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CodyLabs — Forest of Daggers: Chapter 5
#alien #fanart #fanfiction #ghost #robot #scifi #shapeshifter #gravityfalls #dipperpines #wendyxdipper #wendycorduroy #wendip #seeyounextsummer #forestofdaggers
Published: 2018-07-05 14:49:05 +0000 UTC; Views: 9230; Favourites: 41; Downloads: 0
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Chapter 5: The Forest of Daggers
Author's Note: This is kind of the defining chapter of the story, in many ways. We start to understand the weight, scale, and flavor of the mystery, and get one of my favorite illustrations to go with it. Except Dipper's face ended up being bluish. Why is it bluish?? I didn't draw it bluish! What did the computer do to my baby?!?
Mabel shone the beam from the laser pointer all around the floor. Juan chased it to and fro joyously, his saws scuffing up the floorboards whenever he thought he’d caught it. Always it eluded him, always it escaped him, always he gave chase. He was just like a cat. A heavy metal cat, but nonetheless just as smart, playful, energetic and eager. Mabel laughed at his antics.
When he finally got tired, Mabel turned the laser off, and sat down next to a wall outlet. Juan crawled up on her chest, and stuck his hooks into the socket beside her. A few sparks fizzled, and the robot relaxed.
Mabel petted him. He wasn’t quite as fun to pet as normal animals, since he wasn’t soft or furry in the least. But he was warm, and he was active and squirmy, and if she closed her eyes she could aaaaalmost imagine he was something nice to cuddle.
He finished recharging, and curled up in her lap. She petted his antennae, and they extended and retracted at her touch. His red eyes looked up and met hers, and for a moment, she felt they shared a deep, spiritual bond.
His claws plucked at her sweater as he stretched, and aperture-like eyelids twisted shut over his cameras. He wiggled around one more time to get comfortable, and then he was asleep.
Such a sweet thing.
Too bad she couldn’t talk to him. He spoke and heard in radio signals, and since she hadn’t figured out how to do that with her own body, she had to speak with the walkie talkie. She would listen in on his ‘distress signal’, and add words of her own onto the same frequency. She hoped he could hear her, and she hoped he understood that she was just trying to be friendly.
She pulled out her walkie talkie again now, and turned it over to his usual frequency.
But for some reason, the line was quiet. She cycled through all the other channels, but those were all quiet too. Mable frowned at the robot, and the realization slowly dawned on her.
Sometime in the last hour, Juan had stopped sending out his S.O.S.
He thinks I’m his mommy.
He’s happy here.
He loves me.
But it broke her heart. And she put her hands to her head, and her heart began to race, because another realization was close behind the first.
He doesn’t want his real mom anymore.
His real mom is looking for him, but now she’ll never find him.
I’m his mom now.
“Oh no…” She told the creature. “No… I can’t do that… I can’t keep you… This isn’t right for you… I’m not right for you… This…” She shook her head, and brushed aside a tear. “This was never what I wanted…”
Meanwhile, ten miles away, Dipper and Wendy ventured deeper into a hidden valley. And as they did so, they realized they’d stepped into a different world entirely.
“Okaaaay.” Wendy nodded. “We can tell them apart, at least. The trunks here aren’t bark-colored brown. They’re more like rust-colored brown. And the newer, smaller branches are totally grey.”
“Probably is rust. The newer shoots just haven’t had time to rust.”
“And, of course.” She added. “If we’re ever unsure, we can always just touch the leaves. If they feel like leaves, you’re good. But if they lay you open, chances are they belong to the robot trees.”
“Ha ha. Yeah.” Dipper laughed nervously. “Robot trees.” He echoed. He looked around him again, just to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. But he wasn’t. Before today, he never would have imagined using the words ‘robot’ and ‘tree’ in the same sentence, but there you have it. Those words had passed his lips. And as ridiculous at it sounded, it was nonetheless true. “Robot trees.” He repeated, and liked the sound of it. “I guess this is a thing now.”
“Man, you can smell it!” Wendy commented on the air. “Like oil, or the school’s metal shop after somebody’s been grinding… It’s not normal.”
“Yeah… Wow.”
“So how do we do this whole ‘science’ thing?” She asked, dragging them back to the mission. “I mean, we could just walk around, but shouldn’t we be doing… ‘Experiments’ or some junk?”
“Uh… I dunno…” Dipper bent over to examine a smallish sort of weed. “I guess we take pictures and stuff… And cram as many samples as we can into our backpacks.”
“Sounds good…” Wendy slipped on some gloves, grasped a tuft of grass, and pulled. And then she pulled some more. And then pulled some more. “Oh, okay, want to play it like that, do ya?” She grumbled at the plant. She pulled out an axe, and chopped it into the roots beneath her hand. The tuft finally came out with a snap. She shoved the plant into her backpack.
Dipper peered down at the hole where the grass had been. He poked his finger inside.
A tiny spark of electricity arced between his roots, directly through his finger. He yelped with pain, and brought back his hand.
“You okay? What got ya?”
“Oh, these… The roots zapped me. It must have its power cells down below ground. The panels charge up sun during the day, the batteries power it at night…”
“Wear gloves mate.”
“Yeah.”
This time he wasn’t zapped, and he brought out a handful of soil.
“Dirt?” Wendy frowned curiously.
“Soil.” He clarified, and he dumped the sample into a plastic bag. “Metal plants are growing out of this soil. That… Doesn’t happen. Ever. And that means this soil must be special.”
“Fair enough.”
He pulled out a disposable camera. Ford had suggested no electronics, but this model was so simple that it wouldn’t count. Nothing could detect this bad boy. Dipper took pictures of Wendy’s sample, his sample, and the hole they’d removed it from. Then they moved on.
Careful to dodge the leaves, they made their way up to the trunk of one of the larger trees. Wendy began tapping lightly on the surface with the back of her axe, looking for irregularities or hollow spots. The metallic clanking echoed through the silent forest.
Dipper was hit by a sudden sense of deja-vu, as he remembered his very first adventure in Gravity Falls. He’d found Ford’s hollow, fake metal tree, and a mechanism inside had opened the way to the journal. It was the thing that started it all. The one event that made the way for his entire life since. He took a minute to reflect. He… Or rather they… Had come so far since then. So very far. They knew so much, had done so much, conquered so much, become so much… It was amazing.
“Hey, this part sounds hollow.” Wendy remarked, and tapped again.
“Cool…” Dipper nodded. “Wonder what’s in there… Do we have a way to cut through?”
“Well… The trunk looks like it has a sort of grain to it, like regular wood. Maybe an axe will work?”
She took a swing at it, and made an impressively loud sound.
The axe didn’t work.
There was a dent in the tree, but there was also a dent in the axe.
“Awe…” She ran her finger along the defaced blade. Suddenly she laughed. “Look at me! I’m a scientist! Whacking a metal thing!”
Dipper laughed too. “Who’s the greater scientist? The scientist who whacks, or the scientist who watches whack?”
She groaned in mock-misery. “Waaaah… Why does science feel so much like the chain gang?” She struck the tree once more.
Then they heard movement inside the hollow spot, and took a step back. Something was alive in there. They could hear it scuttling around, clacking against the inside of the tree. Then the sound moved upwards through the trunk. Their eyes followed it up, and landed on a small hole, about 10 feet up. A tiny robot peeked its head out of this hole, and looked down at them with red eyes. It had a vaguely similar design to Juan, but with several different specializations. It was thinner than Juan, and longer, as if for fitting through tight spaces. And instead of buzzsaws, it had a system of small drill bits, which it spun at them in an angry, threatening sort of way.
“Guess we know what the hollow spot was.” Wendy observed.
“Robot squirrel.” Dipper smiled. He held up his camera and took another shot. “Cool.”
Irritated by the flash, the robot climbed out of its hole and up the tree away from them. It had long hooks on the ends of its legs, and a small sort of hollow cone where a tail would be.
As they watched, this cone began to emit a loud wining sound. Dust began to spray and billow around the animal. Then it let go of the tree, and hovered through the air off toward another tree. It grabbed onto a branch of the new tree, pulled itself up into a better position, and looked back at them.
“Robot rocket squirrel.” Wendy noted as Dipper snapped another picture.
“Just too cool.” He nodded.
They continued on.
“Hey, have you seen any other tracks recently? Any sign of the lion?”
“Naw, man. I can’t track anything here. Can’t make heads or tails of this grass, and all the tree roots just cover the mud and dirt.”
“All right.”
“Are you picking up any radio signals? Like Juan makes? Or from the decoy we put on her yesterday?”
“No, nothing from the decoy.” He said. “The tracker we put on her stopped transmitting sometime last night. I guess she found a way to get it off.”
“Dang it… Well, any signals at all?”
“Uh…” He turned on his walkie talkie briefly. It became to click and whistle with noise. There were hundreds of signals around here. All of them weak, quiet and brief. Like the chirping of crickets, or the singing of birds. Dipper realized this forest wasn’t silent. It was filled with life, but all of it was silent to human ears. He turned the device back off, and returned it to his vest. “Yeah. None as loud as Juan, but… Yeah. They’re there. And they’re everywhere. But they’re all so quiet that they’re undetectable from far away. Probably why we never detected this place before.”
“Huh. Say!” Wendy pointed ahead. “What’s that up there?”
She gestured toward a nearby stream. Bright, bulbous white flowers were growing all along its banks, some of them the height of trees.
“Woah. Giant flowers.”
“That’s science, right?”
“Yeah…” He approached the nearest one, and circled it slowly. Nothing much to see… But this plant didn’t have any leaves; no solar panels. All the other trees had solar panels. How was this one getting its energy?
He looked inside the bulb of the flower, and slowly put it together. Although they wide pedals were white on the outside, they were extremely shiny on the inside, like so many separate sections of a bowl-shaped mirror. And each one shared the exact same shape: that of a geometrically perfect paraboloid. And in the exact center of each ‘dish’, there was a tiny metal bud, attached to the wider stalk by what looked like tubes.
“Solar thermoelectric power.” Dipper nodded.
“A what now?” Wendy frowned.
“Instead of using plain old solar panels, like the trees do, these plants use the flowers.” Dipper explained. “The flowers are giant mirror dishes, and concentrate sunlight into those little buds. Those buds must have steam turbines or something inside them. The sunlight is all focused into the bud, that boils the steam, the steam spins the turbines, the turbines generate power, and that’s what powers the plant.”
“Woooooah…” Wendy scratched her head. “So ‘flower power’ is a real thing… I always thought those stupid hippies were insane…”
“Solar collection is actually much more efficient that normal photovoltaic systems.” Dipper continued. “It’s not used much in the human world because it’s so expensive to build, but these things just grow that way, so I guess expense isn’t an issue… And that’s probably why they only grow so near the creek. They pump up the water to refuel their turbines and dispose of waste heat.”
Wendy considered this.
“Is that why you were so tired this morning?”
“What?”
“You stayed up super late studying weird science.”
“Uh… Yeah. Why?”
“Okay… Hey wait a minute, why the heck were you studying thermoelectric solar power anyway? That’s such a randomly specific thing…”
“Well… I figured that these things would have to live without fuel, so I just started researching self-sustaining power, and clean energy… Parabolic solar collectors came up at some point so I read about them… And anyway, it came in handy, didn’t it?”
Wendy scratched her head. “Of all the millions of people in history who’ve ever gone out looking for trouble, only two of them have ever happened upon a thermoelectric solar flower. And one of those people just HAPPENED to thoroughly research that same thing the night before.”
“It… Seemed prudent.”
“Why are you wearing long pants instead of shorts today? As if you knew we would be walking through razor grass.”
“Well… You mentioned my… Habits… Yesterday… And it seemed… It seemed like a good idea?”
Wendy seemed suddenly suspicious for some reason.
“Dipper.” She asked. “Are you psychic?”
Why was she so suspicious? He went on the defensive. “No…”
“Do you have any psychic friends?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Is being psychic a thing?”
“Not that I know of…”
“Have you always been this randomly lucky?”
“Definitely not.”
“Do you consult oracles?”
“No.”
“Do you own a crystal ball?”
“No.”
“Does a future-Dipper travel back in time to give you advice?”
“What?? No…”
She gave him a hard stare. He frowned back at her, in a confused way. What was she thinking? What did it matter? What was going on? Did she seriously believe whatever that was? Why? Huh?
Then Wendy just smiled and shrugged. “Ah, never mind.” She turned back to the flowers. “Flower power. The hippies were right. Whatever we do, we can’t tell my dad about this. Got it?”
“Umm… Yeeeeeah… Got it.” Dipper yanked one of the smaller stems out of the streambed. It weighted about 3 pounds. Wow. He never thought he’d ever hold a 3-pound flower, but hey, there’s a first time for everything. He put it in his backpack. “This sample is Ford’s eyes only.”
Seeing as how there was less razor-grass in the water, they followed the creek up deeper into the woods. They kept a look out for lion-bot tracks, but nothing was visible.
Before long, a loud roar echoed through the trees. It was like the sound of a massive motor, grinding, tearing, ripping.
“Woah.” Wendy said. “Cliché giant monster sound. That might be our girl, huh?”
“She never made noise before… What was that?”
Now there was a new sound, the whizzing of small motors, and the scraping of metal-on-metal. The teens looked up to see several monkey-octopus-robots swing through the treetops above them, moving away from the cliché monster sound. Each one had a spherical torso about the size of a basketball. The torso had an eye on the top, another eye on bottom, and 5 long tentacles around the rim. They were using these tentacles in much the same way that normal monkeys use their arms. (Except, judging by the way they were swinging and flipping, they had very little concept of right-side-up and upside-down.) Dipper thought they looked strikingly like the evil robot from the movie ‘The Incredibles’ but he kept this to himself, as it would make him seem like a total dork.
One of the monkey-bots stopped to look down at them, and spun one of its claws in their direction. Dipper noticed it had smaller monkey-bots latched onto some recharge sockets between its arms. Nursing babies; Mabel would think that was adorable. The mother seemed to decide they weren’t a threat, and followed its companions off into the distance. Dipper took several pictures as they went.
“Good grief, they look just like the robot from ‘The Incredibles’.” Wendy frowned.
“You’re such a dork.” He replied.
“And among present company.” She retorted. “I need not feel ashamed.”
The monster noise sounded again, and they continued to follow it up the creek. They were moving even more carefully now, silent and alert. Eventually the noise was very near, just on the other side of the next thicket. They stopped and hid themselves to prepare. Dipper got his camera ready, Wendy took her axe out, and they both tightened the logging chaps on their arms.
“This could be it.” Dipper whispered.
“Don’t engage.” She reminded him. “Just take pictures. Be ready to run.”
“Yeah.”
They stepped quickly from behind the thicket. She leveled her weapon, he leveled his camera, and they both came into view of the sound’s source. And then they both frowned, disappointed.
An adorable little round robot had been cutting down a small tree. Now it paused in its work, and looked up at them. It had a flat paddle tail, little chubby legs, and a gigantic cutting blade built into the front of its head. The blade slowed down, and the noise died off. It tilted its head at them curiously.
“Aw man…” Wendy groaned. “All that noise! All that noise, and it turned out to just be a chainsaw beaver.”
“Come on!” Dipper sighed, taking a picture anyway. “Man, who knew?”
The chainsaw beaver cavorted back toward the creek, and disappeared beneath the water.
“Well.” Dipper shrugged, and noticed the tree the beaver had been chewing on. “Hey! At least we can get a picture of the inside of these trees. For science!”
“Yeh science!”
As it turned out, there wasn’t much for science to see. The trees had bark on the outside and growth rings in the middle, just like normal trees. The only really different part was all the pipes and wires, but even those weren’t all that surprising.
“This is boring.” Wendy decided, after Dipper took his 4th picture of the tree’s innards. “Let’s keep going. Gotta be more to see!”
They left the creek now, and steered into the trees. Toward what seemed like the center of the robot forest.
The trees were getting closer together now, and the grass was getting thicker. All the leaves were still razor sharp, so they proceeded ever more slowly and carefully. Dipper had taken the precaution of wearing long pants today, so his legs were mostly shielded. And the chainsaw chaps kept the worst of it off his arms. But he was still getting pricked and sliced, just a little bit, here and there. On his exposed hands, or through his socks, and even a couple times on his face. It was always just light brushes or pricks, but even that was enough to sting. Sometimes he would stumble or let his arms get clumsy, and a branch would contact his pants or chaps hard enough to pierce through. He would make a face, pull himself free, and soldier on.
Good grief, this was miserable! Dipper felt he was made of paper, walking through a world made of scissors and knives. Dying slowly and surely, just by walking. Once he wiped the sweat off his face, and there was traces of red among the moisture. He looked at Wendy. Her face had some slight damage as well, though he couldn’t tell about the rest of her body. Their eyes met, and they silently shared their misery.
This place wasn’t a good place.
This place wasn’t okay for people to live.
This place wasn’t suited for flesh.
Well, it explained one mystery at least: why they hadn’t seen any ordinary animals or birds around here. Everything soft that ventured in here carelessly (or without clothes) probably just DIED.
“When we come back tomorrow.” Dipper said. “We need football pads and helmets. And bigger boots.”
“We need something more like knight armor.” She agreed.
“And a diamond-tipped weed-eater.”
“Or a tank.”
“Or one of McGucket’s robots.”
Wendy thought about this. “Say.” She said. “Are we seriously coming back tomorrow?”
“Uh…”
“You have a hot date tomorrow, and I just need a day to rest and… You know, take a bath! Don’t want to go through this two days in a row…” She rolled back the chaps to show him the scratches and cuts on her arms. “Plus, dad wants me looking for a job and stuff…”
“Oh yeah… Yeah…” Dipper remembered his date. “I guess I probably shouldn’t show up to some fancy dinner looking like I got ambushed by a pencil sharpener…”
“Pacifica would NOT appreciate that.” Agreed Wendy.
“No, she would NOT.” Dipper glanced around. “Say, speaking of eating, you want to take a break somewhere?” Dipper asked. “Have some lunch?”
“Ugh.” Wendy nodded, and stopped walking. “Yeah actaully. I just need to sit down.”
They found a hollow trunk from some massive fallen tree, and Dipper ducked inside. Apparently, small animals or micro-organisms in this ecosystem found the inside easier to eat than the outside. Although the outer crust and bark was mostly intact, the inside had been cut completely away. A few small robot bugs scampered away as he crawled deeper.
The metal wasn’t particularly smooth, but it was sure better than the grass outside, so he got himself comfortable in the narrow space. Wendy ducked in after him, and took off her backpack. Dipper took off his hat and chainsaw chaps, and wiped his face with his shirt. All his tiny cuts stung as he did so, and he remembered not to wipe again. Now he removed a map and a sandwich from his pack, and leaned back against the metal to chew thoughtfully and inspect the map.
Wendy peaked over his shoulder at the map.
“We’re somewhere around here, right?” She pointed to some contours in the southeast.
“Yeah.” He made a small black mark at his best guess. “And the robot forest is… Well, we crossed in somewhere about here: the northwest border…” He drew a short line.
“Oh wow. We haven’t come very far have we? Maybe a half mile. How big is this forest anyway?”
“I’m not sure how far it extends south and east, but it can’t be much more than about 20 miles wide and 50 miles long, since there’s a highway over here, and the cliffs over here, and there’s hiking trails all along the cliffs…”
“Yeah…” Wendy nodded. “I’m thinking this place has to be pretty small, y’know, since nobody’s ever noticed it before. A couple miles at most.”
“Yeah, or very new…” Dipper began to chew his pencil. “Say, what if something we did caused the creation of this place? What if we… Released it from somewhere, somehow? What if it came in through Bill’s rift, or…”
“I doubt it. It doesn’t look new.” Wendy shrugged. “Some of these trees are dead, some of them have all fallen over, like this one, and… And most of these trees are gigantic! Just like the normal forest. How many growth rings did we see in that tree the beaver was sawing on?”
“Uh… 16, I think…”
“Yeah.” She said. “And that was a really small tree. So, assuming growth rings here mean the same thing they do in the normal forest, that means this place has to be a couple hundred years old at least… Right? Before the white man settled here, for sure…”
Dipper nodded, slowly, and chewed his pencil even harder.
“What if they’re not robot trees?” He asked. “What if they’re just normal trees… And normal mountain lions, squirrels, monkeys, and beavers, for that matter? What if there’s some virus that turns things into robots?!?”
Wendy’s eyes got wide. “Dude… We’d be infected then!”
“Oh dang!” Dipper looked at his hands, rolled up his sleeves, and blinked his eyes. Everything seemed normal… He stuck out his tongue. “Weny! Iz ma tug a saw yeh?”
She looked. “No. Not a saw yet. Show me your feet.” He took off his right shoe. “No.” She reassured him. “Not a tank track yet… Maybe it takes a while… Or starts on the inside and works its way out… Maybe you have a robot liver by now? How would we check?”
Dipper put his shoe back on. And then he put some serious thought into the virus theory. “No.” He finally answered, after a minute or two. “That can’t be it… A conversion virus doesn’t make sense…”
“Why not? There’s been weirder things.”
“Because… Because the creatures here are all made of straight-up metal.” He tapped the tree trunk next to his head, and the resounding clang proved his point. “But normal living bodies don’t have any metal in them, not more than a few grams at least… So we’d have to start eating metal, gorging on it, if we wanted to transform our bodies into that. And then, the only way we could actually chew or digest that metal is if we already had a body like that… So… So the conversion process can’t happen. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of thing.”
Wendy thought about this. “So… I guess that begs another question: where’d all THIS metal come from anyway?” She asked. “This forest is made of metal, but where did it come from originally? There’s not that much metal in the ground, there’s just rock…”
“A lot of rock is actually aluminum by weight…”
“Really?”
“Yeah…”
“Well… You’ve held Juan, and those plants. They’re heavier than aluminum. Gotta be partially steel, at least.”
“Yeah…” Dipper scratched his head, and turned back to the map.
“Hey, what’s that big circle?” Wendy leaned over and pointed to a mile-wide disk he’d drawn on the map, centered around the hill above the town. “That’s the Weirdmageddon radius, isn’t it?”
“The Weirdmageddon radius was a little bigger. That’s actually…” He suddenly hesitated. That circle was the giant, buried alien spaceship. But should he tell her about that? Ford had definitely told him to keep it a close and guarded secret from anyone outside the inner circle… But then again, who would he ever trust more than Wendy? She would probably run across it on her own eventually… Right? It would be safest and best to tell her all about it up front…
That was when Dipper got a new idea: he wouldn’t tell Wendy about the UFO. He would show her. One of these days, he would show it.
But for now, he still had to tell her what the circle was. “That’s uh…” He decided on a half-truth. “That’s the epicenter.” He said. “The focal point of weirdness in Gravity Falls. Ford’s been studying the ‘weirdness magnetism effect’ of this place, and as it turns out, this place exerts a pull on anything unusual. Sometimes it manifests as a psychological pull, which is how six-fingered Ford and I guess Trembley found it. Sometimes it manifests as a literal magnetic force, as it was for ethereal beings like Bill and his goonies. And sometimes it’s just quantum probability. For instance, gnomes could theoretically live anywhere. But they’re very improbable, which makes them very probable to be here. And brain-switching carpets? Or eye bats? Those things probably don’t exist. So when they do exist, they probably exist here.”
“That probably makes sense.” Wendy joked. “And that circle is where it’s strongest?”
“Yeah.”
“Man. The town’s right on the edge of it.”
“Hence why we get mermaids, living video games, and ghosts popping up underfoot all the time.”
“Makes sense… Makes sense…” She turned back to her backpack, and began removing her lunch.
Dipper looked back at the map, and his eyes caught on the ship
Could the crashed UFO have anything to do with this robot forest?
It didn’t seem like it could. The forest didn’t start until about 12 miles south of the crash site’s furthest radius… If this was aliens, it would have to be a separate crash entirely…
Worth an investigation, anyway.
Wendy extended her hand with some food in it.
“Bacon?” She offered.
“Oh yeah! I could go for some bacon right now…” Dipper took a piece from her.
“Smoked sausage?”
“Oh… Sure.”
“How about some jerky?”
“Um… Did your dad pack you this lunch, by any chance?”
“What makes you say that?” She asked.
“Oh you know… It’s just your dad’s sort of… Style. I mean, meaty, high-protein everything… And this.” Dipper held up the package of jerky, with its ultra-manly mascot, and its ‘YOU’RE INADEQUATE’ slogan. “I haven’t seen anything less than a manotaur try to chew this brand.”
“It sure takes a mighty resolve, doesn’t it? Well, surprise! I packed this lunch! That’s just the Corduroy style, mate! Gotta keep your energy up, and keep your jaws strong.” She ripped open the bag of jerky, removed a stick, and tore off of a piece with her teeth. “And hey.” She continued with her mouth full. “Don’t be intimidated by a little bag of jerky, dude. I bet you can chew it. Take some.”
Her encouragement suddenly made Dipper feel very motivated to chew it. He took some from Wendy, bit off a huge piece, and he chewed it.
And he kept chewing it.
And he kept chewing it.
A minute later, he paused briefly, frowned, and kept chewing it.
And he kept chewing it.
About 5 minutes later, it was finally chewed, and he swallowed.
He rubbed his jaw, and stared down at the rest of the jerky. “I don’t… I don’t really want to do that again.” He decided out loud.
“Hmm.” She snickered. “5 minutes. Not bad.”
“’Not bad’…? What’s ‘good’, then?”
“I can chew it in 2 minutes. My brothers are between 3 and 6. My dad can do 45 seconds. I saw a manotaur do it in 5 seconds once, but I think he mostly swallowed it whole, and that’s totally cheating.”
“Oh totally. Those guys are bogus.” Dipper rubbed his jaw again. “So… I ate the jerky. Does that… Prove I’m manly, then?”
“Eh.” She shrugged. “There’s better ways to measure manliness. Mayor Tyler, for instance, can giiiit, giiiit that jerky in about 4 minutes, and he ain’t no man. So…”
“What’s a better metric?” Dipper perked up. “Wrestling bears…? Jumping over cliffs…? Plunging your fist into holes filled with pain…?” (He had done all these things at some point, and thought he’d done all right.)
“Uh…” She frowned, and scratched her head. “That third one is super random, but yeah… That’s kind of the stuff my dad uses… But I’ve got another little method. A little more… Personal. You wanna try?”
“Okay!”
“Awesome. Do you have a spider phobia or anything?”
“Uh… Well, no not really… I mean kinda. Not as bad as some people, but I’m not a huge fan of spiders anyway…”
“Awesome!” She smiled. “Well then, if you wanna prove your manliness, would you go ahead and describe what you see?”
She turned around. When he saw what was on her back, Dipper gave a scream nothing short of girly. “AHH! UH. Yeah! Spiders!”
“Describe them.”
“Uh… There’s about, like, 7 maybe. They’re all about 4 inches across. They… Ooooh… Wow. They’re pretty spiky and… Wow. They’ve got drills and everything. You know what, until today, I wouldn’t have honestly believed that robots could look quite that scary.”
“Good to know.” She nodded, and began to hold perfectly still. “Now would you do me a solid and pick them off for me?”
“UHH?”
“Come on, I can’t see back there.” She hissed. “Grab them and pull them off. Be a man, man.”
“I’m not sure…”
“And they’re sharp little legs are starting to get on my nerves.”
“Uhh…”
“Literally on my nerves. As in past my skin, and down to my nerves. Come on man, you got this.”
Dipper summoned up every ounce of manly courage he had in his reserves, reached forward, and gripped one of the spiders by the thorax. It panicked, waved its drill around threateningly, and began to grip into Wendy’s skin with its legs.
“OW.” Wendy grimaced.
“Sorry!” Dipper stuttered. “Uh… I don’t want to hurt you…”
Wendy’s cool demeanor broke, just for a second. “Just yank it, wimp!”
He yanked it, hard.
It didn’t yank.
Instead, it dug in further. The skin on Wendy’s back stretched up in eight points as Dipper pulled, and each point began to bleed badly.
“OW!” She screeched, and doubled over in pain. Tears came to her eyes.
“UH!” As his heart thundered out of control, Dipper let go of the spider, and turned to his backpack. “SCREW MANLINESS! THIS IS GETTING DUMB!” He said, and pulled out the magnet gun. He flipped it to pulse. “Hold still!”
The gun hummed, and the spiders all convulsed violently. Their red eyes stopped glowing, their legs went limp, and then they were dead. Dipper picked them off one by one, and tossed them outside the log. The last one he removed was the one that had dug in. He had to manually unhook each of its legs, leaving a circle of 8 wounds on Wendy’s back. This one he didn’t toss. This one he smashed with the butt of the magnet gun, leaving its wreckage sparking on the bottom of the log.
They breathed a sigh of relief. Wendy’s breath sounded forced. Dipper had never seen her like this, in so much pain.
“Are you okay?” Dipper asked.
She turned back to him, and she had tears in her eyes. She stretched her back experimentally. “Uh…” Her voice was small and shaky. “I didn’t stay chill…” She muttered, ashamed.
“Oh man, oh man, I’m… I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have tried to yank it.”
She stretched some more, and grimaced. “Uh… No. You didn’t do ANYTHING wrong. I was the one who told you too… I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay… I…”
“Dipper, no, I’m SORRY. I did WRONG. I made a fool of you, and made you hurt me on accident. And dude, that wasn’t a manliness test. Heck, far as I know, manliness CAN’T be measured! You know what that was?? That was me being dumb! I just wanted to tease you a little, and… And honestly, I kind of have a thing with spiders. So when you described them… I started to panic. Just wanted them gone. I did the worst possible thing I could have done, and I yelled at you, and made you panic… But you didn’t panic for long. You did all right. So here it is, honestly: I’m sorry.”
Dipper nodded, and held her eye. “I forgive you.”
“And finally: you’re not a wimp. You know that. I know that. We both know that. Don’t let anyone tell you different. But I forgot it for a second, and I made it sound like I meant it. I made it sound like I don’t respect you, even though I do. I’M SORRY.”
“And I said I forgive you.” He repeated plainly.
She held his eye for a minute, took a deep breath, and then smiled shyly. She picked up her backpack. “Let’s get back in the open.” She mumbled, and led the way out of the log.
Dipper cast another glance around the inside of the tree, looking for more sharp metal creepy-crawlies. Now that his eyes were adjusted for the darkness, he noticed a mean-looking centipede thing and a colony of shredder beetles (which he named himself based on what their mouths looked like.) Metal bugs seemed to be much larger than their normal counterparts.
He wasted very little time following Wendy out into the light. He picked up one of the dead spiders, and put it in his pack with the other samples. Then he shouldered the pack, tightened his chaps, and seated the hat more firmly on his head.
Wendy grimaced as she put her pack on over the spider cuts.
“Want me to carry your stuff…?” Dipper offered.
“Uh… I’ll be fine…”
They stood there for a moment, and Dipper began to have second thoughts about this mission. He looked left, toward the iron thicket ahead of them. He looked right, back the way they’d come. He looked at his camera, already full of amazing pictures. He looked at the cuts on his hands, still painful. And then he looked Wendy in the eye, and he could tell she was thinking all these same things.
“We need to go back.” She stated, matter-of-factly. “We’re getting cut, drilled, sliced, and stabbed. It ain’t getting easier to take, and it sure as heck ain’t stopping. We can’t survive here. We’re only human, and there’s only two of us. If we stay here any longer… If something bigger or sharper comes around… Something that’s actually trying to kill us… Nobody will know anything’s wrong until 6, when Thompson shows to pick us up and we’re not there… We’re not in a good spot. This wasn’t a good plan.”
It was then that Dipper understood: Wendy was afraid. He’d seen it before only rarely, but he recognized it now: she feared for their safety. She feared for their lives. And that made him afraid too.
“Yeah…” He agreed. “But we need to come back. Like we said earlier: armed to the teeth, and armored from head to toe. We’ll bring the equipment, and a plan, but we need to come back here.”
“Oh, of course! We will!” She promised. “Heck yes we will. But not now. Not until we have a plan. For now we need to get OUT.”
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
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Comments: 4
That was most CERTAINLY part of the inspiration.
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Okay, the title of this fic is finally making sense. How did I not see that previously... ?
Damn you write Dipper and Wendy's interaction well. The tasing, having fun, admiration and respect for one another. It's all good. I'm looking forward to when Dipper tells her about the UFO. Didn't you once make a picture of them going there?
Speaking of previous pictures is the "Wendy vs the Future" comic you made part of this story? I didn't really think about it much until she asked if Dipper had met his futureself. Gives an interesting aspect that Wendy has already had a sneak peak on things that might be.
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You click on a story called "The Forest of Daggers", then by golly you GET a story about the Forest of Daggers, dagnabbit!
Ah yes, the UFO. The UFO is coming soon. And yes, that illustration you mentioned, as well as the "Wendy vs the Future" comic, both play into this. (I try to make everything of mine all fit into the same 'canon', partly to make the story richer, but mainly so I don't get confused.)
I'm really glad you're enjoying it so far, and your comments really mean a lot! Thank you!
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