#she saw the town in ruins??? she and dipper almost got murdered??? she had to face the idea of losing stan forever????

[nenoname]

still seeing "um i don't think mabel faced enough consequences" weirdos in 2025.....

[codylabs]

Chapter 3: Hunt the Huntress

“So Ford was right!” Mabel exclaimed. “There ARE more out there!”

“It’s better than that!” Dipper added. “If this really is robotic life, life doesn’t work alone! That means there’s a whole ECOSYSTEM out there! A robot ecosystem somewhere out in the forest! Just waiting to be found!”

Wendy was strangely silent. “Hmm.” She said.

They found their bikes outside the manor, and began to mount up.

“That means Juan has a mom and dad to go home to!” Mabel said, stepping on the first pedal. “I’m so happy for him! But I need to get all my cuddling done now before you guys find them!”

“Cudling. Right. Sure.” Dipper said. “Okay! Wendy. Where did you find this thing? Let’s head back to that area of the forest, and have a look around! See if we can’t find some other signals or footprints to track…”

“Wait!” Mabels said. “They don’t have footprints! They have tank tracks on their feet! So it’ll be tracking track tracks!”

“Ha ha! Track track track…” Dipper laughed. “Right?”

“Yeah.” Wendy mumbled, her voice still quiet. “Let’s do that.”

“HOLD UP THERE, FELLERS!” McGucket’s voice interrupted them. “I think I may have somethin’ fer ya ta use!”

“’Sup?” Dipper asked.

“Eh, just these contraptions here.” McGucket pulled a half dozen cup-sized devices out of his pocket. “I hootinannied up a couple radio transmitters to give out the same signal that your robit does. So you can use ‘em for bait, decoys… I ain’t rightly sure how ya plan ta go about this, but if you ever wanna use ‘em, just flip that there switch.”

“Hey, thanks!” Dipper took two, and Wendy took the rest.

“Yeah, awesome!” Mabel said.

“No problemo!” McGucket did a happy little jig, turned back toward the manor, and waved goodbye.

“That’s so great!” Mabel said. “You’re so totally prepared for this now!”

“Wait, aren’t you coming?” Dipper asked.

“No, I’ve got to introduce Juan to Candy, Grenda, and Waddles! They’ll adore him! Could I have the other pair of gloves?”

“Uh…” Dipper handed them to her. “Sure. Just… Um… Just keep an eye out, all right? We don’t know if Juan’s family is gonna come back for it, and they could be… Dangerous…”

“Okay.” Mabel said. “I’ll stay in the shack then, and invite everyone over! Ford has ray guns. He won’t let people near.”

“Hmm.” Wendy mumbled. “Yeah. You go do that.”

“Hey.” Dipper noticed his friend’s grim expression. “What’s bugging you?”

“Here, take the box, Mabel.” Wendy said. “Run on ahead. I think my bike has a flat tire; we’ll catch up.”

“All right!” Mabel rode off merrily with Juan in her bike’s basket. The little creature chirped happily in the breeze. (Aunt Mabel definitely was its favorite.)

Dipper turned back to Wendy, and her bike with perfectly fine tires. “Hey.” He said. “What’s wrong?”

She sighed, and thought for a moment. “Have you ever played ‘Space Androidoid 2?’” She asked.

“Space androidoid?” He frowned at the change in subject, and worked his memory. “Wasn’t that a game franchise back in the 90’s or whatever?”

“Yeah. Soos plays it. Have you played it?”

“No.”

“Okay.” She said. “So… In this game, you play a bounty hunter. The android, yeah? This bounty hunter was sent to this dangerous planet, the homeworld of this super dangerous alien creature. Right? These creatures are nearly extinct, but the last of the species are on this planet. They may be dangerous, but there’s not many of them left, right?”

“Right.”

“In the game, your job is to kill them. You have to kill them. Every last one of them. Because the risk they pose is too great. If they fell into the wrong hands, if they spread across the universe, if they grew larger… The risk is too great. People could die. So… They need to die. Every last one of them.”

“You’re saying…?” Dipper glanced over his shoulder, to make sure Mabel hadn’t doubled around and snuck back near, as she was prone to do. “You’re saying… We should kill these things? Exterminate them?”

“I’m telling you that it might be the best option. Depending on what we find in the forest today, we might need to. I’m preparing you for that.”

“That’s… Wendy, that’s wrong. We can’t just… Exterminate an entire species. Just because they’re different than us, or just because they scare us. It’s irresponsible. It’s ruining the environment. It’s destroying something priceless and irreplaceable…”

“Heck YES it’s destroying something priceless and irreplaceable. Heck YES it’s ugly, and there would probably be a better solution if we were richer, wiser, or more powerful. But at the end of the day, that may be the only solution we have. And they aren’t just different, they’re dangerous.” Wendy showed him her bandage. “Juan is a juvenile the size of a kitten, and he almost cut my finger in half. Could have done worse is he was on full charge, or if he were actual trying. This took him about half a second. Now ask yourself, how big do these things get? The size of a person? The size of a cow? The size of a car? A bulldozer? A house?”

“We have literally no idea…”

“Imagine the worst-case scenario, dude.” Wendy said. “The very worst. Imagine if they were really big, like tank-sized, and found out they could leave the forest. Imagine if they found out that the wide world is filled with metal: cars and buildings and those guardrails on the roadside and telephone wires… In civilization, they would have all the metal they could eat, and no natural predators. They could cut a car in half and eat it. With the people still inside. They could chop bridges up and let them crumble. When the military comes to evac the town in their helicopters, they could jump out and chop up the choppers. With the people still inside. When they roll down the roads to the big city, they could eat away at the foundations of the big skyscrapers like beavers, and let them fall. With the people still inside. The government might have to nuke the city. WITH THE PEOPLE STILL INSIDE. Are they bulletproof? We don’t know. Can they shrug off an RPG? We don’t know. Are they invulnerable to nuclear fallout? We don’t know. Can they swim? We don’t know. How fast do they eat, grow, and reproduce? We. Don’t. Know.”

“Wendy… You’re being paranoid.”

“So? Our paranoia is what keeps us alive. And keeps others alive. People of our ‘profession’ can’t afford ANYTHING less.”

Dipper considered this long and hard. “But… We don’t even know that they’re that bad at all… What if they don’t get much bigger than a dog? What if they could be easily domesticated, or trained not to eat stuff we like? What if it could actually all turn out to be just like Mabel sees it: happy and adorable...”

Wendy threw her arms in the air. “Yeah!” She said. “That would be great! That would be the most awesome thing in the world! My brothers would totally LOVE a robot dog! Mabel would too! But… But remember the last adventure we had together? YOU were the one who taught me a real meaty lesson that day: life isn’t Mabel Land. If we think it is, if we pretend it is, if we forget our troubles and focus on being positive, then that’s not real. If we do that, people die. I’m not saying we need to kill the cat-rat-bots, dude. Heck, everything we’ve been saying here has been straight-up speculation. We don’t know a thing about these creatures. But if they are hostile, if they’re highly dangerous, we need to be prepared to do anything. Murder an entire race. Do a cover-up. Burn a forest down; I don’t know. And in the end, hardest of all, we’ll need to explain it all to Mabel.”

Dipper felt a terrible and ungainly weight on his shoulders; a looming dread. And he knew that Wendy was right. If these things were hungry and mean, if peace was not an option, she was right. It really could be us-or-them. He finally answered. “I’m glad you sent Mabel off before describing this.”

Wendy beamed, and stuck up her thumb. “Yeah! No problem, dude. I got yer back.”

Dipper nodded. “I guess you’re right though… I guess you’re right.”

“These are the tough calls, Dipper.” Wendy swung her bike around to the direction of the road, and began pedaling. “Depending on what we find out there, sooner or later… These are the tough calls we’ll have to make.”

A half hour later, Dipper and Wendy left their bikes at the end of a logging road, and started into the trees.

Two hours after that, the found themselves deep in the forest, in the cool and quiet stillness beneath the massive trees. Somewhere far away and high up, a lonely woodpecker drilled into a trunk, and its tapping echoed hauntingly through the forest, the only living sound. Wendy folded up her map and slipped it back into her pack. “This is it.” She said. “This is the place.”

The bear trap lay in the same place she’d found it, the branch she’d used to pry it open still wedged between its jaws. And the rusty metal of the trap itself was scarred and cracked in places where Juan had grinded on it, in his futile efforts to escape.

“Okay.” Dipper nodded, and pulled out the radio tracker. “Let’s see if I can find a signal of some kind…” The devices speaker warbled with unclear static, spun lazily around a few times, and finally pointed back the way they’d come. “No good.” He said. “It’s still just picking up Juan. I wonder… If it DOES have a mother of some type that’s supposed to home in on its signal, I wonder where it is now? It’s been 3 days…”

“Maybe its mother abandoned him.” Wendy suggested. “Maybe it was here, and since it didn’t have hands, it saw that it couldn’t free him from the bear trap without destroying him. So it just left him. Started ignoring his signal.”

“That would make sense…” Dipper nodded. “But what do we do now?”

Wendy looked around, and then pointed to the next ridge. “Well. Maybe if we head up there and hit one of McGucket’s transmitters, she’ll see the source has moved, and understand he got free. Worth a try, right?”

Dipper nodded, pulling out a decoy. “Good idea. And while we’re walking, keep a look out for… You know… Like, anything.”

“Oh, I have been.” Wendy assured him. “Way ahead of you. Way ahead.”

“Seen anything?”

“Nope.”

“Well.”

The ridge turned out to be a little taller than it looked from a distance. And a little steeper. They were on their hands and knees now, half walking, half pulling themselves past the rocks and roots. Though the sun remained obscured behind the trees, Dipper soon found himself sweaty and weary. Sports. He growled to himself. Why have I never done sports? Maybe a little football, or… Track, or… Wrestling or something, would have given me some better cardio. Should have known this was waiting for me. Man. Now I’m like a second-class-adventurer. He looked up at Wendy’s backside, progressing further and further ahead of him. She’s the athletic one. The dangerous one. And I’m the smart one. Right? I always was the smart one. But now she’s in on everything I was. And she’s been at it all year. She probably knows more than I do. She’s probably more curious, more clever, and smarter than I am. The journals are gone, and she has her diary… What do I bring to the table now? When Wendy got more than 20 feet further up than him, she seemed to notice his exhaustion, and stopped to let him catch up.

“You need a minute?” She asked when he passed her.

He thought about this briefly, but his sense of manly honor allowed only one answer to pass his lips. “Nah.” He said. “I’m good… We’ve gotta be halfway, right?”

“Uh…” She gazed down the slope. “Yeah.” She said. “A third at least. But it’s best not to think about it like that. Think of something else.”

They climbed on in silence, as Dipper tried to think of something else to think about. He settled on Gideon Gleeful for no real reason, and spent the rest of the climb nursing silent grudges and wondering how that kid had turned out.

“Hey, we’re basically to the top!” Wendy finally announced.

Dipper was right behind her. He breathed deeply, rubbed his sore arms, and leaned against a tree.

“Ugh.” He said. “This hill looked way shorter from the bottom.”

“Yeah.” Wendy nodded, leaning against a different tree. “Yeah. So. We’re up here now. The radio signal can probably reach the whole valley… How we gonna do about this?”

“Okay…” Dipper said, looking around. “Let’s put the decoy up in a tree or something, so it gets even better range.”

“I have a better idea. Since the idea is for it to think the decoy is its baby, why would we put it up a tree? How would its baby got all the way up a tree? I think we should put ourselves up in a tree instead. So we can see it coming and stay out of danger.”

“Alrighty.” Dipper said. “This is going here then.” He dropped the decoy on the ground.

“Nope.” Wendy reached into her backpack and removed a large net. “It’s going on top of this. Did your dad ever teach you how to rig up a trap like this?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well here, I’ll show you.”

Twenty minutes later, the decoy was transmitting, the trap was set, and the two teens were thirty feet above it, trying to find some way to get comfortable up among the sharp and pokey branches. Wasn’t long before Dipper got sort of bored. “So.” Wendy broke the silence. Apparently, she was just as bored as him. “How about that Pacifica brat? Mabel said she asked you on a date or something?”

“OH OH UH… Yeah.” Dipper looked up at her branch, and scratched the back of his head nervously. “Yeah. Yesterday. She… Well, she’s actually changed. A little. I think. She’s not a brat very much I guess… I mean… She’s not super mean, really, and… And she can actually be a hero when she needs to. Anyway, I said yes, and… I guess it’ll kind of be my first date.”

“Oh yeah? That’s cool. Where you guys going?”

“I guess we’re going to the… Uh… I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s like a seafood place. Mabel says she went there with Gideon once. And she says the food is really fresh. But she said the word ‘fresh’ all slow and menacing, so I’m not sure what she actually meant.”

“Huh. Sounds awesome.” Wendy nodded.

“Yeah.”

“Y’know, I’ve never really had seafood.” Wendy said.

“Me neither.” Dipper shrugged. “But it sounds like it could be pretty fun. Pacifica said the Caviar is really good.”

Wendy seemed to consider this for a moment. “The Caviar.”

“Yeah.”

“…You poor jerk. You don’t even know what Caviar is, do you?”

“No.” He admitted.

“Me neither.” She shrugged. “Probably some kind of enchiladas.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“What are you gonna wear?”

“I don’t know. Something, uh… Some fancy color. Like black pants, and, uh… A black shirt… That… Goes over top of a white shirt or something. Like whatever Bipper wore. Mabel said that he looked pretty nice.”

“Yeah, he was pretty dapper.”

“Yeah. Can’t be too hard. I’ll figure something out.”

“When is this date?”

“Thursday.”

“You should probably figure that out sooner rather than later. Correct me if I’m wrong, but right now your entire wardrobe consists of socks, underwear, brown shorts, red t-shirts, and that vest.”

“Well, no… I… I… They’re all different…”

He felt his gaze on her, looked up, and met her eye. She frowned very slightly. “Which means.” She reasoned. “That every day I’ve ever seen you… You’ve been wearing the exact same shirt and pants. The. Exact. Same.”

“UH…” He struggled to weasel his way out of this. Had he really? He thought he’d just been procrastinating washing his clothes. Sure, some mornings he just picked up his shirt and pants where he’d tossed them the previous night, but had he REALLY done that EVERY morning? Was he seriously that bad? “Uh…” He repeated.

“I knew it.” She snapped her fingers and leaned back against the tree trunk. “It’s true. You never change your clothes. That means I win the bet. Ford has to pay up.”

“UH…” He struggled. “How about you, then? Your shirt and pants have stayed the same color since as long as I can remember…”

“Woah, dude, chill. This is my lucky jacket. And I do have other things besides grey jeans.”

“Like what?”

“Like… I have some red pants… And a dress. And my dad gave me a kilt at some point.”

“Red pants. Red.”

“Yeah.”

“And a dress.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And a kilt.”

“My dad has… Eccentricities.”

“Have you ever worn any of those items?”

“Umm… Well… No.”

Dipper smiled with smug satisfaction. She’d fallen right into her own trap. “You know what they say…” He chided, as he leaned back and inspected his fingernails. “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw dirty laundry.”

“Oh yeah, Mr. Kitten-Sneeze?” She retorted, sitting forward. “Well people who live in wooden houses shouldn’t roast.”

“Yeah?” He retorted. “Well people who live in ice houses shouldn’t blow steam.”

“Yeah? People in paper houses shouldn’t choose scissors.”

“Yeah? People in gallium houses should stay chill.”

“Yeah? People in spiky houses shouldn’t trip and fall on their face.”

“Yeah? People in straw houses shouldn’t lose needles.”

“Yeah? People in bubble houses shouldn’t even walk.”

“Yeah? People in golden houses shouldn’t… Uh… Okay, I got nothing.”

Their intellectual debate was suddenly interrupted by a noise from below. Their eyes swiveled downward, and stared at their new visitor. They both grinned, half in satisfaction, half in horror.

The parent had returned.

It was the perfect image of Juan, but scaled up to roughly the size of a lion. Its legs were longer and leaner, its back was wider and flatter, its treads were wider and more rugged, and its head was the size of a wheelbarrow. For a machine of its size, it moved surprisingly quiet. Almost silent, but for the occasional snapping twig beneath its treads.

Unlike its child, which had been shelled in silvery, bright plating, the parent appeared as a matte grey/brown, with a oil-like bluish sheen. Almost so dark that it blended in with the forest floor.

If these robots were, as they suspected, part of some unknown larger ecosystem, what role would these cat-like units play in that system? Dipper began to strongly suspect that Juan, and his parent here, must be the predators. Their eyes were in front, they moved silently and directly, and they had a large system of hooks in their mouth, as if for spearing and grappling. They were looking at a robot designed for hunting, killing, and eating other robots.

So rad.

Wendy took out her phone and began taking a video. Dipper took out disposable camera and began snapping pictures. The lion-bot seemed oblivious to them as it moved through the trees. Its dark red eyes swiveled back and forth across the ground, searching carefully for its target.

“Man.” Wendy whispered under his breath. “Soos is gonna flip when he sees this.”

“Soos and I are pterodactyl bros.” Dipper mentioned off-hand. “I wish he didn’t have to stay back at the Shack. He’d love this thing.”

“What’s pterodactyl bros?” Wendy asked. “And doesn’t that have a ‘P’?”

“It’s like blood brothers, but totally dinosaur-centric in every way. And the ‘P’ is silent.”

“Makes enough sense…”

The antennae mane of the lion-bot extended up and outward now, fanning out like a radar dish. It turned its head side to side, scanning. Then the antennae retracted, and it turned around to look directly at McGucket’s decoy.

“This guy is too big to trap in the net…” Dipper groaned.

“Yeah…” Wendy ran her fingers through her hair. “She’s gonna set off the trap anyway, but then just escape, and then… Then what do we do? How are we gonna find her again? How are we gonna track her back to where she’s from??”

Dipper racked his brain. Finally something occurred to him. “Wendy! Give me the magnet gun!”

As she handed it down, he pulled out his swiss-army knife. He unscrewed the side of the gun, reached into its mechanisms, and removed one of its neodymium magnetic armatures.

“What’s that?” Wendy asked.

“This.” Dipper answered. “Is a rare-earth magnet. One of the strongest on Earth. You got some tape?”

“No.”

“DANG IT… Uh… I’ll just use my sock.”

He took off his right shoe and sock, squeezed the magnet into the sock, then squeezed another one of McGucket’s decoys in on top of it. Then he tied the mouth of the sock closed, and was left with a finished product.

“Ah.” Wendy nodded. “I get it.”

Dipper smiled as he put his shoe back on. “Poor man’s GPS tracker.” He said proudly. Then he turned it on, and held the package out at arm’s length over the net. “Now come on, girl. Just a little closer…”

The lion-bot wandered over toward the decoy at the bottom of the tree, and began to circle around it curiously. Its antennae extended again, as if to make sure that this was, indeed, the source of the signal. When it decided it was, it angrily stepped on the decoy, destroying it instantly. The robot began to look around and turn in a circle. And at a single moment, it was directly beneath them.

Dipper dropped the package.

It fell silently and unceremoniously straight down for 30 feet, and finally connected with the lion-bot directly in the small of its back. With a loud ‘CLUNK’ it stuck and attached, and the magnet kept it secure.

“YES!” Dipper cried.

“DUDE!” Wendy congratulated him.

The robot seemed to panic at the impact, and stumbled around just enough to set off the trap.

The net jerked up around its front left leg, and tangled in place. The robot thrashed for a minute, backing away. Then it noticed the rope holding the net in place. Its head opened up and its mouth extended.

Dipper and Wendy stopped smiling, for the hooks in its mouth were the size of steak knives. As for the saws, they were easily as big around as dinner plates, and there were about 5 of them.

The lion-bot clipped the net with the saw, and it fell away. The robot stepped free. Then, forgetting both the net and the tracker on its back, it turned its eerie red gaze up toward Dipper and Wendy.

“Welp.” Wendy said. “It occurs to me that it can chop down trees.”

“You know what?” Dipper said. “Today was fun.”

The robot retracted its saws, and swatted at the trunk of their tree with one paw. The tree shook heavily, and Dipper grabbed a nearby branch to steady his balance.

“Plan.” Wendy said.

The robot turned the top of its head forward, and rammed the tree with the entire weight of its body. The tree shook so violently that Dipper had to grab the branch to keep from falling off, and it almost didn’t work.

“Plan.” Wendy repeated.

“What do we have?” Dipper asked. “Do we have, like, weapons?”

“Between the two of us.” Wendy recited. “We have two axes, three knives, four decoys, two walkie-talkies and a magnet gun that’s missing an armature.”

“Actually.” Dipper pulled another magnet gun out of his backpack. “I brought one too. You just had yours handy… Uh… Take mine.”

“I was gonna say…”

The tree shook again as the robot spun its saws up to speed and began to cut away at the base of the trunk. It was cutting FAST.

“PLAN.” Wendy repeated once more.

“Okay…” Dipper racked his brain, and finally got an idea. When it came, he began speaking fast. “…Okay, Check this thing out. It’s got no ears, and no nose. Just its eyes, and those antennae. So I’m guessing it usually tracks prey by sight and electromagnetic junk. Us meatbags got none of that junk, so if we’re out of sight, then it’s lost us.”

“Climb down the tree then.” Wendy said. “Climb down to just out of reach. When the tree topples, we hit the ground running, and get hidden as fast as possible.”

“Yeah.” Dipper began his descent. It was counterintuitive, climbing down TOWARD the hostile thing. But he understood the sense in it. The higher up they were, the faster they would hit the ground.

“Worse comes to worse.” Wendy added. “This gun’s ‘pulse’ setting fried my old phone from 20 paces. It could be deadly to this girl.”

“Yeah.” Dipper nodded, while silently praying that they wouldn’t have to kill it. It was just looking for its child. It had been deceived, and ensnared, and taunted from above. Now it was just as angry as anyone would be. It didn’t deserve to die.

Wendy seemed to read his thoughts. “I don’t want to do it either, man. Which is why I haven’t done it yet. But it’s just an animal. Like we talked about; us or them! Now get ready!”

The pile of sawdust beneath the lion-bot’s apparatus was growing, and the tree was swaying more and more. Now there was a cracking noise, and the tree was going down.

“JUMP!” Wendy called, and they did.

Dipper heard the tree crash to a stop behind him, and he hit the ground running, aiming for the nearest, thickest tree. He ducked down behind it, and took a deep breath. These trees were very old, very thick, and large. Room enough for a teenage boy to hide behind most any of them. A few seconds later, Dipper hazarded a look back at the scene of the fallen tree.

The robot turned in a circle about thirty feet away, looking for a sign of them. It had its antennae out, so Dipper supposed his guess must have been correct: it used electrical signals to find its prey, and they had stumped it, just by virtue of being human.

Wendy was nowhere to be seen. Good.

In a moment when the robot was turned away, Dipper sprinted off toward a different, further tree. So it continued. Eventually he was able to put some distance between himself and it, and could just barely pick out its movement through the trees.

It moved around, this way and that. Sometimes nearer, sometimes further. As if it believed they were still near, and didn’t understand where they could have gone.

At long last, it turned, retracted its saws, and retreated down the far side of the ridge. It moved down the embankment with agility and speed, almost identical to that of a real lion.

When all had been silent for 5 minutes, Dipper again decided to breathe easy, and stepped out from behind the tree.

He met back up with Wendy near where they had split.

“Good plan.” She told him. “I noticed the no-ears-no-nose thing, but I guess I never put it together that it actually COULDN’T hear or smell.”

“Yeah, thanks!” He ran his fingers aggressively through his hair, just to dispel the pent-up adrenaline. “WOW, that was intense!”

“Yeah dude! Totally crazy. Did you get pictures of it?”

“Heck yeah, but not after the action started. Did you get footage?”

“I dropped my phone somewhere… Ah ha! Here it is! And the camera is still running! That means it got all of it!”

“AWESOME!”

Dipper pulled out the radio tracker, and tuned it back to Juan’s frequency.

The needle pointed decisively down the ridge, in the direction that the mother had disappeared. “Hey, I’m tracking her!” Dipper said. “The magnet kept the decoy still attached to her!”

“Dude!” Wendy said. “That means mission success! Woot woot!”

“Mission epic success!”

“Dude!” She said again. “We survived a robot lion attack today! Gimme some!” She held up her hand.

Dipper high-fived her. “Yeah!”

“That’s going on my resume!” She added.

Dipper smiled, quite unsure how to take that, but mainly just alarmed and amused that something like THAT would go on a resume. “Uh…” He frowned, and laughed uncertainly. “Seriously? Could I see this resume at some point?”

“Uh… Sure. I guess. I’m still working on it though, so spelling and whatever isn’t… Swanky.”

“I could check over that if you want.”

“That’d be nice.”

Dipper realized he had more important business at the moment, while they were still up on this ridge with this great view. He pulled out a map, a marker, a compass, and the radio tracker, and laid them out on the forest floor. And he began to record the lion-bot’s progress.

He sat there, writing down numbers and angles from the tracker’s needle, for about 5 minutes. At the end, he drew out the results on the map. Based on all this, the robot seemed to be heading in a generally south direction, away from town, away from the valley. Over toward a small cluster of hills in the far distance.

After this, he folded the map back up, put the tools away, and hefted his backpack.

“Okay.” He announced.

“Okay.” Wendy nodded.

Dipper pointed toward the cluster of hills. “There’s our new target.”

“Hmm.” Wendy squinted up at the sun. “Might want to hold till tomorrow. If we turn back now, it’ll be almost dusk by the time we make it back to the shack. And I still have to bike home from there.”

“Okay.” Dipper nodded. “Man. Yeah. We’ll call it a day then. I’m pretty whooped anyway.”

“Me too. I think a branch caught me as I jumped off the tree. Gonna have a nasty bruise in the morning.”

“Ah. And I… Well. Now I don’t have my sock. I’ll probably have a blister or something by the time we make it back.”

“Awwwww, poow baby…”

They turned away from the view and their new target, and started back down the slope toward town.

After a few minutes of climbing, Dipper spoke up. “What you making a resume for?” He asked. “You looking for work? Or… Like, where you hoping to work?”

“Uh… Oh… You know…” She shrugged. “Work. I don’t exactly have a job yet this Summer. I worked weekends over the school year for a fast-food place, but… I don’t know. Now they don’t need me full-time. I want something a little better for the Summer, right? But I don’t really… Know what to do. I think a resume might open up some… Stuff. Right?”

“Yeah, but what job were you hoping for?” He clarified. “Like if you wanted to give a rocking resume to one person, who would it be?”

“Uh…” She turned her attention back to the hike for a moment, and descended the slope by a few tricky steps. “I’ve been thinking, and I think maybe it would be nice to be a cop. What do you think?”

“A cop??” Dipper blinked, a question suddenly burning in his mind. “Have, uh… You HAVE met the cops around here…”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, I’m sure you would fit right in.” Dipper grinned sarcastically.

“But that’s just it, isn’t it?” She asked. “These idiots, these BUFFOONS, need all the help they can get. Maybe if they let me… Shuffle paperwork. Or be secretary. Or ride along on patrols, I could actually help them be a little better at their job. Then people would actually be SAFE… Instead of… You know… Now people have to put caps back on the fire hydrants the cops turn into sprinklers, and everybody has to worry about not being zapped for mentioning our mutual friend…”

“So… You take the fall. You have to work with... Those guys. And you have to do a job with tons of boring paperwork… And you work extra hard to pick up the slack… All just to make people safer.”

“It’s not a great plan.” Wendy mumbled. “And… It probably doesn’t have much of a future. And I’d probably hate it, and I don’t really want to do it, but… If I could get that job, it might… Be best? I don’t know.”

“Wendy.” Dipper said. “I’m not positive, but I think that makes you a hero.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “Uh. Yeah… Yeah. I know.”