Post-Fall Falls False Starts- Chapter 6: Wish Upon a Triangle
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"Cosplaying him didn't work, or at least it hasn't yet," Sarah mused. "I was gonna go and try to fall asleep by the instructions for summoning him, but it turns out I've only ever seen here and never actually been here and I don't know my way around at all. Embarrassing, right? I just fell asleep in a random cave and hoped that would work."
Rob blinked absently.
"Thing is, I dunno when we are. Like, has he already been summoned? If I did it first, would that lead to some kind of freaky paradox? Would I be on the wrong side of time law? I guess I also want him to come to me because that's more satisfying than just brute-forcing it and making him show up, but is that too selfish of me, or is it just the right level of selfish?"
"Uh-"
"Besides! Imagine I summon him and he asks why, and I say, oh! I dunno. I just wanted to talk! That would make me seem so desperate! Ugh, but maybe desperation can be cool in sort of a yandere type of way? Is that how I want him to see me? As some- some- fangirl? Well, maybe I am, but not for him! This is purely a narrative thing! Ugh! How the heck do I get him to notice me without making it seem like I want him to notice me? Rob, any ideas?"
Rob scrunched his eye closed. He felt like a web browser with 52 tabs open. Minutes earlier, Sarah had led him back to camp, sat him down, and promised to explain everything. She had asked him where to start, he had said, 'wherever you think is best', and she had replied, 'okay, I'll start in the middle'.
"Uh, you want me to tell you how to meet a demon?"
"Not just any demon. We're talking about-"
"I know, you've said Bill like fifteen times! I have no clue who he even is or why you wanna meet him so bad. We're done with the middle and the end- start at the beginning. Can you do that?"
"The beginning. Okay, okay, sure, I can do that. I'm more of an in medias res type of girl, myself, but linear storytelling has its benefits-"
"Get to the point."
"Chill out! I'm getting there! Okay, okay, so! Our story begins in 2012."
"Maybe start a little closer to the present."
"No can do. You want the whole story, right? Besides, 2012 is the present right now, at least probably. The timeline hasn't been confirmed- whatever."
Rob almost scoffed, but found himself nodding and burying his chin in his palm.
"Okay, so, the year is 2012, and the media landscape is a pretty great place for a company called- wait. No, no, let me start from the veeeeery beginning. The year is 1901. Flora and Elias Disney are in Chicago, Illinois, about to bring their fourth child into the world..."
The shadows grew longer, and Sarah's story meandered every which way, and at one point she retrieved a flashlight from who-knows-where and held it under her chin despite the lack of anything spooky in her ramblings. When she finished, the first stars of the night had appeared in the evening sky above the clearing. Rob found himself staring at them instead of paying attention.
"Anyways," said Sarah, taking a breath so deep she momentarily turned inside out (had she not been breathing for the hours it took her to tell the story?) "Gravity Falls. That's where we are."
He sat up, rubbed his eye, and thought for a moment, 'what a waste of time'. And then, as if by a truck, he felt the weight all of the information his subconscious brain had picked up on while he zoned out.
"Wait," he said, holding his hands up. "You're telling me this place where we are exists in the form of a fictional cartoon back home? We are inside a story you've already seen? Right now?"
He knew this place was also a work of fiction to the real world, but he had never once considered that it might be fiction to his world as well. What did that mean? Surely that had really huge implications hovering just outside of his cognitive reach! Hindsight was 20/20! And now, for better or worse, he was no longer the capable one. Upstaged. By a fangirl, no less. Typical. Hold on, he wondered, what if this went both ways? What if somebody recognized him as a fictional character? That would be bad for his whole monster shtick that he had been fantasizing about on the down-low since his encounter with that human guy. He'd need to know for sure! Sarah was nodding.
"Do you know if there's an internet in this universe?" Rob asked. His phone had been dead since long before he left Elmore, what with the lack of a usable power grid.
"Sure there is! After all, in season 2, episode 2-" Sarah paused, noticing Rob's dead, empty gaze, and got to the point quickly. "Yes, the internet exists here. Why? Oh, don't tell me..."
Sarah was blushing and squishing her cheeks now and Rob felt it was best for his peace of mind to not think about why. He had in his grasp a chance at thriving in this new world, armed with someone knowledgable about it, and he could not jeopardize that by giving the poor girl an existential crisis over her own nonexistence. He had come to think of himself as the solemn guardian of forbidden knowledge- a man (or, when it counted, kid) burdened with the truth and the responsibility associated with that truth. That had been the ethos behind his convoluted rescue plan for the people of Elmore Junior High. Well, that and it seemed like the kind of plan a professional supervillain ought to make, and, provided there were a lack of supervillains in the real world, he wanted his rather spotted career to go out with a real bang.
"Sarah, I just wanted to ask- no hard feelings, right?"
"Hard feelings? About you not listening to me? Oh, trust me, I get that all the time."
"No! I meant about the whole Superintendent Evil thing!"
"That? That was a long time ago."
"It was two weeks ago."
"Two weeks is a long time in the apocalypse. Look, don't worry about it, okay? Human AUs are totally classic! I was just thinking, hmmm- if this Evil guy is actually evil, Gumball and Darwin will take care of him in about 11 minutes."
That comment might as well have been an arrow through Rob's nonexistent heart.
"Would it cheer you up if you got to say, 'I told you so'?"
He had wanted to say that before, but now there was very little fight left in him.
"I told you so," Rob replied in a weak little voice...
...That grew stronger as something bubbled up inside of him.
"I told you so! I TOLD YOU SO!" He got to his feet, gesturing wildly, as his pent-up rage came to the surface. "Nobody listened, and we could be in the real world, but instead I'm stuck here with a crazy weirdo girl who's trying to summon a demon! On purpose! And we have no food, no internet, no way home, heck, no home to return to. It's your fault. It's all of your faults! The one time I try and do something good, fate comes along and slaps me in the face for it! UUUGH!"
He smacked his head on a nearby tree and fell backwards into the dirt, clutching it in pain and glitching out for a second. Why was it that every time he tried to lash out in anger he ended up hurting himself? ...Well, in this specific instance, he wasn't sure what he thought would happen.
"What did you think would happen?" Sarah asked, peering over him.
"Shut up," he mumbled, rolling over to lay face-down in the dirt.
"Do you need ice?"
"I know that if I say yes, you're gonna-"
She flopped down next to him on her back so that they were cheek-to-cheek, her iciness soothing his headache a little. He reluctantly let it happen. He hadn't meant to fall asleep, but something about the whole situation lulled him away from the waking world and into an uneasy dream.
It was the forest, yes, just as it had been before he fell asleep, only Sarah was absent and so were the stars above. He noticed moments later that the floor underfoot was the familiar- if heavily cracked- tile floor of Elmore Junior High, covered in the dirt that lined the forest floor in the waking world, with a familiar hole several feet from him leading down into the void. It wasn't growing. A moment from his memory forever frozen in time. Something drew him towards the hole and he discovered first that its surface rippled like water and second that he could see his reflection in it.
The reflection shifted and changed with the surface of the liquid static. It melted into his cute (he liked to think so) look from long before he had been chewed up and spit out, and then into how he'd looked right before hitching a ride out of the void the first time, and then into Superintendent Evil's visage, and then into an odd human form he didn't recognize- and then into a yellow, strangely-shaped form he definitely didn't recognize.
It blinked.
Five seconds later, Rob processed what exactly was wrong with that, and six seconds later, one of the reflection's black hands reached past the static surface and latched onto the edge of the hole, pulling its entire triangular body out and into the air right in front of Rob's face. The thing put its hands on what passed for its hips, ascended further into the sky, and turned a gaze with an undercurrent of frustration to Rob, who blinked and suddenly righted himself in confusion. Something stirred in the back of his mind, something that would have helped clarify the situation had he been more lucid.
"Hey, kid! Want a once-in-ten-billion-lifetimes opportunity?" came a shrill voice from everywhere, though Rob gathered the thing was the one speaking by how its body flashed. "You're about to hear me say something I have never said before! Listen up- I'll only say it once- this is the kind of thing you're gonna remember for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not!"
Happiness, maybe? Annoyance? Anger? It was hard to tell. Either way, Rob found his words at the exact same time that the yellow thing did, and as it turned out, they were the exact same words.
"Who the heck are you?"
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