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minijenn · 7 years ago

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Universe Falls Chapter 47

Yeeeee you guys all seemed pretty excited about this one and I’m really glad to have it finally finished for you guys to read seeing as how I’m super excited about it too! It has a lot of interesting parts in it, so I can’t wait to see what you all think of it! Enjoy!

Previous: http://minijenn.tumblr.com/post/169117963199/universe-falls-chapter-46

Chapter 47: Society of the Blind Eye

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Seeing as how Greasy’s Diner was one of the few general eateries in Gravity Falls, it often stayed open rather late into the night to accommodate the offhand insomniac customer. Even so, it did close eventually every night, and every night Lazy Susan dutifully closed the diner up before heading home. It was business as usual as she cheerfully swept the floors, emptied the register tills, beat the possums out of the dishwasher, and chased Old Man McGucket out from under one of the tables. With all of these average tasks completed, the waitress locked the restaurant for the night, blithely bidding it farewell as she began to head home to tend to her multitude of cats.

“Good night, diner!” she exclaimed brightly before doing the same to the surrounding woods. “Good night, trees!” Her string of warm goodbyes continued even as she passed by the group of gnomes, stacked upon each other’s shoulders, trying to reach a still-warm pie sitting on the diner’s windowsill. “Good night, tiny men stealing my pie.” Lazy Susan stopped dead in her tracks immediately after saying this, a shocked gasp escaping her as she spun around to face the thieving gnomes again. “Wait, what?!”

“Lift with your knees,” Jeff commanded his tower of tiny accomplices, unaware that the waitress had caught them. “No, your knees! If I go one more hour without eating, I’m gonna resort to cannibalism.” The gnome leader paused, briefly, noticing the still quite stunned Lazy Susan standing nearby before he casually tipped his pointy hat to her. “Ma’am.”

Needless to say that upon seeing such an alarmingly bizarre sight as actual, living gnomes of all things, Lazy Susan’s first reaction was to let out a panicked shriek of fear. The gnomes themselves hardly reacted to the waitresses’ terror as she hurriedly backed away, trying to make sense of the impossibility standing right in front of her. “M-magic little men! What does it mean?! What do I do?!” At that moment, she fortunately managed to bump into the payphone near the diner, and she didn’t hesitate to scramble to dial 911 amidst her palpable distress. “Yes, hi, I’d like to report something” she began frantically as the dispatcher answered on the other end. “I’m at Greasy’s Diner. You won’t believe what I’ve witnessed! It’s unbelievable! Its indescribable! It’s-”

Lazy Susan was abruptly cut off as two sets of hands suddenly grabbed her from behind. She barely even had time to let out another fearful scream before the pair of robed figures covered both her mouth and her eyes as they began to forcibly drag here away. Their leader nodded in approval as they passed by him, before he followed after them himself, leaving only a graffiti insignia of a single eye crossed out on the wall behind him. “It is unseen…” he proclaimed darkly as him, his cronies, and their unwitting target disappeared into the darkness of the night.

“…Welp, back to pie!” Jeff concluded in the aftermath of what him and his fellow gnomes had witnessed. Still, they hardly cared about its ominous implications as they made off with their prize, all of them more than eager to devour it whole. “I was this close to eating you, Carl.”

With the laptop busted seemingly beyond repair and the bunker devoid of any further tangible clues, Dipper had found that he was largely back to square one when it came to his search for answers about the author of the journals. Still, despite the roadblocks he had faced, personal and otherwise, over the past several weeks, he still saw that search as a necessary one, for both the sake of uncovering the mysteries of Gravity Falls, as well as potentially rescuing Lapis from her aquatic imprisonment. A goal that, regardless of the pain he had been put through in his reckless attempt to achieve, he was still striving towards as intently as ever.

Of course, seeing as how his last venture in this search had ended in such momentous disaster, Dipper had wisely decided against going it alone this time, which was why he had ask Steven and Connie to help him sort through all of the clues and leads he had gathered thus far. The trio congregated in the attic, Connie already scribbling away on a notepad as Dipper carefully examined the detailed photo board he had put together concerning the author’s unknown identity. “Alright, author,” he muttered to himself, stepping away from the board as he absently chewed on the end of a pen. “Who are you? Who are you…?” Dipper’s concentration was abruptly broken as the pen he was gnawing n suddenly snapped, resulting in a messy spray of ink all over his face. “Ugh! Not again,” he groaned in disgust, tossing the ruined pen into a bin of other pens that had met the same fate.

“Uh… Dipper? How about instead of snacking on pens, you snack on one of these?” Steven offered with a smile, holding out a plate of cookies he had brought up from downstairs. “They’re a lot sweeter, and way less inkier! That’s a guarantee.”

Dipper let out a somewhat exasperated sigh as he cleaned the ink off his face and took one of the cookies before turning back to his collection of clues. Steven couldn’t help but smile a bit as he handed the cookie plate off to Connie, a wave of contentment washing over him as he thought about how normal this all felt. With Dipper thoughtfully mulling over the mystery of the author, Connie working through her own theories on paper, and Mabel having promised to bring more snacks up in a few minutes, the young Gem was more than happy to see them all working together again. In a way, it was almost as if the sword training debacle, their struggle against Bill, and even the hand ship invasion had never even happened. Like nothing had changed at all. And after all of the upheaval of the past several weeks alone, that was something that Steven was more than happy to hold onto.

“You know, you guys,” Steven began with a warm smile, wanting to spread this happiness to Dipper and Connie as well. “This is… really nice. These last few weeks have been pretty rough, what with those Gem mutants in the Kindergarten, and the invasion, and that whole thing with Bill-”

“Um… Steven?” Connie spoke up in a small whisper, her expression filled with sudden concern as she looked over at Dipper. Upon the mention of the dream demon, he merely glanced down disdainfully, clearly not wanting to be reminded of such a sore subject, though Steven didn’t initially notice this as he continued blissfully.

“I guess I’m just glad that we’ve been able to move past all that,” the young Gem remarked, still smiling, though it quickly fell as he looked over at Dipper. “…R-right?”

“Oh, yeah, sure, we’ve ‘moved past it’,” Dipper remarked, feigning dismissiveness and complacency, though his tone was still somewhat bitter as he muttered his next statement. “Of course, we wouldn’t have had anything to move past if none of it had ever happened in the first place…”

Steven’s upbeat manner diminished completely upon hearing this as he instead instantly regretted even bringing any of it up at all. In all honesty, he should have figured that, even weeks later, the entire possession incident would still be quite a sore subject for Dipper, even despite his apparent progress in recovering from the wounds it had left behind both physically and emotionally. As much as it worried the young Gem to think so, those were wounds that ran so deep that they might not ever completely disappear, no matter how much time and healing passed. And despite his sincere sympathy, regret, and devout desire to help Dipper, to help all of them really, move beyond the pains of the not too distant past, Steven had no idea where to even really start with such an immense endeavor.

All the same, the newly solemn atmosphere was soon broken through as Mabel blithely barged into the attic, message in a bottle in hand as she hurried over to greet the others. “Hey, guys! Guess what I got!”

“Um… a dirty green bottle?” Connie ventured with a small, joking smile.

“It’s a bottle message from Mermando, remember?” Mabel explained, still smiling fondly at the thought of her former infatuation. “He was part fish, part shirtless guy, and by far one of the hunkiest, least creepy guy I’ve crushed on this summer! What if he wants to get back together?!”

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Mabel…” Dipper said rationally. “I mean, the guy does live in the ocean and the chances of you two actually, you know, being together seem kind of-”

“Too late! Hopes are way up!” Mabel interupted as she rushed to get the letter out of the bottle and read it aloud. “‘Dear Mabel,’ So far so good! ‘It is with a heavy heart-’ So far so good! ‘-that I must inform you I’m getting married?!”

“And… there it is,” Dipper remarked with an already sympathetic frown upon noticing how suddenly distraught his sister was by this news.

“‘In order to prevent an undersea war… arranged marriage… queen of the manatees’?!” Mabel frantically read, growing more distressed and heartbroken with each word. “And she’s so beautiful!” she wailed upon looking at the picture Mermando had enclosed of him and his new, rather unsightly bride. “This can’t be happening…”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mabel,” Connie said comfortingly. “We all know how much you liked Mermando.”

“But look on the bright side,” Dipper attempted to encourage. “You’ll get over him eventually.”

“That’s not the point,” Mabel huffed as she pulled out her summer scrapbook. “On my first day here, I made this page for summer romances because I thought I was going to have so many sweeping relationships! But look at my luck so far: turned out to be gnomes,” she pointed to a picture of ‘Norman’, who had indeed ended up being a stack of lovestruck gnomes. “Child psycho…” she continued with apt disgust as she nodded at Gideon’s picture. “Made out with his own hands,” she went on, pointing at a picture of Gabe and his puppets. “And now with Mermando out…” Mabel sighed as she scribbled the word “failed” above the page’s title of “summer romances”, a claim that rang true, as every single one of her relationship attempts had ended in nothing but heartbreak thus far. “I wish I could just forget about them all forever…”

“Aw, don’t count yourself out yet, Mabel!” Steven encouraged as he placed a hand on her shoulder. “The summer’s not over yet! There’s still plenty of chances for you to find that special someone. In fact, I bet it’ll probably happen when you’re least expecting it!”

Mabel looked over at the young Gem at this, her cheeks filling in with an almost invisible blush as she met his warm, sincere smile. A smile that she almost returned, until she took a second look and saw Connie sitting right next to Steven, and rather closely at this. Much closer than she was to him, in more ways than one. “Y-yeah…” she muttered, looking away dejectedly. “When I’m least expecting it…”

“Hey, if its any consolation, my summer mission hasn’t been a huge success either,” Dipper said, turning back to his photo board full of dead ends and incomplete hints. “We’re still no closer to finding out who the author of the journals is. And honestly, at this rate, it feels like we’ve barely made any progress at all!”

“Well, we do have some clues…” Connie interjected, glancing back at her notes. “Like the fact that he probably has six fingers and that he supposedly disappeared over thirty years ago. But other than that… yeah… we really don’t have a whole lot to go off of.”

“Well, we would if the laptop wasn’t smashed…” Dipper added, hesitantly glancing over at the brutalized laptop sitting on the desk nearby. Despite its current uselessness, he still decided to hold onto it, much like how he had held onto the torn scraps of the pictures of himself and Lapis. After all, even aside from sentimental value, he never knew when either of those things might become useful again. “But without it, we’ve lost just about any lead we might have had for finding him…”

“Wait a minute…” Mabel mused as she took a casual look through the bottle Mermando’s message had come in at the laptop, noticing something that none of them had before. “Dipper, look at this!”

“Through your bottle?” Dipper asked dubiously.

“Just do it,” Mabel rolled her eyes as she handed the bottle over to him.

While still skeptical, Dipper did as she said, peering through the end of the bottle as it effectively magnified some of the laptop’s smaller features. Most notable of those being a small metal plate screwed to the undercarriage of the machine, engraved with the name of its inventor. “‘McGucket Labs’. As in… Old Man McGucket?!”

“Isn’t he that crazy old hillbilly that lives in the junkyard downtown?” Connie asked, just as confused as Dipper was. “He built that laptop?”

“Well, he did build that Gobblewonker robot,” Steven pointed out. “And it actually worked pretty well. Until Opal shot it in the face with one of her magic arrows.”

“But wait,” Mabel interjected with a dawning realization. “If the laptop was McGucket’s then… you guys don’t think…?”

“No, he couldn’t be,” Dipper quickly refuted, though as he took another look back at his compiled clues, his tune gradually started to change. “It wouldn’t make any sense. Unless….” He trailed off as he began making connections that had previously seemed completely arbitrary, such as the laptop’s label reading “property of F” and McGucket’s first name: Fiddleford. Connie got up to join in on this, correlating the six fingers on the cover of the journal to the fact that McGucket’s right hand was continually bandaged up, almost as if one of his fingers had somehow been chopped off. Mabel and Steven also ended up collaborating, adding ties between clues and facts until nearly everything seemed to point towards one person and one person alone: Fiddleford McGucket.

“No way…” Dipper muttered, completely awestruck by what had never, ever seemed anywhere remotely possible until now. “So that means… Old Man McGucket wrote the journals?!”

“You know, I gotta admit that out of anyone, he was probably the last person I would have suspected…” Mabel remarked, rather taken aback herself.

“Same here,” Connie agreed, checking over the clues again to see if they checked it, which, against all logic, they somehow did.

“Oh my gosh, you guys, just wait until we tell the Gems!” Steven exclaimed with an excited smile. “They’ll totally freak out when they hear we’ve found out who the author is! Heck, maybe it’ll even jog their memory and they’ll remember helping him write the journals!”

“Then that’s who we’ll go ask first,” Dipper said with apt resolve to finally put this longtime mystery to rest. “Let’s go!”

“Am I blanchin? Girl, we blanchin. I live up in a mansion. Am I blanchin? Girl, we blanchin, I live up in a mansion.” Soos sang along to this rather repetitive rap tune playing on the radio as he swept up in the gift shop, not noticing Wendy’s growing annoyance with the song until she could no longer remain quiet about it.

“Ugh! Soos, can we please turn that stupid song off?!” she groaned, slamming a fist down on the counter. “I can’t get it out of my head!”

“Oh, you mean ‘Straight Blanchin’ by Lil’ Big Dawg?” Soos retorted with a smile. “It’s the catchiest song of the summer!”

“What even is ‘blanchin’?” Wendy asked with a harsh scowl. “Rappers can’t just make up words!”

“Rappers are visionaries, Wendy,” Soos countered. “If they told me to eat my own pants, I would do it.”

“Eat your own pants! Eat your own pants, yeah!” the song blared, and of course, the handyman readily followed along with it.

“Guess I have no choice,” Soos shrugged blithely as he began to unzipper his pants and chow down. However, before Wendy could talk him out of it, the kids rushed into the shop, all fueled by the adrenaline of their newfound lead.

“Soos, Wendy! We need to go see the Gems and Old Man McGucket!” Dipper hurriedly informed, effectually asking them to come along.

“We’ll explain on the way!” Mabel added, booking it after her brother towards the door.

“For now, let’s just say we discovered something huge!” Steven exclaimed, running backwards until he happened to trip. Fortunately, Connie caught him before he could fall, eliciting a small chuckle from both of them. “Thanks.”

“Anytime,” Connie nodded before beckoning Soos and Wendy again. “Come on, you guys!”

Not even needing to ask anymore questions, the pair was immediately on board with whatever unknown mission the kids had in mind, so they wasted no time in running out after them, past a very confused Stan.

“Hey, what about work? Kids!” the conman shouted after his employees, though he paused in disturbed bewilderment upon turning to catch the fleeting sight of them. “Why is Soos eating his own pants?”

The Gems’ peaceful afternoon of putting together new stools for the kitchen’s island was abruptly interupted as the kids burst into the house, all of them more than excited to unveil their latest development. “You guys! You guys!” Steven shouted, stars in his eyes as he ran over to his guardians, the others not too far behind. “The most amazing thing just happened, you’ll never believe it!”

“Now, Steven, what did we talk about overexaggerating things?” Pearl chastised gently.

“But he’s not overexaggerating!” Connie protested.

“No, he’s not,” Mabel agreed readily. “Cause we just found out who the author of the journal is!”

“What?!” Pearl and Amethyst exclaimed in shocked unison, while immense, silent surprise crossed over Garnet’s expression as well.

“Well, what are you waiting for?!” the purple Gem asked, just as eager as her teammates to get these long awaited answers. “Spill it! Who is he?!”

“Yes, by all means, tell us!” Pearl nodded vigorously. “It’s about time we find out who this mysterious, seemingly all-knowing “author” is!”

“Go ahead,” Garnet advised more calmly, nodding to the kids to make the anticipated reveal.

“Ok, so this might be a little far-fetched,” Dipper began somewhat tentatively, hoping that the Gems would hear him out on this. “But based on every clue we’ve gathered thus far, we have reason to believe that the author of the journals is none other than… Old Man McGucket!”

Upon hearing this, the Gems’ shared interest immediately fizzled out into confusion and doubt, which were things they had no qualms about sharing with the kids. “Huh, looks like Steven was right,” Amethyst remarked, crossing her arms caustically. “I really don’t believe it.”

“Oh, I get it!” Pearl exclaimed with an amused chuckle. “It’s a joke! There’s no way someone as outlandish and scatterbrained as that wild hillbilly could have written something as collected and articulated as the journals! Very funny, kids. You almost had us going there for a second!”

“Uh, actually, Pearl, they’re not joking,” Wendy clarified as Soos nodded his support. “Even if it does seem pretty out there.”

“And you have proof that McGucket wrote it,” Garnet assumed as she looked to the kids again.

“Y-yeah, we do!” Dipper assured, pulling out the broken laptop. “His name is on the laptop we found in the bunker and everything! And he easily would have been around over 30 years ago to write it.”

“Is the thought of you guys maybe working with him ringing any bells?” Connie asked curiously. “At all?”

“Uh, not really,” Amethyst shook her head.

“Mostly because it’s a rather absurd notion…” Pearl muttered dubiously.

“But is a notion we can’t dismiss, at least not yet,” Garnet interjected, placing steady hands on both of her teammates’ shoulders. “The only way to for sure is to go talk to McGucket ourselves.”

“And if he really is the author, then maybe you guys will remember working together and you can all be friends again,” Steven said with a small smile. Of course, the Gems merely exchanged an uncertain glance at this, none of them really wanting to dash their encouraging young ward’s hopes. But even if McGucket was indeed the author, none of the three of them had any intentions of rekindling whatever “friendship” they might have had with him way back when, for reasons that had little to do with the hillbilly personally and everything to do with the nature of the journal itself. So much of its contents concerned them, and they didn’t seem to have the faintest idea about how all of that comprehensive information was either gathered. Really, what the Gems wanted most now were answers; answers about the past that could hopefully, finally lead to certainty in the future.

Without any further ado, the kids, Soos, Wendy, and the Gems all headed down to the junkyard, knowing that they were McGucket’s favored stomping grounds. Oddly enough, there were no apparent signs of the hillbilly as they arrived, but the Gems in particular were rather tense and alert, all three of them aware that this meeting could change everything. Either that, or it would be nothing more than a rather bizarre waste of time.

“Old Man McGucket, are you here?!” Dipper called, glancing around the mountainous piles of trash for the supposed author.

“Here, hillbilly-billy-billy!” Soos exclaimed louder, as they drew closer to McGucket’s shack in the middle of the dump.

“I still can’t believe we’re following through on this…” Pearl murmured, clinging close to Garnet as she narrowly avoided stepping on any stray bits of garbage.

“Me neither,” Amethyst said as she munched on a stray shoe she had found. “How could that crazy old McGucket guy and author dude be the same person? Pretty sure that guy doesn’t even know what a book even is, much less how to write one.”

“Like I’ve said before,” Garnet spoke up, her tone firm to balance out her teammates’ doubt. “Before now, we didn’t even have any guesses about who the author could be. Even if this new lead seems unlikely, it’s the only one we have. And that alone makes it worth pursuing.”

While Amethyst and Pearl were still rather hesitant to buy into the possibility of McGucket being the author, they heeded their leaders’ advice and held their peace on the matter. At least for now.

As the group finally arrived to McGucket’s ramshackle shack in the center of the junkyard, they found that it was in the middle of being vandalized, as Nate and Lee graffitied the words “McSuckit” onto its side. “Ha! This is hilarious,” Nate chuckled as they finished up their prank.

“Took an hour to think of this, but it was worth it!” Lee laughingly agreed, though the levity was cut short as McGucket suddenly emerged from his hut, having overheard the noise, prompting the teens to flee from the scene.

“Get outta here, ya salt-lickin, hornswaggling…” the hillbilly trailed off, his anger dissipating into dejection as he turned back to the insult painted onto the side of his dilapidated home. “‘McSuckit’… They got me good…” McGucket was quick to perk up, however, upon noticing the group of kids and Gems standing nearby. “Visitors! Come, come!” he exclaimed brightly, leading the way into his shack. Its interior was expectantly a disaster, with trash and spare broken down mechanical parts strewn all over as the hillbilly’s racoon wife scurried about freely. Even so, McGucket hardly seemed to pay this any mind as he instead cheerfully entertained his rare guests. “Pull up some rusty metal! You’re just in time for my hourly turf war with the hillbilly that lives in my mirror. Quit starin’ at me when I bathe!” he shouted at his reflection in the nearby metal bathtub.

“Somehow I find it hard to believe that he was the one whom Rose trusted with so many of her best kept secrets…” Pearl muttered to Garnet, the doubt and disdain in her tone clear.

“You can drop the act, McGucket!” Dipper exclaimed boldly as he pulled out the journal. “I know you’re the author. You studied the mysteries of this town and wrote this book!”

“Yeah, and you filled it with all kinds of personal junk about us,” Amethyst added, her hands on her hips. “Speaking of which, I don’t think you have a lot of room to write about my room bein’ a mess when your place is pretty much just as bad. Kudos to you on that though, I’d party in a mess like this.”

“Anyway, dude, you’re the genius Dipper’s been looking all summer for!” Wendy got back on track.

“Er, genius?” McGucket questioned with an uneasy frown that was quick to turn remorseful. “I’m no genius… I’ve never done nothin’ worthwhile in my life. Everyone knows I’m no good to nobody. I can’t remember what I used to be, but I must’ve been a big failure to end up like this.”

“Wait, so… you’re saying you lost your memories too?” Steven asked, glancing over at the Gems as he said it.

“That seems a bit too ironic…” Pearl remarked, looking to McGucket with newfound suspicion.

“I-I swear… I don’t know nothin’ about no book or mysteries or any o’ that there flimflam…” McGucket said, fretfully fiddling with his long beard. “Sorry to disappoint ya kids…”

“But… but your name is on the laptop!” Connie argued intently.

“Unless that’s supposed to be some other McGucket,” Soos shrugged. “But there’s probably about… only one dude in Gravity Falls with that name, maaaaybe two, tops.”

“Well, what about this book?” Dipper asked, presenting McGucket with the journal. After all, he wasn’t about to forget about his only possible lead on the author so easily, especially not when it felt like he was starting to get so close. “Are you sure you didn’t write it? Here, take a closer look.”

McGucket shook his head once more as Dipper started flipping through the journal’s pages, none of them apparently registering in his already sparse memory whatsoever. “I told you, I don’t recall. Everything before 1982 is just a blur. Just a dim, hazy-” The hillbilly abruptly cut himself off as the journal landed on a page featuring the dominating image of a single eye crossed evenly through its piercing pupil. McGucket let out a shriek of raw terror upon so much as catching a glimpse of it, and he fell to the ground hard, scrambling away from the journal as his manner grew frantic and erratic. “The Blind Eye! Robes—the men! My mind! T-they did something!”

“Wha—who did?” Dipper asked, just as taken aback as the others by this sudden outburst.

“I… I don’t recall…” McGucket admitted, his shoulders slumping in defeat.

“Oh, well isn’t that just incredibly convenient?!” Pearl exclaimed, a hint of accusatory hostility in her tone. “I mean, what are the odds that this elusive author we supposedly worked with years ago just so happens to be an amnesiac garbage-dweller who can’t even remember anything important at all? Ugh, I knew this would be a waste of time.”

“Pearl,” Garnet interjected, silently commanding the white Gem to calm down before she turned back to McGucket. “You mentioned something called the Blind Eye. What is that?”

“I… uh, I don’t… they… i-it was…” the hillbilly trailed off, placing a hand on his head as he seemed to lose himself to a longstanding yet unknown panic. “I don’t know!”

“Aw, you poor old man!” Mabel said with genuine sympathy. “No wonder your mind’s all loopy. You must have been through something really intense.”

“What if McGucket learned something he wasn’t supposed to know, and someone or something messed with his mind?” Dipper theorized. “If that’s the case, then we have to get to the bottom of this!”

“Well, I guess we gotta if we ever wanna figure all this journal junk out, huh?” Amethyst asked, glancing to her teammates.

“Yes,” Garnet nodded resolutely. “It’s not entirely clear, but I can see that looking into all this will lead us to answers of some kind, though its hard to say exactly what those answers might be right now.”

“And even if you aren’t the author, then at least maybe we’ll be able to help you get your memory back,” Steven said to McGucket with a supportive smile. “So no matter what, it’ll be a win-win!”

“Think, dude, what’s the earliest thing you can remember?” Wendy asked the hillbilly.

“Uh… this, I reckon,” McGucket took a newspaper clipping he had pinned to the wall down, one that pictured him lost and disoriented in front of a rather familiar building in town.

“That’s the history museum!” Connie exclaimed, pointing the building out.

“Then that’s where we’re going,” Dipper asserted, knowing that it would be the best place to start looking for clues that could very well finally led to the missing piece of this intricate puzzle they had all been searching for.

Eager to follow this newest lead, everyone rushed to pile into Soos’ truck and head over to the museum. However, as soon as the handyman turned the ignition, they were all instantly met with a song playing over the stereo that set Wendy off the moment she heard it.

“Are we blanchin’? Girl, we blanchin, I live up in a mansion.”

“Ugh, Soos!” the cashier groaned in frustration as she hurriedly ejected the aggravating CD and tossed it out the window. The others all looked to her in surprise at this, particularly Soos, which was why she was quick to make a terse, rather stilted apology. “I’ll buy you a new one.”

“Can you guys believe it?” Steven remarked to the other kids with a bright smile. “The four of us are finally back in action, solving mysteries and rewriting history again! Isn’t it great?”

“It will be great if we can jog McGucket’s memory and he actually turns out to be the author after all,” Dipper remarked rather dryly, his attention mostly focused to combing through the journal for any further clues.

“And hopefully we can do all that without running into that Blind Eye thing he mentioned, whatever that is,” Connie added just as seriously, already examining a map of the museum on her phone for anything out of place.

“Y-yeah, but… we can still have fun doing all that, can’t we?” Steven asked, suddenly apprehensive as he glanced back at the Gems, whose expression were all also rather somber and tight.

“Fun?” Dipper repeated with something of a scoff. “Steven, come on. This is serious, our biggest break towards finding the author yet. We have to focus on that first. Especially considering what happened the last time we let ourselves get distracted…”

“R-right…” Steven said, his smile finally falling completely as he let out a small sigh as he leaned his head against the window. Dipper and Connie didn’t notice this, and the young Gem didn’t blame them for it; after all, he knew exactly why they both had every intention of pushing themselves so hard with this important mystery. Still, that didn’t make him feel any better about one of the underlying reasons in particular about why that was.

Mabel, on the other hand, had taken notice of Steven’s sudden melancholy as she sat right next to him, and while it did worry her, another part of her saw it as an opportunity. One that, largely without thinking, she decided to try and take. “Uh… hey, Steven?” she spoke up, trying her best not to come across as flustered.

“Yeah?” the young Gem replied in an absent mutter.

“W-well… I was just wondering… if maybe you and me could, uh… if we could…” Mabel trailed off, her cheeks blushing brightly as she let out a small gasp of realization. “Oh my gosh, I think I finally know how Dipper felt about this whole confession thing…”

“What was that?” Steven asked, having not heard her last muttered statement.

“Oh! Uh, I was just…” Mabel finally gave up with a small sigh, deciding that now really wasn’t the time for this, especially as she spared a quick glance over at Connie sitting on the other side of her. “I was just, uh, thinking that you and me should take Dipper’s advice and be more, um… serious and focused about this author mystery, is all… Y-yeah, that’s… that’s totally what I was gonna say…”

“Oh… Ok, then…” Steven frowned, both confused and downcast as he went back to staring out the window, not noticing Mabel’s clear frustration with her own nervousness. Usually, she had no problem with this sort of thing, but this instance was entirely different than anything she had ever felt before. If she was perfectly honest with herself, these feelings in general were rather foreign to her, at least to the extent that she had been experiencing them for the past several weeks. Which was likely why she was having such a hard time admitting them to anyone really, but especially to the young Gem and in a sense, even to herself. After all, she had already failed at this so many times already; what would good would throwing her heart out on the line again do her, especially since she knew there was such a huge chance that it would be thrown right back?

The rest of the ride was rather silent until the group got to the museum, which was, for some reason, closed for the day, Fortunately, they were able to find easy enough access inside through an open window, and as soon as they all made it inside, Garnet held her teammates back for just a moment, to make sure that they were all clear about what exactly their mission was.

“Remember,” she cautioned, her voice quiet but firm. “Our main mission is to fill in the gaps between us and the author. We don’t know what we’ll find here, so we need to be ready for anything. And if we learn something that we don’t like… then we’ll just have to deal with it and move on from there.”

Amethyst and Pearl nodded in affirmation of this, both of them knowing just as much as Garnet did that today’s investigation could very well change everything they thought they knew. But all the same, they were quick to rejoin the others in starting their search for clues.

“Alright, everyone, keep your eyes peeled for anything suspicious,” Dipper advised as they all spread out throughout the main hall.

“So would this exhibit on these groady old caveman forks be considered suspicious?” Amethyst asked, casually infiltrating said exhibit without a care.

“Uh, that’s not really that suspicious, Amethyst,” Connie remarked, raising an eyebrow. “Its just… weird, I guess.”

“Yeah, I’ll say so,” the purple Gem agreed, grabbing one of the wooden utensils. “How the heck did humans used to eat with these lame things without getting mad splinters all up in their mouths? They should have just used their hands to chow down, like a civilized person or whatever.” With that, Amethyst downed the ancient fork with one gulp, much to the startled surprise of everyone watching. “Huh, kinda woody but other than that, it’s not too bad.”

As the investigation continued, Mabel found herself rather disinterested with it as she heaved a morose sigh, something that Wendy too notice of as she paused her search to check up on the younger girl. “Mabel, are you ok? You just walked past a cat without petting it,” she pointed to the nearby taxidermy mountain lion, which Mabel had barely even spared a second place at.

“Oh, Wendy, everything I look at reminds me of my failed romances…” Mabel pouted, nodding to several of the nearby exhibits. “That formaldehyde heart, that romantic diorama. Even this poster of my most recent crush,” she said, looking up to a poster advertising one of Gabe’s puppet shows before disdainfully pulling it down only to reveal an old poster for Sev’ral Timez underneath it. “Oh come on!”

“So, your last memory was here,” Dipper said to McGucket as the hillbilly meandered about. “Anything coming back?”

McGucket frowned as he looked around the museum, quite uncertain though it was clear he was making a genuine effort to try and remember something, as difficult of a task as that often was for him. “Er—well, I-”

“Guys, look!” Soos cut in, pointing down the museum hall. At the end of the corridor, obscured by shadows, was a vague human figure, one that was quick to further into the darkness upon being spotted.

“Whoa, who was that?” Steven asked with apt alarm.

“Everyone, after them!” Pearl commanded, already running on ahead. The others followed suit, chasing the shadowy figure down the hall, tracing their path all the way to a room lined with a myriad of images of eyes. Yet as they all piled into this room, the unknown figure was seemingly nowhere to be seen at all.

“Well kettle my corn! He vanish-ified!” McGucket exclaimed, aghast.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Dipper shook his head, confused. “Where did he go?”

“Hm…” Garnet mused, looking over the eyes covering the walls and remembering something the hillbilly had mentioned earlier. “The Blind Eye…”

“You don’t think this could be it, do ya, G?” Amethyst asked, slightly disappointed. “Just a room filled with a bunch of creepy old eyeballs?”

“This better not just be it!” Pearl remarked hotly. “That would make this whole thing even more of a wild goose chase than it already is! You!” she spun around to face McGucket. “We brought you all the way here, so I think its about time you start remembering something or else!”

“I-I… I’m tryin’,” the hillbilly said, clearly intimidated as he shrunk back a bit. “But its mighty difficult to recall just ‘bout anything when I feel like all these eyballs are a-watchin me…”

“Wait,” Dipper interjected, tracing path of nearly pupil in the room right back to McGucket. “They are! Move aside.”

The hillbilly did so, casting a nervous glance at the rather impatient Gems as he did to reveal a central stone tablet, one that carried a carving of yet another eye, yet much like the one in the journal, it was crossed cleanly through. The way it was set up, it almost looked like a switch, and as Dipper gave it an experimental push, that proved to be exactly what it was as the wall started to peel back to a short staircase that led into mysterious darkness down below.

“Whoa, a secret passageway!” Connie exclaimed, amazed. “This just took on a whole new level of cryptic! And that’s saying something, seeing as how it was already really cryptic to begin with.”

“What’s down there?” Pearl asked, looking to Garnet for answers, which was something the Gem leader didn’t really have as she instead simply shrugged point blank.

“We’ll have to be stealthy,” McGucket noted with newfound resolve. “I’ll hambone a message if there’s trouble.” He did so, slapping his arms and legs in a rhythmic message that was lost on everyone else.

“I… have no idea what that means,” Dipper admitted with a frown.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Amethyst asked daringly. “Let’s scope this sucker out!”

Seeing as how the group was unsure of what they’d find below the museum, they made sure to take care to keep quiet as they descended the staircase down below. As they reached the bottom, the sound of deep, unified chanting soon became apparent amidst the narrow, candle-lit corridors. They all remained on high alert as they followed this chanting, which only grew louder and more ominous with each passing second until they reached a thick scarlet curtain. And as they collectively peered out what lay beyond this curtain, they were met with by a sight that none of them had been expecting.

A large, wide open room laid before them, once again lit only by candles sconced on the walls. At the room’s center rested a reclined leather chair, one with restraining straps attached to the armrests and body. But by far the most sinister thing about this already alarming setup was the multitude gathered around this chair in an organized circle, all of them wearing crimson, floor-length robes with hoods that concealed their faces completely. And as they assembled for their unknown purposes, they continued their Latin chant, unsettling the hidden group watching them from behind the curtain. “Novus ordo seclorum. Novus ordo seclorum.”

This continued chant continued as the apparent leader of this gathering stepped forward, the familiar crossed-out eye symbol adorning his robe as he held his hands up to quiet his followers. “Who is the subject of our meeting?” he asked, his manner cold and authoritative.

“This woman,” another one of the robed men announced, escorting a familiar, albeit blindfolded figure into the room. Her identity only became clear, however, as he pulled the sack covering her head off, revealing a very confused, disoriented waitress underneath.

“Lazy Susan?” Mabel whispered, exchanging a bewildered glance with the other kids at this. After all, what could the usually kindly, albeit a bit dimwitted waitress have to do with this foreboding group of robed figures?

“What is it you have seen?” the leader asked Lazy Susan as she was sat down in the reclined chair.

“Speak!” the other members echoed, startling the already anxious waitress quite a bit.

“Uh, w-well, I was leaving the diner,” she began unsteadily. “And I saw these little bearded doodads. And I was like ‘bwaaa?!”

“There, there. You won’t be like ‘bwaaa?’ for much longer…” the leader said with faux sympathy as he opened up a wooden box one of his compatriots presented him with. He pulled a strange looking device out of it, one that was clearly some kind of gun or blaster, though it was rather archaic and bizarre in its design. A large lightbulb was fixed to its front, and on its side was a dial used to input letters, though overall its purpose was initially unclear. As the leader began to dial the words “little men” into the machine, the other members all pulled their hoods down, none of them bothering to even acknowledge Lazy Susan’s barrage of curious, nervous questions.

“What is that gizmo? It looks like a hair dryer. Are you guys barbers? I-” the waitress cut herself off with a sudden scream as the leader pulled the gun’s trigger, a burst of electricity zapping Susan squarely against her forehead. The blast held her paralyzed in its thrall until it finally died out, leaving her slack in the chair for a moment, her eyes blinking slowly and unevenly as she recovered from what looked like a very horrific experience.

“Lazy Susan, what do you know of little men?” the leader asked, hands held behind his back as he set the ray gun down.

“My mind is cleared, thanks to the Society of the Blind Eye,” Lazy Susan reported almost robotically, much to the satisfaction of said society members.

“It is unseen!” they all proclaimed in triumphant unison, their mind-erasing mission complete for now.

“Oh my gosh! They just wiped Lazy Susan’s memory!” Dipper exclaimed in a stunned whisper, just as shocked as all the others at such a disturbing sight.

“They should have wiped off that awful mascara,” Soos joked, trying to lighten the mood, though his attempt wasn’t well received by Mabel or Wendy.

“I think she looks beautiful!”

“She’s doing the best she can, Soos!”

“Whoa… touched a nerve there…” the handyman frowned, glancing away fretfully.

“So uh, I guess this whole mission just got a lot more serious, huh?” Amethyst asked, rather apprehensive in light of what they had just witnessed.

“I’d certainly say so…” Pearl muttered, somewhat shaken by the implications of all this as she gripped the edge of the curtain a bit tighter.

“Lazy Susan, how do you feel?” the society leader asked the waitress as a few other members helped her out of the chair.

“I feel great!” the waitress remarked brightly as she began to be led away. “I can’t even remember what was wrong, or what I’m doing here, or if I’m a man or a woman!”

“Your memories will be safe with us,” the leader said solemnly as he removed the glass tube from the ray gun, labeling it with Lazy Susan’s name. “Buried in the Hall of the Forgotten.”

“Into the Hall of the Forgotten! Into the Hall of the Forgotten!” the other members chanted as the leader sent the cylinder off through a vacuum tube, one that carried it up to the ceiling and out of the room.

“Good chanting, boys!” the leader exclaimed proudly. “Have you been practicing? Either way, meeting adjourned.”

“Unsee you later,” the society members bid each other farewell as they began to disperse.

“Unsee you later!”

The group behind the curtain waited a moment or two to make sure all of the society members had left, and upon Garnet’s cue that the coast was clear, they all emerged to investigate things further. “Amazing. A secret society of evil mind erasers!” Dipper remarked, both amazed and unnerved. “I’ll bet they erased your memory a long time ago, McGucket. And maybe even all of your memories about the author too!” he theorized, turning to the Gems.

“But… but that’s impossible!” Pearl exclaimed, looking to the nearby memory gun anxiously. “If we ever had a run into this so-called ‘Society of the Blind Eye’ in the past, then certainly we would have remembered it!”

“No, we wouldn’t have,” Garnet clarified. “Not if they used that gun on us.”

“So, uh… what are we supposed to do now then?” Amethyst asked.

“Well, if we can find where you and McGucket’s memories are hidden, it could be the key to unlocking all the mysteries of Gravity Falls! And then some…” Dipper mused, ever mindful of his own personal reasons for wanting to find these long awaited answers. “Alright. Mabel, Wendy, Connie, you three stay here and make sure those robe guys don’t come back.”

“Whoo! Girls club!” Wendy cheered, exchanging fists bumps with both Mabel and Connie.

“Steven, Soos, McGucket, we’re gonna go find that Hall of the Forgotten,” Dipper continued with apt resolve.

“Meanwhile, we’ll try to track down some of those society members,” Garnet said readily, her hand clenched into a tight fists. “And if they won’t give us answers willingly, then we’ll make them.”

“Yeah, now you’re talkin’!” Amethyst exclaimed rowdily, already summoning her whip. “Time to beat up a bunch of creepy, robe-wearing nerds!”

“W-we’re not actually going to utilize any physical violence against them!” Pearl assured as her and the other two Gems began to head off. “Unless, of course, they refuse to deny us access to memories that are rightfully ours, in which case we might consider it…”

“Well, dudes, I guess we should-” Soos was cut off as his hat was suddenly sucked into one of the nearby vacuum tubes, sending it off to where all of the memories the society collected were supposedly sent.

“Quick! After that hat!” Dipper exclaimed, already running after it as McGucket and Soos followed quickly after.

Steven started to join them, though he did stop short briefly upon taking another glance at the memory gun sitting on the table behind him. The example of its use they had all witnessed had been frightening to say the least, but there was no deny that gun was effective at clearing away any and all memories of harrowing experiences. And while the idea was just a small, fledgling thought inside the young Gem’s mind, he couldn’t help but wonder if it could be used to erase other kinds of memories as well, including those of pain, remorse, fear, and sorrow. If it could destroy all thoughts of past regrets, from a perilous invasion that ended in heartbreak or an ill-fated puppet show marred by wrongly-spilled blood. If it could do more than heal the long-lasting scars of the past, but instead make it as so they had never happened in the first place.

All the same, Steven’s initial musings on the matter were cut short as he was abruptly thrown right back into the moment thanks to Connie. “Uh, Steven? Aren’t you going with them?” she asked, noticing the young Gems rather awestruck expression as he stared at the gun.

“Huh? O-oh… oh yeah,” he blinked, shaking his head clear of such thoughts for now as he hurried after Dipper, Soos, and McGucket, but not before calling back to the girls. “Good luck, you guys!”

“R-right back at ya!” Mabel called back with a smile that was just a bit too wide, though thankfully neither Wendy nor Connie seemed to notice.

The Gems remained swift and silent as they made their way through the society headquarters’ labyrinthine halls, all three of them ready to summon their weapons at a moment’s notice if need be. Needless to say they were all rather tense, and they had every reason to be; after all, it truly did seem as though the Society of the Blind Eye could possibly be behind their string of missing memories concerning the author. And yet, despite how close they apparently were to getting answers, they couldn’t help but be mutually anxious about it all the same. None of them really knew what they would learn if they truly did recover their supposedly lost memories, but if anything was clear, it was this: reconnecting the faded pieces of their past would either answer all their questions, or create countless more.

“Gems,” Garnet stopped suddenly as they began to pass by a closed door, one that was more than enough to peak some interest.

“It’s locked,” Pearl reported, trying to wedge it open to no avail. “I suppose we’ll just have to-”

The white Gem was cut off as Garnet’s gauntlet crashed into the door, breaking it apart easily. “Well, I guess that’s one way to get in,” Amethyst chuckled, hopping inside the rather small storage room. At first glance, it didn’t seem like there was anything of note to be found save for several boxes filled with spare society robes. However, as preceptive as always, Garnet approached the far end of the room, which was largely concealed in darkness until Pearl followed suit, her gemstone casting light upon something that made all three Gems gasp in shock.

The entire wall seemed to host a wide array of old documents and newspaper clippings, some tracing back as far as almost thirty years ago. Regardless of their age though, almost all of these clips contained common themes: reports and coverage of Gem monster attacks, of the Crystal Gems themselves fighting off such attacks, of the town suffering mass damage from those attacks. The Gems themselves recognized every single one of the instances hanging before them, though they were still quite surprised by them all, especially seeing as how they weren’t the only things there. A myriad of notes was also tacked to the wall, filled with all manner of disparaging accusations and insults towards the Crystal Gems themselves: “Crystal Menaces!”, “Gravity Falls isn’t safe with them around!”, “Disaster Magnets!”, “Are they even of this Earth?!”, “Alien Invaders?!”, “Some ‘protectors’ they are!”, “They must be witches!”, “They’ll bring destruction upon us all!” and so on and so forth, seemingly without end. All of these notes had been arranged in such a way that they formed the society’s ionic eye symbol, its center being a picture of the Crystal Gems, one that included Rose Quartz herself that had been crossed through in dark red ink. A perfectly obvious testament to what the Society of the Blind Eye clearly thought of the Crystal Gems.

“W-wha… what is all this?” Pearl asked in a shocked whisper, taking a small step back as she looked to this unnerving display with wide eyes.

“Uh, I think its pretty obvious what this is, P!” Amethyst exclaimed in sudden defiant anger. “It’s proof that those ‘Blind Eye’ chumps, or whoever they are totally jacked our memories! All cause they hate our guts for some reason, which is like, whatever! Obviously they don’t know how awesome we are and how we save this town’s butt like, pretty much every day!”

“G-Garnet, what do you make of all this… this slander?” Pearl asked, gripping the Gem leader’s arm tightly. Garnet herself still seemed quite taken aback by what they were seeing, her jaw still dropped and her expression unreadable as she glanced around again. Her gaze finally stopped, however, upon the newest article of the collection, one that pictured the hand ship’s approach on Gravity Falls just a few weeks ago. The Gem leader was still silent as she pulled it off the wall, and when she finally did speak, her tone was soft, solemn, and most of all guilty.

“They… they’re right,” she said, not bothering to glance up. “The only reason Gem monsters attack Gravity Falls is because we’re here. We’ve known that for years now. Our presence puts this town in danger nearly every day.”

“W-well… b-but we always do manage to fend the monsters off and keep the town safe!” Pearl protested fretfully. “It’s what Rose wanted us to do! She… we… Oh, what would she think of all this? An entire society dedicated to ridding people of their memories of anything out of the ordinary? Including us? She would have hated it…”

“S-so… they’re trying to erase people’s memories of Gem stuff,” Amethyst said, still shaken and upset. “And that’s super messed up, yeah. But what about our memories? Why would these guys even go after us in the first place if they want everyone else to forget about us? And why would they only get rid of our memories of author dude and like, nothing else?”

“Maybe they wanted to get rid of the memory of him even more than us…” Garnet theorized, putting the picture down.

“Of McGucket?” Pearl asked incredulously. “But he’s completely harmless! Well, aside from that fact that I’m fairly certain that supposed ‘racoon wife’ of his is rabid…”

“What if he wasn’t so harmless before those robe dudes took his memory?” Amethyst wondered worriedly. “What if he was some kind of threat to them, so they messed his brain up and made him go totally nuts? And… what if they wanted to do the same thing to us only they didn’t make it that far?”

“B-but… no,” Pearl shook her head, refusing to believe it, even though the evidence was starting to add up. “Rose would have never allowed something like that to happen! She would have put this Society of the Blind Eye nonsense to a stop the moment she heard about it! U-unless…”

“Unless they erased her memories too…” Garnet mused, looking back up to the wall of accusations before them. “The shapeshifter… When we were in the bunker, it mentioned something about us having ‘gaps’ in our past… And it questioned whether Rose had those same gaps or not.”

“W-well of course she did!” Pearl countered, flustered for the sake of defending her former liege. “She must have! Otherwise, she would have known about all this. She would have told us!”

“Would she have?” Amethyst asked, an anxious frown crossing her features. Pearl initially prepared to counter back that Rose indeed would have, but her words faltered as she looked back to the wall of clippings again. Specifically, at the photo of their happy, smiling, stalwart team, standing together, tarnished by the blood red X crossed over it by the society. Rose had had many enemies in her time, from the highest elites on Homeworld, all the way down to mere Gem foot soldiers who loathed her stance to protect the Earth. But that was back during the war. For practically the duration of their time living in Gravity Falls, the Crystal Gems had faced no severe opposition to their presence there, save for perhaps Gideon, but the Gems saw him as only a minor aggravation at best. But this, this was nothing less than complete and utter malice on the part of the Society of the Blind Eye towards them, malice that had most likely led to several important memories being stripped away from them, if not more so. But, in the eyes of the Crystal Gems at least, Rose Quartz was infallible. She had never been defeated by any foe before, to any degree. Certainly, there was no way she would have never let herself fall victim to a group of mere humans with an archaic memory erasing ray gun, even if the rest of them had. So why, then, would she have never filled in the gaps for her teammates? Why would she have let memories that bore at least some significance fade away into nothing?

And most of all, why would she decide to keep things that way, even after she was gone?

With the boys and the Gems gone, the girls found themselves with little to do as they remained in the meeting hall, keeping a tentative eye out for any stray society members. Mabel and Wendy sat on the steps leading into the hall as Connie stood a few paces away, practicing some maneuvers with the blade Pearl had entrusted her with for this mission. It wasn’t an incredibly eventful way to pass the time, but at the very least, it was something.

“Whoa, Connie, you’re getting pretty good at swinging that thing around,” Wendy remarked with an impressed grin upon watching the younger girl pull off a deft technique.

“Thanks, Wendy,” Connie returned her smile. “Pearl’s been teaching me and Dipper some pretty advanced moves lately, and it’s a good thing too, seeing as how we’re basically dealing with a sinister mind-erasing cult here.”

“Correction: they’re an evil, mind-erasing cult that totally needs to invest in some new robes,” Mabel added, sticking her tongue out. “The look like they’re all in some kinda demonic choir or something. A few more colors other than that overdramatic blood red would totally spruce things up!”

The girls all got a good laugh over this lighthearted suggestion, though the levity was soon broken as a sudden rattling crash sounded out from somewhere down the hall. Upon hearing it, Connie was instantly on the defensive, her sword held out in front of her as she poised to listen once again.

“What was that?” Mabel asked with a curious, concerned frown.

“I don’t know, but I’m gonna go check it out,” Connie said, resolved. “You guys stay here, I’ll be right back.”

“You got it, ‘Miss Knight’,” Wendy smirked, sending Connie off with a salute before she disappeared into one of the headquarters’ many halls. Only a beat or two passed after she left, however, before Mabel let out the long sigh she had been holding in, flopping down to lie on her back with an exasperated groan.

“I just don’t get it, Wendy,” she began, still caught up in her earlier dejection. “I hug a lot, I can burp the alphabet, I have scratch and sniff clothing, I’m the total package! So why does every boy leave me?”

“Pfft, who cares?” Wendy asked with a shrug. “Boys are the worst. You shouldn’t get hung up, man.”

“M-maybe I come on too strong, you know?” Mabel wondered, sitting up.

“Well, what’s your opener? Pretend I’m a boy.” At this, the cashier tucked most of her hair under her hat, though she did leave enough to make herself a fake mustache with it. “Mm, testosterone,” she quipped with a manly spit before Mabel dove right into her incredibly enthusiastic pitch.

“Hi! I’m Mabel! I’m 12 and own a pig! Wanna get married?!” she exclaimed loudly and exuberantly, a bright, beaming smile dominating her features.

“Honestly, that was perfect,” Wendy chuckled, amused by her excitability as she let her hair fall down once more. “Like I said, just don’t let all those sour crushes get you down, dude. You’re way better than like, all those loser guys, if you ask me.”

“Ugh, that’s what I keep trying to tell myself,” Mabel groaned. “But its so hard when not even one of them has worked out at all! I mean, I have so many failed romances now that its getting hard to keep count of them all: there’s Norman, Gideon, Sev’ral Timez, Mermando, Gabe, Steven-”

“Whoa, whoa, hold up!” Wendy interjected, looking to Mabel with stark surprise. “Who was that last one again?”

Mabel flinched, covering her mouth as her face flushed red with a bright red blush over her accidental slip up. “Uh… n-no one! It was no one!”

“Nuh uh, man, I heard you,” the cashier remarked with a knowing grin. “You totally said Steven! Since when have you been crushing on him? You gotta spill all the details, dude.”

“Mmm…. You promise you won’t tell anyone?” Mabel asked hesitantly, knowing that if there was anyone she could trust with this information, it was Wendy.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” she assured, pulling of her signature zipping lips motion.

Mabel still didn’t jump right in, mostly out of nerves more than anything else. It was bizarre, really, seeing as how she had been vaguely aware of these feelings for quite some time. But only now was she finally admitting them out loud, not just to Wendy, but to herself. “I guess… it all started when me and Steven fused… We had such a great time together, to the point that… neither of us really wanted to let go. I-I sorta felt like I would have been really happy just staying with him forever, you know? And… in a way, I guess I still kinda feel like that…”

“Aw, Mabel, that’s super sweet,” Wendy said with a sincere smile. “But if you’ve felt like that about Steven for this long, then why don’t you just tell him about it already?”

“Ugh, cause it would make things super awkward!” Mabel exclaimed, frustrated. “Steven’s not just some random guy of the week, he’s Steven. He’s one of my best friends! If I told him I had a crush on him and he turned me down, then it’d ruin like, everything! And not to mention, he’s already…” She trailed off as she glanced over at the hallway Connie had headed down, shaking her head as she decided to leave it at that. “N-never mind…”

“Dude, don’t worry about it being awkward,” Wendy advised, placing a steady hand on the younger girl’s shoulder. “Steven’s like, one of the most chill people ever. I’m sure he’ll understand. And even if he says no, it won’t really change anything. Chances are you’ll both just forget about it and move on with your lives eventually.”

“Forget…” Mabel repeated, her eyes widening with realization as she glanced over at the memory gun sitting only a few feet away. “Wendy, that’s it!” she exclaimed excitedly, rushing over to the device as the cashier followed in confusion. “I just need to type ‘summer romances’ into this thing, and I won’t feel bad about them anymore! And I bet if I do, it’ll even get rid of that silly old crush I have on Steven too! It’s perfect!”

“Whoa, hold up, Mabel,” Wendy cautioned, concerned. “We don’t even know what that thing does. You could accidentally erase, like, learning how to read, or breathe, or-”

“Or one of those terrible summer songs you can’t get out of your head?” Mabel suggested with a broad smile, instantly quieting the cashier at the promising prospect of forgetting the incredibly aggravating ‘Straight Blanchin’ once and for all.

Dipper, Steven, Soos, and McGucket had narrowly avoided being spotted as they raced after the handyman’s hat, in the hopes that it would lead them to the mysterious Hall of the Forgotten. And, seeing as how they had a definite path to follow, it didn’t take them too long to find it. It was a large, sparsely lit room, much like the rest of the society’s headquarters, but its defining feature were the countless glass tubes contained within it, staking almost all the way up to the ceiling. There were hundreds, probably thousands of them, all encompassing the memories the Society of the Blind Eye had taken away from innocent people over the years. An alarming, yet awe-inspiring sight, to say the least.

“Honey fogelin’, saltlickin’ skullduggery!” McGucket exclaimed upon taking in this incredible sight.

“Man, you have got to teach me some of those old man swears,” Soos remarked, impressed by the hillbilly’s vernacular.

“Look at all these tubes!” Steven remarked as they walked into the room itself. “How are we ever gonna find McGucket’s memories in all this? Or the Gems’?”

“I know, right?” Dipper agreed, just as daunted by this seemingly impossible task. “No wonder nobody knows in Gravity Falls seems to know anything about the supernatural. These guys must erase the memories of people all over town!”

“Dudes, what if they’ve even erased some of our memories, but we forgot about it because our memories were erased?!” Soos exclaimed with a gasp. “Wouldn’t that be totally nuts?”

“Y-yeah… it would be…” Steven muttered rather apprehensively. He took pause, however, upon noticing yet another memory gun lying on a nearby table otherwise laden with tubes. His earlier uncertainty returned to him at the sight of it, especially as he looked around at all the stolen memories surrounding him. The Society of the Blind Eye used that gun to strip people of their pasts, though their purpose in doing so was by all accounts unclear, but it was easy to assume their motivations weren’t too ultraistic. But just because the hands using it were sinister, didn’t mean the memory gun itself necessarily was. There had to be beneficial uses for it, uses that the young Gem had already considered, uses he thought about as he took a tentative glance over at Dipper, remembering well just how hard of a time he in particular had had of things immediately following that disastrous puppet show, knowing that the memory of that dark day still haunted him, even weeks later. And yet, that painful memory could so easily disappear, for all of them really, with just the mere pull of a trigger. It would be so quick, so easy, so harmless, and so ultimately helpful for helping all four of them finally move on. Which was why, without drawing any attention to himself at all, Steven slowly and silently grabbed the memory gun and slipped it into his backpack, with an idea in mind but not enough courage in his heart to act on it just yet.

“Whoa, check this out,” Dipper spoke up, calling everyone over to what was clearly a viewing machine for the memory tubes. He had managed to find one with Robbie’s name on the label, and so, unable to shake his curiosity, he inserted it in the machine. The screen went live, showing the angsty teen strapped to the chair in the meeting room amidst being interrogated by the society.

“Yes, Robbie, what is it you have seen?” the leader asked somewhere offscreen.

“So I was attacked by this magic kung fu guy that was throwing, like, balls of fire at me,” Robbie began recounting a familiar tale. “I kicked his butt though.”

“Robbie, speak honestly.”

“…I was saved by a 12 year old and a lady with a square-shaped afro…”

From there, the society was quick to wipe the teen’s memories of the encounter completely clear, resulting in the screen abruptly going black as a result. Of course, this was only more proof that the society had been clearing the town of their memories of the alarming or the paranormal, but that they did so to seemingly any extent, both massive and mundane. And seeing as how they had apparently taken so many memories already, it was clear their intentions were to keep the people of Gravity Falls in the dark about the magic and mystery that surrounded them at every turn.

“I still don’t get it,” Dipper remarked, glancing around at the immense collection of memory tubes filling the room. “We know what they’re erasing memories of, but why are they doing this in the first place? What would they have to gain from-”

“Looky, fellers!” McGucket cut in, excitedly pointing up to a memory tube that, fittingly enough, had his name on it. “It’s those words what people call me!”

“Oh, dude, your memories!” Soos grinned. “We did it!”

“Great, now all we need to do is find the Gems’ memories and we can put a rest to this mystery once and for all,” Dipper said with pleased resolve as McGucket headed for the shelf his memories were sitting on.

“Grabby grabby!” the hillbilly exclaimed blithely, climbing onto the shelf and retrieving his tube. “I got it!” However, what McGucket, or any of the others failed to notice, was that as soon as the tube was removed, the discreet electrical chip that had been positioned underneath it began blinking. And as a result, a sharp alarm suddenly began to blare throughout most of the museum, one that startled the entire group as their stealth was completely compromised. “Ah! The alarm in my brain is a-ringin’ again!” McGucket cried as he fell off the shelf.

“Halt! Who’s there!?” the distant shout of a society member sounded out from somewhere down a nearby hall.

“Oh no! Run!, dudes” Soos exclaimed, already leading the way out of the room. Dipper and Steven were quick to follow suit, though it was clear they had already been spotted by a member who was now on their tails.

“Get back here!” the member shouted after them, not noticing as McGucket managed to tuck away behind the large statue at the back of the room as he chased after Soos, Dipper, and Steven. Fortunately, no other members seemed to be hunting them down as they rushed through the headquarters’ narrow halls. Not too long into this chase, however, the young Gem happened to remember the weight of the memory gun in his backpack, and, given how things had just drastically changed, he realized that it would either be now, or never. And so, without any warning, Steven suddenly grabbed Dipper by the arm and pulled him into a nearby shorter hallway. Dipper was about to question the young Gem on this, but he was quick to assume what Steven had apparently been thinking as the society member ran right past them, not spotting them at all as they tucked away out of sight.

“Nice thinking, Steven,” Dipper said with a smile, though he was quick to prepare to move on ahead. “Now, we should probably go find the Gems so they can help us-”

Dipper cut himself off abruptly upon hearing the familiar sound of a memory gun sparking up, prompting him to stop dead in his tracks and turn around to see the last thing he could have ever expected. Instead of a society member, the charging memory gun was in Steven’s hands as he pointed it directly at him, with the clear intent of firing it. Yet despite this intent, the young Gem’s face was awash in worry, regret, and most of all fear, emotions that were all quick to amplify the moment he took in Dipper’s expression of immense shock at this unexpected twist.

“S-Steven, what… what are you doing?” he asked, scarcely able to believe what was happening.

“Dipper, I… Y-you…” Steven trailed off, taking in a deep breath to steady himself before continuing, though he still held the memory gun up all the while. “Listen. What happened to you a few weeks ago, that whole thing with Bill, i-it… it was terrible. A-and so was most of what came after it. When I stood there and watched him possess you, the only thing I wanted to do was go back in time just a few seconds to stop it from ever happening. And while I know I can’t do that, I… I feel like this memory gun might be the next best thing.”

“Wait, so… you want to erase my memories of Bill possessing me?” Dipper asked, deeply unnerved by this news. “Steven, that… that’s crazy!”

“No, it isn’t!” Steven argued with a small, wavering smile. “Don’t you see, Dipper? It could be like none of it ever happened, especially if Mabel, Connie, and I get rid of our memories of it too! It could help all of us finally move on and feel better!”

“How would it make us feel better?!” Dipper asked hotly. “Steven, that thing is dangerous! You saw what it did to McGucket; it made him go completely insane! And what about the Gems? It’s the reason why they can’t remember even a single thing about the author of a book that’s filled with information about them! Do you honestly think that gun would make anything better? Because the way I see it, it would only make things so much worse!”

“Not if we only erase our memories of Bill!” Steven protested, though his adamant tone was quickly starting to waver. “Dipper, you got hurt really badly, in so many different ways. All I want to do is help you finally forget all that pain because you didn’t deserve any of it in the first place. W-wouldn’t the chance to make it all go away be worth a few lost memories?”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Dipper said, trying his best to remain calm and rational amidst one of his closest friends pointing a memory-erasing gun right at him. “Steven, if you erase all our memories of Bill, then we’ll be completely defenseless against him the next time he shows up, which he will eventually, I know it. And even if he didn’t, you’d still basically be undoing all the progress we’ve made in getting over it, which wouldn’t be fair to any of us.”

“B-but… but we wouldn’t have anything to get over if I just… i-if I…” Steven trailed off again, guilty tears starting to well up in his eyes.

“Steven, I’m not going to try and stop you,” Dipper sighed almost wearily, even though he could have easily stopped the young Gem if he really wanted to. It would be as easy as simply drawing his sword, and yet he didn’t. Mostly because some part of him, however small, that was still plagued by the pain of nightmares and remorse, might have actually wanted him to pull that trigger. “But I do want you to ask yourself this: if you go ahead and do this, how would it make you any different from those Blind Eye people?”

Steven paused at this, a very soft, tearful gasp escaping him as he briefly considered this question. By all accounts, he was intending on using the gun on Dipper largely without his consent, before moving on to do the same to Mabel and Connie. He wasn’t giving any of them a choice, much like the society didn’t give its victims any choice, all because he thought this was the right way to go. Because he believed this would help, regardless of the risks it might bring about. Because he thought it could, at least in some small, fleeting way, help ease the load of guilt and sadness off his own shoulders and finally make things right.

Except no. The only thing this would do, was make things all wrong.

As torn apart by conflict as he was, the young Gem’s finger still rested lightly on the memory gun’s trigger, even though the decide itself had begun shaking in his trembling hands. No matter how hard he tried to force himself to swallow his palpable fear and regret, he found that he simply couldn’t, especially as he met Dipper’s soft, sad, and surprisingly almost accepting gaze. Still, even despite that, Steven had barely just begun to squeeze the trigger when the tension of the moment was broken through completely.

“Steven?!” Connie’s shocked exclamation instantly caught the attention of both boys as they turned to see her standing at the other edge of the hallway, sword in hand. “Dipper? W-what’s going on? What are you doing with that thing?!”

“C-Connie!” Steven gasped, tears still streaming down his cheeks as he abruptly lowered the memory gun. “I-I… I wasn’t… T-this isn’t what… I-”

“I-it was my idea!” Dipper suddenly interjected, maintaining this course even as both Steven and Connie looked over at him in apt disbelief. “I… I guess I was still feeling kinda torn up about the whole Bill thing, a-and I figured that memory gun would be a good way to just forget about it once and for all. So… I asked Steven if he would… you know…”

Connie’s expression was still wide-eyed and incredulous as she looked to Dipper, but all the same, she still let out an appalled scoff in response to such an apparently hazardous idea. “Dipper, I know what you went through because of Bill was awful, but… that memory gun is really dangerous. We really shouldn’t be messing around with it.”

“Yeah, that’s… exactly what Steven told me,” Dipper lied, feigning guilt. Guilt that the young Gem refused to let him take.

“W-wait, Connie, no,” Steven shook his head, wiping his tears away. “Dipper wasn’t the one who-”

He never got to finish as suddenly, out of the shadows of the hallway, three pairs of hands emerged, each of them abruptly covering each of the kids’ eyes before they could even see who their assailants were. “W-wha-? Who’s there?!” Steven asked in apt alarm as the memory gun was starkly ripped out of his hands.

“Let us go!” Connie growled, swinging her sword out broadly as Dipper struggled to draw his amidst the hands already pinning his arms down. “Or else!” Her threat went unfulfilled however, as her blade was subsequently knocked out of her hand. With all three kids left essentially defenseless, the hands restraining them were quick to whisk them off, dragging them all back to the main meeting hall and an unknown fate.

As the society members rounded up all the kids, they failed to track down all of the intruders to their headquarters and among the ones they missed was McGucket. The hillbilly had indeed had the wits about him to tuck himself away just out of their sight, his memory tube still tight in his grip as he peeked out from behind his hiding place. True, the key to restoring his long lost memories lay right in his hands, but he couldn’t very well take that key in good conscious while the ones who had done so much to help him find it were in trouble.

“Oh, you’ve really tarred up now, Fiddleford,” McGucket lamented to himself fretfully. “This is all your fault… Oh wait! I know! I’ll go get them three shiny women!” With this newfound idea in mind, the hillbilly prepared to emerge from his hiding spot, though he stopped short another brief moment upon glancing down at his beard. “Why does my beard have a bandage? Does that even make sense? Why has no one pointed that out?”

While still confused, McGucket was quick to shake this momentary distraction off as he headed off, scuffling his ways down the halls. However, like most everything else he tried to do, the hillbilly had something of a hard time focusing on this task of finding the Gems. His already frayed and scrambled mind could barely stay on any tangible, rational thoughts for too long before it dove right back into the dense fog of forgetfulness he was so used to. But this was a serious situation, one that could have a very dire outcome if he wasn’t vigilant with this search. Which was why he did everything he could to force himself to buckle down and focus, to keep his flighty mind grounded, and remain on track, despite how much of a challenge that was for him. Yet in the end, his hard mental work paid off as he eventually passed by the room the Gems were still congregated it, its door hanging wide open as they continued investigating the photo collage on the walls for any further clues.

“Hey! Ladies!” McGucket exclaimed, frantically running over to them. “I need ya’lls help!”

“Oh, great…” Pearl grumbled, rolling her eyes as they all turned to face the hillbilly. “Just what we need right now…”

“What’s the problem, dude?” Amethyst asked, crossing her arms as she watched McGucket anxiously shift back and forth on hi feet. “Did you find a beehive in that big hat of yours?”

“No! I-its… I… Aw, hornswaggle! I done went and forgot!” McGucket exclaimed, his slipping memory a result of mentally spending himself so much moments ago.

“Of course you did…” Pearl remarked dryly, turning back to the clippings. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re in the middle of something actually important here…”

McGucket frowned as he glanced down fretfully, unsure of what to say or do to get the Gems to hear him out, much less what they were even supposed to be hearing him out about in the first place. He turned to leave them to their business, but he stopped short upon glancing up at the wall of clippings, catching sight of the photo at the very center of the board. And as he spotted the pink haired figure in that picture specifically, the hillbilly stopped to stare, his jaw dropping in awe at the striking familiarity of her warm, smiling face. The kind of familiarity he had not been acquainted with in years.

“I… I remember her…” he began, almost in a daze as he stepped forward. The Gems all glanced back at him, confused as he took his hat off in almost a solemn show of reverence.

“Who?” Garnet asked, even if she already had an inkling of who he was talking about.

“H-her,” McGucket nodded up to the pink Gem’s image, still clearly trying to recall the details. But in the very smallest of ways, a vague, broad picture had started to emerge from the fog, one that he forced himself to cling onto as he continued. “I… I think her name was… o-or at least I called ‘er… M-Miss… Miss Quartz…”

“R-Rose Quartz…” Pearl whispered, her eyes widening with shock. “You… really did know her… Then that… that would mean… I can’t believe it… You actually are the author?!”

“I-I don’t know ‘bout all that…” McGucket shook his head. “But I do know I know her! O-or at least I used to, way back in the bygone days…”

“What do you remember about her?” Amethyst ventured, exchanging a tentative glance with the other Gems.

“Not too much…” the hillbilly mused. “B-but I reckon she was big, and pink, and pretty, and… and she had a voice like sweet honey, and boy howdy she was smart too! She always had somethin’ nice to say, no matter what the occasion. But I wasn’t really as close to her as…” He trailed off, his brow furrowing in confusion as the gaps in his memory returned, gaps that, despite his bout of recollection, he was unable to fill in.

“As who?” Pearl pressed, growing more curious by the second about the secrets her liege had supposedly left behind.

“I… I can’t quite recall…” McGucket frowned. “But there was someone else, I know there was. I just ain’t got any recollection of who…”

“Ugh, someone else?!” Amethyst groaned, exasperated. “How many other people were involved in this whole journal biz?”

“That doesn’t matter right now,” Garnet shook her head before looking back to the hillbilly with respectful sincerity. “What matters is that we finally get to the bottom of these missing memories. All of our missing memories.” She smiled somewhat at this, something that McGucket returned as a sense of familiarity passed between them, one that had been long forgotten, but was just starting to come out of the darkness and back into the light. “McGucket, we need you to try to remember what you came here to tell us. I have a feeling that whatever it was, its important.”

“What I was gonna… oh!” McGucket gasped, realizing that calming down had led to the clarity he needed. “The young’ins are in trouble! Them Blind Eye folks are after ‘em!”

“What?!” the Gems exclaimed in startled unison at this alarming news.

“Well then we gotta go and save them!” Amethyst exclaimed intently. “If those creepy guys get their hands on them, their memories are as good as janked! And I’m not about to be the one tryna explain to Greg and Stan why Steven and the twins don’t remember them.”

“Then let’s go,” Garnet ordered, already heading for the door. However, before the Gems could leave, McGucket happened to stop them with a sly, barely even manic grin.

“Hold on a second, ladies. I got me an idea…”

Despite their struggling, the kids, Soos, and Wendy found that they were largely outmatched by the sheer number of society members, which had made their capture relatively easy. Mabel and Wendy had been apprehended first, seeing as how they had been on guard in the open in the meeting hall itself and Soos had been caught just before Steven, Dipper, and Connie. The society could tell that their young captives were all quite resilient, which was why they had taken the precaution of tightly tying all six of them to a large beam in the meeting hall, as all the society members gathered around to watch their intruders be punished.

“You should not have come here,” the leader began ominously as he stepped forward. “We do not give up our secrets lightly.”

“Who are you bathrobe wearing freaks?” Wendy asked harshly as she tried pulling out of the ropes.

“Why are you doing this?” Connie demanded just as fiercely.

“And what’s with your creepy British accent?” Mabel asked the society leader in particular.

“Well, I suppose we are just going to erase your minds anyway, so…” the leader nodded to his followers, who complied with his orders as they removed their hoods, one by one, revealing a host of surprisingly familiar faces.

“Toby Determined?”

“Mr. Fryman?”

“Bud Gleeful?”

“Mr. Smiley?”

“That farmer guy?”

“Creepy dude who married a woodpecker?” Soos finished this barrage of stunned exclamations. “How’s that marriage goin’, by the way?”

“Oh, great, great,” the man chuckled nervously, glancing at the woodpecker perched on his shoulder before dropping his voice down to a whisper. “Not great.”

“But you’ve never met me before. And if you had, you wouldn’t remember,” the leader said, finally removing his own hood. Sure enough, he was completely unfamiliar to all the kids, with a gaunt, rather grey face, a crossed scar over his right eye, and interestingly enough, a bald head adorned with a complex set of tattoos replicating a phrenology map all over. “I am Blind Ivan, and we are the Society of the Blind Eye! Formed many years ago by our founder… our founder… Does anyone remember who he was?”

The society members took pause at this, all of them trying to come up with an answer to this question until they inevitably found one. “Huh, well, what do ya know?” Mr. Smiley shrugged, grinning blithely as usual. “Guess none of us remember.”

“We have been usin’ that ray on our own brains an awful lot,” Bud added just as casually.

“Why would you guys do all this?” Dipper asked petulantly. “What do you have to gain?”

“As you have no doubt discovered,” Blind Ivan began to explain, hands behind his back. “Gravity Falls is a town plagued with supernatural strangeness. The kind of strangeness that can drive any normal mind to madness. No one knew how to stop the things that went bump in the night, so our founder invented the next best thing: a way for us to forget. We took it upon ourselves to help the troubled townsfolk by erasing the memories of the strange things they’ve seen. Now the people of Gravity Falls go about their lives ignorant and happy, absolved of the dread of the dangers that lurk in the shadows all around them thanks to us. And as a perk, we help ourselves forget things that trouble us. Everyone has something they’d rather forget. In fact, your own sister was about to use that ray on herself. Isn’t that right?” he asked Mabel with a knowing smirk.

“Mabel? Seriously?” Dipper asked, incredulously looking over at her.

“Heh, I was thinking about it, ok?” Mabel shrugged with an awkward laugh. “I wasn’t actually gonna do it… Ok, maybe I was…” She bit her lip, especially as she stole a quick glance at Steven.

“Uh, Dipper, I don’t think you really have a lot of room to talk seeing as how you basically asked Steven to do the same thing for you,” Connie pointed out, not harshly, but still rather disappointed.

“What?” Mabel, Soos, and Wendy all asked in unison as they looked to Dipper, genuinely surprised by this news.

“Oh, uh… y-yeah, I guess I kinda did?” Dipper admitted, still keeping up his former ruse up.

“W-wait, no,” Steven tried to clarify once more, rather overwhelmed by guilt that Dipper had chosen to take the fall for his own mistake. “He didn’t-”

“Enough squabbling!” Blind Ivan interjected impatiently as he grabbed the nearby memory gun. “You children have seen quite enough. But worry not; very soon it will all be come unseen…”

“And how is that your call, huh?” Wendy asked defiantly. “In fact, why do any of you weirdos get to decide what memories people keep and which ones they don’t. This whole thing seems pretty rigged in your favor if you ask me.”

“Yeah, don’t you see? This thing is ruining lives!” Dipper added just as boldly. “What about Old Man McGucket? He lives in a hut and talks to animals thanks to you. Don’t you feel bad about that?”

“Mmm… maybe a little…” Blind Ivan considered briefly before promptly shooting himself with the memory gun. “But not anymore! Now…” he began inputting the word ‘summer’ into the device. “You won’t be telling anyone else about what you’ve learned here. Say goodbye to your summer…”

Needless to say that the entire group panicked as the memory gun was aimed at them, charging up with the power to delete their entire summer from their minds altogether. “Guys, if we’re gonna forget everything, I got some stuff I wanna get off my chest,” Soos began anxiously. “Mabel, for half the summer, I thought your name was Maple, like the syrup. No one corrected me!”

“I only love some of my stuffed animals, and the guilt is killing me!” Mabel cried, knowing that she could have easily admitted something much more personal, but she figured it would be best to let those feelings be buried in the past.

“Sometimes I use big words but I don’t actually know what they mean!” Dipper admitted tightly. “I mean, I’m supposed to be the smart guy. If I’m not the smart guy, then who am I?!”

“One time I got an A- in science and I never told my mom about it!” Connie exclaimed guiltily. “She’s a doctor! If she ever found out I preformed less than perfectly in science of all things, she’d completely flip out!”

“Ok, I’m not actually laid back,” Wendy took in a sharp breath. “I’m actually stressed like, 24/7. Have you met my family?!”

Steven was the only one of the group to hesitate in this round of confessions, but in the end, his remorse won out and prompted him to finally speak the truth before anyone could stop him. “C-Connie, I was actually the one who wanted to erase Dipper’s memories about the whole, uh… puppet show thing. A-and yours and Mabel’s too…”

“Steven!” Dipper exclaimed sharply, having not wanted the young Gem to admit this.

“You wanted to what?!” Connie looked over at Steven, completely appalled.

“Wait, what happened again?” Mabel frowned in confusion, completely lost about this news.

“Oh, stop being a bunch of babies,” Blind Ivan rolled his eyes at this melodrama, more than ready to fire the ray at the frightened group. However, just before he could, something that was nothing short of a miracle happened. And, bizarrely enough, that miracle came in the form of a loose canon hillbilly.

Out of seemingly nowhere, McGucket dropped down from above, landing squarely on Blind Ivan and knocking the memory gun out of his hands. Of course, the kids were pleasantly surprised by this interruption, but they were even happier to see that the hillbilly wasn’t alone as the Gems suddenly emerged from the shadows of the room, their weapons ready as they confronted the startled society members.

“All of you! Stand down!” Garnet ordered as Pearl rushed over to cut the kids free. “Or else.”

“You three!” Blind Ivan exclaimed in outrage as he pulled himself up to stand again. “The Crystal Gems… By far our greatest adversary in keeping the minds of this town clean from thoughts of disaster, seeing as how disaster follows your group around like its attached to you at the hip! Gravity Falls would be much better off if your kind was forgotten about completely… in fact…” The society leader smirked darkly as he reached for the memory gun, but before he could get it, Amethyst was quick to snatch it away from him with her whip.

“Sorry, baldy,” the purple Gem smirked, keeping a tight grip on the gun. “But we’re not gonna let anyone around here forget about how awesome we are!”

“We raided the mining display for weapons!” McGucket informed the newly freed kids, presenting a cart full of what they had nabbed. “Now fight like a hillbilly, fellers!”

The kids heeded him as they were all quick to take what they could from the cart, including pickaxes, banjos, taxidermized animals, and Soos even managed to find a display block on dysentery. “Oh nobody better mess!” the handyman exclaimed, holding his ‘weapon’ out threateningly.

“They know too much!” Blind Ivan shouted to his followers. “Don’t let them escape!”

While the society members were quick to attack, kids all steadily defended themselves against them now that they were armed with their unorthodox weapons. “Get this song out of your head!” Wendy proclaimed, bashing one member in the head with a banjo.

“Dysentery’s gonna get you, dawg!” Soos warned, chasing another member through the hall with his dysentery plaque.

“I’d watch out if I were you,” Connie smirked as she fended a member off with a stuffed rattlesnake, aptly terrifying them. “I’ve heard rattlesnake bites are pretty deadly.”

As this scuffle continued, everyone managed to hold their own, including the Gems, who did use some restraint with their weapons as they kept the memory gun out of the members’ reach. In the midst of this chaos, however, Dipper happened to spot a familiar, rather important tube lying on the ground just a few feet away.

“McGucket’s memories!” he exclaimed with a gasp, rushing for it only to be blocked off as soon as he had grabbed it.

“Not so fast, kid,” Fryman said, his arms crossed as he kept Dipper from getting the tube back to McGucket. Fortunately though, a vacuum tube was right next to him, giving him a another option.

“Mabel, catch!” Dipper shouted to his sister on the other side of the room, shoving McGucket’s tube into the suction. Mabel did so, grinning triumphantly as she nabbed it, only the farmer to try and snatch it away from her a moment later.

“Give it up, girl,” he warned as she held it away from him, though she had a sly idea as she looked to the vacuum tube once more. “You’re no match for the unstoppable power of-” The farmer cut himself off as Mabel pointed the suction tube at his robe, which was quick to come flying off as a result, revealing that he was only wearing his underwear and nothing else. “That’s right. I don’t wear nothin’ under my robe. Not gonna apologize for that. Maybe ya’ll should apologize for bein’ a bunch of prudes.”

“Ew!” everyone exclaimed in disgusted unison at this unsavory sight.

“Welp, time to erase that forever,” Soos quipped, holding up the memory gun Amethyst had just handed off to him. However, before he could do anything with it, Blind Ivan finally reclaimed it, not hesitating to point threateningly at Dipper as he caught the memory tube Mabel had tossed back to him.

“Give me that tube,” the society leader growled, clearly tired of playing games.

“Never! These memories belong to McGucket!” Dipper protested firmly, shoving the tube back into the suction tubes to get it away from Blind Ivan.

“The society’s secrets belong to us!” the society leader countered as they both raced after it in the hopes of securing it once and for all, even as it zoomed across the ceiling and into the Hall of the Forgotten. They were largely neck-and-neck in the chase for the memory tube, until Blind Ivan ended up intentionally tripping Dipper, allowing him to claim the coveted tube first. “End of the line,” the society leader scowled, pointing the charging memory gun at the defenseless boy before him. “By tomorrow, this will all seem like a bad dream. Say goodbye to your precious memories…”

“No!” Dipper gasped, fearfully, unable to really bear the thought of losing his memories of the Gems, of Steven, of Connie, of Lapis, even as he braced himself for the inevitable blast. One that, much to his surprise, never ended up hitting him as someone else took the brunt of it instead. “M-McGucket?” he flinched upon noticing that the hillbilly had jumped in between him and Blind Ivan at just the right second. “You… you took a bullet for me…” McGucket didn’t get a chance to respond as he was blasted by the memory gun once more, much to Dipper’s apt alarm. “Oh my gosh! Are you ok?!”

The hillbilly paused, blinking away the ray’s effect for a moment or two before letting out a hearty laugh. “Ok as I’ll ever be!”

“W-what?” Dipper asked in confusion, surprised as everyone else was as they all rushed into the room to see what was happening.

At the same time, Blind Ivan continued shooting blast after blast at McGucket, startled that it seemed to have no apparent effect on the hillbilly as he continued approaching him steadily. “Why… isn’t… this… working?!”

“Hit me with your best shot, baldy!” McGucket challenged with a wide, wild grin amidst the successive round of memory blasts. “But my mind’s been gone for thirty-odd years! You can’t break what’s already broken!”

“Wha—no!” Blind Ivan growled hotly, still trying in vain to wipe the hillbilly’s mind. “This is impossible! You can’t just be immune to-”

“I reckon I can!” McGucket interupted, finally snatching the memory gun away from the distraught society leader. “Say goodnight, Sally!” With this, the hillbilly abruptly headbutted Blind Ivan, knocking him out cold just long enough to allow the Gems to finish apprehending the rest of the society members. With the entire group captured, the kids didn’t hesitate to tie them all to the same pole they had formerly been restrained to, all of them quite pleased that they had gained the upper hand against the sinister society and their mind-erasing agenda.

“Unhand us!” Blind Ivan demanded upon regaining consciousness as him and his fellow society members tried to break free. Their attempts were quickly stopped, however, as Garnet stepped forward, cracking her gauntleted knuckles to keep them in check.

“Yeah, it isn’t so fun being tied up, is it?” Mabel asked with a smug smirk before turning to the others. “Hey, you guys wanna draw on their faces?” Despite protests from Blind Ivan on this, Mabel proceeded to do just that, crossing out his tattoo that read ‘knowledge’ and writing the word “butts” over it.

“Hey, stop that! Its not funny!” the society leader clambered angrily, especially as the kids and the Gems all got a good laugh out of it.

“I dunno, dude, its pretty funny,” Amethyst chucked.

“It’s like, objectively funny,” Soos agreed with an amused nod.

“Now, before we put an end to this horrid little society of yours…” Pearl began, her spear at the ready as she addressed Blind Ivan coldly. “We still have one final question for you: where are our memories?”

“Your memories?” Blind Ivan shook his head incredulously. “You fools, we never took any of your memories! We were only ever interested in eradicating the townspeople’s memories of you and your so-called ‘Gem monsters”. What good would erasing your memories do for us?”

“Wha—but… nah, man, you guys gotta have them,” Amethyst contested. “We saw that whole room of newspaper clippings you keep around just to bash us! So quit your lying and tell us where our memories are!”

“He’s not lying,” Garnet suddenly spoke up, looking down intently.

“Huh?” all of the others looked to the Gem leader, surprised by this revelation.

“He’s not…” Garnet shook her head, placing a hand against her temple as her future vision refused to comply with her. “I-it… its foggy, but… I can tell. Our memories, wherever they are, aren’t here.”

“So… they weren’t the ones who took your memories about the author away?” Steven asked with a confused frown.

“But if it wasn’t them, then… who did?” Dipper added, just as bewildered by this ongoing mystery. “And why?”

Garnet sighed, looking between her two aptly disappointed teammates first, and then to the worried group of kids. “The truth of it is… we don’t know… For all we know, they might not have been erased by one of those guns at all. But its safe to say that something happened to make us forget the truth. And even if we didn’t get that truth here today, we’re not going to stop looking for it until we find it. Right, Gems?”

Pearl and Amethyst paused, both of them frowning as they looked to their leader with initial uncertainty. They had wanted to finally get answers, to finally piece together the puzzle that was this part of their past so much, that the thought of having to wait much longer for those answers seemed almost unbearable. But as it stood, their memories were still lost, still unknown and forgotten; which meant that the most they could do now was keep moving forward, in the stalwart hope that the missing pieces of their past would return to them soon enough. “Right,” they both agreed with small smiles, resolved to do just as Garnet had said and keep searching until they finally found what they were looking for.

“This isn’t over!” Blind Ivan cut through this moment with an angry threat. “We’ll have our revenge! We’ll never forget what you’ve done!”

“Oh, I think you just might…” Dipper smirked as he fired the memory gun up, entering ‘Society of the Blind Eye’ into it as the subject. And, with a mere pull of a trigger and a flash of light, the mind-erasing society was, ironically enough, completely erased.

Of course, all of the former society members were somewhat disoriented upon having their minds wiped of their original purpose for being at the museum. So the kids had been quick to come up with a convenient guise, one that even ended up helping McGucket out as they escorted the society members out.

“Thanks for visiting the museum for Gold Miner Appreciation Night,” Dipper grinned as he stood alongside McGucket, who happily held his hat out for solicitation as the passing former society members dropped money into it. “Be sure to tip the gold miner on the way out.”

“I’m sorry, but… what’s my name?” Blind Ivan stopped short at the door, far more confused and lost than any of the other society members. “Where am I?”

“Uh oh… might have gone a little overboard on him…” Dipper noted worriedly.

“Well, remember, he did try to erase all our memories,” Connie said, hands on her hips. “So I wouldn’t feel too bad about it.”

“Your name is Toot-Toot McBumbersnazzle!” Mabel quipped to the former leader brightly, handing him a banjo. “You’re a traveling banjo minstrel, with a song in your heart and funny tattoos on your head!”

“,,,Yes,” Blind Ivan, or rather “Toot-Toot” said with a wide grin of acceptance with this. “I am Toot-Toot McBumbersnazzle! Cheers!” And with that, the former society member walked off, plucking away at his banjo happily, his former ill intent completely forgotten.

With the society members all gone and the threat they had posed eliminated, everyone decided to head back into the museum with the same intent: to finally uncover the secrets that lay hidden within McGucket’s memory tube. They all gathered in the Hall of the Forgotten, eager to see exactly what and who the hillbilly used to be, but even so, McGucket himself was quite anxious as he glanced down to the memory tube in his hands.

“Uh, Mr. McGucket?” Steven spoke up with a small supportive smile. “Aren’t you going to put your tube in that machine so you can finally see your memories? You know, find out who you really are?”

“I-I… I’m not so sure…” McGucket frowned, still uncertain. “What if… what if I don’t like what I see?”

“We’ve come all this way,” Mabel encouraged warmly. “You gotta at least take a peek. Go on.”

The hillbilly let go of his lingering reservations as he took in a deep breath, inserting the tube into the machine to see what hidden past it contained. As the static on screen cleared away, it revealed a much younger version of McGucket, who, by all accounts, looked much more scrupulous and put-together than he currently was. This younger McGucket was keenly dressed, with a suit jacket, tie, spectacles perched on his nose, mostly neat light brown hair, and no unkempt, overgrown beard in sight. Yet even despite this, his expression was still tight and deeply unnerved as he spoke to the unseen screen before him.

“My name is Fiddleford Hadon McGucket, and I wish to unsee what I have seen.”

The group watching all let out a shared gasp of surprise upon seeing this younger version of the hillbilly, and to learn that he had apparently willingly wanted his memories erased. Though none of them were more stunned than McGucket himself as he took a small step forward, awestruck as he listened to what his younger self had to say.

“For the past year, I have been working as an assistant for a visiting researcher,” Young McGucket said, his tone and expression still quite serious. “Along with the help of four magical, extraterrestrial women, he has been cataloging his findings about Gravity Falls in a series of journals. These women, the ‘Gems’, and I helped him build a machine which he believed had the potential to benefit all mankind, but just as easily could be used to bring about great destruction.”

Upon hearing about this unknown machine, Dipper was quick to turn to one of many cryptic pages in the journal, one that held what he assumed to be at least part of some kind of blueprint for a mysterious device. More than likely, they were one and the same, but even so, then what could such a supposedly dangerous machine even do? And more importantly, did it even still exist somewhere?

At the same time, the Gems all exchanged a bewildered glance upon hearing them be mentioned directly, though what bothered all three of them more was, once again, the sparse details McGucket provided about this machine. Certainly, there was no way they had been a part of constructing something that could put humanity in such apparent danger… could they?

“I decided to quit the project,” Young McGucket continued, wringing his hands anxiously. “But I lie awake at night, haunted by the thoughts of what I’ve done. I believe I have invented a machine that can permanently erase these memories from my mind,” he said, holding up the memory gun, of all things. “Test subject one: Fiddleford.” At this, he fired the gun off, the screen going to static as a result. As it cleared once more, a much happier McGucket appeared, clearly absolved of his horrific memories. “It worked! I can’t remember a thing!” The screen cut once more, with McGucket still quite ecstatic over his new invention as he held up the society’s iconic eye image. “I call it the Society of the Blind Eye. We will help those who want to forget by erasing their bad memories!”

As static cut in once again, the next shot of McGucket showed him much more disheveled and distraught than before, the lab setting behind him in a complete state of disarray as he twitched almost endlessly. “T-today I came across a colony of little men, very disturbing. I would like to forget seeing this.” The inventor used the memory gun on himself again, cutting to show that some time had passed. His hair had begun to grey and wither, his arm was held in up in a cast, and dark bags had formed under his eyes, which had begun to take on a glazed, blank state. “I-I accidentally hit another car in town today. I feel terr-bibble—terrible! I’ve been forgettin’ words lately. I wonder if there are any negative side effects to-” McGucket was cut off as the scene cut again, this time to show that he was in a rundown motel, his mental and physical state steadily declining even more as he had finally started growing his thick white beard. “I s-saw somethin’ in the lake, something big!” In the next shot, his beard was even longer, his manner wild and untamed and a wide manic smile on his face as he put his large hat on. “My hair’s been a-fallin’ out, so I got this hat from a scarecrow! Hey, are my pants on backwards?”

The tube cut to one last memory, this time showing McGucket as he was in the present, living in the mess of the junkyard as he cheerfully ran about, insanely chuckling and speaking in absolute gibberish. “Yroo Xrksi! Girzmtov!” he laughed, using his fingers to form the shape of a triangle over his eye right before the memories cut out into nothing more than static completely.

With this show of memories finally over, a solemn silence feel over everyone in the room as they all looked to McGucket sympathetically. There was no question that the hillbilly had fallen far from the seemingly promise beginnings he once had, into the depths of insanity and instability he was famously known for. And the worst part of it all was that he had instigated that fall himself, out of the best intentions that had turned into the worst of situations.

“Oh, McGucket…” Mabel was the first to speak up, her voice soft and somber. “We’re so sorry…”

“Aw, hush,” the hillbilly said with a wave of his hand as he retrieved his memory tube. Surprisingly enough, a small smile was on his face as he turned back to the group, even despite everything he had just seen. “You kids helped me get my memories back, just like ya said.”

“But… did you want those memories back?” Connie asked, concerned.

“After all these years, I finally know who I am,” McGucket mused, still smiling as he looked down at the tube. “Maybe I messed up in the past, but now that I’ve seen what happened, I can begin to put myself together again. And I hope you ladies can do the same when you find your memories,” he said to the Gems with a smile of solidarity.

“Thank you,” Garnet said with a cordial nod.

“Yes… we’re… sorry about how we might have treated you before…” Pearl rubbed her arm guiltily. “We just… really want to get to the bottom of this, once and for all…”

“Aw, its all water under the bridge,” McGucket cheerfully quipped. “And don’t worry, I’m sure ya’ll will figure it out eventually!”

“Yeah, and maybe once we do, you can tell us about all the crazy stuff we used to get up to, since we all apparently used to hang out back in the day,” Amethyst remarked with a playful grin, eliciting a genuine laugh from all four of them.

“So, wait,” Dipper interjected at this, still somewhat confused as he looked between the journal and McGucket. “You aren’t the author, but you worked with him. Do you remember who he was?”

“Its… beginning to come back…” McGucket acknowledged. “But I need more time. And reading glasses!” The hillbilly grinned as he grabbed a pair of said glasses that was fortunately sitting on the nearby table before letting loose a hearty spit. “Heck! I got some rememberin’ to do!”

“Uh… speaking of remembering…” Steven spoke up apprehensively, addressing Dipper and Connie in particular. “Dipper, I’m sorry about what happened back there with the memory gun… I guess I just thought that it could finally help us all forget about… well, you know, but… maybe forgetting about it isn’t really the right way to heal from it…”

“You’re only getting that now, Steven?” Dipper asked with a small, joking grin. “Man, and I thought I had to learn that lesson the hard way.”

“Heh, yeah…” the young Gem let out a small, awkward laugh. “So… are we all good?”

“Well, Steven, I’m not gonna lie, what you wanted to do to all four of us was… kind of messed up,” Connie said, crossing her arms. “But your heart was in the right place, just like it usually is. So I guess I can’t be too mad about that.”

“Thanks,” Steven nodded warmly. “And you, Dipper?”

“Yeah, we’re good too, Steven,” Dipper said, still smiling. “Just as long as you promise to never try to pull something like that again, no matter how bad things get, ok? Because, no offense, that was a pretty bad idea…”

“Yeah… it really was…” Steven admitted, though he still couldn’t help but crack a growing grin. “But I promise.” Unable to contain his happiness at this debacle being resolved, the young Gem couldn’t help but pull both Dipper and Connie into a tight, unexpected hug, one that surprised them both, but they were quick to return it all the same.

As the three of them continued to talk, and the Gems kept on discussing the matter of the still-unknown author with McGucket, Mabel found her sights landing on Steven from afar, though he didn’t seem to notice. Wendy, on the other hand did, which was why she decided to address her, knowing exactly what was on her mind. “So, Mabel, you still wanna erase those failed summer romances?” she asked with a knowing grin.

Mabel paused at this, taking a quick glance over at the memory gun lying on the table nearby before letting out a small sigh of acceptance. “You know, nobody likes having bad memories, but maybe its better to remember the bad things and learn from them than to go all denial crazy trying to forget them.”

“And what about your feelings for… you know who?” Wendy asked, dropping her voice down to a whisper.

Once again, Mabel hesitated, casting another longing glance over at Steven as he laughed along with Dipper and Connie. “I… I guess I’ll just have to deal with those feelings as they come,” she shrugged, hoping that would be a task easier done than said.

“That’s some real mature junk right there, Mabel,” Wendy grinned, nodding in approval.

“Yep, Miss Mature, that’s me,” Mabel smiled proudly before turning to the others. “Hey, you guys all wanna help me vandalize this picture of my jerky ex-crush?”

Everyone was quick to agree on this, all of them grouping close to doodle on the poster of Gabe Mabel had found earlier. When they were done, no one say any point to linger in the now-defunct society’s headquarters any longer, and so they all piled into Soos’ truck to head home for the night.

“Hey, you know what?” Wendy remarked to Soos with a grin as she got into the passenger’s seat up front. “Going on this big adventure actually made me get that stupid song out of my head.” Of course, she was quick to remember it again as the very first song that played on the radio as the handyman turned the ignition on was none other that ‘Straight Blancin’. “Oh come on!”

“So, the author wrote all this,” Dipper informed McGucket as he let him leaf through the journal, still trying to glean whatever sparing bits of information he could get. “Does any of it ring a bell for you?”

“Hm… It’s all so familiar…” the hillbilly mused, adjusting his newfound glasses as he peered over the time-weathered pages, pages that he had likely seen before while in the author’s employ. The piece of the mysterious blueprint at the center of the book in particular struck a chord with him, but exactly what kind of chord that was, he couldn’t quite discern yet. “It’s almost like I can remember…”

Unbeknownst to any of them, the realization of those very blueprints rested under the Mystery Shack itself, in the form of the machine that Stan had been pouring the past 30 years into bringing back to life. And with the information he had gathered from journal 3, the conman was growing ever nearer to its reactivation, something that he couldn’t help but revel in as he stood before its brilliant, basking light.

“Alright, you’re getting closer,” Stan said to both himself and the machine with apt resolve. “Every day its getting stronger.” As if to prove to this fact, the machine burst with brief power, ripping the conman’s notepad and mug right out of its hands and into the clarion glow at its center, never to be seen again. “Hah! Yes!” he exclaimed, satisfied by this result. He was less satisfied, however, by the stray pipe that had gone flying from one of the rafters, only to strike him against the back of his hand hard, resulting in a sizable cut. Stan was quick to bandage this injury up, hardly even paying it much mind at all as he looked back to the fruits of his labor, all the more eager to see the very soon coming day when it would all finally come together.

“Hmph, it’s ‘dangerous’, she said,” he rolled his eyes at the recollection of what Rose Quartz herself had told him over thirty years ago. “If that’s so, then why’d you build the dumb thing in the first place, huh, pinky?” he asked the replication of the pink Gem’s gemstone fixed to the bottom tip of the machine. “Well, I don’t care if its dangerous,” Stan continued pointedly, looking back to the vast light ahead. “I don’t care how long it takes. I’m gonna pull this off, and no one’s gonna get in my way!”

The conman’s stern vow echoed throughout the room, all the way back into the lab, where his picture of Dipper and Mabel still remained, their bright, blissful smiles almost serving as something of a testament to the immense secret their uncle had been keeping from them all summer.

A secret that could only remain as such for so much longer.

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