Chapter Eleven: The Oogie Busters

            The bizarre x-shaped tear in the sky above Gravity Falls ominously loomed for nearly five entire minutes. The denizens of the town panicked, fearing the apocalypse had arrived. Only Em, Mabel, Gabby, and their new friends from Starfleet remained somewhat calm, standing in the midst of all the panic and looking skyward.

            “What is it?” Mabel asked of the rift.

            “It’s a dimensional rift that can tear all reality apart, unless we do something to stop it,” Captain Jace urgently stated.

            “So what do we do?” Zack inquired.

            “We need Ford,” Em said. “He’s an expert on these things.”

            “And he’s also several miles outside of town with the boys,” Gabby noted. “By the time they get here, we’ll all be dead meat!”

            Suddenly, a humming and grinding noise reverberated not far from where they stood along the street. When they turned to see where the noise was coming from, their collective gazes met with a peculiar sight (more so than the x-shaped rift in the sky): a tall, black domino-shaped monolith that materialized out of thin air.

            Staring at it, Em remembered how Ford mentioned finding a monolith out in the woods, as well as Ess mentioning how he and the boys encountered a Time Lord. If the two occurrences were connected (and Em assumed they were), then the monolith that appeared on the street was clearly a TARDIS. Only a few M.I.B. agents had ever seen one, many claiming that they pop in every now and then from alternate dimensions. And it had always been the same tall, black domino-shaped monolith.

            A door opened on what Em figured was the front of the TARDIS and a middle-aged blond woman in a black hoodie, purple shirt, and blue jeans stepped out with Ess, Dipper, Stan, and Ford. There were also a bizarre couple of characters – a living skeleton and a ragdoll woman – that were the last ones to walk out of the ship.

            “So this is the Time Lord,” Em said to her husband, indicating the blonde in the hoodie.

            “Yep, her name’s Kara,” Ess confirmed with a nod. “And this is…” He gestured to Captain Jace, stumped on her identity. “Who is this exactly?”

            “Oh!” Em exclaimed, having been reminded to give a formal introduction to the Starfleet captain. “This is Marie Jace, captain of the USS Enterprise.”

            Kara’s ears perked. “Wait. Did you say ‘USS Enterprise’?”

            “If we’re done with all the introductions, we should focus all of our attention on the big dimensional rift in the sky!” Ford growled.

            “You said someone opened the gateway on purpose,” Dipper recollected. “Could it have been Bill Cipher?”

            “Impossible,” Ess said. “The Ghostbusters made short work of him.”

            “With a little help from M.I.B. technology,” Em added with a wink.

            “There’s no coming back from that,” Ess assuredly ascertained.

            “Well, someone had to be responsible for this!” Ford griped.

            As the group deliberated on the true culprit of the rift, a charismatic voice outside their party proposed, “I might have the answer ya’ll are lookin’ for.” The voice, as the group discovered, belonged to a tall, skinny man with a thin mustache, purple eyes, and a gap between his front teeth. He was dressed in black-and-red clothing that held together his long, lanky form. He also wield a cane with a purple globe on top.

            He certainly wasn’t any resident of Gravity Falls that the Pines family had ever seen before. This was clear when Stan asked him, “Who the heck are you?”

            The lanky stranger tipped his hat. “My name is Doctor Facilier…the culprit you good folks seek.” From his tipped hat, he produced the containment orb missing from Ford’s coat, much to the horror of Ford himself.

            “Give that back!” Ford demanded. “You have no idea of its properties!”

            “I may look like a simple man, but I sure ain’t simple-minded,” Facilier professed. “I know exactly what this lil’ trinket of yours is capable of. Allow me to demonstrate.” He pointed the orb towards the rift-infected sky. A beam of blue light shot out of the orb and struck the X-shaped rift right at its center. In seconds, the entire rift was sucked into the orb, returning the sky above Gravity Falls to a normal, starry black-and-bluish hue.

            Surprised by Facilier’s control of the orb, Dipper inquired, “What was the whole point of creating that rift in the first place?!”

            “To get ya’ll’s attention, of course,” Facilier casually replied.

            “Well, it worked,” Ess said, prior to taking out his M.I.B. standard handgun and aiming it at Facilier. “Now, just as our friend told you before, give the orb back!”

            Em had her handgun drawn and aimed for Facilier as well.

            Dr. Facilier balked over their attempt at threatening him. “You M.I.B. jokers just don’t get it, do ya? Ya’ll ain’t as scary to those of us in the Shadow World as the Ghostbusters!” He delivered another demonstration by pointing the top-half of his cane towards the two M.I.B. agents and unleashing a blast of mystic energy that instantaneously turned them into stone.

            Reacting to this, Captain Jace tried to contact the Enterprise with her communicator, only to have it shot out of her hands by Facilier. Completely rendered into glass, it fell out of her grasp and shattered on impact as it hit the asphalt.

            “Help ain’t comin’,” Facilier said. “And I sure as Hades wouldn’t count on the Ghostbusters helpin’. They’re too busy bein’ out of commission.”

            “What’ve you done to them?” Jack Skellington asked.

            “Oh, nothin’ but bounce them back through time and space in ol’ Gracie Manor,” Facilier stated. “And all it took was a lil’ encouragement for one of them to look into her family history. I knew enchanting Gracie’s house would be useful one day.”

            “So, Doctor Facilier,” Kara addressed, “what is your end goal in all of this?”

            “It ain’t all my plan,” Facilier told her. “I’m just followin’ the boss’s orders.”

            Before Kara could ask who Facilier’s “boss” was, she and the others heard loud cackling echoing all around. Looking for the one who found their predicament so amusing, they noticed that the full moon hanging in the night sky had a strange shadow cast over it. Only Jack, Sally, and Kara recognized whose shadow it belonged to.

            “Oogie!” Skellington cried. “So that’s how he escaped Halloween Town!” He then pointed to Facilier and angrily prosecuted, “You were the one who freed him!”

            Facilier didn’t hide it. “Guilty as charged,” he proudly verified.

            Waving his cane around, he conjured a team of four people in front of him, dressed very similarly to Ghostbusters. However, they weren’t just dressed like Ghostbusters; they also branded the names of four specific Ghostbusters: Venkman, Stantz, Spengler, and Zeddemore.

            But none of these individuals looked like the Venkman, Stantz, Spengler, and Zeddemore that the world knew. The “Venkman” was a Caucasian woman with short, cropped blond hair; the “Stantz” was a short-statured black man; the “Spengler” was a bespectacled woman with long brown hair; and the “Zeddemore” was a muscled, bald Samoan man of substantial height.

            The only notable difference in their Ghostbuster uniforms was the company logo stitched on the upper left sleeves. Rather than the usual generic ghost, it was instead Oogie Boogie.

            In each of the eyes of these “Ghostbusters” was an eerie purple glow.

            “May I present the Oogie Busters,” Facilier said of the team. “Plucked from another dimension to serve one purpose: destroying anyone who stands in our way.”

            Without warning, the Oogie Busters attacked with their proton streams.

            “Inside my TARDIS now!” Kara urged everyone, and they followed her lead without question. Taking the petrified forms of Agents Ess and Em with them, they all retreated into the tall, black domino-shaped monolith and sealed themselves in. Its hull withstood the Oogie Busters’ attacks.

------------------------------

            “Did we just walk into another dimension or something?”

            “Is this place like one of those dolls with a smaller doll inside of it?”

            “Just when I thought I’ve seen everything on my five-year journey.”

            “Why does all of this remind me of Dr. Zone?”

            While Gabby, Mabel, Captain Jace, and Milo were baffled and intrigued by the interior proportions of Kara’s TARDIS, Dipper flew into panic. “What’re we gonna do? We don’t stand a chance against a group of evil Ghostbusters from a parallel universe!”

            “They’re not evil,” Kara told Dipper. “They’re just being controlled by Oogie.”

            “How’re you so sure about that?” Stan asked her.

            “Because I’ve met these Ghostbusters before,” Kara said. “I’ve visited their world, which isn’t so different from yours – just a bit more…retro.” She proceeded in turning knobs and flipping switches on the hexagonal console at the center of the room. “Anyway, it’s that reason why we have to stop Oogie and Facilier once and for all.”

            “Facilier mentioned something about the Ghostbusters being sent back through time,” Dipper noted. “That sounds like a good place to start.”

            “I agree,” Kara acknowledged. “We just need to pinpoint the energy signature of this ‘Gracie Manor’ to determine when in the timeline it is.”

            “We have just what you need aboard the Enterprise,” Captain Jace suggested. “The ship already picked up on the mansion’s signature when we scanned for the spellbook’s whereabouts.”

            Hearing the name “Enterprise” again, Kara’s amusement piqued. “You know, I think I’ve met your dimensional counterpart before,” she told Captain Jace. “He was captain of the USS Enterprise, too.”

            “Oh, really?” Captain Jace reflected. “What’s his name?”

            “James T. Kirk,” Kara revealed.

            The Starfleet captain shook her head with a snicker. “As weird as this may sound, there’s something you should know: I am James T. Kirk.”

 

----------------------------

            Facilier looked on the impenetrable monolith that his adversaries retreated into, his frustrations boiling. And they reached their point as soon as he witnessed the monolith vanishing from the spot where it stood. “It’s just like the boss told us,” he vented to the shadowed form of Oogie in the sky. “That ‘Gladiator of Gallifrey’ or whatever they call themselves is gonna be a real fly in the ointment.”

            “It don’t matter!” Oogie bellowed, his booming voice echoing all over Gravity Falls. “They won’t be able to stop what’s comin’ next!”

            Facilier smirked, his vexations alleviated. “That’s right,” he agreed with his shadowy associate. “As long as we still have the plan, we run this show.” He commenced in putting the containment orb and the globe from his cane side-by-side with each other until they made a clink.

            In conjunction with the clink, all of the Gravity Falls fell dark, consumed in one endless shadow. But it didn’t stop just on the Oregon town; it continued to cast all over the world, from the American continent all the way to the far ends of Asia.

            Everyone and everything…swallowed up in total darkness.