Chapter Four: Distant Travelers

 

Chapter Four: Distant Travelers

            “Quaint lil’ town, Gravity Falls,” Captain Jace admired as her tricorder beeped in hand, working to detect the energy from the spellbook that she, Milo, Zack, and Melissa hoped was there.

            “It really is,” Milo concurred. “It makes me wonder if Star and Marco were talking about the same place.”

            “Well, I am picking up bizarre activity somewhere here,” Jace noted.

            “That’s to be expected,” said a voice that snuck up from behind, terrifying Jace and the youths out of their wits. They spun around to see two young girls and a blond woman in a black leather jacket with matching yoga pants. The woman tried speaking with an air of authority that just seemed to come off as friendly in her voice. “What business do you four have here in Gravity Falls?”

            “Why? Are you the sheriff?” Zack asked in earnest.

            The woman hesitated to respond. “N-No…not exactly.”

            “She’s more like an enforcer,” one of the two girls that accompanied the woman (a 13-year-old Latin American) covered for her.

            “Yeah! An enforcer of…weird stuff,” the other girl (a 12-year-old in a flashy sweater) clarified.

            Jace smiled at the three odd ladies. “Well, I guess it doesn’t get any weirder than a starship captain standing right in front of you,” she said, prior to introducing herself: “I’m Captain Marie Jace of Starfleet. These three with me are acquaintances my crew and I made in our interdimensional mission.”

            The sweater girl’s ears pricked at the term “Starfleet,” not having heard any else of Jace’s character exposition. “Starfleet?! Like in crazy-cool-laser-guns Starfleet?!”

            “We call them ‘Phasers’, but…yes,” Jace verified. “How do you know about Starfleet, young lady?”

            “Only because Star Butterfly and Marco Diaz used your ‘Phasers’ when we fought Bill Cipher a couple of years ago, and they said they were courtesy of Starfleet,” the sweater girl explained.

            “Star and Marco used Phasers?!” Zack exclaimed, sounding very jealous.

            “I thought you said we weren’t allowed to use Phasers at any time on or off the ship,” Milo told Jace.

            “You aren’t,” Jace said in a strict voice that clearly would be reserved for a later long conversation with Star and Marco. Mentally putting aside that deceptive revelation, Jace focused on making use of the sweater girl’s connection to the two Phaser-stealers. “Maybe you can help us out, young lady. What’s your name?”

            “Mabel…Mabel Pines,” the sweater girl replied. “And, in case you were wondering, these two ladies next to me are Gabby Duran and Agent Em.”

            “Agent Em?” Melissa reacted amusingly. “What kind of agency you work for? I’m guessing your tailors are on strike.”

            Em briefly shot Mabel a chiding look before she conjured up what had to be the worst cover-up ever. “We are on strike,” she told Melissa. “We’re an agency of tailors.”

            Mabel and Gabby cringed at her lame cover-up.

            It was only made worse when Milo recalled, “I thought you said were an enforcer for ‘weird stuff’.”

            “Tailor agents are pretty high up there on the list, Milo,” Zack said.

            “How ‘bout spellbooks?” Jace brought them back on topic.

            Mabel considered the Starfleet captain’s inquiry. “My brother’s the book nerd. He’s always got his nose in one of our Great Uncle Ford’s journals. Maybe one of them can help you find your spellbook thingy.”

            “Lucky for us, Ford allowed us to keep the copies for investigative purposes in the Traverse,” Em said.

            “Um, yeah,” Gabby condescended, “would that be the same Traverse we allowed the boys to take into the woods?”

            Em slapped her forehead in a moment of aggravation. “Dang it!”

            Shortly after her outburst, a lamppost from the other side of the street toppled over and nearly crashed down right in between the two groups, nearly injuring them or worse. Gabby looked on it in baffled surprise. “Well, that was out of nowhere,” she observed.

            “Oh, that’s just Murphy’s Law,” Milo casually said. “I was wondering when it was gonna kick in during this story.”

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            Stanford Pines’ three journals – burgundy-colored relics in their own right with gold six-fingered hands embroidered on the covers, each with a corresponding number – juggled around in the very back of the Chevy Traverse, as Ess drove it further and further along the woods’ rocky terrain.

            Night had fallen, leaving only the Traverse’s headlights to guide Ess on its path.

            “Whatever this is my brother found better be worth driving this far out of town,” Stan griped during the bumpy car ride. “It’s taking us at least two hours!” He double-checked his Rolex for accuracy.

            “Great Uncle Ford’s never let us down in his discoveries, Grunkle Stan,” Dipper attested. “Whatever it is. I’m sure it’ll be…”

            Dipper stopped short on his claim just as soon as they reached their destination and found Ford standing near the monolith itself – a tall, rectangular black solid of some kind, undoubtedly alien in design. Ess kept the Traverse’s headlights on to illuminate the area as he, Stan, and Dipper joined with Ford at the monolith.

            “What the heck is this thing?” Stan asked his brother.

            “I don’t know, Stanley.” Ford hadn’t taken his eyes off the monolith, even in the presence of his brother, his great-nephew, and the M.I.B. agent. “But it seems to be…alive. I felt it humming.”

            “Wait…you touched it?!” a revolted Stan berated.

            “I do it all the time, Stanley,” Ford nonchalantly asserted. “Anyway, I tried to breach the hull but with no luck. I figured Agent Ess might have a piece of M.I.B.-sanctioned tech that could breach any alien construct.”

            “As a matter of fact…” Without much of a warning, Ess tossed a silvery disc-shaped device at the monolith. It latched onto its front side magnetically. With his car remote, he pressed a button that had a function not made specifically for the Traverse, but for the silver disc magnetized to the monolith. In the beat of a second, the alien construct opened its “doors” to the four men.

            They stepped inside of an interior that was much bigger than its exterior. Dipper spotted some type of alien insignia over what appeared to be a large viewscreen. Stan saw roundels over certain sections of the wall. Ess detected a hint of strawberry-lemon in the air (it definitely had a woman’s touch).

            But it was Ford who deduced, once he noticed the hexagonal console at the center of the room, “This is an alien spaceship!”

            “It’s my alien spaceship.”

            The four men jumped at the young female voice that spoke from one corner of the spatial area none of them bothered to look in. She appeared to be in her early twenties with long, flowing auburn hair and a fair complexion, wearing an orange turtleneck and blue jeans that showed off her petite figure.

            “Which one of you used the dentrenal inhibitor on my front door?” She gestured to the doorway, still left open. “That thing is illegal in fifteen quantum realities!” Her tone became increasingly judgmental, like a mother who caught her child’s hand in the cookie jar. It was obvious when she warned, “You boys better have a good explanation!”

            “We didn’t mean to intrude, miss,” Dipper said. “We just assumed this spaceship was abandoned. But I guess we should’ve learned from experience in the last alien ship we investigated. Right, Great Uncle Ford?”

            Ford gingerly cleared his throat. “Uh, y-yes,” he stammered. “That’s right.”

            “This is a TARDIS, isn’t it?” All eyes centered on Agent Ess, who gazed up and down at the structure of the room, analyzing it.

            His spot-on deduction managed to impress the ship owner. “That’s…right.”

            “And, going by that logic, you would be a Time Lord, correct?”

            “O.K. How is it that you know so much about me, Mister…?”

            “Kent. Call me ‘Kent’.”

            Stan burst into a fit of laughter. “What kinda stupid cover name is that, Ess? What? Are ya goin’ for the Superman class of secret identities?!”

            “Seriously, Grunkle Stan?” Dipper scathingly muttered beneath his breath.

            “Ah! I see we have guests! How splendid!” A voice with a debonair flare to it entered at the same time as a tall white skeleton in a pin-striped suit. He was accompanied by a rag doll of a woman, every part of her body held together by stitches.

            Their appearances were mortifying in the eyes of Stan. “Yeesh! Who called in the freak show?”

            “These are my friends, Jack and Sally,” the Time Lord girl introduced at the behest of Stan’s ignorant remark. “They came to me for help to search for the infamous Boogeyman himself…goes by the name ‘Oogie Boogie’.”

            “Oogie found a way out of our realm, Halloween Town,” Sally said. “He’s somewhere across the interdimensional space now. That’s why we came to Shel for her assistance. This amazing ship of hers can take us anywhere within the multiverse. We fear Oogie has come to this specific realm, which we know to be that of the Ghostbusters. We’re hoping they can help us find and stop Oogie.”

            “Well, you’re in the right realm but in the wrong place,” Dipper delivered the unfortunate news to the travelers. “The Ghostbusters reside in New York. This is Gravity Falls, Oregon – along the other side of the United States.”

            “But Gravity Falls is exactly where I detected the nuage energy – that’s the dimensional energy that makes up the multiverse – Oogie would need to travel between worlds,” Shel elaborated.

            Ess felt his M.I.B. communicator vibrate inside his jacket pocket. He took out the device, which resembled an old-school flip phone (only slimmer and more chrome) and answered, “You’ve reached Ess.”

            “Don’t ya mean ‘Kent’?” Stan teased.

            “Ess, this is Em. We need information from one of Ford’s journals about a particular spellbook.”

            “It’ll have to wait,” Ess denied. “Ford came across something a lot bigger than we anticipated. The monolith he found turns out to be a TARDIS.”

            “Really?!” Em gasped over the communicator.

            “Yeah, and we just met the pilot – a Time Lord.” Ess glanced over to Shel.

            “I thought they were extinct.”

            “Yeah…so did I.”

            Unbeknownst to the M.I.B. agents, with Shel’s acute hearing, she could hear their full conversation. The part about extinction didn’t necessarily please her. There were many kinds of rumors about the Time Lords spread throughout the universe – some nice, some not-so-nice. But the one about extinction hurt worst…because it was true.

            All of the sudden, they were rocked by a massive earthquake.

            It was big enough to have been sensed even from Em’s location. However, she discovered something more as she exclaimed over the communicator, “What is that?!”

            “It’s an earthquake, honey,” Ess still believed she meant the other thing. “We experienced one back in Maui once, remember?”

            “No…I mean…in the sky!”

            They were still in Shel’s TARDIS. Ess’s hasty exit prompted the others to follow him outside. The first thing they noticed was that the night sky had been replaced by a swirling mixture of bright colors that basked the woods in a hypnotic hue; it even muted the headlights of the Traverse.

            In the sky, right where Em said, was a huge X-shaped dimensional rift.

            “No, it can’t be!” Ford huffed. “I didn’t think it would happen, not even after we defeated Bill, but it has!”

            “What is it, Ford?” Ess questioned.

            Rather than answer the M.I.B. agent outright, Ford reached into his coat to retrieve the containment orb he kept there, only to find it missing.

            Someone has purposely opened the gateway.