February Catrchall

[cryptograms]

Who: Ford Pines (cryptograms) & you!
What: February catchall
When: Throughout February
Where: Various

Content Warnings: Pending

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swans in with broadway musical starbucks

[sparklehorror]

"Heya, Grunkle Ford."

Quite frankly, this isn't the slightest bit strange, and Mabel waves right back at him. Ford has always been up to shenanigans in the background. All that has changed is the specific flavor, and -- well, now he does things like this in the kitchen sometimes instead of holing himself away in his lab forever. Mabel is happy about that. Even if Ford is still doing his own thing, he's doing it more with the rest of them than he used to, and it is companionable and good.

"How'd you get up there?" she asks, giving Robert a pat as she starts gathering up the scattered Doritos. The Litwick's little flame doesn't cause her pain, she's discovered since Dipper's death last month, and so long as she doesn't let her fingers linger there they won't have time to burn or blister, so the Pokemon has been getting plenty of affection from her lately. "Are you building science stuff, or is it blood magic?"

[cryptograms]

"Blood magic, this time."

Robert lets out a chirping little affirmation when Mabel pats him on the head, glad that someone in this house knows how to treat a candle with respect. He holds out his tiny little arms for each of the chips Mabel passes him, eagerly stuffing them in his mouth and munching away.

"Darkbloods have an inherent ability to manipulate gravity - or at least, some of us do. I wanted to see if it would be able to convert that ability into a spell using my own blood as a reagent."

Given that he's standing on the ceiling, he seems to have had some success.

[sparklehorror]

"I know a girl who floats! Her name is Alice. She lives in that haunted house brobro visits all the time. I guess she must be a darkblood, too."

She mindlessly munches one of the chips. Robert glowers, but decides not to make a fuss. Mabel is an agent of chaos, to be sure, but she is also very sweet and gets away with a lot for this reason. He will allow a limited amount of Dorito theft if it is her. Limited.

"Hey, if it's gonna be a spell, that means anybody can use it, right?" she asks, in a very unsubtle and leading tone. Depending on how much attention he's been paying to the kids lately, Ford may have noticed Mabel spending more time with her brother -- or rather, spending more time doing things with him, rather than simply doing her own thing in his company. Her attentions have been shifting, since his death last December.

[cryptograms]

Alice registers as a name that Ford is passingly familiar with - probably from Dipper reporting back about his haunted house adventures.

Mabel's question is unsubtle and leading, but fortunately even Ford could have gotten it without that much. He grins at Mabel's question and digs into his pocket, withdrawing another talisman. It's a plain stripe of journal paper inscribed with Darkblood ink, though not in any sort of coherent language. He reaches 'up' to pass the talisman to Mabel.

"Just rip it in half and get ready to flip over, though it should reverse slowly enough to not be an issue."

As for the change in Mabel's habits, it's the sort of thing Ford has noticed without being consciously aware of it - but he doesn't seem taken aback that Mabel is interested in his work, just pleased to be able to share.

[sparklehorror]

Mabel immediately licks dorito dust from her fingers and then wipes them clean somewhere in the midst of her ruffle pile, and reaches properly up to take the little paper. In the past, she would have ripped it without even looking at it, and everyone would have had to deal with her frenetic cackling as she went rampaging around on the ceiling. Now, she sits and examines it properly, taking stock of whether the marks look more writerly or like one of Dipper's weird ghost sigils and tilting the paper back and forth to get an idea of how the ink reacts to the light.

"I gotta learn to make this sort of stuff," she says. Not in the way she might express a "need" to make this or that style of dress in such and such color, but in the same way she might say she had homework to do. "You guys can't be the only people who know how to do this around here."

[cryptograms]

Ford is, in fact, expecting a flurry of activity from Mabel. At the very least he's prepared for her to rip the talisman in half without a shred of hesitation, and he's half expecting he might need to step forward to catch her.

But instead she slows down and stops to study it, and Ford pauses as well. The talisman is inscribed with sigils rather than writing. Or rather, a single large sigil unique to trench, with a meaning somewhere between 'air' and 'sky'. It's scrawled across the whole of the talisman in the blue-black, slightly glittery ink indicative of a Darkblood-based reagent.

Ford is a little surprised when Mabel slows down to take interest, and surprised to the point of being almost excited when she mentions wanting to learn some magic of her own.

"Oh-- it's similar to the magic Dipper and I used in Gravity Falls! In execution and practice, at least. On a theoretical and mechanical level they operate very differently, though that's to be expected given the transition into a different universe."