. “SCREW MANLINESS! THIS IS GETTING DUMB!” He said, and pulled out the magnet gun. He flipped it to pulse. “Hold still!”

The gun hummed, and the spiders all convulsed violently. Their red eyes stopped glowing, their legs went limp, and then they were dead. Dipper picked them off one by one, and tossed them outside the log. The last one he removed was the one that had dug in. He had to manually unhook each of its legs, leaving a circle of 8 wounds on Wendy’s back. This one he didn’t toss. This one he smashed with the butt of the magnet gun, leaving its wreckage sparking on the bottom of the log.

They breathed a sigh of relief. Wendy’s breath sounded forced. Dipper had never seen her like this, in so much pain.

“Are you okay?” Dipper asked.

She turned back to him, and she had tears in her eyes. She stretched her back experimentally. “Uh…” Her voice was small and shaky. “I didn’t stay chill…” She muttered, ashamed.

“Oh man, oh man, I’m… I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have tried to yank it.”

She stretched some more, and grimaced. “Uh… No. You didn’t do ANYTHING wrong. I was the one who told you too… I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay… I…”

“Dipper, no, I’m SORRY. I did WRONG. I made a fool of you, and made you hurt me on accident. And dude, that wasn’t a manliness test. Heck, far as I know, manliness CAN’T be measured! You know what that was?? That was me being dumb! I just wanted to tease you a little, and… And honestly, I kind of have a thing with spiders. So when you described them… I started to panic. Just wanted them gone. I did the worst possible thing I could have done, and I yelled at you, and made you panic… But you didn’t panic for long. You did all right. So here it is, honestly: I’m sorry.”

Dipper nodded, and held her eye. “I forgive you.”

“And finally: you’re not a wimp. You know that. I know that. We both know that. Don’t let anyone tell you different. But I forgot it for a second, and I made it sound like I meant it. I made it sound like I don’t respect you, even though I do. I’M SORRY.”

“And I said I forgive you.” He repeated plainly.

She held his eye for a minute, took a deep breath, and then smiled shyly. She picked up her backpack. “Let’s get back in the open.” She mumbled, and led the way out of the log.

Dipper cast another glance around the inside of the tree, looking for more sharp metal creepy-crawlies. Now that his eyes were adjusted for the darkness, he noticed a mean-looking centipede thing and a colony of shredder beetles (which he named himself based on what their mouths looked like.) Metal bugs seemed to be much larger than their normal counterparts.

He wasted very little time following Wendy out into the light. He picked up one of the dead spiders, and put it in his pack with the other samples. Then he shouldered the pack, tightened his chaps, and seated the hat more firmly on his head.

Wendy grimaced as she put her pack on over the spider cuts.

“Want me to carry your stuff…?” Dipper offered.

“Uh… I’ll be fine…”

They stood there for a moment, and Dipper began to have second thoughts about this mission. He looked left, toward the iron thicket ahead of them. He looked right, back the way they’d come. He looked at his camera, already full of amazing pictures. He looked at the cuts on his hands, still painful. And then he looked Wendy in the eye, and he could tell she was thinking all these same things.

“We need to go back.” She stated, matter-of-factly. “We’re getting cut, drilled, sliced, and stabbed. It ain’t getting easier to take, and it sure as heck ain’t stopping. We can’t survive here. We’re only human, and there’s only two of us. If we stay here any longer… If something bigger or sharper comes around… Something that’s actually trying to kill us… Nobody will know anything’s wrong until 6, when Thompson shows to pick us up and we’re not there… We’re not in a good spot. This wasn’t a good plan.”

It was then that Dipper understood: Wendy was afraid. He’d seen it before only rarely, but he recognized it now: she feared for their safety. She feared for their lives. And that made him afraid too.

“Yeah…” He agreed. “But we need to come back. Like we said earlier: armed to the teeth, and armored from head to toe. We’ll bring the equipment, and a plan, but we need to come back here.”

“Oh, of course! We will!” She promised. “Heck yes we will. But not now. Not until we have a plan. For now we need to get OUT.”

He nodded. “Let’s go.”

[movedtosalamoonder]

Unforgettable ~ a Dan and Phil Fanfic [side 1a]

Imagine someone tracing back over your life and looking for the one thing that makes you stronger. The thing you couldn't live without. The thing that makes you feel smarter, braver, kinder, funnier, more you.Simply MORE than you were before.

Maybe someTHING is inaccurate. No, that should be someONE.

Imagine someone found that person in your life, and they ripped them out. I don't mean remove them physically, I mean rip them right out of your memories. Make it so you might as well have never met them.

Are you imagining it? Yes? Good. Unfortunately Dan Howell doesn't have to imagine.

Now imagine being on the other side. Imagine that the person who matters most to you in the world, your best friend, the reason you are better, has no memory of you. Imagine them trapped and terrified and confused...and there's nothing you can do about it. Well, almost nothing.

Unfortunately Phil Lester doesn't have to imagine either.

Genre: Angst, amnesia, horror

Wordcount: 1.6k

Warnings: Kidnapping, amnesia

A/N: This fanfic is a Within the Wires AU. I understand that the phandom is WAY bigger than the WTW fandom, and so the majority of people reading this won't know what Within the Wires is (it's a podcast made by the creators of Welcome to Night Vale). Soooo....go listen to Within the Wires!! Go!! It's so good and so underrated and it is incredible and creepy and heartfelt and oddly relaxing. (Oh, also, this fanfic contains spoilers for season one, so careful with that.) This fic has been a long time coming and I’m so happy to bring it to you finally ^.^

Side 1b | Side 2a | || Read it on AO3 ||

He wakes up cold and alone.

The floor beneath his fingers is smooth and slippery. Tile. His eyes burn whenever he tries to open them; the ceiling blazes with artificial light. Everything hurts. Color swim behind his eyelids.

He tries to speak, but no words will come to him and his throat contracts painfully. For a terrifying moment his mind goes blank and he simply gropes for something, anything, to hold on to. The fear propels him to his feet and as he stands, a rush of information in the form of images and emotions and an overwhelming panic washes over him.

Dan. His name is Daniel James Howell, and he makes Youtube videos, and he lives in a flat in London with–with–

Nothing. The memory has slipped from him like sand through clenched fingers. His surroundings slowly set in: a 10x10 concrete cube with a mattress in one corner. There's a doorway to his left, a small bathroom with bare hinges where the door should be. Directly in front of him is a door with a slot in it, like for letters, a tray of what looks like high school cafeteria food on the floor, and a small package wrapped in brown paper. Another pang of fear shoots through him. Is he in jail? What has he done? He can’t remember anything except going to bed Friday night. Is it still Friday? It feels as though it has been much longer.

Dan bends down and picks up the package. There's no writing on it, but when he turns it over he finds a typed out label reading simply “For Dan”.

A new thought occurs to him. Has he been kidnapped by a fan? Oh, dear God, he hopes not. That would probably be worse than being in jail. He digs his fingernail into the corner of the packaging, trying not to think about the possibility of having been captured by some psycho subscriber.

Inside the package is a clear plastic box, the kind organized people use to store things in their bedrooms. He scrabbles at the snaps on the sides, noticing for the first time that his nails are broken and bloody.

Inside the box is an old battery powered tape recorder and ten cassette tapes. Each of the tapes have the same kind of typed label as the one that is on the package, and has a number and a letter. Dan takes the box over to the bed and collapses onto it. He wants to just lie there and go to sleep for hours, but he's afraid that if he does he’ll forget more than what he already has. He takes the first tape out of the box and slides it into the cassette player and presses play. He pulls the tray of plastic looking food over to the bed as the initial white noise begins. He figures he’ll probably need some kind of sustenance if he's going to figure out this madness.

Cassette One, Side A: Stress, Shoulders (Ocean)

Welcome to your first relaxation cassette. In these tapes I will guide you through a series of visualization exercises. These tapes will aid you in your recovery here at the Institute. When you are finished with this tape, return it to your unit nurse and fill out the accompanying survey.

Breathe in.

Breathe out. Settle yourself. Forget where you are and how you got there; focus on breathing.

Breathe in:

Feel the air fill your lungs. Feel your body rise as you absorb the oxygen, as it rushes through your bloodstream, bringing life to every tiny corner of your body. Imagine you are an ocean, and your breath is the rising tide lapping against the beaches of the world. Imagine the way hundreds of millions of grains of sand feel beneath you. Imagine reaching out...and relaxing your grip, falling back to the depths, between each bit of sand and sea smoothed boulder and broken branch of coral.

Breathe out.

In this tape we will focus on breathing. You will trust only my voice and your body, to which you are subject.

Imagine you are on a plane. You do not like planes very much. They used to be something of an adventure, holding an air of excitement and novelty when you were in your younger years that has long since worn off. You have been on far too many planes now.

You have made your way through security half asleep, a travel coffee mug clenched too tight in your right hand. The coffee is scalding, but your mind is too busy to remember the last time you placed the rim against your lips, and so your tongue is numb and sore by the time your bags have been rifled through and your body wanded over.

You keep looking across the space of the airport, too big to be called “room” in your head. There is nothing to see, nothing but people and suitcases and scratched plastic chairs, but you feel as though you’ve lost something. You’ve lost something, and you have to keep looking for it.

Much like the coffee, it is something that won’t quite register in your hazy, before-ten-am mind. He’s not lost, you tell yourself. You do not have to look for him.

Still, your eyes wander across the terminal until they snag on a familiar figure, and then wander back lazily to the conveyor belt until they are drawn back across the space again.

The figure notices you looking, but pretends not to. He always does. He knows you want no further reminder of your need to cling to familiar objects, familiar faces, of your hatred of airport terminals with their heavy chemical air and too bright lights and barking security guards.

There’s some small holdup, some tiny detail of protocol that causes one of the officers to exhale through her nose unhappily and leave you fidgeting uncomfortably, sweating under the lights. You don’t know what to do with your hands. Your limbs are long and awkward and seem stitched onto your body, like an ill made measurement for a marionette with its strings left loose. You shove your hands deep into the pockets of your skinny jeans, scrunching your fingers against the thin lining of lint that’s collected in them.

“Just a minute,” the security guard calls in a clipped voice, and you nod. Your head feels disconnected from your body, the sharp movement somehow separate from your consciousness. The lights are hot and bright. You blink, trying to clear the spots from your eyes. Lint gathers under your fingernails and you hear the person behind you huff impatiently. The space is too hot, and too cold. Your skin films with sweat and the coffee mug comes automatically to your chapped lips.

There’s a sudden warmth on your left shoulder, a slight weight that hovers tentatively above your collarbone and the beginning of your shoulder blade. It anchors you, the gentle heat unknotting the nerves coiled in your upper body.

“Just a little while longer,” says the voice that belongs to the hand which has attached itself to your shoulder, and unlike in the security guard’s previous announcement, your ears are able to detect genuine concern for you. The presence stays slightly below and behind your shoulder, close enough for you to sense.

You do not turn around, but you place your hand briefly on top of the other. The swirling galaxies of your fingerprints read wrinkled knuckles, infinitesimally small lines of the keratin of a nail, the softness of skin made so much more obvious because it is not your own, all in the few seconds that you allow your hand to linger. Enough to lock in an unspoken message; don’t leave me.

So the hand stays, even when the security guard finally returns with your suitcase and it is time to leave, even though you no longer have to worry about the disgruntled woman behind you or the uncomfortable limbo of standing still in a place that is meant only for movement.

A minute later and there is simply an arm around your shoulder, and so you lug the suitcase behind you with one arm, even though it’s heavy. You wait in line like that, the quiet presence beside you instead of behind you, all your anxieties and tangled knot of worries unraveled and smoothed out like a ball of yarn, pushed along by a curious cat until the whole thing lies complicated but flat and still against a clean floor.

You board the plane and fall asleep, despite the caffeine feebly pushing at your consciousness, and when your head lolls over onto his shoulder he does not say anything, even though he can hardly move for the couple hours. He does not mind, because to him your comfort and security are much more important than his ability to move his arm.

(Here the voice pauses, and Dan could hear whoever was speaking draw a deep breath.)

Breathe.

We got away from the breathing, didn’t we? Breathe in. Imagine watching the ground drop away from you as sleep tugs at your eyelids, imagine somehow feeling as calm as though you are still tethered to the ground, because there is a well known hand on your shoulder. Imagine looking outside and thinking that you can almost see well enough to barely comprehend the slightest curve of Earth, how truly enormous it is.

Breathe out.

You are asleep now; you are safe.

Well; safe has many meanings. You are not whole, but for now no further risk will come to you than what already has. I do not mean to alarm you. We will work on you being whole again. It is very important that you remain calm.

Remaining calm is extremely important to your continued safety and eventual...release. The institute does not wish to harm you. Continue to practice your relaxation exercises, and your release will occur much sooner.

END SIDE A.

Side 1b 

[180abroad]

Day 153: To Vienna

Today marked the end of our brief but enjoyable stay in Eastern Europe (the merciless heat notwithstanding) and our return to the German speaking world, which we had briefly touched back in Lucerne, Switzerland. The day started out well--sleeping in and reveling in the luxury of not feeling delirious with heat and sleep deprivation. The rest of the day proved nearly as pleasant, apart from a bit of stress on the train.

We took an Uber--Prague's metro is fine, but it's a perfect city for ridesharing--and made it to the train station with plenty of time to spare. Poking around, we saw a memorial to US president Woodrow Wilson, who played a significant role in the international recognition of Czechoslovakia as an independent country after WWI. I also found much less somber collection of "mapy" maps in the station's bookstore.

We didn’t have assigned seats for the ride and knew that the train was going to be crowded, so we made sure to find a spot on the platform where there wasn’t too many other people. Usually this works out for us. As the train pulled in, however, we realized that it was going to overshoot us completely.

Jogging through an increasingly dense crowd of other people who had been overshot, I managed to squeeze into the back coach of the train. We weren’t the first ones in, but we should at least be able to find some seats together. Right?

Well, no. Unlike most other trains we’d been on, this one had it’s first-class coach at the back. So we would have to move down to the next coach before even looking for seats. I thought about getting back out and walking down the platform, but the crowd was already oozing onto the train behind me and I didn't want to risk getting shut out.

We squeezed and shuffled my way to the next coach, which–of course–was more first-class seating and the dining area. I didn’t realize it, but at this point an attendant checked Jessica’s ticket and actually forced her to go back out the door and walk down to the second-class coaches. Apparently she didn’t want us riffraff even passing through first class.

The third coach was the beginning of second class, but it was already nearly full. I thought I had hit the jackpot with two empty seats right by the door. I had taken my backpack off and begun to wave at Jessica--who had caught back up with me--when I finally noticed the tiny electronic "reserved" indicator above the seats. Moving on…

The fourth coach's seats were unreserved but full up. The train had already started at this point, and we could barely move at all because of other people pushing in both directions to try to find seats as well.

After making our way through almost the entire train–and seeing plenty of duos coming the other way from the front–we gave up and settled for separate seats. So much for watching a movie along the way.

I took the fourth seat in a quartet occupied by a family of three Asian travelers. The mother gave me a polite smile, but I was certain that I was making them at least borderline uncomfortable. The nervous sweating certainly didn't help.

After about an hour of sitting as compactly and inconspicuously as I could manage, a seat opened up closer to where Jessica was sitting--one in a section of the coach where all of the seats faced the same way. I jumped on it. About an hour after that, my new partner detrained, and Jessica joined me. So at least we got to spend the last hour of the train together.

There wasn't any time for a movie at that point, but we were able to get some planning done. I also listened to a Rick Steves podcast about Viennese café etiquette.

Cafés are just as important in Vienna as they are in Paris or Rome, if not more so. Here, you enter into a space that's like a cross between a fancy restaurant and someone's living room, find a table, and sit down. Sooner or later, an extremely well-dressed and Germanically curt host will ask you what you want. If you want an espresso, you ask for a mocha. If you want a cappuccino, you as for a melange. If you want a latte, ask for a kaffee verkehrt (which literally means "coffee [made] wrong"). If you want something special, ask for an ice coffee, which is actually coffee with ice cream in it. For something a little zestier and more adult, a Maria Theresia is an espresso with a shot of orange liqueur and a topping of whipped cream.

Anyway, once we arrived in Vienna, things got easier. It was breezy, not too hot, and the train station was easy to get out of. We called an Uber and were at our flat about fifteen minutes after stepping off the train.

Our flat in Vienna wasn't the largest we stayed in, but it was a mansion compared to our place in Prague. For starters, the bed had its own room with a door separating it from the rest of the flat. Imagine that. And even with the sofa bed out, there was actually floor space left over for walking around.

Best of all, it had fans for both of us.

As I marveled, part of me wondered what it will feel like to be back in the States, where even my fairly modest bedroom is still bigger than some of the places Jessica and I have shared in Europe.

Our apartment building was nice, with a surprisingly modern elevator. It was elegant and ornate, but also slightly shabby--albeit in a mostly charming way. Which turned out to be a fairly fitting introduction to Vienna as a whole

The historic city center was about a 40-minute walk or 15-minute bus ride away from our flat. We had thought about going into town the first night--a great choice whenever time and energy allows it--but we decided to take it easy instead. We had a very busy week in Munich ahead of us, and we were still running on dangerously low batteries after the Great Krakow-Prague Heatwave.

Instead, we took a short walk down to a train station near our flat (not the one we'd arrived at earlier) and bought tickets for our next travel days. It was an automated kiosk, so on the one hand, we didn't have to worry about embarrassing ourselves in front of a local human. On the other hand, we didn't have a local human on hand to explain how the system worked. We figured it out quickly enough, though, and ended up buying tickets for the next two legs of our trip, which would take us to Munich. We actually could have booked our tickets within Germany too, but we wanted to do a bit more research first.

We walked back to our flat and picked up some groceries at the Billa literally right across the street from us. (Billa is an Austrian supermarket chain that we'd first run into in Prague.) Vienna is definitely a beer city and not a cider city. But luckily for me and Jessica, it is also a wine city. Apparently, it has the largest acreage of urban vineyards anywhere in Europe.

I grabbed a bottle of Grüner Veltliner–the main varietal grown in Austria. Neither of us had tried one before, but I had been curious about it for a long time. It turned out to be really good. It’s a light white wine, and ours had flavors of citrus and tart green apples.

Sipping Austrian wine in Vienna on a warm summer evening. How cool is that? After five months on the road, I sometimes needed to force myself to step back and appreciate just how amazing this trip really is.

After dinner, Jessica gave her brother Nic a call to wish him happy birthday. We would be meeting him in Amsterdam in less than a month. Which means that we would be heading home in just over a month. It was one thing to be halfway through the trip, or two-thirds through it. But to be five-sixths through was crazy. When we started, I didn’t know if I could do six months. Now, I wished I could keep doing this for another six months. Or at least three…

At the very least, I wouldn’t mind getting to sleep in my own bed and eating real California Mexican food. So there’s that. Oh yeah, and my friends and family. Them too, I guess.

Next Post: Vienna (The Habsburg Hustle)

Last Post: Prague Castle (and the Window that Sparked a War)

[coleruth]

So it did not take us 16 hours to get to the Berry Islands. It took almost twice that; 32 hours exactly from the time we pulled up anchor in Nixon’s Harbor but 30 if you figure that we really left from the Bimini Sands Marina where we stopped to get water and ice.

When I uploaded my last post, minutes before my cell coverage died and land disappeared from sight, it was sunny and the winds were light. We ate soba noodle salad that Chris and Gabe had prepped that morning and chilled in the cockpit playing Scrabble.

Then we discussed how the night would proceed, and divided up into watches. I’d never done it this way, but we staggered the watches so that no one would be alone for longer than an hour. The first half hour and the last half hour of each two-hour watch would overlap with the previous and next watch. We did this because, as newbies, Chris and Gabe wanted less time alone. In retrospect I wish we’d paired up in three-hour watches of two people each because the wind piped up around sunset, along with the seas. We were heeled over for the next twelve hours – leaving really only two berths on the low side of the boat on which to sleep.

With the boat on a decent heel, Chris made rice and beans for dinner. I watched on, impressed. She even managed to cut onions amidst the turbulence. Around sunset I took a bunch of pictures and this 3D video.

Then we ate in the dark, then I went below to try and get some sleep. The boat lurched forward and back and swayed side to side, as it does when forging ahead into the wind and seas, and every time a wave smacked against the bow I felt like someone was beating me with a cudgel. I tried to imagine how this would feel once Greg was in the berth with me – because the heel of the boat would certainly force him down on me, unless I tried to sleep on the high side, in which case I would be on top of him. It would be like sleeping in a washing machine with a bowling balI, complete with water, as a stream of seawater came in from the anchor locker whenever a wave came over the bow. What’s more, I could hear every word of conversation from the cockpit. All I could think was: this is not going to work.

About an hour before my watch started I went up into the cockpit in a tizzy.

“We have to anchor at Mackie Shoal,” I declared. Mackie Shoal is a shallow-er area in the middle of the bank where many people stop and wait out the night. The French-Canadians in the anchorage in Bimini told us that was their plan. We decided instead to try and make it to the Berry Islands as quickly as possible, and during daylight hours instead of spending two whole days sailing and risk arriving at night. I no longer liked this plan.

“We can’t anchor at Mackie Shoal,” said Greg. “It’s way off our course. By the time we get there it would be 2 am and then we’d be so tired we would sleep in and then we wouldn’t make it to Great Harbor by nightfall.”

As a rule, we don’t enter strange ports at night.

I knew he was right, but I wanted to sleep and knowing that I couldn’t sleep in our berth, I knew I had a long, sleepless night ahead.

I pulled on my foul weather gear and climbed into the cockpit. I might as well be topside.

Chris and Gabe both went below leaving Greg and I alone in the cockpit for a few hours. Several ships came near us in the night, and Greg shown his light on the sails.

We were bashing into wind and seas, and making only 2 knots when the autopilot quit. Greg figured we must have run out of battery power so we decided to start the engine in order to charge the batteries, and we rolled up the genoa.

We motored for a while, until Greg spotted a red light on the engine control panel that had never been it before. It was the alternator. This was not good. We shut down the engine. We would have to sail. What’s more, the alternator was key to battery supply – which was key to running the autopilot… which we had assured Chris and Gabe that they could rely on to steer the boat, since they still hadn’t really learned to sail.

Later we learned that Chris was a bit nervous about being alone on watch, and Gabe had reassured her, “All you have to do is make sure the autopilot is on course.”

When we turned off the engine, we had only the mainsail out.

“Guess what our speed is?” Greg asked and then answered his own question: “Zero.”

Because of the oncoming seas, we were completely stalled.

So we unrolled the genoa, but only part-way, to a #1 jib, so we wouldn’t find ourselves over-canvassed in the night.

Shortly after this, a bright pink oblong shape appeared on the horizon to port. It looked vaguely like a cruise ship. We watched it, waiting to see if it was getting closer or crossing ahead of us. Greg once again shined his dive light upward to illuminate the sails.

“We should alter course,” he said.

We tacked, and kept watching the strangely shaped vessel until it morphed again and then lifted up off the horizon. It was the moon.

We had a pretty good laugh about this. I wonder how many sailors before us have been fooled by a moonrise.

Greg went down to “sleep” around 11 pm and I stood watch until Gabe came up at midnight.

I told him that the autopilot was down. He seemed a bit nervous but sat down beside me in the cockpit and watched. I told him how I was trying to steer as close to the wind as possible, how to watch the sails to make sure they were full, how to listen for when they flogged, and how to feel the acceleration when he found the sweet spot. Then I handed him the wheel. He erred a few times to one side or the other and I simply pointed, indicating that he should head up or fall off. Within minutes he seemed to get it. I curled up in the cockpit and dozed off to sleep. Several times I awoke to the sound of the sails, or perhaps to something I felt, and I would look up, look at Gabe, and see he was already correcting.

On the long slog down to Key Biscayne, the day Greg and I beat into the wind all day, I remember saying something to him about how I thought that for all its exhaustion, sailing to windward was one of the easiest tacks to learn on. Gabe was living proof. An hour and a half later Chris came up and I overhead Gabe giving her the same advice I’d given him. I didn’t intervene, but sat back and watched Chris take to the helm as naturally and instinctively as Gabe had. It’s hard to explain how rewarding this is to the non-sailor, but there is magic in it. It’s a beautiful thing when you feel for the first time that you’ve harnessed the wind, and when you see someone else get it for the first time, it’s like sharing a secret understanding of how the world works.

Greg came on watch late at 3:30 am, and I immediately headed below to get warm. I was so tired by this point that I slept right through the bucking bronco ride, until my alarm went off at 4:30 am for my next watch.

Gabe and I watched the day break over the ocean and once everyone was up we made coffee, ate leftover rice and beans for breakfast and spent the day sailing along in pleasant winds under a hot sun. I slept some more in the cockpit and Chris and I played Scrabble.

Not long before we arrived at Great Harbor, the winds completely died. I went below and made hot dog buns, and just after we anchored we put them on the grill. We ate what Chris and Gabe allege to be the best hot dogs of their lives, then we all fell asleep with the dishes still in the sink.

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Greg steering with his feet around lunch.

Watch schedule

The seas were the choppiest right around sunrise, as we briefly sailed over deep water.

Morning has broken.

Greg taking a swim to unwrap the dinghy painter from around the prop. (Note: he is touching bottom.)

That’s bottom you’re seeing.

Greg reading the charts before anchoring at Great Harbor.

I see a bad bun rising.

Chris eating the best hot dog of her life.

Sunset at Great Harbor, calm and at anchor.

Sunset at sea on our night sail.

Wishful Thinking So it did not take us 16 hours to get to the Berry Islands. It took almost twice that; 32 hours exactly from the time we pulled up anchor in Nixon’s Harbor but 30 if you figure that we really left from the Bimini Sands Marina where we stopped to get water and ice.