Thankfully, with Dipper now safely faffing about in his tank in an alive kind of way, Mabel has settled down noticeably. The pointy teeth remain, but the hissing has ceased. This is in part because her brother is no longer a corpse, which means the danger of thinking about or otherwise encountering his existence as such has lessened. Perhaps, though, it can also be said that Mabel's choice of intentional activities is helping to even her out further. It's hard to tell at this stage whether it's her actual corruption levels reacting, or whether it's just an improvement in mood over an activity Mabel loves anyway.

"Just catching up on things," she says, and while she's decidedly less energetic than usual she does at least sound like herself. "We haven't been taking too many pictures, so I gotta draw stuff."

For Stan's benefit, she flips her sketchpad and holds it up so he can see. Using her older sketches of the moment as a reference, she's doing a proper full-scale colored drawing of their arrival here in Trench -- which is to say, it's a made up family portrait style image that could look like any posed vacation photo were it not for her portrayal of Stan as a horrifying squid thing with glasses and a man face wrapped around Mabel's head like an awful winter hat.

Turns out she's still in there somewhere.